let’s just try the gate she might be in the backyard your Nonna opened the gate for us she was like a human that had been made in half-size a family mascot her eyes and chin a symbol of you

‘Mother, are you drunk already?’ the man asked the woman. He was a man and not a child, she remembered now, watching the hairs of his moustache glisten in the morning sun. She saw that he was holding a child on his hip; a small, watchful child with blonde curls. Her granddaughter. ‘Where did she come from?’ the woman asked.

Remember the thin, fetid mattress you lay on as hunger gnashed in your gut. A voice had whispered your name in the dark. Through the bars of your cell there came a hand, and in the hand, a packet of Ritz crackers.

I don’t expect you to believe me, but my name is Juno Barrios and this is a work of nonfiction.

I’ve been so bored with realist Australian fiction; sleepy stories that perhaps have one eye open, but aren’t looking at anything worth seeing. I’m guilty of it too. You should see the piece I’m working on at the moment; it’s terrible, and leaves me wanting to turn the pages inside out. Still, I summoned the nerve to plead for something different.