We were pleased to see a broad range of entries in the 2018 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize, stories diverse in form and voice, and creative in their approach to the theme of travel. We noticed that some writers struggled to think beyond cliché and others struggled to balance experimentation with engaging the reader. In general, though, the quality of entries was very high, and we enjoyed seeing some humour and formal experimentation in the mix.

This is the letter the government department has sent Joe, advising him that he could be deported. Here is the number of days until he might go: 28. A number as small and square and bureaucratic as the postage stamp on the envelope. Here is the lawyer’s website. This is the figure the lawyer quoted to help save him and it’s astronomical, eye-watering, but also doable. Essential.

In the summer days of 2010, Linh squatted in the back of the kitchen and pressed her bare back to the stone sink. Customers stopped coming in and even the ice melted in their tubs of sweet drinks in the fridge. At the end of the days, cubes of grass jelly shrivelled, growing wrinkled layers of film on their sides and Linh had to throw it all into the bushes at the back of the cafe.

The Mexican dream went something like this: Talia’s dad is dead, and what’s less like a dead dad than Pina Coladas on the beach, maybe some Mayan ruins, some of the less morbid ones. It was supposed to be just me and Maggie but we needed to get her out of it, her shredded family, the eulogies suggested by every park and school and supermarket. The whole city full of so sorry with Talia in the middle, sitting cross-legged on the kitchen bench among the funeral programs and the flowers, gorging herself on cheeses sent by the sympathetic.

It was a chilly evening in Tehran in 1983. Narges was sitting on the couch, listening to the radio, stroking her daughter’s hair. Asi lay asleep, her head on Narges’s thighs. The apartment was small and didn’t have much furniture. The war limited their luxury. Asi’s grandmother stood at the window, her small figure half-lit by the evening. She looked out through the steamed glass towards the autumn sky. No-one knew what lay behind those dense, livid clouds. A missile could hit their apartment this time, as it had next door.

‘Sophie, come and look,’ Mum calls. I sulk, go to the window. Pretend to give a shit about jewellery. The opals are arranged on velvet cloth, shimmering under the hot beam of an office lamp. Occurs in the fissures of almost any rock, the note card says, most commonly in limonite, marl, basalt, rhyolite. Before they’re mined, opals run deep underground, seamed through the earth like irregular veins. These stones look dead on the black cloth, as if prepared for reburial.

By the time he pulls into the driveway it’s almost midday. Mum’s got the turkey in the oven and the heat has steamed up all the windows, so I have to make a hole in the glass with my sleeve to see. But I know it’s him alright. I can tell by the way he walks up the path and the look on Mum’s face when she opens the door.

Karl had sharpened the knife exactly as I’d asked and he’d also brought home a bottle of Japanese whisky because he knew this was coming. He’d got started on the whisky in the car, out the front. I was drinking myself, watching him through the blinds, trying to decide if I would really do it or not. When he came inside I was sitting on the lounge. I had two clean glasses ready and he sat down beside me, stinking of beer, smoke and vegetable fat plus the cleaning products they use on the grill that take me way back to preschool.