Flash Fiction
July 5, 2019
They trek north of the Alice towards Black Tank Bore. Trekkers behind her? She worries she’s delaying them. Ahead of her? She could lose sight of […]
July 5, 2019
I can’t sleep. It’s the stars. Not those nebulous, negligible pin-holes of light dying in the city, but desert stars: fat diamonds, the silver-dark genius of […]
July 5, 2019
Wild flowers barely contained in shifting sand, guarded by barbed sentries: the Tiger Pear, the Barbary Fig. Thorns against hardwood. No country for sword-rescuing princes trained […]
July 5, 2019
Every so often, if I’m not careful with my feet, I find that I have clicked my heels together and landed somewhere completely other. Not Berlin, […]
July 5, 2019
In the desert language of her people one word does for wind and spirit. Far from where she lives the word throws out potent lures of […]
July 5, 2019
The dream: performing in front of applauding thousands. The reality: the ballet master placing her to the far left in the back row of every ensemble. […]
July 5, 2019
Nothing is quite so energising as getting up from a day’s wordsmithery and heading for the kitchen. The brain’s active areas swap sides and now the […]
July 5, 2019
She wonders if it happens to others? Their eyes deadbolt onto a stranger’s face. And with a shudder of recognition they identify that stranger’s source: birthright, […]
July 5, 2019
‘Tomatoes! This climate is perfect for toma …’ The taxi driver halted mid-sentence as he sped up to overtake a petrol tanker. ‘Bloody Safeway trucks. Shit! […]
July 5, 2019
Jews of my age called ourselves the second generation. Our parents, Holocaust survivors, were the first. It was as though 1945 became Year 1 for them. […]
July 5, 2019
There was a time when Time was brutally Australian — when we landed on this wide brown land and declared it began only then. Nothing of […]
July 5, 2019
When Moses tried to etch another edict onto those sapphire tablets, God objected: ‘Five on one side and six on the other? It will ruin the […]
July 5, 2019
‘I took Fieldmarshal for a walk yesterday,’ her friend said over coffee. ‘Turned my back for one second and he lifts a whole chicken from someone’s […]
July 5, 2019
I remember my older sister most when I roll up my socks or read 19th century novels. A remarkable student of both, Vivienne showed me how […]
July 5, 2019
At eighteen, armed with a driver’s license, I found an entirely new way of indulging my old love of shortcuts. Traffic-light-evading routes, corner-cutting byways along the […]
July 5, 2019
There are two beginnings to this tale but perhaps I should allow Marc Chagall and Isaac Bashevis Singer first words. Fabulists of phrase and image, surely […]
July 5, 2019
The mathematics of language has always enthralled me, the way it calculates. But the language of mathematics has always eluded me. Still there are those — […]
July 5, 2019
She took Hitler to bed. It was hard-going. It took her a month to read the 221 pages. It took him a month to burn 8000 […]
July 5, 2019
I am waiting for the Word to crash upon creation, making ancient stars flare in skies this night. I am waiting for God to confess his […]