Ray puts his mouth up to the gap between the window and the car door-frame. Still, everything smells of burning. Smoky air grazes his throat, punches his lungs. His head spins and he slumps back into the driver’s seat. No matter what he does, he can’t stop his hands from shaking. I could go out, he thinks, find her.

The last Pieface in the state had closed its doors; not even a concession at a servo remained open. This is it, I thought, the golden age is at an end, it’s all drying up now, no one will ever prosper again. An echo rang out—a small pop as if someone had taken a pin to the thin membrane covering a void—the bubble had burst.

He pushes his chair back and stretches his limbs, turning himself into a multiplication sign before taking his glasses off and rubbing his eyes. He knows how they must look: red, irritated, thirsty for a few artificial tears. Has he just snapped at a student? In an online class which was recorded? God damn it! He slams his laptop shut, opens his desk drawer, picks up his eyedrops, and walks to the window. His father still squats where he’s been for the last hour, under the shade of the fig tree, a garden trowel in his hand.

Tayla placed the cap back on the permanent marker and swivelled her foot around. When light shone directly on the shoe, you could see the difference in colour but otherwise the ink matched well. She’d get another couple of weeks out of that patch before it needed touching up again.

We meet in the domestic terminal. A departure lounge cliché. You with your schooner of James Squire in the airport bar and me with a stale glass of sparkling, the last dregs of the bottle smelling a bit like feet. We sit at different tables. You take a photo of your beer, framed by the window, the wingtip of the aeroplane beyond. I scribble in my journal wingtip.

my daughter steals the papers every morning like she stole english. she chopped the language up and put it in her pocket. she’s a smart girl like that. knows how to survive like that. up in the trees, eating lagartas, she reads the papers aloud and slow, piecing together all the chopped-up sounds and vomiting them back out through her teeth.

On a sweltering summer day, a young man signs in at the front office and is guided through the building by a pleasant woman with purple hair. Brick peeks out of peeling paint like a snake shedding its skin and endlessly wide windows sit deep in the walls, hedges of flowering murrayas obscuring the view. […]

Quite informally, as if trying on new clothes in front of a friend, you tell me you love me. I was not expecting to hear these words on the phone, especially after you’ve driven for days across the flat expanse of our country. Western Australia to Queensland is some girth to cover in fifty-six hours.

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, […]

Refugee Football League trial match at Linkbelt Oval, Nauru. Young men in official RFL Draft guernseys play with ferocious intensity, a cloud of phosphate dust billowing from the grassless surface. Leaning on the rusted boundary fence, Dirk is just one of the dozens of talent scouts closely watching the action.

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.