Welcome to GR Online, a series of short-form articles that take aim at the moving target of contemporary culture as it’s whisked along the guide rails of innovations in digital media, globalisation and late-stage capitalism.
Annah the Javanese
Pol drags the chair near, steps up onto it to hammer a nail into the wall above the mantelpiece. He squats to lift a painting of a woman seated in a rocking chair. As he attaches it to the wall, Annah steps back, enraptured by the languid lines of the woman, her black hair, her cinnamon skin, which is the same shade as Annah’s own. The woman’s dress is as red as a nutmeg’s lacy mace. Her bare foot reaches from beneath its folds.
Paper lands
ZHEZHI SPIDERS SWARMED over the old lady and her luggage, hunting for drugs and weapons and everything else forbidden...
Gun
One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong...
The sin room
When they left, carrying Will on a stretcher, I closed the shop for the day. My thoughts were all a swirl, and the most important was that Will would be all right, despite concussion and a broken jaw – and the source of the blood, a shallow flesh wound in his back. I saw it when an ambo pulled up Will’s black shirt tail and thought: that’s not road trauma. I know a knife wound when I see it.
Memorial park
DANIEL SAT ON the damp earth between two buttress roots of the massive fig tree. They rose up beside...
Visiting day
ONCE A MONTH, Mrs Murphy took him on a trip to the other side of town. For these journeys...
Prepping
YOUR LAWYER – A woman, for Chrissakes, young and Australian – is making you do some last-minute prep-prep-prepping. That’s really what...
Early adopter
ONE TWO THREE running, jumping hops and I launch into the sky, wings beating down hard, plastic feathers scraping...
Dummy
MAGGIE IMAGINES THE stale Ginger Nuts and Milk Arrowroots that will be in the biscuit jar at break time,...
Tamby East
THIS IS THE kind of place people leave. This town, Tamby East, sits a few kilometres off the North-West Highway....
River cities
EASTWOOD HAD NEVER liked storms. Not the Brisbane ones anyway, which didn’t so much pour as drop. He hadn’t liked...
The storm
THE PASTURE IS dry. Dust on her boots, burrs in her socks, sweat under her breasts, neck, pits, crotch....
