Published in Overland Issue 219 Winter 2015 · Uncategorized Exhumed at Earth’s end Rachel J Fenton I dug out the porcelain bust of a doll, first; her cheeks the tickled-pink of rosehips, her nose, so small yet broken. Frost bit its comic end. Without arms, her hips, too, were frozen in the earth’s cervix, mid birth; unable to push herself free of it, she’d given up, suspended between the spit and swallow of orange clay. Her eyes, black dots beneath twice fired glaze, long since lost. Extinct. But her mouth, the diagram of a seal, was perfect. Rachel J Fenton Rachel J Fenton lives in Auckland. Finalist in the 2014 Dundee International Book Prize for her novel Some Things the English, she is also an award-winning graphic poet AKA Rae Joyce, and is co-editing the forthcoming anthology of women’s cartoons Three Words. She tweets as @RaeJFenton. More by Rachel J Fenton › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 21 April 202621 April 2026 · Reviews Pilled to the gills: Ariel Bogle and Cam Wilson’s Conspiracy Nation Cher Tan The question that Conspiracy Nation implicitly raises isn’t why people believe in conspiracy theories but rather why people have stopped trusting official narratives. But what do we do with this knowledge? When we call something a conspiracy theory, what work are we doing? Who benefits from that designation? 17 April 2026 · Friday Fiction These old hands, they are still growing Sam Fisher It was an old house meshed in an unrelenting grid of brick and weatherboard. Its walls still stood stark, red brick. Paint like tender old sagging skin on the timber windows. A bastard of a garden surrounded it, ran up brick wall and concrete path. The lawn, dead that time of year, luminescent in the streetlight. In the center of that void, a sign, Auction.
