Udjerlah’s Song (continued)

y Nelen

In the Upside Down Country, Udjerlah suddenly felt the need to escape the endless red desert, the land-locked interior, and went in search of relief to the Turquoise Coast. Down by the harbour, where the boats go out to the Pink Coral Reef, she spotted a public phone box and decided to surprise Slava with a call out of the blue. There was a great barrier between the two of them now. But at her first attempt, she got through to him in Moscowville and said:

“I do still love you.”

“Prove it then,” he said.

The call was horrendously expensive, painfully short and painful.

Later Udjerlah sat alone on the beach at Cape Trouble, watching the full moon, like a huge, pink grapefruit, rising above the stinger-infested sea. She began to dissect the way in which their paradise had gone rotten.

Udjerlah’s Song is an adult fairytale set in Moscow and Central Australia, and serialised at Alice Online.