Published in Overland Issue 205 Summer 2011 · Uncategorized Fresh Kill Cath Drake Set off later than we meant to. At home, we’d been nagging about dishes, shopping lists, the bike with the chain hanging. Now, with the light going, we flash our mobile phones to find a path in the forest back to the train station. Pure white feathers flare across black mud. The blood is cold, solid, no splattering. So it doesn’t look fresh. I’m not sure if we came past this spot earlier. Its body opened, luminous red, neck gone, eyes empty; abandoned to death. We stand over it. Each fine-boned feather perfect. There’s no evidence of a criminal, no tracks, only soft blank mud; we heard no struggle, no screams, no scuttling away in the dark. We keep walking, become disorientated, walk past it again, this time only white feathers strewn in pitch dark. The body is stolen, and still we’ve not heard or seen anything. When we get to the sturdy well-lit bitumen I can’t look at him. Just say: I can’t see you anymore. Cath Drake Cath Drake is an Australian from Perth who moved to London in 2001. She has been published in anthologies and magazines in the UK, Australia and the US. She currently works in communications for a children’s charity, focusing on life stories. Her website is www.cathdrake.wordpress.com/. More by Cath Drake › 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 February 202521 February 2025 · The university Closing the noose: a dispatch from the front line of decasualisation Matthew Taft Across the board, universities have responded to legislation aimed at rectifying this already grim situation by halting casual hiring, cutting courses, expanding class sizes, and increasing the workloads of permanent staff. This is an unintended consequence of the legislation, yes, but given the nefarious history of the university, from systemic wage theft to bad-faith bargaining, hardly a surprising one. 19 February 2025 · Disability The devaluing of disability support Áine Kelly-Costello and Jonathan Craig Over the past couple of decades, disabled people in much of the Western world have often sought, or agreed to, more individualised funding schemes in order to gain greater “choice and control” over the support we receive. But the autonomy, dignity and flexibility we were promised seems constantly under threat or out of reach, largely because of the perception that allowing us such “luxuries” is too expensive.
