The snow has stopped falling when we approach the old bus, although the motionless air stings perhaps colder than when it snows. Some boys throw stones up at the bus windows; their arms wave strange circles over and again as though motioning to someone we cannot see. Clumps of snow leap up from their shoes as they run off. We too used to throw stones, when we were young boys ourselves.

When the mighty roar goes up, I’m in the alley, looking for my keys in my pockets. The ground falls away beneath my feet. I stop. I think it might be a delusion again. But the earth starts moving up and down slowly, then quickens. It looks as if somebody is shaking the asphalt street and everything stuck on it, like when you shake a mat out of dust and soil.

Kandinski orbited through the kitchen, past the water cooler, past the toilet block, past Yang’s desk on the right – the carefully timed three-minute lap of the office’s gravitational path. He awarded himself another lap, a bonus for four cramped hours at his desk.

I am imprisoned. I am in here for three years. I am having to endure and more two years and three months. I don’t know if I can endure. I don’t speak. This is a curse and there is no reply to make back to a curse.

Some kind of pain, Jolene says as they hand her a baby still bloody and wet. Then, Perfect. A bit of blood marks Baby’s chin, or is it a beauty spot? Even that is perfect.

He brushed the dirt from his cheek and sat back on his haunches to relieve the strain on the leg muscles. He dimly realised that the right leg would be numb and tingle when he stood up.

The third of these Fancy Cuts is from Christos Tsiolkas, who needs no introduction to Overland readers. His story ‘Petals’ responds to Brian Gorman’s ‘Afternoon among flowers’, which first appeared in Overland 33 in December 1965.

Wind tore through the darkness, and rain was beating down in heavy showers, the night one of the Sicilian wood-carters came to the door of Ryan’s Hotel and hanged on it so that its shrunken panels rattled. Michael had shut-up at nine o’clock; bolted the windows and barred the doors against the wind and rain.

‘So, what’s the report from your sector, Hector?’ asked Laylene, the night supervisor. As usual, she gave no indication that she noticed the rhyme in her question. Her unsmiling face radiated, as usual, blankness. Hector saluted precisely, as usual. He knew that small talk was not necessary.

A couple of weeks after I started my new job, a woman from the office took a shine to me. Her name was Wanda and she was the payroll lady. She had some Polish blood in her somewhere along the line and she understood a few words of my language. She had a nice, round, pleasant Slavic face. I liked faces like that.

They come in through gaps around the pipes, and under doors and windows that don’t close tightly enough. Their heads are wide and flat, their skin translucent. When my daughter manages to catch one, she runs her finger from its nose to its tail, slow and rhythmic. The lizard trembles with its own heartbeat.

There has, in recent years, been a push to rescue various ‘lost’ writers from obscurity. And yet the short story is a literary form deeply embedded in its time. Much of the energy that has sustained Overland throughout the years derives from its contemporaneity – its commitment to the urgent, emerging or marginalised voices of its day.

It was Melinda who came up with the idea; she’d seen something like it on TV. Women who can’t have orgasms meet in groups to practise. Sometimes they sit facing each other in pairs with their legs parted and their feet touching – linking hands, they rock back and forth and groan and yell.

The landlord and I meet on the threshold like ex-lovers, avoiding the subject of his three-and-a-half-year absence. I don’t care if I am speaking for him, but it’s the oven that sits heavy between us. He steps around me into the hall and gazes up at the circuit board, while I try to find the marks of whatever befell him the day he was supposed to turn up with an oven. He still looks like he’s in his mid-thirties.

We left the Hôpital Saint-Antoine at dawn. We stood on the pavement, cold and dumb. I heard the whale song of an ambulance fade sourly into the streets. It was Lewis who turned his back on the building first. ‘Come on,’ he said, with a jerk of his hand. ‘Let’s go home.’

Until they suddenly loomed large in the lives of her parents, Camy had never heard of Nicki and Sam Cabiri. Not only did they become regular visitors, but Camy also picked up hints that they had loomed even larger in that shadowy time before she was born. If the arrival of Nicki and Sam Cabiri was sudden and complete, the arrival of their daughter Suzie was sudden and complete and unwelcome.