Kaaron Warren - All You Can Do is Breathe

His house was full of his sponsors’ food and friends came over to eat it because he wouldn’t. Some of the rescuers too, looking at him as if they’d wasted their time. Sitting there in front of the television, warm rug, warm slippers, all skinny and pale.

He couldn’t even fake a smile anymore. His famous watch had slipped off his wrist and sat in the dust under the couch.

“We shoulda bottled it. We could give him a taste of his own self,” one of the rescuers said. He knew they were disappointed in him, that he wasn’t doing what they wanted him to do.

“Three days of my life, I gave to save him,” he heard one say in the kitchen.

“Now look at him.”

They left him alone.

And he didn’t care.

Kaaron Warrenhas lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Fiji, She’s sold many short stories, three novels (the multi-award-winning Slights, Walking the Tree and Mistification ) and four short story collections. Two of her collections have won the ACT Publishers’ and Writers’ Award for fiction, and her most recent collection, Through Splintered Walls , won a Canberra Critic’s Circle Award for Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Australia, the US, the UK and elsewhere in Europe, and have been selected for both Ellen Datlow’s and Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Anthologies.

She was shortlisted for a Bram Stoker Award for “ All You Can Do is Breathe ”, and is Special Guest at the Australian National Science Fiction Convention in Canberra 2013.