The Tasmanian Writers’ Prize began in 2009 in order to promote and support writers. Since 2014 the competition has been themed on the concept of ‘island’ and is open to residents of Australia and New Zealand. This year's winning story, Damselfly, by Andrea McMahon was published in Issue 97 of Forty South print magazine and The Short Story Anthology 2020. Submissions for The Tasmanian Writers' Prize 2021 are now open, closing February 15, 2021. Learn more or submit your story here.

Vincent is resting on one of the many park benches dotted along the canal, his gaze tracking the brilliant blue damselflies flitting in and out of the reeds. He has taken a sip from the single bottle of beer he has pulled from the sports bag by his side. He is enjoying the warmth of a perfect summer evening, the familiar scents of his childhood. 

For a week now he has been coming down to the canal each evening, not only to relax but to practice his English. From the flags fluttering on the bows of the moored barges and cruisers, it seems that today the port is full of travellers from afar, Australians and New Zealanders escaping the southern hemisphere winter. He will wander past their lovingly renovated luxe motors and tjalks when he has finished his beer. He will offer greetings in his stilted but perfectly adequate English and open himself up to learning about the many trials and tribulations of owning a canal boat.

It is the Australians whose attention he wants to attract. Once he has heard all about the leak in the bilge or the newly renovated saloon, he will direct the conversation to the wildlife: the kangaroos and koalas, the possums and platypus. Easy enough to do. Australians, he has discovered, are rather proud of their odd-looking animals. The words marsupial and monotreme are two recent additions to his English vocabulary. 

For Vincent had planned to emigrate to Australia. Once he had proved himself to be of good character. This is the fantasy he had shared with his sister, Lise. She had told him about the Australian government’s Family Reunion Scheme for people with no close family in their country of birth. There had been no need for him to mention the stumbling block of his criminal record. She had been visiting him in prison at the time. 

They will understand, she told him, you were young. You were protecting your brother. 

They will not understand. For he killed a man. A good man. A husband, a father. A brave man who had taken them by surprise, fighting back as two black-clad strangers in balaclavas, one wielding a hunting knife, attempted to rob a small tabac of the day’s takings. The irony of it was that he had only gone along with his drug-fuelled brother’s insane plan because he hadn’t wanted anyone to get hurt. He knew how his brother could fly into a blinding rage at the slightest provocation. He knew. 

The plan had been for Vincent to keep watch near the entrance, armed with the knife to ward off passers-by, while Antoine ransacked the till and stockpile of cigarettes. The tabac owner would be immobilised by fear. It would be over in a blink of the eye. They would make their get-away and he, Vincent, would forget it had ever happened because the following week he was leaving for college. He was leaving forever. Antoine was beyond help and in her ignorance and denial, so too was his mother. But his plan—hatched the moment he had seen the madness, the pure, unadulterated madness in his brother’s eyes—had imploded like a house of cards when it came into contact with reality. 

The tabac owner had not frozen at the sight of the knife. Fight, flight, freeze, faint, the four responses to fear that he had learned about in his psychology class. Why had it not occurred to him that they would come face to face with a fighter? That two fighters would come face to face with each other. For he was a fighter. When he had seen the baseball bat being pulled from behind the counter, when he had seen it coming down on his brother’s skull he had lunged forward, uttering a primal scream, a war-cry, as the blade of his knife lodged in the tabac owner’s neck. The same neck the man’s young children had nuzzled for comfort; the same neck the man’s wife had smothered with love. 

He had called the emergency services, cradling his slumped brother in his arms. Wanting him to live; wanting him to die. Three weeks later Antoine was gone, having never regained consciousness. The storekeeper was pronounced dead when the paramedics arrived. Vincent, just turned eighteen, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for manslaughter. He served six. 

Vincent’s reminiscing is cut short as his attention is caught by a damselfly, a glittering sapphire amongst the reeds, carefree and free. But it is no more a free spirit than I am, he thinks wistfully. We are both bound to this waterway, to this way of life. He is thinking now of the last visitor he received prior to his release. It had been his brother-in-law, Luke, a big-boned, ruddy Australian who had met his sister while studying winemaking in Burgundy. Lise had explained the situation, apologetically, shamefaced even, on a previous visit. She had used the money inherited from their mother—all of it—to purchase a vineyard in the Tamar Valley of Tasmania. To provide for the family she and Luke planned to have one day soon. Lise had explained her decision in minute detail, as if needing to expunge her sins. But he had not been bitter. He had expected nothing and anyway, his mother had left everything to Lise for her to do as she saw fit. And she had seen fit to create a fairy tale where they all lived happily ever after. You can become a winemaker, Vincent. You can return to La Bourgogne to study like Luke. There is a shed on our property with a bathroom and kitchen. It will be perfect for you. 

It was a perfect fantasy. Luke had seen that. 

You know how much she loves you, Vincent, Luke had said, his eyes lowered. He too was ashamed by what he had to say. Vincent knew how much he was loved by his big sister. What had poured out of Lise as guilt during her vacation visits to the prison had poured into him as love. Love that had shone like a comforting night light during those many dark months he had languished in a prison cell. It is consuming her, the guilt she feels, Vincent. Every moment of every day she is thinking about you, what to do, when to do it, how to do it. My sister needs to be able to forget about this fantasy of you emigrating to Australia. Lise believes everything is possible. It is one of the things I love most about her. She believed we could own our own vineyard and now we do...It is excellent wine, by the way. Australian wine is expensive, but excellent. Luke smiled as he said this, a small, solemn smile. Vincent had promised Luke he would write to his sister as soon as he was released. 

He has been released for more than a week now. He has written the letter. A handwritten letter. The way of the prisoner. Tomorrow he will drop it into the mailbox and it will begin its long voyage to Australia. His hopes and dreams of emigrating to Australia will begin their much shorter voyage of evaporation. In the letter he explained to Lise that La Bourgogne is his home. He explained that he needs to make amends for what he has done, and it is not something he can do from an island at the other end of the earth. 

The irony of his situation has not escaped him. He has read about the history of Tasmania, the former British penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land. Convicts transported across distant seas for far lesser crimes than killing an innocent man. Stealing a loaf of bread, a handkerchief even. There are many in this town, not so far from the village of his birth, who would be only too happy for him to be transported for his brutal crime. But he is aware of the stark reality—the only isolated island he will ever set foot on is the one he is now marooned upon. 

There can be no greater isolation, he thinks, than the isolation that is imposed upon a convicted felon, a killer, from within his own community. 

But he has not told Lise any of this. He has told her instead that he is continuing to work on his English—prison had been good for that—and being fit and strong—prison had been good for that also. He has picked up some labouring work at a local building site. He told her he is hopeful that when the harvest season approaches, he will be able to pick up some work at one of the local vineyards. He told her about the gentle warmth of the Burgundian summer evening on his skin. He told her about the swallows sweeping low over the canal. If he had been writing the letter today, he might have told her about a sole damselfly that has come to rest on the water’s surface in front of him. 

Not sinking. Not swimming. Not flying away.

He takes a final mouthful of beer, puts the empty bottle back in his bag, stands up and stretches. He spies an elderly barge owner struggling with a gas cylinder. He will approach and offer assistance in his best textbook English. 

Andrea McMahon writes short stories for adults and children, poetry, and the occasional essay. Her short story collection, Skin Hunger, was published by Ginninderra Press in 2008 and her work has appeared in the Forty South Short Story Anthology in 2012, 2015 and 2016. McMahon lives in Hobart and works as a librarian and adult literacy coordinator with Libraries Tasmania. She has recently begun working on a novel based on the unsolved murder of her grandfather, Edgar Geer, in Hobart in 1953. More of Andrea's writing can be found at andreaswriting.wordpress.com