Girija Tropp
Paradise Beach
The adrenalin running high and her argument looping in her brain,
she grabbed the children and marched past the lounge where the men
watched baseball, cheerios crumbling yellow into the folds of their
clothes, chased down with warm beer, their feet atop the furniture
in pungent socks, and she took her babies away from the smoke,
followed by a stray dog wanting adoption, and the sea washed over
shoes, blessing, and they went down the main street to buy fish and
chips and teenagers shot fake targets in the game arcade, and the
noise of them puffed out onto the pavement, leaving her to think
about her mundane life, and how she was mad at God for making her
care, and here she was, a target for the fat man harassing her to
repent, in the name of Jesus, and she was rude and felt bad about
this in the same way she felt bad about the bank balance in her HSBC
account, and the children kept shooting with their toy guns,
pretending that he was the villain.
Girija Tropp lives in Melbourne, Australia and her short
fiction has been published in Agni, The Boston Review,
Best Australian Stories 2005 and 2006, Southword,
sleeping fish, Fiction International, Denver Quarterly,
and Blip Magazine Archive; online fiction at Diagram,
elimae, and Café Ireal amongst others; forthcoming in
Meridian and Quick Fiction; finalist in the Faulkner
Awards for the Novel 2006. Winner of the Josephine Ulrick Literature
Award 2006.