#18: Weightlessness by Karen Hitchcock

Released: 2009

Available: Little White Slips

Originally published: Sleepers Almanac No. 3

I first came accross Karen Hitchcock in Best Australian Stories 2006, and she has been in every edition of  Best Australian Stories since. This is not by chance; reading Karen Hitchcock's work, you are drawn in from the first line. She takes her motivations from marginal people, and by this I mean people who find the very act of living throws them to the margins: people who have distant husbands; people who eat for comfort and protection; people who struggle to connect with 'difficult' fathers.

The other thing I like about Karen Hitchcock is her sense of humour. In her world, it seems both men and women are out to enrage her central characters, and their rebuttals are often pure gold, both funny and jarring, all at once.

The Story

Weightlessness tells the story of Alice and her brother Chris, two siblings raised on ice cream sundaes, chips and orange jelly. Through childhood they gorge, each growing larger. By adhulthood, Chris has sculpted Alice in his image: they are both overweight and addicted to pancakes, tarts and other sweet treats.

Chris becomes a chef and marries a thin woman, "her nose as sharp as her tongue". Alice is ashamed of her body and is constantly trying to reshape it, despite Chris' and her husband Peter's best efforts to keep her well fed. She eats because she must, but despite so much consumption, she still tastes "mouthfuls of nothing."

The wife leaves Chris while Alice juggles jogging and degustation. Both are spiralling. Both are suffering from something "sick and unsatisfied" within themselves.

Chris keeps getting bigger. He rings Alice one night from the restaurant, says there has been an accident. When she arrives she finds him with a tea towel wrapped around his hand, the towel staurated with blood. Somehow, somewhere, there is a connection between the food that satiates them and the pain they cannot escape.

Why it Sticks

C.S. Lewis said that "Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see."

Weightlessness, if not a miracle, is at the very least a succinct articulation of a truth found deep in our culture, a craving for sustenance to feed the gap between body and malnourished soul.

In Weightlessness it is as if the act of eating is both dance and collapse; fingers dip into tubs of cinnamon yoghurt, tangy berries explode in Alice's mouth, and yet by linking pain and consumption, the mix is almost repellent; you can taste the food, yet already feel the guilt.

More importantly, Weightlessness is a story about love, about wanting to soften the edges of a world too harsh for some. In following Chris and Alice, Hitchcock charts love as something unprejudiced and unconditional, a unifying thread that links anyone who has ever felt lost or undeserving.