Where the wild things aren’t

About the author

Mikaella Clements

Mikaella Clements is an Australian writer who lives in Berlin. Her first novel, The View Was Exhausting, was co-written with her wife, Onjuli Datta,...

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Non-fictionMY FAMILY HAVE always been wary around animals, especially in the home (I could have written ‘non-human animals’, but a stark separation of human from animal is truer to them). My brother and I have changed because of animal encounters in share houses and via intimate others, and we now each live with a partner who likes cats (I ‘have’ one cat; he ‘has’ two). But our parents have remained the same.

Taking the reins

Non-fictionThat’s when it started, I think. That evening at home I cantered on an imaginary horse along the lawn towards our back paddock, reciting over and over the lines I could remember. An unusual initiation, maybe, but it was ‘The Man from Snowy River’ that set a bespectacled, bookish ten-year-old on course to becoming a ‘horse girl’.

Object permanence

Non-fictionTigger arrived with one eye and a tender but wary disposition, and at first it seemed like the missing eye would be the locus of his mystery. But within a few months of his living in my small apartment, he began presenting strange troubles – back legs listing when he turned a corner, spasms in his resting spine – that were quickly diagnosed as arthritis and diabetes.