Escape rooms

Click here to listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘Escape Rooms’. THE RAINBOW LORIKEET – a fledgling, brilliant green with texta-colour highlights – stumbled around like a person too long at a party. It tripped on the roots of the fig tree it should have been in,...

Unaccompanied minor

THE FIRST TIME I fly to Melbourne to see my father alone I am four years old, and I’m so little that Qantas won’t take me unaccompanied. My father pays an air hostess to sit beside me the entire flight down. For the rest of my life...

At the end of the line

THE CALLS STARTED the night I was released from hospital. My lungs again. I’d coughed so hard inside my motorcycle helmet that I’d blacked out as I slowed down for a traffic light, slipped off and under my bike, and out into a rain-slick intersection.

Speaking my language

MY AUNTIE HAS stopped speaking to her siblings. Rifts like these are commonplace in my family, where people fall out with each other like dealt cards. The size of our family doesn’t help. The original eight siblings have grown into four generations and almost...

Moonwalking

WHAT WILL IT mean for a woman to set foot on the Moon, a world whose human landscape has so far been shaped largely by men? In the twentieth century, twelve men became moonwalkers, their footprints tenuous trace-fossils pressed into the soft, fine lunar...

The banksia revolution

IT IS FRIDAY morning in a moderately busy, inner-suburban Melbourne supermarket and I am standing a little awkwardly in the cosmetics aisle, completing a television news interview about something that is happening in the store. It is a fine day outside, mid-twenties, but you wouldn’t...

Away from the edge

MY MOTHER EMIGRATED to Australia on the SS Australis in 1967 as a ten-pound Pom. I first opened my eyes at 1.42 am in the maternity ward of the Manly Hospital, Sydney, in 1974. Now, forty-five years later, Mum and I are driving west from...

For all we do in the dark

I DEAL WITH grief the way I deal with most trauma. I keep it locked away in a dilapidated archival box – one of the brown ones from Officeworks that you have to fold together yourself – only to be opened during my darkest moments. When you experience...

Welcome

FROM THE TIME Kurt Talker disappeared, presumed drowned, people began to claim him. They named his parents, his extended family, even whose Old People’s blood ran through his veins. Some swore they knew the very words whispered to him when he was a child,...

Americano Sal

It was always busy there in Palermo. During a snow shower I’d sit in the cafés, small corner net connections. Sometimes the weather was a little heavy – I’d kick my boots clean of ice at the entrance, umbrella heavy with sleet. The man you paid to use the internet would be singing in Farsi; a woman would speak in hushed tones in the cubicle. Sometimes not so hushed. Talking to her family on the other side of the world. Where maybe it was snowing, too. And together they could listen to each other. Together in the snow they could talk.

The menaced assassin

SOPHIE STANDS IN front of the painting, flexing her toes. She pushes one heel off the ground and then the other, as though she were a sprinter about to crouch into blocks. Museum walking is harder than other kinds of walking – why is that?...

Wildflowers

Listen to contributor Peggy Frew read her fiction ‘Wildflowers’. IT HAD TAKEN Meg a long time to convince Nina. Many lengthy phone calls. During these Nina had experienced a lot of trouble staying on the line. She walked around the flat she was living in then, the tired-feeling...

Emily presents

MEG IS ALLOWED onto the tarmac to watch the unloading. It is a vast, empty space at this time of night, except for the cargo plane parked a short distance from the terminal and the scuttle of small vehicles around its base. A spotlight has...

Reflecting light

DAYS FROM NOW, when the ship pitches so hard Jesse is woken being tossed from the bed, he’ll remember his first moments on board. He’ll know the placement of furniture in the tiny room by memory, and in the dark, his eyes still adjusting,...

Walk

HE WALKED DOWN the seething streets of Fortitude Valley. It was 2.30 in the morning of a Saturday night and his face was lit by the glow of a cigarette. It curled and broke against the faces of people walking by, who were stumbling drunkenly...

Vavan

LOOK AT THAT lamppost by the newspaper kiosk. No, not the one where the bike is locked. The other one. A woman just walked by it. A boy once leaned against it and wept. Wherever you turn in this town, you come across reminders. You...

Pidgin

Now Pidgin didn’t say much to nobody, but he was different around his feathered friends, and also with me, coming to overlook my human bits. Plus I never poked fun at him the way others did, about the slowness, the bung eyes or walking like a string was tied from his ankle to the back of his nog – you know, pidgin-like – or being good with nothing else but bird things, which never holds much bargain for others, and they’ll want to tease and knuckle what they don’t get. Truth is I was in love with Pidgin, not that he knew – though it could have been mooch, since he was always calling me up.

Displaced

THE DELICATE RED filigree of the sea fan coral looked like alveoli in lungs, Clare thought as she kicked through the shallow waters of the reef, out towards a rock wall that she saw in the distance. She passed an orange coral grouper speckled...

Camelopard

MOST OF THE time, I know I’m human. There’s a buttoned flap to fuss with when it’s time to eat, and another for toilet. Every enhancement comes at a price. It’s not good teamwork to complain, not when things are going so well. Seven games in...

soap

Artist Walter Inglis Anderson escaped from the Mississippi State Insane Asylum on 1 April 1939   i.  hold, he prayed, and wrenched the sheet into a rope.                heft, and twist.                heft, and twist. tie a knot when the...

In America 1979

In America, I was no longer who I thought I was; one time in America, I was a white person helping an elderly black woman with her heavy suitcase across the platform. A tall black man holding a Bible bowed his head at me,...

After three years in Australia

I take for granted going into movie theatres  without checking for guns, or sitting as close  to the exit as possible,  assume now any big backpacks are just for smuggling snacks. 

The day Khet Thi was tortured to death

after Lou Reed   I dreamed –   I was the poet laureate of Naypyitaw, the Abode of Generals.    The Generalissimo was a poet too. So was the Generalissimo’s  American cocker spaniel.  To exorcise the woes in me I took the wok pan   I used to cook kanzunywak for supper,  I smacked it so hard  it...

The night sky from the surface of Mars

Well, first off, it’s not home. Your sharp intake of breath  tells you that, as you clock the horizon-to-horizon stars  from the Mars robot’s black-bubble swivelling eye all is uncanny: the planet’s surface cold and empty as death, and the surface of Mars like the ground  in the video games...

Frederick the Great

When he was young, Frederick the Great tried to flee his tyrannical father By conspiring with his best friend,  A young officer, Hans Hermann von Katte, to escape. When caught he was imprisoned, and feared he would be executed, Something his father probably considered, though he eventually relented. His...

My mother disliked the sea

My mother disliked the sea after we arrived in Australia. She would say, ‘Four weeks on a ship. Waves. Waves. That’s all it was... And the horizon never getting closer.’ Once, going on a picnic with friends to Shellharbour she sat with her back to the water. ‘Seeing the waves makes me...

Tyranny of distance