Start reading Just Like the Night by Michael Caleb Taster
- Allen & Unwin
- 23 hours ago
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Read an extract of Just Like the Night by Michael Caleb Tasker.
ONE
It was quiet without a cellmate. Some nights Sera could hear the wind, outside, breaking against the trees. It was a hollow sound, and distant, like it still had a long way to go. It was better in winter. Everything was. The moon was closer so that the tired light filled her cell and made it look clean, and the damp didn’t leak from the walls. And the bats were calmer.
The new girls still cried. Slow, smothered cries that stopped with a sudden hiss, a snakebite from a cellmate, and left the air empty.
Sera listened to the wind and she wanted to sleep with an open window again, feel the cold night on her skin and smell the smoke from the fires over in the mountains.
Her body clock was out of whack on the inside. It had been since the start. She was asleep early, before lights out, even when she had cellmates. She slept through all the voices, and the methadone-spiked fights, and every now and then a hard beating that shut the whole place down. But she was up early, before the sun, face washed, push-ups done and bed made, waiting like there was something to wait for.
Her father had been like that when they first came over to Australia, when she was twelve; left the States behind and tried to start over. He couldn’t get into it, he couldn’t relax, couldn’t find a rhythm. Something always lingered. It was like some kind of jet
lag he didn’t want to get over.
Extracted from Just Like the Night by Michael Caleb Tasker, available now.
Just Like the Night
by Michael Caleb Tasker
A gripping exploration of loneliness, conscience and the ties that bind.
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