Ghosts come to roost in our new home. Aunts and uncles, yiyis and kaufus, a medley of half-remembered faces and ancestors I’ve never seen. They flock on the balcony and screech against the glass doors. They crawl through the floorboards like cockroaches and root through the trash, looking for things to eat.

The OH&S officer’s name is Lucy, though she looks like a Karyn to me. This is the sort of epiphany I have after an hour of listening to her tell us, over and again, that knowing your fire exits will save your life. We’re all sitting in Sunshine bookstore’s staffroom, where Clare, the sometimes-manager, has set up a whiteboard and a bunch of chairs; she’s in her mid-twenties, just a few years older than me, and I have this funny feeling she wants to ask Lucy, where are the fire exits, exactly?

I wake this morning with Andy Gibb’s “Thicker than Water” playing a personal broadcast in my head. Fifty-odd years since I last heard the damn thing, and maybe I only ever heard it a couple of times back then anyway, and yet it rings clear and distinguished as a pulsar’s hammering — every note, every corny line. I never even liked the Gibb brothers.

One hot and dusty summer day, while strolling to a kite shop, Ali requested me to write a letter for him, addressed to Nelofer — the narrow-nosed shy girl with dusky eyes, whose family had recently moved a few doors down from Ali’s, in the fatigued neighbourhood of Mariabad by the foot of the mountain, in Quetta city.

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.