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,…