Kathy Prokhovnik

Listen to Kathy read her story

‘Shut up,’ Nora snaps, brittle like mum, arm flailing like mum’s to catch any limb within reach in the back of the car. We laugh, but not really. We stop joking around to look at the land slipping by. Familiar but not familiar, landmarks washed away or covered in whatever the deluge had vomited up. Everything tumbled and drained of its recognisable life. 

Much like our parents, I suppose.

The penitent sky spreads above us, blue as innocence, exhausted of clouds, of water. I know it doesn’t hold my parents, robed and winged. Mere death couldn’t conjure benevolence, or penitence, in them. 

Nora turns into the driveway and there is the hotel, the place where we once made our breakfast, ironed our shirts and left for school. Stomping, disgruntled, unaided by a sheltering parental touch. Denied a gentle word. 

The hotel. The place where we brought ourselves up. The one love of our parents’ little lives. There’s that neon sign, dangling by a straining cord, never to flash again. The day it arrived they almost danced. Their only dance.

We stand near the car, alert for snakes and runaway animals, carried or harried by the waters. Amy cries, ‘What’s that?’. Of all the runaway animals we might encounter, I’m relieved to see a smudged white horse picking its way alongside the remains of a fence, a crumpled line of pickets and barbed wire. I can’t watch. The horse’s legs are bare and vulnerable, the skin thin and easily broken. The wire lurks in unpredictable loops. 

I make my own precarious way through tumbled pieces of furniture and flattened gardens towards the hotel. I hear Amy say, ‘It’s made it!’ and ‘It’s running!’ and ‘It’s like a sign of hope,’ and Will says, ‘Do you ever hear yourself? Do you ever listen to what you even say?’.

We’ve been warned not to go inside but there are no threatening beams or dislodged staircases. There’s just the smell. Cracked sewers and swept-up mud. 

‘Polly!’ Nora calls. ‘You shouldn’t go in there.’ But it’s too late. The dusty waft of mould is already seeping in, creeping through my nostrils, around my mouth.

She comes up beside me, sends me out. Amy and Will follow her in. I track their movements by Amy’s calls and exclamations as they come across broken pieces of our past.

That night I have my first asthma attack in years and it does more than remind me of childhood. That first stifled breath brings spores of memory, shifts me right back into endless nights of silent, abandoned panic.

‘I told you. The mould. ’ Nora says in the morning. 

We’re eating cereal out of cardboard packets.

‘Or the horse,’ Will adds. ‘You’re allergic to horsehair as well aren’t you?’

I say nothing. The attack didn’t surprise me. My time in that hotel was always a mould lodging within me, lying in wait in my lungs, infesting my very bones. No flood could wash that rot away.

Kathy’s prompts were: A Derelict Hotel, Horse/s, Mould

She said of the challenge: “This is one of those stories that wrote itself. I read the prompts and saw the four siblings driving down a road. The hotel was there, derelict, but why? Once I saw the flood, I saw the horse and the mould. I’ve reworked the original draft, but the whole structure was there from the start. Even if no-one else likes it, I love this little story for coming into life, magic! Just like that.

Kathy writes fiction (long form, short stories, microfiction) and nonfiction. She is currently submitting her second novel to unappreciative publishers and preparing a podcast series based on her CNF manuscript, a social history of Sydney, Australia. Highlights include a fellowship at the Perth, Western Australia, KSP Writers’ Centre and a Newcastle [NSW] Lighthouse Arts residency.
Her short stories have had some wins, some shortlists, some publications.
Kathy has a podcast called Seeking Sydney. “This is a recording of Sydney as I, and others, see, hear and remember it. Together we show where it has come from, and the past that it relies on for its existence. “