Where are her eyebrows?
What? said Graham.
Her eyebrows. She’s hairless.
I’ve never noticed.
Continue reading “Mona Lisa by Susan McCreery”Midnight in Mozambique by Ceridwen Dovey
It was neap tide – a low high tide, a complicated idea. Sun, earth, moon at right angles, gravity’s dance out of whack. How had the first mapper of the moon, the one before the two Jesuits, described the Earth? The sublunar world. Two worlds facing each other, land masses mirrored back: one unchanged, one that churned and boiled and froze.
Continue reading “Midnight in Mozambique by Ceridwen Dovey”Marriage of Convenience by Julie Chevalier
a small painting of marquis lodovico’s daughter dorotea sent from mantua by courier to be inspected by her would-be spanish groom
Continue reading “Marriage of Convenience by Julie Chevalier”Lights by Susan McCreery
Another red light. He palms his chin, taps the steering wheel.
Sport-plus-shopping traffic. Next to him his wife is silent. What
a way to spend Saturday morning, stuck in the car with her in a
mood. His head hurts from last night.
Jut by Paul Hetherington
Falls of fruit in the garden, and morning’s triangular shadow,
catching the house. Yachts like postage stamps on a blue
envelope; your gestures smoothing them.
In Brief by Patrick West
One morning, a story appears in the ‘In Brief’ column of the newspaper that is published every day except Sundays. The subheading reads, like a chapter title from a children’s book of mysteries, ‘The First Ocean’. An African source reports that a young man has begun (to coin a phrase) ‘the swim of a lifetime to Australia.’
Continue reading “In Brief by Patrick West”Her Dark Ground by Richard Holt
Adelie kept a locked book of recipes for black. Thirty or so, each with its mood and purpose. Every canvas she painted began as one of these shadowy combinations.
Continue reading “Her Dark Ground by Richard Holt”Fragment from a Western by Mark O’Flynn
… when the horse fell and the rider fell the dust caught them with a tenderness beyond the normal capacity of dust to feel, its race was finished. The horse would never run again.
Continue reading “Fragment from a Western by Mark O’Flynn”Northern Rivers: A Gothic Tale by Moya Costello
To come to Northern Rivers is to find – or lose – yourself among vines, beneath trees, under rain shatter, in flood-marked houses on stilts, within storms of deep, low thunder, high ice-green clouds and lightening startle.
Continue reading “Northern Rivers: A Gothic Tale by Moya Costello”My Past is Shopping at Woolworths by Shady Cosgrove
I’m trapped between the deodorant and shampoo, trying to decipher my wife’s handwriting, while Joe – my two-year-old– stacks soap into an aisle fortress. I’m re-shelving the boxes when I hear my name, the second syllable a question.
Continue reading “My Past is Shopping at Woolworths by Shady Cosgrove”