I was fanning myself with a textbook when the tradie told me about the gecko. It had, in search of reprieve from the burning meteorological irregularity, crawled inside our air conditioning unit, damaged the wiring, and gotten itself fried. Without climate control, we had suffered through December and January, red-faced and irritable.

There is, apparently, a certain psychology attributed to those who collect and hoard. I am not sure if I fit the mould of a subject suffering from early deprivation or having an intense fear of intimacy, but I am a collector. I collect endings. Each one is different in its own singular way. Maybe I even orchestrate them in my life: manipulate break-ups, terminations, conclusions, finales. Such a habit might be symptomatic of a particular disorder, possibly a certain form of masochism.

If you saw me munging on a hypertrophied human arm in the wee hours behind a sand dune, no you didn’t. The itch is hereditary. If you like this, you might also like the headache from eating ice cream too fast. What of the muted sun inherited? The hour dispenses its smallest trifles to its biggest minutes. The troubles accumulate. Bin night eve. Thursday. Late night shopping. The night is but a kitten. Meow. See also: meow. A collision in kahoots.

The hauntings are actually quite flamboyant here, though. Yeah, come in, come in. Not like my friend Moya’s house—it just has a tool shed that sometimes isn’t there and that’s it. So boring. Yes, you can keep your shoes on.

You get in early to the Department of Prosperity and Initiative, which you’ve been doing since the restructure of 2018. As government departments go, it’s nondescript. It works in the way that gumboots work. Not pretty but it does the job. You arrive at seven, card swipe, and in through the front, up the lifts, […]

It was on him again. Mick could feel it on his skin and this time it was even over the sheets and pillow. He lay perfectly still. If he moved it would get over Janelle. The last thing he wanted was to wake Janelle at midnight in another panic. With his eyes firmly closed, Mick tried to imagine himself as a small-to-medium-size car, moving slowly through an automated car wash.

Find it. Kill it. The thought has been bothering me and my fingers fumble, working back and forth on the mariner shell necklace. Walking home along the beach, I pull my coat tightly about myself, keeping the wind from probing the exposed skin of my neck.

She felt both sick and sensuous, all at once, felt she ought to call someone but secretly suspected nobody wanted to hear it. She paced from kitchen to bedroom, recalling the flimsy truth of the factoid her younger friend’s boyfriend had casually shared at yesterday’s picnic, when they’d found themselves not part of any particular conversation beside the warming watermelon, the voices of their peers swirling like bees drawn to more promising flowers.

A woman is lying on her back, disappearing into the sand. Bit by bit. First her belly, then her legs and lastly her feet. Her eyes are closed. She could be dreaming. She could be dead. From above on the boardwalk, Madeleine has an excellent view. A boy and a girl gleefully scoop and dump sand over the woman’s body. The mother must trust them not to get carried away and dump sand on her head.

Several things happen. I wake up. I hear the appeal of the advertising cruisers creeping past my building. My skin flames where it rubbed against the grainy sheets. Still two more days before I can do a load of washing. My Palm lights up with messages from work, Mum and (surprise, surprise) no men. And my mind remembers too late my affirmation principles: today is a good day. I am good. I am today. And all that. But I feel like death, or worse, like life gone on too long. Mornings like this, with the abrupt awakenings and the too-late affirmations, I fall into a mood made up of a single thought: is this all the apartment my hard work can afford?

It was the machine attached to someone’s arm that woke me up. That type of machine on wheels they use to monitor blood pressure, take your pulse, drip meds into you. It was beeping loudly. They always seem to. I became aware of feeling cold. Hospital cold. I was lying on my back. I felt like I was perfectly straight. I pulled the covers up to my neck. I nestled into the warmth of the bed as best I could but I still could feel the cold all around the room above me. I kept very still. What else was there to do?

I’m biking and I’m biking and this could be anywhere: Audrey Hepburn’s Rome on a mint-bodied Bianchi, or mid-80s Minneapolis on a hot pink BMX, or the Capetown M48 on a drop-bar Momsen. I’m pedalling and I’m pedalling, working my legs to the limits and when I finally catch the truck, I carabiner on, kur-klunk!

Although mothers and daughters were not an unusual subject, this triptych’s macabre, violent and sexual themes were unprecedented for the period. The first panel depicts a mother and teenage daughter reclining. Dark figures, which art critics have variously described as satyrs, devils or gargoyles, emerge from the mother’s mouth and hands.

Janusz tucks his mouth into his elbow, makes the shape of the word with his lips. He recognises the sound, insectile in the distance, pictures the plane on the runway, propellers whirling, ready to launch. He rolls his head so his cheek rests against his forearm, the open pages of his maths book a pillow beneath.

You remembered the smell of him. Like milk powder, rimmed with the tang of compost. When you held him, you would breathe in deep, and squeeze him so tight he started to wiggle and huff. He came out smaller than a toaster, then took on the shape of a loaf of bread. Now, he was just starting to get lanky. Knobbly knees and feet so big in their fat, laced shoes, still round-toed.