Hold Your Fire is a daring collection of stories from debut Australian author Chloe Wilson that exposes the battles we wage beneath the surface.
Chloe Wilson’s stories have been shortlisted for the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and ‘Tongue-Tied’ won the 2019 Iowa Review Fiction Prize, judged by Rebecca Makkai. She is also the author of two poetry collections, The Mermaid Problem and Not Fox Nor Axe , which was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry and the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. Her poem “Soft Serve” recently won the Newcastle Poetry Prize. Chloe is a former Voiceworks Poetry Editor and holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne, where she currently lives.
Today, we have an extract from the title story of the collection, ‘Hold Your Fire’, to share with you. Read on …
Hold Your Fire (extract)
While waiting for his faecal transplant, my husband wasn’t as fun as he used to be. This was largely due to the changes in his diet. He had to be strict. He was down to eating chicken breasts poached in unseasoned water, and a small variety of baby vegetables. Baby carrots, baby corn, baby beets.
‘Why only baby vegetables? How is baby corn different from corn?’ I was being peevish. I couldn’t help myself.
‘It’s what the doctor said. I can’t take any chances.’ I stared while he cut the piece of baby corn into three, chewing each piece the recommended twenty-five times. I actually counted the movements of his jaw. Twenty-five, right on the money, every time.
I knew that I should take his condition more seriously. The last time Connor had thrown caution to the wind – it was his birthday, he ate a chicken parmigiana and a tiramisu and nearly wept with the joy of it – he’d had to run home from the train station the next morning because, without warning and in considerable volume, he’d shat his pants.
He’d grown wan like a wilting lily on this new diet. It wasn’t just the pallor and the weight loss, which left him looking bent, like his head was too heavy for his body. It was that he’d lost shape and definition, muscle mass. I felt I might accidentally skim a bit of him off, the way you can chip part of a mushroom away without really meaning to.
To make matters worse, he had become obsessed not only with his condition, but with its accoutrements. The most prized among these was a footstool he used to make evacuation more comfortable. It had been recommended to him in a faecal forum. Rather than a simple plastic stool that could be purchased anywhere, he invested in an ergonomic timber one; comfortable, warm, but still easy to clean. The forum had a preferred artisan who took Connor’s foot size and height into consideration. Connor loved that stool. Whenever we went away for the weekend it came with us in the car.
‘Anyway. Tell me about your day,’ I said, spinning my glass of wine. I’d given up joining him in his misery, and was halfway through a bloody steak.
Connor addressed our son, Samuel. ‘We went to the park,’ he said. ‘Didn’t we?’
Samuel nodded enthusiastically. ‘Daddy saved a seagull.’
‘He did?’ I knew I sounded sarcastic, but Samuel didn’t seem to notice.
‘It was hurt,’ he said.
‘I just called the council.’ Connor cut his chicken breast along the grain.
‘Poor thing couldn’t fly. It was the least I could do.’
I could tell he wanted to be congratulated for his humane behaviour, for the good example he was setting.
‘They’ll just euthanise it, you know,’ I said. ‘Kinder to let the other birds kill it.’
They would, too. I’d seen the way those gulls went at each other.
Samuel looked at me, appalled. He got up from the table and ran to his father. Connor bent his head to Samuel and I wished, once again, that Connor wasn’t going bald. He looked like a villainous, wispy invalid, the more so because his paleness made the rims around his eyes seem a bright watery red, like tomato skins.
Connor put his arm around Samuel and hushed him.
‘You said seagull would get better,’ Samuel said. Then he commenced whimpering.
This annoyed me. Samuel was a smart child – smart enough to understand the word ‘euthanise’ – and he knew where to put a definite article. He reverted to baby talk to soften up my husband. This was unnecessary. If Connor were any softer you’d be able to eat him with a spoon.
‘Mummy doesn’t mean it,’ Connor said, looking over him to meet my eye. ‘Mummy’s had a hard day at work. She’s very tired.’
Mummy was two glasses of wine down and hadn’t had satisfactory penetrative sex in more than a year.
‘Daddy’s right,’ I said. I drained my glass. ‘Mummy’s very tired.’
—Hold Your Fire by Chloe Wilson (Simon & Schuster Australia) is out now.

Hold Your Fire
The debut of an unforgettable new voice in Australian fiction, Hold Your Fire exposes the battles we wage beneath the surface.
The title story takes us into the cold war of a contemporary family: a missile-making mother doubts her husband’s guts and the steel of her son, until a playground incident escalates and brings them into the most surprising of alliances. Needle-sharp, effortlessly surprising and beautifully controlled, every tale will pin you to the page. A young couple move into a house in which there’s been a recent murder, and fall...
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