Leo was alone. He had always wanted to be alone and now he was. No pestering acquaint- ances, no nagging relatives, no poky neighbors, no boss. Maybe just a little bit more alone than he wanted to be (he was twelve months an orphan, and his girl friend had just married someone else), but what […]

Sometimes, when I wake, I cannot stand the thought of living off the fragile fruits of our labour — all the things that wither and die in the palms of our hands and at the bottom of our stomachs.

When Jens found Lucy Teller squatting in the dandelions, he had been planning to tell her he was her father.

I am sitting on a deckchair. It is so humid even the air feels moist on your skin. It doesn’t take long before the waves become heavier and the ocean is howling. I am on a cruise to K’gari island. I am not a swimmer. I fear deep water.

“You can take this off now,” Tegan says, leaning over and tugging at Blue’s bow tie. She’s sitting cross-legged and she falls against him, one knee flipping up beneath her purple taffeta dress. “It’s so hot still, how can you even breathe.”

The Rotuman culture is rich in community, land, the spiritual and the physical. Various factors from colonialism to Christianity have left generational legacies that clash with Indigenous knowledges. Often such clashes leave cultural practices, like that of the Rotuman tattoo, on peripheries of a history. In between survival in a Western-modern world and the need […]

Her back is perfectly straight. She perches on a small black leather stool, her neck curving over the thin table in front of her. The fine bones of her shoulders are pinned back, her hands reaching across the table, to hold a stranger’s hand in her own, working fast. A white surgical mask stretches across her nose and mouth, elastic bands keeping it taut, tucked behind her ears. The sharp smell of chemicals seeps in anyway.

You need to look at me. There were not enough words to explain. You need to look at me. He didn’t believe her yet. He wouldn’t even pretend. He could do that, for her, and maybe she’d get to believe she’d affected another person and he’d get to enjoy the gratitude she flung at anyone […]

Light from a distant glass atrium loiters passive-aggressively, just on the other side of Adam’s closed eyelids. It’s a hue so warm it must be sunshine, but that implies day, and he really has no idea what time it is. He is parked on a moulded plastic seat, part of an armrest-linked row skirting a quadrangle of hog-bristle walls and patterned grey carpet.

I saw the boyish woman walking towards me along Paisley Street. Each time I see her I think she might look at me, know me and speak to me, finally, after all these months I’ve watched her from the window in my study that overlooks the street, turned away from my desk, tired or bored, while below she paces from the mall to the bridge just about every day, howling obscenities, squatting and smoking, pulling her pants down to wee between parked cars.

She slammed the bedroom door shut, turning us both into silhouettes against the fading light filtering through the large open window. Barely in the room, she collapsed on the bed in front of me, said, “Smartphones are what cigarettes were for the great masses of people once addicted.” Reaching across her bed, she dipped her hand into the bottom drawer of her bedside cabinet and pulled out a single cigarette.

It is not the first time the thought occurs to her: that it might be days before anyone finds her, lying still on the linoleum. What prompts the thought this time is her bleeding thumb. Clumsily opening a can of baked beans she finds at the back of her kitchen cupboard yields such blood. Sofia drenches the handle of her mother’s old wooden spoon. The sauce, also a sickly red, is starting to bubble on the stove.

The next time we saw each other I would only remember the name Bastard, which was not his name but what his friends had called him, how they’d introduced him that first night, because it resembled the sound of his true surname. But I felt strange addressing him as that; even an unflattering nickname seemed to produce intimacy I didn’t care to feel. Instead, I didn’t call him anything.

The things I want to say aren’t the sort of things you’re allowed to say out loud. You’re not even meant to think the things I think. But sometimes I think them anyway and sometimes I want to say them, so badly, that my chest fills with this irredeemable rage and I don’t know which way to look.