3 Stories by Jay McKenzie

The Free School Meal Kids Got a Complimentary Trip to the Woods

It was a hushed, furred forest that held the cabins where they took you free school meals kids to show you what outside felt like. Spat from a bus clutching borrowed holdalls stuffed with clean underwear, you filed into the cabin you’d been allotted, looked mournfully at your friends assigned another through the trees.

You lit incense sticks, played Now That’s What I Call Music tapes on Kelly’s Walkman, breathed in the forest before it was fashionable to do so.

Under the cloak of night, the other cabins were an eternity away in the thin beams of your torches. The sticks beneath your feet popped like bubble wrap. Shhh, you hissed, and the trees whispered back.

The girls with perms left a defrosting chicken on the clothes of the newly converted vegetarians. The boys slipped ventilation blocks from the side of the cabins so they could watch girls change pads and shit into the compost toilet, whispered we’ve all seen your fanny now, and you’re disgusting when you were grouped together for high ropes so everyone laughed and you burned. Girls already gagged in lipstick sneaked into clearings with fast-tongued boys and came back flushed and knowing.

Your teddy remained in your holdall for the whole trip.

 ~

The trees are thinner when you come back, fifteen years, a mortgage and the creeping flush of a middle-age spread separating you from your teenage selves. The next cabin is a crow's spit from your own. Lichen nibbles the wooden feet, and inside, the burnished golden pine has faded to frog-throat pale. The sliding blocks have been nailed shut and in their place, a wheezing vent offers personal stenches up to the sparse leaf canopy gods.

Do you remember when you spied on me on the toilet? you ask your husband. Weren’t me, he says and you bite back I saw your glassy eyes.

Where’s the Wi-Fi password? asks your son. You’re telling him that there isn’t any when he spots it printed on a white rectangle stuck to a cupboard. Here, he says with triumph and relief. Show me, says your daughter and they are lost to TikTok and YouTube and Minecraft and your husband joins them on the rickety couch.

You slip on your shoes and dip out of the cabin unnoticed. I could just walk, you think. Keep going, see what happens. You take a step away from the cabin, then another, then another, then another.

And the Water Caught Fire

Did you hear about the arsehole who slid sideways out of his wife’s life while she was bone dry and shrivelling? There was no storm, no flash flood, just a rain that stopped metres from the ground, high enough that he didn’t need an umbrella. He licked a parched tongue, cast a final glance over her skin flaking off like paperbark ribbons, and slipped into a desert air.

They talk of shimmering oases on bending horizons and that’s where he heads, a path back to where it is wet and warm and he might feel the weightlessness of a salt-heavy sea holding him. A man doesn’t have to walk too far to find a stream or a lake or an ocean, even when he’s adrift in a dust bowl, and he takes comfort from this as he chokes up another sand ball from his cactus-ground guts.

 ~

You might have heard of the couple who begged at the door of someone with a well. Please, they said, we’re dry and thirsty and don’t know where else to turn. Of course, it wasn’t a spinster in a cottage, nor a witch on dry land, but a therapist in a glass-windowed office over a laundrette and a juice bar.

Here, she says, and hands them tiny paper cones with a thimbleful of water in the tip. During sessions she asks them to cut open veins and listen to the drip drip drip of one another’s blood because apparently even He came by water and blood and that’s where the truth is. While they talk and drip and parch, the therapist takes long sips from a Starbucks bottle she keeps on her desk bubbled with condensation. I could lick that, the couple both think, and they are mocked by the suck of the dirty water being cast out of the washing machines downstairs, affronted by the clinking ice churned in blenders, something hard made liquid, while they’re chiselling and hammering to get the drip started.

 ~

Stop me if you’ve heard the one about the twins floating in the amniotic swell of the womb. The swimming is easy in here, they think both together and alone. The bob, the ebb, the flow. The soft croon of a sailor’s lullaby. There’s a siren song that they hear again and again, sweet and sad like whale song that tells them about how hard everything is beyond their tiny wet bubble. Out there, it sings, the waters are rough, the drowning happens on dry land and oh baby! You were made for the tides.

There’s such melancholy that they make a choice without words, hands reaching for one another through the waters. The tips of the tiny fingers are wrinkled like raisins so, science says, that we can grip better when our hands are wet. The babies grip hard and decide that no, they have no intention of living outside of these waters.

 ~

Have you heard about the wife who couldn’t find a vein to get that drip drip drip started? Who said nothing because her throat was a scorched pavement and her lips two withered autumn leaves. Who would have said please don’t go. Let’s talk and wept on his shoulder if she hadn’t used up all the liquid in her body trying to keep her babies moist enough to survive.

She watches him go and nothing snakes from her eyes down her cheeks, but still there are channels scored in a trail to her chin like cracked and dried up riverbeds. There should be tears: this she understands but there aren’t. There’s just no water.

There will be no blame on either side. It’s just so sad, well-wishers will say, dabbing their own tears on her behalf, on his, on theirs. But she knows that he will find his lush, palm fringed island, green and fertile and abundant. Grasses will sprout and fat coconuts will quench his thirst. He will be drenched.

She will slowly stop moving, turn to a hard sand pillar, let the wind carry her away, tiny piece by tiny piece. She will crumble, dry, alone.

BeSpoke

We met when the BeSpoke Cafes were still legit: soft lights, plants, mediocre coffee. Piped Morning Harmony a backdrop to ugly words, snot and tears. They lined us up in a passageway, blotches of red and purple pressed in indelible kisses around our eyes.

She was to my left, and she absently shredded a tissue between delicate fingers, anxious and exquisite as she made nervous confetti that shimmered to her jeans.

They’d not been around long, the cafes. A boy from our street was an early pickup bundled into a van by masked assailants. He was petrified, said his mother, a quivering blancmange of rage. Thrown onto a chair, held down, handed a printout of everything he’d said online in the past six months. A stream of teenage girls and bespectacled boys, iced mochas in hands, sat opposite while the black-clad vigilantes barked at him to read his words to their faces. You’re an ugly bitch, he stammered at a preteen. Say it you little shit, they said. Slit your fat wrists and die, he murmured. Tears spilled into the girl’s drink before the next one was ushered in. It’s criminal, said the boy’s mother to a circle of neighbours whose eyebrows read: well maybe you should have parented better.

When they called me in, I flashed her a glance. You could cry on my shoulder, I thought. But she looked straight through me, blank, impassive. Through my exchange with what turned out to be a fifty-year-old bricklayer from Dubbo, I thought about those fingers, the shredded tissue on jeans. Instead of concentrating on the fat tradie’s words, I found myself daydreaming about protecting her from dicks like this.

Why her? I asked, when Brickie finished reading his shaking missive, but I was moved on before my latte had cooled.

I searched online, mined our brief encounter for a clue, a name. Weeks passed, and the scent of her lemony laundry detergent still haunted the edges of days. I called the cafe, but they said confidentiality in clipped, authoritative tones. I was a victim too, I said, but I was speaking into an empty receiver.

I found the brickie online, went on a painstaking trawl through his racist, sexist diatribes until I found her: there! Defending a Paralympian under her smiling image.

DMs first, but they went ignored. Then: leave her alone from a friend.

I sought a better way to get her attention. And to see her face to face.

You’re a whore, I wrote to her on a Glee fan site. Die, bitch.

Then the cafes went bust. Pushed the whole industry underground and everyone knows someone who’s been taken to a derelict warehouse under the cover of night at gunpoint to mumble their vitriol at a disgruntled shopkeeper.

At night, I sleep with an eye open, dreams of making her love me buried under a pile of broken nightmares where I lose a limb to the angry bite of a gunshot crack.

Jay McKenzie’s work appears or is forthcoming in adda, Maudlin House, Fictive Dream, Fahmidan Journal, The Hooghly Review and others. She has won the Exeter Story Prize, Henshaw Prize and others, and been shortlisted for Edinburgh Story Award, Exeter Novel Prize, The Alpine Fellowship, Bath Short Story Award, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, The Bridport Prize, Fish Short Story Prize, Oxford Flash Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She has lived in Greece, Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea and Australia. Her first novel Mim and Wiggy’s Grand Adventure (Serenade) was published in 2023, and her next How to Lose the Lottery will be published by HarperFiction in Spring 2026. She lives with her husband, daughter and too many cardigans. Find her at www.jaymckenzieauthor.com or Instagram @jay_writes_books.