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.
Chronicles of the Maiwar mangroves
THEN LIKE SO MANY human faculties that had been tested and failed in that new colony, the retrieval of accurate...
Cleave
Arrival THEY ARRIVE AT the town just after nightfall. Stand at the town sign looking up at it: Population 2,500,...
Spectrums
Elsie THERE IS LIGHTNESS and darkness. Everyone knows that. There is a name for the shade that is neither light...
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,...
