The Last Lamb of Swanston St

Swanston St, Melbourne.

Please note: This is not an AI slop romance. This was written by a real person. Every typo and plot twist was hand-delivered by a real brain. Please point out any errors :)

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The actual smell of the public aged-care facility was a permanent resident of its own.

A thick stench of bleach and stagnant urine mixed with a hopelessness perfumed the hallways and seemed to seep into the very marrow of your bones.

In the Dementia unit, Room 4B, the walking corpses shared a cramped and run-down space smaller than a jail cell.

Paint peels from the walls and the fluorescent lights overhead flicker angrily.

Three beds are crammed into a room that was never quite clean, under overhead lights that flickered with a rhythmic, headache-inducing hummm. The long hallways and cold concrete floors created an eerie echo chamber, carrying every sound and blasting it to every space of the facility.

I sat by my mum's bed, watching the early-onset dementia steal the last of light from her sad eyes. It had been three years since she first forgot the way home, wandering the Melbourne streets for days until the police found her. Now, she was mostly gone, just an empty shell.

I missed her so much. Home was so cold without her.

Lately, I spent as much time here as I possibly could, ensuring she had been fed and bathed properly and was not sitting in her own filth. Even still, she wasted away before me day after day.

I wish I could send her somewhere that would take proper care of her, but for a pensioner in this country, all you get after a lifetime of taxes is a dilapidated, cell-adjacent room with drippings from the ceiling.

"When are we leaving for church, Suzie?" she asked softly, her voice thin as parchment.

My heart twisted inside my chest a little deeper. Suzie was her baby sister, dead from breast cancer a decade ago. But I didn't have the heart to kill Suzie twice.

"Soon," I lied, patting her hand.

If believing I was her sister brought her peace, I would play the role until I didn't need to anymore.

My eyes prickled with a mixture of extreme fatigue and heartbreak. Around us, the room was a symphony of despair.

A combination of the rhythmic groans of patients in pain, underscored by the aggro, tinny blare of television sets turned up to a deafening volume.

My ears began to ring. I was so earth-shatteringly tired that the world was starting to blur at the edges. My inner eyelids scratched like sandpaper with every blink.

They felt as though two lead weights were attached to each lid, dragging me down into a sleep I could definitely not afford right now.

I'd been working food deliveries since 9:00 PM last night with no sleep yet, and my bed was calling me from across town like a siren song.

Soon, my sweetness, soon, I mused to myself, yawning widely.

I fingered the coins in my purse, counting the coins. I had exactly $3.75.

If I bought Mum a coffee from the rip-off merchant kiosk downstairs, I wouldn't have enough for the bus fare home.

It would be a twenty-five-minute walk home in the dark, with potential creepers lurking in every alley on the way.

Everyone knows what happens to girls walking home alone at night in Melbourne.

I thought of Ruth, the girl from my school class who became a headline after walking home alone. I gripped my house keys between my knuckles.

So, if I buy the coffee, I walk home with high creep-risk.

But if I walk, I'm late for the dog's dinner.

If I'm late for the dog, he howls, and the neighbor files another complaint I literally cannot afford. I am already on thin ice around there.

But she deserves a treat, I thought, looking at her frail frame. Her thin arms were poking out from underneath her footy blanket I'd brought from home weeks earlier.

Anything to give her some kind of comfort in this place.

I can power walk home, I decided. Besides, I have my pepper spray. There's always the 'kick to the balls and run' method, anyway. Never fails me.

In the bed beside Mum lived Mr. Wu. He was always agitated, yelling in Mandarin at nurses who didn't bother with translation apps.

They usually just scolded him or they drugged him into a nonsensical, drooling stupor.

My heart ached for him; he had a photo of three young kids on his bedside table, but no visitors ever came to claim him.

I'd started downloading old C-Dramas onto a USB for him, bringing the local Chinese paper when I could afford the spare change to. He would always greet me with a cheerful nod and a twinkle in his eyes.

Sometimes I would watch them with him and fall asleep in the chair. Funnily enough, he was never agitated then.

As I stood up to get Mum's coffee, I paused by his bed and bowed head in respect, the way I'd seen the actors do in our favorite shows. Mr. Wu was trembling tonight, his eyes wide and searching.

With a strength that didn't match his skeletal frame, he reached out and grabbed my wrist. His fingers were like ice, but the object he pressed into my palm was the opposite...

It was some kind of ancient copper coin with markings on it. The moment it touched my skin, it felt... warm.

An electric tingle shot up through my fingers, making goosebumps appear right away on both forearms.

How strange! Must be static electricity, I thought.

My fingers instinctively curled around the coin as I received it, noticing the unusual warmth it emanated.

Almost too hot to hold, I thought.

He whispered a string of garbled words and I scrambled for my phone, quickly shoving the coin in my front pocket, but the words were too fast for Google Translate to catch. He closed his eyes, falling into a sudden, deep sleep.

The walk home was a complete and utter disaster.

I had exactly $0.70 left in my bank account, a rumbling stomach, and an aggressive notification from my landlord saying I was late on rent again.

The cherry on the cake was the hole in my sock kept getting wider as I walked, inviting the cold in.

"Can I truly get any worse luck?" I whispered upward to the rain.

Famous last words.

I shivered and suddenly realized I'd left my favorite puffer jacket, the one with the broken zipper, on the chair in Room 4B.

I ran back to the building, but as I reached the lobby, I turned to go back... the Toad Lady was at the desk.

Ugh. Mrs. Higgins. Looks and smells like a toad.

She glared at me over her spectacles, her thin lips pursed as if she were tasting something sour.

She probably ate three flies before I walked in, I mused to myself.

"Visiting hours ended ten minutes ago, Suzie. Or whoever you are today," she snapped, her voice like sandpaper.

"I just forgot my coat..."

"Rules are rules. You can get it tomorrow. If it hasn't been 'misplaced' by then."

She went back to her stupid paperwork without another word.

"Absolute toad," I whispered aloud.

I looked at the rain lashing against the glass doors. I didn't have the energy to fight her tonight. I stepped out into the Melbourne wind in nothing but a thin, op-shop jumper.

Right on cue, a car sped through a nearby puddle, sending a wall of muddy water over my head. I stood there, drenched and shaking, feeling like a drowned rat who climbed out of a sewer.

The freezing, oily grit of the Swanston Street grime soaked immediately through the massive hole in my right sock.

My toe throbbed aggressively with the sudden cold. It was a small, private humiliation, the kind that makes you want to sit on the curb and never get up again.

I'd been half-running/half-walking along the footpath feeling sorry for myself, reading the landlord's texts when my foot hit something solid.

I went down hard and my knees hit the pavement at full force. Pain exploded from both kneecaps and I yelped.

"Ow... Excuse me!" I blurted out, trying to stabilize myself to stand up.

A mysterious, looming figure in a dark coat stood over me.

~~~

A Note from S.J. Prior:

Thank you for reading the opening of The Last Lamb of Swanston St. 🫶

📅 Updates: New chapters WEEKLY

🦘 Vibe: Proudly Australian. Written in the heart of Melbourne.

💬 Feedback: This is a journey of grit and heart. Criticism and comments are always welcomed. PLEASE let me know what you think of Maya's beginning!

- S.J. Prior ❤️‍🔥🦘