Hi, I'm Charli. I write about things that burn. Faith, family, and the towns that never quite let go of either.
My short fiction leans towards Australian gothic. I explore droughts that last for decades, fathers who mistake duty for salvation, and girls who mistake faith for love. Over the years, I've come to understand religion and womanhood both as languages of inheritance. Sometimes sacred, sometimes suffocating, oftentimes both.
My short story "Come Forth as Gold" explores these inheritances through Jennifer, a girl who once mistook her father for Jesus and now has to watch him die of human things.
Check out my Substack @/umaxci or at https://substack.com/@umaxci
When I was six or seven, I believed the second coming of Christ had arrived. I went to a Catholic school—mass on Wednesdays, nuns, the whole deal. I grew up hearing priests preach about the rapture. So, when the sky turned red and the land around me was engulfed in flames, with air so hot it hurt to breathe, the end of times was the only way I could comprehend the devastation.
These memories of bushfire played such a heavy role in shaping the imagery of "Come Forth as Gold" due to role fire plays in the Australian ecosystem, both as a devastator and an agent of regrowth.
Because later that night, Jennifer would sit in the garden with her dad, and he would tell her that the doctors were prescribing him another round of treatment. Her mother and Callum were well and truly asleep by then, so Jennifer would allow herself to lean into her father’s chest, feeling for its rise and fall. Then her dad would rake his fingers through her hair, like he had when she was a little girl, and hum in tune with a mixtape he had made in the nineties… If Jennifer also fell asleep outside, no harm would come to her, not when she was enveloped in her father’s arms, and if he were gone by the time she woke up, having already returned to fight his holy crusade against the devil in the hills, then Jennifer would manage, she always had.
when i wrote this, i didn't set out to make grief sound gentle. but sometimes it is. sometimes it hums to you until the side runs out.
Her Dad was a firefighter, but no one ever taught her how to survive the burning.
This story means a lot to me, so thanks for reading if you choose to <3
Come Forth as Gold
“Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him:
On the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold him:
he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him:
But he knoweth the way that I take:
when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.”
– Job 23:8-10
Jennifer drove her dad to get his chest x-rayed in her little Ford Fiesta after he spun out and collided with his Station Officer whilst go karting. Her Dad was fifty-three but may as well have been nineteen. As far as he was concerned it was still the Summer of 1992, where he’d spend afternoons loitering in a Sanity, when he’d seen Metallica play live at the MCG, and business was still booming for the milk bar on Campell Street, that her dad was yet to accept had gone under years ago.
She didn’t blame him though, for living in the past. Everything sounded better back then, even to her. Sometimes, she would walk past the town’s cemetery, and cut through to a bush trail hidden behind it, just to hear dried gum leaves crunching like kindling beneath her feet. Every time she passed through, she’d hurry past the grave-marker of a boy no one remembered the name of, but whose sun bleached headstone read ‘At home in the Lord’s open arms,’ though the text was beginning to fade like ash on wind. If her former best friend was to be believed, the boy had hung himself sometime in the 1970s, and the reason no one liked to think about him was because he was troubled. She wouldn’t admit it but sometimes Jennifer wondered if he was just tired, tired like her. She thought about the boy’s parents sometimes, imagined them standing alone by their son’s grave, long after the few people who had attended the service went home. She wondered if she would be like them, standing all alone by a gravesite, long after the rest of the world moved on. Although, maybe she was more akin to the boy, left hanging, as the world fell out from beneath her feet because two weeks later she finds the purple, yellow and white ‘Understanding Radiation Therapy: A Guide For Cancer Patients, their families and friends’ pamphlet buried like coal underneath a pile of electrical bills on the kitchen table, capable of igniting if handled to roughly, and wordlessly tucks it into her school bag as she heads out the sliding security door. She stashes it out of sight in her dad’s desk, slid in between two notebooks after memorising all its content during school that day.
It takes her yet another week to confront her dad about the pamphlet, which she only does when forced by circumstance. Callum and her mother were well and truly asleep by the time Jennifer wandered into the lounge room, stale carpet beneath her feet, Red bull in hand and stumbles across her father in his armchair, skimming the very same pamphlet by lamplight.
“Since when did you learn how to read?” She asked, looking at Raymond as if she was daring him to lie to her.
“Four or so weeks ago,” He replied easily, “Figured it was about time.”
He briefly glanced up at her, peering at her above the lenses of his glasses. Jennifer narrowed her eyes; she’d given him a chance to fess up and he hadn’t taken it. But if it’s the avoidance game he wanted to play, well so be it.
“Oh. You didn’t think that was something you might want to share with the rest of us?”
“Don’t see how it concerned you.”
“Bullshit.”
A quickly smothered lick of anger flared in her father’s eyes.
“Don’t you have homework you could be doing? Or a SAC to be studying for?”
Relegation via redirection. Textbook checkmate.
She didn’t even bother replying, just walked away.
The game, just like every other one they’d played, had rules.
Don’t say what you mean.
Keep your cards close.
Don’t flinch first.
And, if all else fails, deflect, deny, dismiss.
She let him have his victory.
It hadn’t always been like this, between them, they used to think of each other as being invincible. When her dad left for work the next morning, he gave her a wordless hug goodbye. Not an apology, never that, rather more akin to a victor shaking his opponent’s hand after a match as a show of good faith.
“Have a good day,” He muttered into her hair,
“You too,” She responded.
The interaction was robotic and lacked the warm affection one would tend to associate as commonplace between a father and his only daughter, who was often a bit too much like him in both appearances and manner for comfort, but it was how they functioned.
She had been seven when the fiery hell her school’s priest had preached about to a room of terrified four-year-olds swallowed the mountain ranges surrounding her town whole. He had always described hell and the devil as something that, when the rapture came, would rise from fissures in the drought-ridden earth. So, when instead perdition rained down on her from the heavens above, it seemed only logical to Jennifer that she should begin to question the man’s credibility as a reliable source on the natural order.
In fact, she had mused, if hell had arrived earlier than Father David expected, then it stood to reason that Jesus’s second coming must have too. And she didn’t have to look far from home to find him, either. After all, who else but the true Lord and Saviour would, without hesitation, charge headfirst into the inferno, haloed by smoke and flame, armed with nothing but a knapsack pump, the conviction of a saint and pull people from the grasps of death? Who else would hold her hand in his own, palms scarred from catching falling bits of roofing, or disappear for days on end and return smelling like smoke and eucalyptus? Although it had seemed obvious to her, when she proudly announced during morning prayer the next Monday, that her dad was actually Jesus, come to save them all, and that he was off fighting the devil in the hills, Father David was not impressed. He made her apologise to God during recess, for being arrogant and comparing his son to a mere mortal man. Jennifer had done as she was told, and prayed her penance, even though she secretly thought that God would be lucky to have a son as cool as her dad, and so he probably wouldn’t mind the confusion.
Whilst her dad continued saving people, Jennifer eventually grew out of the belief that he was Jesus, like one outgrows a favourite pair of shoes: loved to bits and worn every day until the soles fall apart, before one day, you slide them on and realise that your big toe has worn a hole through them, and so, with a heavy resignation, you discard the shoes in favour of a better fitting pair. Though her faith had faded over the years, Jennifer never forgot the heat that clung to them during the February she turned seven, when the sky turned red, and the clouds black from smog and ash. She remembered how they used to keep a brick in the toilet cistern, how the bubblers were turned off at school. She was raised on scarcity, not of food or money, but of water. Even now, nearly a decade later, she felt a quiet guilt every time she reached for the hose.
Now freshly eighteen, when the next bushfire season rolled around, Jennifer didn’t wave the convoy off like she previously had. She couldn’t bear to, not when her dad was returning to the very thing that was now slowly killing him, like a battered woman returns to her abuser, time after time. As she lay awake that night, her peripheral was stalked by leaf litter, consumed by fire before being reduced to ash, and her dad, standing amongst it all. To her, he’d always be a hero, of course he would be, he’s her dad, sometimes she just wished he’d stop being one to everyone else and just be hers. If Father David were there, he would have scolded Jennifer for being selfish, after all, generosity was a virtue. Father David wasn’t there though, because God had called him home years ago, via an unexpected heart attack at the age of forty-six. She was still here though, so Jennifer guessed she could be a little selfish for the moment.
The next time her dad was home for dinner was two and a half weeks later, all four members of her family sat around their wobbly dining table, separated by junk mail and newspapers with reports on the bushfires that painted the horizon, columns of smoke towering above lands for miles to come. Despite their best efforts, Callum had discovered their father's cancer in the worst possible way; by hearing it passed down the grapevine, where pitying whispers curled into crawling trellises and allowed fictitious details to grow from them like peas did on the veranda.
It had been Jennifer that he confronted. Demanded answers from, and it was Jennifer he lashed out at when she took a page from their father's book.
Deflect.
Deny.
Dismiss.
She recalled the conversation with haunting accuracy, as if she would never be deserving of forgiveness and had taken it upon herself to deliver divine punishment.
"Why are people at school saying the reason Dad's voice is hoarse is because he has cancer?" He'd demanded. Jennifer, startled by his directness, fell back on the only way of communicating she knew how.
"I don't know." She muttered, not looking up from her homework.
"Bullshit."
Frustration at being called out took root in her gut.
"Don't you have some bowling you could be practicing?"
He huffed and slammed the sliding door on his way out.
He spent the afternoon practicing his bowling against Jennifer's bedroom window. With increasing power and pace just to make sure she really understood how scorned he was.
Now, they all sat around the dinner table, not saying a word. The distinct absence of the usual jovial atmosphere was left unaddressed by both Jennifer and her Parents, Callum however, would never be able to let things lie, and in that moment, Jennifer hated him for it. She hated her baby brother, who was no longer a baby, for being protected when she was sacrificed. She despised his refusal to act his age, although admittedly, she didn't know what normal behaviour was for a fifteen year old boy, she'd never been one. Most of all, she hated him for breaking the rules.
"When were you going to tell me you had cancer?" He directed at their dad, who then looked at Jennifer, as if to say, 'are you going to handle this?' and so, she hated Raymond in that moment as well. Just a little bit. When Jennifer refused to fill the silence, her dad gave Callum his signature 'I'm not having this conversation with you' look in an attempt to force him to drop it.
Callum, however, had gotten his stubbornness from his dad, he and Jennifer both had.
"You weren't, were you?" He pressed, gripping his fork with increasing intensity, his knuckles going white from it. If Jennifer had thought the air was tense before, now it was scorched, still and hot like the inside of a hot car in the middle of February, the kind of heat that made you afraid to move, afraid to breath, lest something explode.
Finally, Raymond stepped up to the crease, "I didn't-"
"Didn't what?" The room flashed over, everything they'd been holding onto for the past eighteen years had finally reached its ignition point. Everything except her dad, who still sat at the head of the table, collected as if nothing were wrong.
“Callum,” He warned, “You’re upsetting your mother.”
A mother who sat opposite her husband and couldn’t make eye contact with her children. But it was the final blow, not the silence, or the illness but the quiet invocation of the universally accepted truth that no one was to upset mum. Even when they were all falling apart, it was the one line they would never cross. If her dad had been Jesus, then her mum was sacred. The holy Mary of their household. The divine mother who did not shed a tear when her family was tested by God, whose faith remained resolute throughout their trials, even when her daughter lost faith and renounced the heavenly father.
If her dad were Jesus, and her mother the Madonna, then Jennifer was Mary Magdalene, present for the crucifixion, full of doubt, yet the first to believe in the resurrection. Whose femininity was her damnation, whereas it was her mother’s salvation. Which would make Callum Peter, passionate and impulsive in his declarations to follow in his father’s footsteps, with such a desire to do good in the world but unable to follow through. And my, what a strange family they made, the sacrificial lamb, the virgin mother, the heretic desperate to believe and the faithful denier. It shouldn’t work, and most would argue it didn’t.
But maybe it had, once, before a cancerous Judas Iscariot, sent by Satan and permitted by God, to stain the cheek of his only son, the saviour of them all. Because later that night, Jennifer would sit in the garden with her dad, and he would tell her that the doctors were prescribing him another round of treatment. Her mother and Callum were well and truly asleep by then, so Jennifer would allow herself to lean into her father’s chest, drawn to his warmth like an ember to a flame, feeling for its rise and fall. Then her dad would rake his fingers through her hair, like he had when she was a little girl, and hum in tune with a mixtape he had made in the nineties, playing through an old boom box, music crackling gently like wood splitting in flame, stored on a nearly out of reach shelf in the garage, but that had been relocated to the deck for the evening. He would hum to her until the side ran out, and Jennifer would let her mind latch onto the vibrations of his throat, even as they grew weaker as he fell asleep. If Jennifer also fell asleep outside, no harm would come to her, not when she was enveloped in her father’s arms, and if he were gone by the time she woke up, having already returned to fight his holy crusade against the devil in the hills, then Jennifer would manage, she always had.
If you've made it this far, I'd love to hear what you think! This is my first time sharing my writing so any and all feedback is appreciated <3
“Don’t you have homework you could be doing? Or a SAC to be studying for?”
Relegation via redirection. Textbook checkmate.
She didn’t even bother replying, just walked away. The game, just like every other one they’d played, had rules. Don’t say what you mean. Keep your cards close. Don’t flinch first. And, if all else fails, deflect, deny, dismiss.
The mentality of a writer is so unhealthy sometimes
Like i can be sitting in my bed spiraling and crying thinking about my own mortality, and how I am only on this earth for so long, so how could I even hope to achieve all my goals as an author? How could I even begin to make a following? To make a living off of what I love?
But then five minutes later I could find something cute on Pinterest and be giggling to myself for the next hour
It makes you wonder sometimes how many people out there are sitting on masterpieces that they can't bring themselves to share with the world, out of the fear that there's no audience out there for them.
The snippet of the landscape that inspired my short story, "Come Forth as Gold". It will likely burn beyond recognition by the end of bushfire season, its ashes fertilising the soil for the next generation of growth.
I. The Invocation - Faith, Fire, and the Beginning of Everything
She had been seven when the fiery hell her school’s priest had preached about to a room of terrified four-year-olds swallowed the mountain ranges surrounding her town whole. He had always described hell and the devil as something that, when the rapture came, would rise from fissures in the drought-ridden earth. So, instead when perdition rained down on her from the heavens above, it seemed only logical to Jennifer that she should begin to question the man’s credibility as a reliable source on the natural order.
From "Come Forth as Gold", a short story about a girl who mistakes her father for Jesus and learns what it means when gods start dying of human things.
(Faith doesn't fade; it just burns out slower than the fires do.)
"...she had been seven when the fiery hell her school’s priest had preached about to a room of terrified four-year-olds swallowed the mountain ranges surrounding her town whole..."
From "Come Forth as Gold", a short story about faith, fire and family.
