Gunflower by Laura Jean McKay
“I can smell more blood, other blood, new blood. Out there. Un-tasted. Big blood and small. Blood in the trees and blood in the yards. Blood at a time different from now. A time I can get to. And the folds rise on the air, and I go for it.”
Gunflower (2023) is the new short and flash fiction collection from Laura Jean McKay, award-winning author of Animals in That Country (2020). It’s a dynamic and profoundly perceptive collection that “offers hallucinogenic glimpses of places where dreams subsume reality”. Many of the stories in this collection depict a world that is a flipped reality of our own, serving as the perfect backdrop for McKay to cleverly engage us in the psychological intricacies of her very human characters.
In the opening story, ‘Cats at the Fire Front,’ McKay has created a nuanced narrative where domesticated animals like cats are farmed for their fur, and typical farmyard animals are kept as docile pets. The owners of the farm are facing financial struggles. Perplexed by their options, it seems the answer might be closer to hand than they first realise.
“The thing is that cats are survivors, aren’t they? More than that: they thrive.”
I only recently learnt about Tasmania’s issue with feral cats, and I loved how McKay used the narrative of this story to highlight the hypocritical ways we treat animals while also providing an illuminating look at the often unacknowledged realities of introduced domesticated and wild species across Australia.
Readers of McKay’s first novel will remember how astutely she is able to slip into the perspective of different creatures, and that remains present throughout many of the stories in this collection. In ‘Those Last Days of Summer,’ we are shown the heart-breaking existence of caged hens. In ‘King,’ we see the world through the eyes of an ageing lion in the wild. McKay is an expert at crafting empathy for these creatures, and even when animals appear as secondary characters alongside humans, this devotion for them is always present.
“One thought of us all as sisters and rubbed her raw skin against the bleeding cage when another passed away. The guards would bring in someone new, and after a while, she’d forget and call her sister, too.”
The pulse of contemporary issues is threaded throughout, with McKay tackling climate change, overfarming, land ownership, the pandemic and reproduction rights. In the titular and longest story of the collection, ‘Gunflower,’ a woman seeks an illegal abortion in the US by joining a crew of women’s rights activists and sailing with them out to international waters. During her stay on the ship, the crew are exposed to a violent storm, losing location services and their orientation to land – a foreboding glimpse at the unrecognisable positions many women find themselves in across modern society.
“‘Can you see it?’ I screamed. They shook their heads, staring into a tempest so dense it formed a mass. I thought: I've come so far from home to get access to my body. I thought: if this is America, there is no America. Has there ever been?”
One of my favourites in the collection, ‘Come and See It All the Way From Town,’ may also be one of the weirdest. Two boys living on a farm, presumably in the outback, begin to hear voices uttering odd phrases. At first, they think their dog is speaking to them, but they discover from their father that the truth is something far more surreal.
“When I got to the lip, he told me to turn off the quad beam, so we tipped into darkness – broad shapes of the rocks below. We all heard the word – as though someone had flicked a switch – but Sam said it first.
‘Light’.”
It’s a terribly kept secret how much of a lover I am of short story collections and flash fiction (of which McKay has scattered a handful of utterly perfect examples throughout), but this is easily one of the best I’ve read in a long time.
McKay’s exceptional imaginative capacity, paired with her ability to create characters, settings and descriptions that totally enrapture you, means this is one book you don’t want to miss out on.
Elaine Chennatt is a writer, educator and psychology student currently residing in nipaluna. She has a special interest in bibliotherapy (how we use literature to make sense of our lives) and is endlessly curious about the creative philosophies of others. She lives with her husband and two bossy dachshunds on the not-so-sunny side of the river (IYKYK). Find her online at wordswithelaine.com
