Sunday Short: The Weather Inside by Mireille Juchau

In the months after Pip’s funeral your mother started carrying the umbrella. Sometimes the sky was tremendously clear. Blue as a borage, threatening nothing. You didn’t like to see her in the town this way, her face so deeply shaded that it looked as if the umbrella was walking on its own. Sometimes she arrived home with her hair quite wet, and the weather dry, quietly folding the brolly into itself. Your father was often away, following the honeyflow. Ironwood at Caster’s Creek, Salvation Jane on Hussaini’s acres. In the chemist two women watched your mother through plate glass. Is it her skin she’s saving or something else? they asked. You had to run out so you wouldn’t shout, Meg’s Ventolin and Prednisone rattling in a paper bag. You know, it doesn’t make you invisible, says Meg of your silence, folded around you for four months now. It’s the opposite. You and your mother are drawing attention. Meg inhales and wheezes. She sketches her trees bent over with their top branches growing like roots into the ground.

Man, this is close to a perfect short story for me. Deeply emotive, sweet and biting all at once, The Weather Inside traces a small family through the seasons with one of the children very sick. Mirieille Juchau does a wonderful job of capturing the tenderness, the pain and those small, happy moments when you can almost forget. It's a lovely, lovely piece of writing.

You can read 'The Weather Inside' over on the Meanjin website.