Once inside – by Maddie Goss
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLYFROM THE UTAS ‘LOVED STORIES’ PROJECT
2025’s UTAS third-year creative writing students were challenged not to ‘write what you know’ but to ‘write what you love’. What they produced were stories that range from horror to rom com, lyrical writing to memoir, comedy to absurdism, social commentary to fantasy. We’ve featured excerpts from seven stories on Island Online: read all the excerpts here.
He sits in front of a fire, almost life, in a house, a patchwork of frayed could-haves and has-beens. The anger that was once inside is now outside, and the man that was once out there is now in here.
So is the dog, waiting inside to go out.
Once, when the man was boy, he ran and played, small hands tugged, pulled, patted fur and ears with fingers always salty. Now, man smells like something that is not life, pours it down his throat and throws it into the fire. No little hands, no salty fingers.
Dog retreats to the mat by the door.
Underground, life finds its way. Rats fill the space between earth and floor. Writhing, fighting, always inside each other, pushing more warm wet living into the dark.
When the sky dims and man falls as close to death as he can, dog finds a way out. The sorrow of the place falls away as he creeps, crawls, runs, into the trees.
The man wakes, and while he curses, his body keeps living. It demands he keeps going, that the chambers in his heart keep throbbing, that he drinks in the stale air and opens aching eyes. A noise tears out of him, demanding dog. He stands, wobbles. The faded doormat where dog waits is bare, the room with the bed untouched, unmade, empty. Air leaves his lungs, pushed up out of his stomach as he kneels. No dog under. A murky morning filters through dusty curtains, dead cells, hair, spiders’ silk, makers long fled. He cloaks himself, pulls on boots that once moved over muscles that pulled and stretched, now loose.
Roots cut and torn do not soften the earth. The trees bend in the bored sigh of the wind, waving accusing limbs towards the wooden man and his house. Without dog he cannot distract. He whistles, sharp stinging on cracked lips. Days, weeks, how long has it been since he’s been this far? The lives he left behind are in him, the lives made from his very being. Their souls are here.
Once when life was almost new, hardened feet thudded over soft land, this land. Muscles sucking, stretching, pumping, pushing. The grass had deep roots and he rattled the worms while he ran through the bush. He felt the life that had once been, the paws, feet, breeze – chasing, following, inside, beside him. The air he breathed filled clean pink lungs, not yet blackened, filtering the air like leaves above, inhaling the heavy scent of the possums that had trod these same paths only hours before.
Man takes the path away from the place that calls to him, that the squeeze in his heart urges him to find. His mind has long since built the walls that keep that place from his mind and now his body steers him, urges him to stay away.
Heavy steps lead him from the house. He cannot feel dog, cannot smell those possums. The magic he once felt when tracing these tracks, walking this land, has blackened and fallen. He can no longer feel the birds before he hears them, taste the eucalypts on his tongue. Man cannot remember when the connection broke, when he stopped listening.
Rough hands graze rougher bark. Once, feet and hands brought more life, lived and left, same, better. But now this land has learned to be weary of man. Where boy trod around, between, amongst, man steps through.
Man does not know how he notices the wallaby almost masked by the bush and the fading light. Her mob must have drifted off, too anxious to wait to see if she would rise. Something has gotten at her. Guilty hope pushes blood quicker through his veins as he approaches, hoping to see a sign of dog. As he nears, a final instinctual pull, a last flair of a pulse. He sits, and a hand, the boy’s hand, reaches slowly, tentatively, touching fur softer than fleece. Were his hands once this soft? The marsupial’s body bleeds and the place where her joeys were planted and grew weeps. So does man.
He wakes in darkness, the small being beside him still and cold. Muscles protest as he stands, fibre by fibre. The pull to turn back is strong, to trace his way back down that forgotten path and remember. Instead, he pushes on, guided by the stars his father could read like Braille. He knows this space still, doesn’t need the sun’s light to know where to duck beneath the undergrowth, tangled and torn, sheltering small beings beneath their cover. He moves through the man ferns, filling the air with their dark, spongey scent. How far down would he have to trace before his fingers would probe the holes from the stumps pulled for childhood weapons and tools. A voice from long ago warns harshly about the living, sucking, squelching things that lurk in the fern’s furry ribcages and spiral swords, waiting to run under shirts and tuck down behind little boys’ ears.
The cold lies low here, hugs the soft tissue of lungs and lingers. Man uses precious warmth from throat, draws it up past tongue, teeth, lips to whistle. He does not expect dog to be waiting, but a sluggish hope still sputters inside. Water slides down short hair, long neck, inside the skins of the once were. Cold, so cold.
He is reminded of a time before, when sheets were cold, tears wetting his pillow and cheeks. And then one day – dog. Suddenly a heavy warmth beside him, soft hands in soft ears, warm tongue wiping the stains of the day away. So long since man was without dog that he had forgotten this deep cold.
Somewhere, dog whines. For him, there was no time before man.
Man makes his way through the valley, continues through the brush to the road, long and cracked. He tracks the bitumen like a creek uphill, finally reaching the top of the familiar old drive. There aren’t many around here who remember him now. To them, the once-boy has grown and is as good as gone. But in this place, man will be known.
He arrives early, earlier than one should, even he knows that. The lone bulb at the front door blinks in the dawning light, its glow so feeble it draws only the most languid of moths. He sees the truck waiting cold in the shed. The home cannot be empty yet. Still, he counts the battered boots by the peeling front door, wonders whether guns have been slung onto sloped shoulders. Man’s eyes track the driveway back to the road. His toe pushes into the ground to turn back, but a light, brighter, has already flickered on.
Man is still covered in forest floor and the last moments of life, thick slicks of it streaking his body like sap. Too long since he has encountered another, he is no longer used to being seen.
The door clicks and a woman stands in the door, once tall and imposing with her rolling-pin shoulders, now reaching only his chest. She peers at him, a face folded like the dough she kneads. She sighs deeply, lungs loosening, rattling from a life of tobacco. She grips his elbow, hands callused and worn, drawing him inside. ▼
Image: Milad Moqtaderi - Unsplash
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