Elliotte eyed the trees through the kitchen window, flecks of ash scoring the glass. The morning was long, not that they weren’t all long. And as she stared at the knotted forms of the trees, she switched her mind off to the lukewarm water that rushed out of the tap, hit her hands and filled…
I’m 27 and I’m tired. I have a pair of yellow crocs with fineliner drawings scrawled messily on top of them, I sometimes feel like I am living inside a blue curling wave with air bubbles just big enough to breathe inside, I miss waking up to the taste of another’s hair swiped around my…
The sky is black, red, and blue like a bruise. I press on it a little just to feel it ache. It spins above me, the world smearing into streaks of paint. I roll over just in time as the second wave of vomit rushes up to greet me. I hongi the sidewalk, pressing my…
Arthur lives at the edge of town. His house is rife with infestation, with weeds and aphids and pests of all varieties. The house is tucked away by the end of the court. It is the scourge of your street. * Arthur’s front yard is full of birds. He used to tend vegetables there, ripe…
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…
One summer the clouds changed into whales. Before that happened it had been one of those disquiet summers. People had stopped at the seashore to watch lightning storms gathering on the horizon; they had quit their jobs and their failed marriages, instead massing lazily in the city’s parks; they had complained about the heat and…
We need a setting for this story, but nobody can afford a garden anymore, there’s Covid in the bars, and the seas aren’t safe to swim in. The chateau by the mountain was unprofitable and fell into disrepair. The sports fields aren’t fit for use after the floods. Where do we go, but our apartments…