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To Take Into the Air My Quiet Breath single work   short story   science fiction  
Issue Details: First known date: 2016... 2016 To Take Into the Air My Quiet Breath
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

After a flu sweeps the country and leaves most of the population dead, Georgie cares for her two younger sisters and worries for their cystic fibrosis: Annalee had lung transplants before the epidemic and only needs medicine, while Eliza is severely ill. They stay in their house, self-quarantined.

A call comes from the hospital, informing them they have lung transplants ready for Eliza. The sisters travel into inner Melbourne, where they meet a girl, Mari, with an unnamed baby. Mari leaves the baby with them and commits suicide as they're about to reach the hospital.

The hospital is bombed-out, and Eliza reveals that the phone call was a recording she kept from before the epidemic. Annalee is growing more ill as her body rejects the lung transplant, and they're running out of medicine. Eliza faked the calls to get them out of the house. As Georgie begins to despair, the phone rings.

Affiliation Notes

  • Writing Disability in Australia:

    Type of disability Cystic fibrosis.
    Type of character Primary.
    Point of view First person.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Defying Doomsday Tsana Dolichva (editor), Holly Kench (editor), Yokine : Twelfth Planet Press , 2016 9322595 2016 anthology short story

    'Teens form an all-girl band in the face of an impending comet.

 A woman faces giant spiders to collect silk and protect her family.

 New friends take their radio show on the road in search of plague survivors. 

A man seeks love in a fading world. 

How would you survive the apocalypse?

    Defying Doomsday is an anthology of apocalypse fiction featuring disabled and chronically ill protagonists, proving it’s not always the “fittest” who survive - it’s the most tenacious, stubborn, enduring and innovative characters who have the best chance of adapting when everything is lost' (publication blurb).

    Yokine : Twelfth Planet Press , 2016
    pg. 49-76
Last amended 16 Mar 2018 09:39:16
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