Short Stories
Meadow-Wisp was conceived on the Cerne Abbas Giant. Her Dorset hippie parents, who believed in unfiltered communication, recounted every detail: hiking up the hill through dense fog, their torches reflecting chalk outlines (foot, calf, ribs, elbow), grass slick beneath them, concentrating on an energy focal point. In the final weeks of pregnancy, her mother cross-st ...
[after the painting of the same name by Daniela Bradley, 2012]
Contributory Negligence n. 1 occurring in circumstances of negligent conduct on the plaintiff’s behalf that has contributed to the harm they’ve suffered.
...Alex is watching his wife as she stands at the pale stone bench and raises her canister of Chinese herbal tonic to her shoulder to give it a quick shake. She gives him a game, faintly ...
... (read more)When he steps outside and pulls off the mask, it feels like removing a second face, the one he keeps from the ones who wouldn't understand and those who would ...
... (read more)We are wading out, the five of us. I remember this. The sun an hour or two from melting into the ocean, the slick trail of its gold showing the way we will take ...
... (read more)She says it was a man, an old man (but all men are old to her), which man, what did he look like, what was he wearing, what did he do ...
... (read more)Before the ceremony began, the woman with hairy legs and an air of having just abandoned a cigarette wandered as though at a party to the coffin where – though it was impossible and not so – Clelia’s mother, Margaret, was. Three days ago, four days ago, Clelia had said to her mother, ‘Come and see the blossom I’ve brought back.’ She had just returned to Sydney after a three-week absence in the mountains.
‘Can’t it come to me?’
‘No,’ she said gaily, insistently, not thinking really, never wondering. ‘No, you’ll have to come out here. It’s so tall. I can’t move the vase.’
... (read more)