Published in Overland Issue 215 Winter 2014 · Uncategorized Castrato Michelle Cahill When the kitten with a dislocated limb is euthanised, you’ve stopped reading my blog, my sister refuses the call, a bargirl on the south side of Sydney is being shagged, when every contract is optional, the ping-pong game is over, the flat day reeks of a stinking premonition on the pretext of afternoon teacake, vanilla-iced, served with the luminous smiles of a stay-at-home mum to reprise me of the stakes I’ve gambled, make-up too bright, or remind me falciparum malaria hooks up to maggots glossing the trash heaps on Manus Island, page 6 – when the slush pile of supplier statements, invoices, failure-to-pays I’ve ignored becomes a pylon, having clocked up as many as twelve angry men who’d expect equality and dignity are unconditional? When I’ve almost crossed the desert hallucinating Lasseter’s cave, with a parasitic strangle when poetry raids every layer of self-respect so I can no longer read newsprint, let alone the opening sentence of my tenth surplus draft, syllable by syllable – I’ll start over like a teenage boy with secret admirers in the back seat of his mother’s 4WD, learning to curse before my voice breaks for the first time. Michelle Cahill Michelle Cahill is a Sydney writer. Her short story collection, Letter to Pessoa, won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing. She has received prizes in poetry and fiction. More by Michelle Cahill 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 First published in Overland Issue 228 29 May 202330 May 2023 · The university Universities as tools of apartheid Nick Riemer In his new book Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine: Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023), Nick Riemer mounts a comprehensive argument for the institutional academic boycott of Israel. This edited extract outlines the central rationale for the boycott—Israeli universities’ institutional role in enabling apartheid, occupation and anti-Palestinianism. 2 First published in Overland Issue 228 26 May 202326 May 2023 · Fiction Fiction | garramilla/Darwin Lulu Houdini We sit in East Point Reserve and look at how the gidjaas, green ants, make globe-like homes out of the leaves — connected edges with fibrous tissue that I later learn is faithful silk. Safe inside. Why isn’t it safe outside? I pick up the plastic around this circular lake cause this is the way […]