BECAUSE THERE IS A WAR ON — ZOË MEAGER

When it snaps, Mother fusses about sewing new elastic into our knickers, and then, when the haberdasher runs out and her box of sundries yields no more, she devises complicated gestures of ribbon and string. 
           To keep ourselves from sin, we eat everything on our plates and never criticise the cook. She shimmies less the more our food, clear and earnest, wobbles, but all sorts of things can be food if you believe it.
           Our big sister is pale and peaky, Mother says, but she wears lipstick over the white cliffs of her lips and in her pocket are iron filings gathered from the factory floor. After dinner, we bully them with magnets into stars that burst across the table. 
           Bloodlust, our dog, howls home a joke and a lark. He’s been mettle detecting in the streets, tip-toeing broken glass, and pulling parts of pigs from deep in the butcher’s bin. We string our hall with tangles of gut in time for Christmas and rub the fat into our faces, calling it good as cold cream.
           Our big brother who wouldn’t fight sits on our mother’s nightstand, a slice of himself. He looks across at our Father’s side of the room with its thin window and understands the sunlight every morning as it’s shattered by the nets.
           Our little brothers aim their beds at the night sky and sit up shivering until they’ve rat-a-tat-tatted every star into an early grave. Then they roll themselves like pigs in a blanket, believing as they slumber that somehow it will all be mended.

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Zoë Meager is from Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work has appeared abroad in publications including Granta, Lost Balloon, and Overland, and locally in Hue and Cry, Landfall, Mayhem, Turbine | Kapohau, and Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand and two volumes of Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy.