It was only because the children wanted an old board game from the attic that Charlotte discovered it. The sun was shining intensely outside; bees buzzing on the windowsill after resting on the daffodils. On a day like this the children should have been running around in the garden. One of the great sins of childhood is to waste a Read more...
All 10 Minutes
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‘I’m writing a play for my end of year exam,’ Chloe announces. I throw my coat and bag on a chair. I got caught in an almighty shower on the way home from the office; me, the coat and my oversized bag create a little puddle on the floor. ‘Do you have to write in the kitchen? I’ve got to Read more...
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Here I sit, thirty-one years old in a car I’d never be able to buy. Outside a house three stories high. impeccable gardens wrapped around it. Hugging it. With an army of gardeners tending to them day and night. I drove a taxi for ten years in the city. But out here it’s different. In a car like this it’s Read more...
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On the inclement late winter day when Superintendent Cummings called him into his office and first informed him that he was going to be the short-term trainer for a bloke from the Gippsland area, Alex could not help but chuckle at the irony of this rapid escalation in his fortunes. He had only been a driver-bearer in the Geelong Ambulance Read more...
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Night in the country has an inkiness about it altogether unlike night in the city. I stood in the garden of our new home and let the darkness pour itself around me. The only light came from stars tossed like glitter across the arc of the sky and a thin curve of moon shining on the black water of the Read more...
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The daffodils in the garden are in full bloom. Nafisa is looking at them through her window with that wistful look, as though a longing has filled her heart. In the opposite house Solomon is working the ground, tilling the dirt, preparing the beds for the growing season. His ginger cat, a rusty old girl named Gulmohar, is sitting next Read more...
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Squinting to read the menu through cataract-clouded eyes, Ben Jefferson turns the page with stiff fingers, their joints swollen and gnarled with arthritis. Reverend Morris, having seen the sight one too many times, shakes his head and sets his now empty Styrofoam coffee cup aside. He pulls a pair of reading glasses from his inside coat pocket and wipes them Read more...
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SUMMER 1939 ‘Are we there yet?’ I asked Ben, creasing a sweet wrapper into a triangle shape. I never can stop working. ‘You asked me that five minutes ago, and no, nowhere near.’ Ben is staring at the thin sliver of road ahead, only illuminated by our headlights. ‘How long then?’ ‘Barbara, I’ve told you, it’ll be hours. We’re not Read more...
