Adam Trodd We always just called it The Lane. It was a path between two avenues in the same housing estate with cement bollards at either end. Beer cans, carrier bags and other detritus gathered in its corners and lay hugging the high garden walls at its edges. Animal waste too was deposited there to petrify and crumble; nobody Read more...
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Maggie Ling In my perverse mind it’s summertime: that hot summer of 1976. Which it could not have been, since Lukey was born in January. Even so, I persist in seeing it this way. Seeing my mother, in bikini and tie-dyed sarong, drifting from shaded bedroom to sun-scorched balcony, a whiff of coconut suntan lotion wafting through time to Read more...
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Rebecca Audrey Johnson Angela stood at the window, watching her daughter watching the chickens. She carefully rubbed a china plate clean. The girl had always been more like her father, not like Angela at all. And it was possibly her own doing, because from the first moment she’d clutched that delicate and infinitely precious living body to her chest, Read more...
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Alex Learmont Where do we come from – What are we – Whither are we bound?1 * My name is Big-Head, and this is my Tale. The World is Flat. This is what I was told when I was little, and I knew it to be a truth once I had been taken to see it with my own Read more...
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Paul B Cohen I don’t even remember what the fight was about, but what stayed with me was her scratching my arm and screaming that I was a jerk. Succumbing to an immature fit of pique, I broke her vintage Neil Young LP by snapping the vinyl into two jagged pieces. I watched Cheryl rush out of the apartment. Read more...
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Frank E Lee In the days before Christmas the weather turned very cold and people said it would surely snow. Demand for coal, turf and blocks placed considerable pressure on my uncle’s yard. He ran the undertaking on the labour of his three sons, all big strong young fellows who were learning the rudiments of the family business. I Read more...
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Mei Kerr LUNCH ‘She’ll grow up to kill you, you know.’ That was what I wanted to say, but how can you say that? Every time I see them, and smile at that poor little girl, and she tries to smile back at me, I want to seize her mother and shake her, slap her, shout at her, do Read more...
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Simon Kyle Parker Here I sit, thirty-one years old in a car I’d never be able to buy. Outside a house three storeys 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 Read more...
