Published in Overland Issue 219 Winter 2015 Uncategorized Exhumed at Earth’s end Rachel J Fenton I dug out the porcelain bust of a doll, first; her cheeks the tickled-pink of rosehips, her nose, so small yet broken. Frost bit its comic end. Without arms, her hips, too, were frozen in the earth’s cervix, mid birth; unable to push herself free of it, she’d given up, suspended between the spit and swallow of orange clay. Her eyes, black dots beneath twice fired glaze, long since lost. Extinct. But her mouth, the diagram of a seal, was perfect. Rachel J Fenton Rachel J Fenton lives in Auckland. Finalist in the 2014 Dundee International Book Prize for her novel Some Things the English, she is also an award-winning graphic poet AKA Rae Joyce, and is co-editing the forthcoming anthology of women’s cartoons Three Words. She tweets as @RaeJFenton. More by Rachel J Fenton 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 2 First published in Overland Issue 228 20 March 202320 March 2023 War The bus to Baghdad Stephen Pascoe In place of reflection and reform, our leaders have committed to an ever-greater intermeshing of Australian and American forces: what is referred to in contemporary military double-speak as ‘interoperability’. The new AUKUS framework has largely extended the surrendering of our sovereignty and capacity for independent defence decision-making to the American Empire. 1 First published in Overland Issue 228 17 March 202317 March 2023 Friday Fiction Fiction | Wonder women of the lizard world Rebekah Roma 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.
