AustLit

'I sat in the waiting room and tried not to stare. There were fresh flowers on the reception desk, beautiful purple orchids, and a girl in her twenties sitting behind them, her face hidden by a giant flatscreen. Bubbles of air rose in the water cooler and light filtered through windows that if I stood at would let me gaze down on Treasury Gardens, eleven floors below. There were no magazines on the tables, the edict being that the staff would not stock them and none of us were allowed to even so much as bring in a morning paper. So we all sat on wooden minimalist chairs and tried to avoid each other's lines of sight. Some of us you could recognise in the same way you recognise distant family at a belated function, not so much by name as by a voice or the vague contours of a familiar face. It has you whisper involuntarily to your sister or husband, now ex-husband, even though the person's right there just two tables away. Whisper about whose husbands left them, whose teenage sons had already fathered children, whose daughter's stomach had once been pumped to bring up over-the-counter Panadeine. You don't mean to be horrible, but that's all you can recall...' 

 (Publication abstract)