The English Flower Garden, it’s called. Not many flowers in this late Autumn month, though. A few ragged roses, a bed of irises, something white and anonymous in a couple of borders. He and she walk a gravel path to the mock-Edwardian pavilion that faces lawn and ornamental pond. Around them, trees shiver in the…
(Excerpts from the diaries of Officers Jeffrey, McKenzie, Robinson, McGregor, Draper) 1 1400 hrs. From the ship the rocky cliffs and shores are visible, but only intermittently as gales play with the clouds, lifting them for periods of thin sunlight, then dropping them, plunging the horizon into grey foggy thickness. Eventually binoculars and drones…
There were not too many white people left, if any. Not real white anyway. There used to be before the Edict was enforced. Nowadays the only way to sight them was in a circus somewhere, or in the nearest museum where their atrophied carcasses were on permanent view in the history collection. And everybody knows…
Chills wrack my body and my head pounds, throbbing in time to the beat of my heart. The sound of the ocean vibrates around this hill. I try so hard to hang on to the susurration, but it doesn’t ease my mind. Nothing helps. Nothing but her. The fog rose just over an hour ago,…
The husband is standing in front of my register and he looks incredibly uncomfortable. We are unnaturally far apart, and he shuffles his weight from foot to foot. He studies the drink fridge intensely, as if Sprite is an exciting new seasonal flavour, while running his fingers repetitively through his short greying hair. It’s been…
I gazed out over the disused hospital patio. Beyond, brightly garbed workers drained the pond to make way for a new parkade. Ana dozed on the bed, Eleanor in the bassinet. I stood guard, a bulwark against the return of the frenzied excitement of the previous night. The world was hazy and calm. Eleanor stirred.…
‘Have you floated before?’ the woman asks me. The man next to her looks up from behind the front desk. I shake my head. The woman stands up and hands me an iPad with the terms and conditions. She invites me to take a seat on the bulbous couch opposite us. I perch on the…
On the dawn of the solstice, under a sky washed clean of clouds, through the cold air cut with woodsmoke, through the piñon-juniper hills, the quiet comes singing. The quiet takes the shape of a woman. Frost in her hair, mud on her boots, a woman comes singing down the hills, her voice a holy…
I grew up a foreigner in my own country. I was born in Australia to Greek immigrants, but my parents were born in Egypt, not Greece. So I grew up a Greek-Egyptian boy in Australia, a cultural mix that was a target for racism. There wasn’t much room to fit in. In the 1970s, Bondi…
On the beach my belly rippled, thick with the baby… I watched a child’s head go under, and not resurface. Where was the mother? Gone. Unthinking, I ran into the waves. Gentle they were, like silk around my bairn. I struck out towards the darkened hair. Behind my closed eyes, lies the curve of the…