Published in Overland Issue 213 Summer 2013 · Uncategorized Marrickville Fiona Wright Later that night, I cut the plastic boning from the bodice of my dress: no need for structure, over summer. There were bruises on my knees I didn’t recognise. I saw us all that day, all day projected on a big screen: the bathtub underneath the orange tree, crushed grass imprinted on my shins, your cat-like eyeliner, the warm sangria out of mugs. My feet grew numb beneath my hips. Saturation. I still felt overseen when I walked home, alone and shouldered. A black light flicked behind a balcony, a woman, neon-lit, crushed out a cigarette and turned to kiss, to give a kiss. This wasn’t meant to sound like romance. But it’s not ironic, either. Fiona Wright Fiona Wright’s new essay collection is The World Was Whole (Giramondo, 2018). Her first book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance won the 2016 Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for nonfiction, and her poetry collections are Knuckled and Domestic Interior. More by Fiona Wright › 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 19 April 2024 · Friday Fiction Stilted J.E “Mahal” Cuya One hour after midnight. Everyone in rooms. Living room – dark. Table look like monsters. Like death. TV on stand. Netflix Logo. No one watching. Residents asleep. They have dementia. 18 April 202418 April 2024 · Education A Jellyfish government in NSW: public education’s privatisation-by-neglect Dan Hogan A private school that receives public money is not a private school: it is a fee-paying public school. The overfunding of private schools using public money is a symptom of a public service that has been rotted for a quarter of century by a political class with no vision beyond producing dubious, misleading statistics to deploy at the next election.