Family Album

This is a snapshot of my father’s greatest joy, his 1962 blue and white Nash convertible, taken outside the old homestead just before I was born. From left, my dad, Stephen Clarke, who farmed wheat in those days, then my mother, Wilma.

I’m the bump under her apron.

The man with the dog, which I think was a collie, is Uncle Paul. He’s dead now, but he opened the town’s first hardware store. And the toddler next to him is apparently my sister, Jenny, who was killed by the dog in this picture three days after the photograph was taken.

 

 

 

First published in All The Little Things That We Lose: selected stories, by Deborah Sheldon (Skive Magazine Press, 2010).

 

 

 

Deborah Sheldon is a professional writer from Melbourne, Australia. Her short fiction has appeared in many well-respected Australian magazines such as Quadrant, Island, Page Seventeen, and Tincture Journal, as well as in various anthologies. Her latest releases are the crime-noir novella Dark Waters, which includes as a bonus her novella Ronnie and Rita (Cohesion Press); and Mayhem: selected stories (Satalyte Publishing). Other writing credits include TV scripts such as Neighbours, magazine articles, stage plays, award-winning medical writing, and non-fiction books for Reed Books and Random House Australia. Visit her at http://deborahsheldon.wordpress.com.