Chills wrack my body and my head pounds, throbbing in time to the beat of my heart. The sound of the ocean vibrates around this hill. I try so hard to hang on to the susurration, but it doesn’t ease my mind. Nothing helps. Nothing but her. The fog rose just over an hour ago,…
The husband is standing in front of my register and he looks incredibly uncomfortable. We are unnaturally far apart, and he shuffles his weight from foot to foot. He studies the drink fridge intensely, as if Sprite is an exciting new seasonal flavour, while running his fingers repetitively through his short greying hair. It’s been…
I gazed out over the disused hospital patio. Beyond, brightly garbed workers drained the pond to make way for a new parkade. Ana dozed on the bed, Eleanor in the bassinet. I stood guard, a bulwark against the return of the frenzied excitement of the previous night. The world was hazy and calm. Eleanor stirred.…
‘Have you floated before?’ the woman asks me. The man next to her looks up from behind the front desk. I shake my head. The woman stands up and hands me an iPad with the terms and conditions. She invites me to take a seat on the bulbous couch opposite us. I perch on the…
On the dawn of the solstice, under a sky washed clean of clouds, through the cold air cut with woodsmoke, through the piñon-juniper hills, the quiet comes singing. The quiet takes the shape of a woman. Frost in her hair, mud on her boots, a woman comes singing down the hills, her voice a holy…
I grew up a foreigner in my own country. I was born in Australia to Greek immigrants, but my parents were born in Egypt, not Greece. So I grew up a Greek-Egyptian boy in Australia, a cultural mix that was a target for racism. There wasn’t much room to fit in. In the 1970s, Bondi…
On the beach my belly rippled, thick with the baby… I watched a child’s head go under, and not resurface. Where was the mother? Gone. Unthinking, I ran into the waves. Gentle they were, like silk around my bairn. I struck out towards the darkened hair. Behind my closed eyes, lies the curve of the…
Somewhere two kids are leaving the kitchen. Somewhere, a mother has given instructions. Can you two do a job for me? Go and pick up the milk from the gate. It’s one of those days where the Southerly has swept the sky clean. You’re wearing denim dungarees. The label on the front says SKIN JEANS.…
I am three and I am running away. I am running away from my brother and my sister and into the water falling from the sky. They wear togs. My sisters are dark blue like the moana when there’s about to be thunder. The frills at the hips are wavy shades of sunshine. My brother…
I watch the road. I live in a little copse of trees and I keep a fire waiting for strangers. I am a transmutating thing—I can form into fog or a pack of rats. I like best to transform into an owl, the most vicious owl, and I tap tap tap on people’s windows and…