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…
When you’re just a young chap and it’s the nuns teaching you, what often happens during art class is you decide to paint Jesus. As if it’s your own idea and not Sister Perpetua nudging you in a certain direction. In my case, the picture of Jesus morphed into a picture of a hamburger. But…
Emma Sidnam is a Wellington-based writer and lawyer. As a fourth-generation Asian New Zealander, she is passionate about representation and ensuring that all voices are heard. She is a slam poet and her work has been published in the Spinoff, Capital, Newsroom and the anthologies A Clear Dawn and Middle Distance. Her debut novel Backwaters won the Michael Gifkins Prize and was longlisted for the…
You want to order from a local restaurant, but you need to download a third-party delivery app, even though you plan to pick it up yourself. The prices and menu on the app are different to what you saw in the window. When you download a second app the prices are different again. You ring…
I typically avoid hard foods. These mantou are under-fermented: as if someone has poked a white ball with a needle, leaving it pockmarked and deflated. Biting into it might be tough, without the softness I prefer, but I don’t want to try. This results from my inexperience—uncertain about the right amount of water to add.…
As children, wild and unwatched in the streets of Kerman, we played dodgeball religiously. Every day, no exceptions. Those days our bodies were still as swift as hummingbirds, as agile as fish, swooshing away from the yellow ball thrown at us as if it were a comet on fire. The most glorious moments of the…
When you see your ex with a baby strapped onto him for the first time, don’t act surprised. Even though you haven’t seen him in years, obviously, and you’ve just bumped into him outside the cafe where you both used to sit with your laptops, attempting to study, but too distracted by each other, legs…