Read ‘Rope’ by Alexandra O’Sullivan, one of published short stories from the 2025 Fiction Edition by Alexandra O’Sullivan.

Read more about all the new short stories in the Fiction Edition here.

How does anyone read a whole book? This one Miss Brown gave me has eighty-four pages of nothing happening. The other day, during silent reading, me and Roman got our books and put them together by layering the pages, one page from his book, one page from mine, right through. Then we tried to pull them apart but couldn’t. Miss Brown didn’t appreciate the science trick.
I tuck my feet back under my chair, because I don’t want Roman and Jez to ask me why I’m wearing my “horse shit shoes” to school. My borrowed uniform is too small. The spinning ceiling fans don’t do anything but make me feel sleepy with their nonstop whirr, whirr, whirr. It’s too hot to read. I put my head down on my arms and close my eyes.
I hear the thud, thud of Miss Brown’s boots on the floor as she walks up to my desk. I don’t want to lift my head. I can feel her standing there. Dad will kill me if I get another write-up, especially with everything that’s happened, so I open my eyes and sit up. I pick up the book and pretend to read, but really I’m watching to see if I’ve fooled her, if she’ll leave me be. She’s not moving. I don’t need this.
“Frankie.”
“I’m reading it now, I swear.”
She’s still standing there, watching me. I lock my eyes on the pages.
“Frankie, look at me.”
What is this, a trick? I look at Miss. She leans down, resting her hand on the desk.
“Frankie, how are you doing?”
There’s something about the quiet way she asks that makes me feel wobbly. So I nod, not trusting myself to speak. I can’t let the others see me cry. What a fucking wuss. Miss leans closer, speaks softer.
“Do you want to go to Wellbeing?”
As I take the green slip and head for the door, I hear Roman and Jez complaining that I’m being allowed out during reading time when they’re never allowed out, but I can’t even rub it in their faces because the tears are really starting now. There’s no way I’m turning around.
I get myself sorted on the walk over, just a few big sniffs in the corridor, so when I get to Wellbeing, I can sit in front of Mr Rogers okay. I know him from science class, but I didn’t know that he did this too. I haven’t been to Wellbeing before. It’s quite nice really. There’s a fluffy-looking rug with a kind of swirly pattern on the floor. The chair I’m sitting in is spongy. There’s a fish tank in the corner that bubbles softly as colourful fish swim around. Mr Rogers is saying something about not having to talk if I don’t want to and that this is a space for me to just have a break if that’s what I need. I nod and feel the tears coming back. He leans towards me in a way that makes me think I should say something.
“I’m tired.”
“I’m not surprised.”
I’d still woken up early, even though Dad had given me mornings off since it happened. It must be habit. It was dark, and for a second, I forgot where I was. It was only when I stretched my arms out of the covers and felt the weird scratchy doona of Aunt Meg’s that I remembered. It hit me with a thump.
“How are you sleeping?” Mr Rogers says.
The sleeping is the good stuff, I want to say. The waking up is what sucks. For a week I’d been waking up having forgotten, then thump! Bad news. Having that moment of good before it hit me, again and again. It’s tiring, starting each day like that.
“Okay.”
“You’re at your aunt’s, right?”
“Yep.”
“How’s that?”
Aunt Meg is nice enough, but her house has different rules to Dad’s. Like, I can’t use my phone during mealtimes and plates have to be washed straight after eating. Dad says that because she doesn’t have kids herself, she never let her standards drop. I wonder if that means he used to be more like her. I mean, they had to share a room growing up, Dad told me. I don’t have siblings. Dad reckons I’m spoilt, not having to share. That’s what I miss most actually, my messy room and my big bed with the soft doona, my dirt bike posters and my collection of Nikes lined up against the wall.
“It’s okay.”
“Is there anything you want to talk about?”
Who knew horses could scream. That’s all I can think about last Tuesday. Horses have dark eyes, like marbles, but they roll them when they’re really scared, and all you can see is the white edges flashing at you. I could hear the other horses screaming all the way down at the other end of the barn. Then I heard Dad screaming too, telling me to “get him on the fucking truck”. But have you ever tried to lead a panicking horse through thick smoke onto a truck?
“Not really.”
“How’s your dad doing?”
Dad’s been nonstop, since the fire. Not that he ever sat around doing nothing. Up before the sun, every morning. That’s the life of a racehorse trainer, he says. That’s the life of a racehorse trainer’s son too, whether he likes it or not.
“He’s alright.”
“He works hard, your dad, doesn’t he?”
I wonder if Mr Rogers is reading my mind. “S’pose.”
“I know he works you hard too.”
It’s not like I have to do it for free. Dad pays me to help before school. He calls it my “frivolous spending money” which is for things I “want but don’t need”, like Nikes, because “nothing in this world comes for free, Frankie”. I saved up all last year and was finally able to buy my dirt bike, a Honda CRF125F. I ride it round the paddocks. It’s pretty fast. Was. Shit. It was pretty fast.
“Yep.”
Mr Rogers is telling me about growing up on a dairy farm and how his dad used to make him get up to milk cows. He does this little laugh and tells me how once he got trampled by a heifer when he got between her and her calf. He says that was a pretty stupid thing to do. I turn my hand palm up, and glance down.
“How’s your hand?”
It still hurts.
“It’s okay.”
I can still feel the rope in my hand. I can still feel the heat. I can still smell the smoke and see the flames high above the trees in the back paddock. I can still hear Dad screaming and the horses screaming and Mickey, who I’d just grabbed from the closest stable, skidding his hooves on the gravel driveway as he’s dragging me, dragging me across it. The rope was getting pulled bit by bit through my hand and all I could think was don’t let him go, don’t let him go. Then the rope went right through with a flash of burning and I let him go. It was a pretty stupid thing to do.
“It’s not your fault,” Mr Rogers says, reading my mind again.
That’s what Dad said, well after it happened. But that’s not what Dad’s face said, right after, when we’d both watched Mickey gallop away and Dad yelled “fuck!” once, loudly, as the horse somersaulted through the fence in the back paddock. The wires twanged and snapped then he staggered up again, running in a weird zig-zag way, and the other horses lifted their screams as their mate disappeared into the smoke. Dad threw me a look as he wrestled his horse onto the truck, slamming the metal gate hard against his trembling flank. It was a look that said, “you’ve done it now”. We still had to get out. We got the rest of the horses onto the truck and jumped in the cab. Dad over-revved the engine as he drove the five horses away, letting the flames take our house.
The swirly pattern on the rug is bulging and spinning. There’s a heat, like the fire, rising up through me. I can’t breathe. Mr Rogers hands me a cat-shaped rubber toy and tells me to squeeze it and take deep breaths at the same time, and when I do, the eyes bulge out like in a cartoon.
“I think the horse will come back,” he says.
I don’t know what he’s thinking because horses are not like dogs. They don’t come back, they run and run and run. You’d think a science teacher who grew up on a farm would know this. The horse has been missing for a week. That state forest is so big. He’d be long gone, and that’s even if he hadn’t run right into the fire.
“Your dad was hopeful when I spoke to him.”
Dad has always believed in his horses. Even the psycho ones that swing their heads and whack you when you’re leading them to the track. He has this kind of stupid, endless patience for them. They can be carving out a ditch along the far wall of the box with their crazy up and down, up and down, their white eyes glinting, and he’ll just go, “ssshhhh mate, you’re okay,” clip on the lead and turn his back, trusting them to follow behind him. And they do.
I can never handle horses like Dad does. If I’m honest, horses kinda freak me out. The way they go from nought to a hundred in a second. Dad says I’m too much like a horse myself to be any good with them. Too jittery, he says. I don’t like sitting still. You have to be still on a racehorse. You have to be the one that keeps calm. I found that hard, when I was learning to ride trackwork. It seemed like I only had to fart to make the horse bolt on me. I got sick of swinging uselessly on the reins, worried Dad would yell at me for letting one go in a mad gallop again. I started saving for a dirt bike instead. Something I could control.
I’m starting to breathe easier now. I stop squeezing the rubber cat and start poking it in the guts with my finger.
“Hope is important, Frankie,” Mr Rogers says.
It sounds like something Dad would say while saddling up another no-hoper all the other trainers had sacked. Watching it canter home behind the field, the jockey already sitting up before the post. Then loading it up and driving it three hours home. Tying it up in the barn and putting on the ice boots for it to wear while it stands munching on supplement-loaded feed we could barely afford. “We haven’t seen what he can do yet,” Dad would tell the part-owners. “Let’s wait and see what he can do.”
The one I let go, though, wasn’t one of those. He was a youngster, fresh from the sales and bought by Dad’s personal syndicate. Not well-bred, that’s why he came cheap, but “well put-together,” Dad said. “Just look at those clean legs.” And they were, even I could see, straight and long and strong. Now, having gone through the fence, the horse might have sliced open a tendon, or worse.
“It’s important, Frankie,” Mr Rogers says, “to reframe those negative thoughts in our mind to something more positive. It’s useful, I think, if you can somehow add hope into the mix.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“Think about something that’s troubling you. A regret, maybe. Then re-word it to be hopeful.”
I wish I hadn’t let go of the rope. How do I change those words? “I hope I hadn’t let go of the rope” makes no sense. Miss Brown could tell you that. Even I know that. But maybe I could hope for something? I hope the owners don’t hate me. I hope Dad forgives me. I hope I haven’t stuffed up his chance to train a good one. I hope we can rebuild our house, bring the horses home from the rented stables at the track, get back everything we had. Maybe I could save for another bike. But, more than any of that, I hope Mickey comes back.
When I get back to class, they’re packing up, putting the books back on the reading trolley. Roman throws a book at me and I duck, letting it hit the wall. Miss Brown tells him off. I turn and pick it up. Then I push a fallen book upright on the trolley, and slot mine in beside it, carefully.

By Alexandra O’Sullivan
Alexandra O’Sullivan lives in regional Victoria. Her work has appeared in Westerly, Meanjin and Brevity. She works as an English teacher and was included in the anthology Teacher, Teacher published by Affirm Press, while her short story about teaching, ‘Things Mean Other Things’, recently won the Apollo Bay Short Story Award.
@alexandraosullivan84 @alexosullivan84

Published in ed#744

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