I watch the road. I live in a little copse of trees and I keep a fire waiting for strangers. I am a transmutating thing—I can form into fog or a pack of rats. I like best to transform into an owl, the most vicious owl, and I tap tap tap on people’s windows and…
One summer the clouds changed into whales. Before that happened it had been one of those disquiet summers. People had stopped at the seashore to watch lightning storms gathering on the horizon; they had quit their jobs and their failed marriages, instead massing lazily in the city’s parks; they had complained about the heat and…
We need a setting for this story, but nobody can afford a garden anymore, there’s Covid in the bars, and the seas aren’t safe to swim in. The chateau by the mountain was unprofitable and fell into disrepair. The sports fields aren’t fit for use after the floods. Where do we go, but our apartments…
Every twenty-eight days, the poets posted pictures of the full moon in the group chat. ‘Wife looking horny tonight,’ they wrote. ‘So hot.’ ‘Harvest Wife, resplendent in fog.’ In life, it was true, the full moon magicked the sad city and its rumpled harbour. In life, it was huge and magnetic. In the photos, though,…
Before my first appointment, I walk through drizzly Newtown, my shoes belching. Personal bias, maybe, but to me this place has always seemed like a cartoon dog with a giant rain cloud over its head. It makes complete sense that here, in 1903, a gardener would have made a formal request for half a tonne…
Leah felt reckless. She sucked air through her teeth as she strode across the sand to the bonfire. There were still a few beers in the bucket. Nothing she liked, but that wasn’t the point. Jimmy stood close to where the waves rushed up the beach and sucked back out. Hungry, the ocean is hungry,…
I’m waiting in the wings tonight. My eyes are locked in a tunnel of black and white. Without the clarity of keys, things are blurred and grey. Voices ring atonal. Away from a piano, I know nothing. I am a cold woman. I’ve been instructed to smile more, and to laugh at jokes, even when…
This story is a retelling of Hector Munro’s classic 1911 short story “Tobermory.” Everybody gathered at Bob’s place, drifting in late Christmas morning after they’d opened their presents wherever they were staying. The women from out of town brought meringues and whipped cream, then spread berries on top of the dessert. The men brought beer, except for…
A beautiful dress caught Emily’s eye in the Fortuny shop. A grey wisp of wool, falling softly from the shoulders. She was thinking of buying more antique fruit plates for her new flat on Nekrasova Street, but the dress drove them out of her mind. Beautiful china and clothes were an old craving, suppressed while…
There’s power in naming things: swallow/warou, yellowhead/mohua, saddleback/tīeke, tūī is tūī. I name the 23 glass birds flying along the length of our hallway. The long overhead skylight is a reflecting pool, the birds’ glass bodies deepening and lightening as they ring in the weather changes. Each bird a ‘this is your life’ moment, right…