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There’s something wrong

Almost twenty years ago, before I left my parents’ house – my home, my country, my continent – to adventure into a new world, I did the maths. If I visited my parents every week for the rest of their lives, I might be able to spend another year with them.

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One language among many

Non-fiction Wyperfeld National Park, Wotjobaluk Country, October 2019 I PASS A defunct railway siding, the remnant mound like a sleeping animal. Pull up beside a mallee...

Safe as houses

IntroductionSometimes, if I can’t get to sleep, I imagine I’m back in the house where I grew up... I like to go back there in my mind’s eye, conjuring the slightly crooked hallway, the doors that never neatly fit their frames, the tiny kitchen with its overwhelmingly wheaten spectrum of 1980s browns. Like handwriting on old foolscap, the more specific details have long faded with time, but the feeling remains: that ineffable sense of calm and familiarity that I associate with being home.

Trash and treasure

FictionIn the middle of the night he had a dream where the dirty pasta bowls he’d left out were on fire, smoking up the apartment. When he shot up in bed, he could still smell the smoke. He remembered Karim, the whole previous day and night flashing through his head. In five strides he was in the living room. Karim wasn’t on the couch. The balcony door was open and he was out there, shirtless, leaning on the balustrade smoking a cigarette. The nodules rising out of his spine pinged the moonlight over his back like a prism. Ben went out, shut the door behind him, leaned over the balcony by Karim. Their arms touched and neither of them pulled away. The forum was emptier than empty. Completely still, like they were peering into a photograph.

The third culture kid

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