1 Down South Lane, tucked away behind Oxford Street, was Jenny’s memory parlour. A remorseless stream of traffic cut through Levin down State Highway 1, beating it into place — lest it slink off when no-one was looking. Few of these travellers ever made it the short hop over to South Lane, though. As the…
Sometimes it seemed as if Eugene was bigger than his body. When he swept his wings past the shelves in the lounge, books fell to the floor and startled him. When he chuff-chuffed around the dining table, his foot caught on a chair leg and sent him sprawling. Sometimes, burning round the racetrack from the…
The first time she slipped into your mouth, she was passing you a plum stone to swallow. Only after she’d stripped the flesh, of course. Fingertips on your tongue, tilt your head back and swallow. You have to remember, she’d said as though she had any idea how it felt, it’s always easier to get…
Cleaning day on the 115th. From the observation window the crickets look like brown beads. Two farmers shake them from their old containers and they crawl over each other to get the grain, grown under lamps upstairs and scattered in fresh, clean boxes. I press my ear to the observation window, hoping to hear their…
It was only February, night flowers still out, that she’d last pushed into trainers that didn’t need lacing. Escape had meant running from the neighbourhood of packed-in, tucked-up houses and bowed street lights. Past the dairy, the bus stops, well past any capacity she had imagined until, hours later, the yolk of morning broke on…
[Content warning: maternal mental health] It’s been so many years, now, that sometimes Gina doesn’t fully clock what month it is, until the dream returns. It cycles back like a weather pattern, a relapse. In the dream, she has left a small baby out on a summery back lawn. The daisy-starred grass soon swoops with…
Since my mother no longer rode her bike over the big railway bridge, her scarf coming loose in the billowing smoke, and since she no longer got to Funky Pumpkin running her hands over the big bins of kumara, since she was in fact at Pak’N’Save on a Tuesday afternoon at 2pm eyeing up the…
Bella calls out “where are you going?” as I run downstairs to the lounge and snatch my phone. I pause for a moment. Faint blue light is slipping into our dark flat. This house is a prison, Bella always says, but some of my favorite and most ridiculous memories have happened here. I realise with…
Yesterday, my mother and I sat down to a typical Fijian breakfast of buns and milky tea. A fruit bat, screaming the joys of eating a pawpaw outside my window, had kept me up for half the night. So, it was with tired anticipation that I packed a backpack for a half day cruise leaving…
Short fiction by Rowan Bishop