Hills and more hills as far as the eye can see. On the outskirts of town, they ebb and they flow. Looking like a far off distant land you could easily explore and conquer like a Burke and Wills expedition. Why is it you feel like screaming and crying and dying as you walk…
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It’s one of those cold winter mornings where my bed feels like a blissful cocoon, warm and safe and impossible to abandon. I wake before dawn and the whole world is encased in this transcendent beauty, like I’m the only person whose mind has sacrificed the land of dreams for a glimpse of reality….
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*Trigger Warning: This post contains writing which may upset those with mental health issues* Imagine waking up in a cold, grey room all by yourself. You have a few of your clothes shoved into a shelf next to your bed and a plastic cup of water sits on the floor. There is no…
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The colour of the tomatoes is changing each day. There are two on the vine; plump sisters, green-golden in the dapple beneath the frangipani tree. They were green yesterday, and now they have changed. I plucked a large tomato from the vine a few days ago. It was almost bursting, skin taut, still somnolent with…
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For the longest time, I’d believed it to be a mere fatigue masked as sorrow, bouts of mourning meant to induce involuntary sympathy. The insanity plea. My mother is an exceptionally engaged person. It’s impossible to slot her into a schedule because she’s constantly days ahead of herself. Compulsion to productivity, she calls it. Cases…
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The colour of this fantasy seems to me to reflect something closer to cream than anything else – cream, yes, because that is the colour of the walls I remember even if it was not correct. That was not important. It was the essence: cream, because even the air was delicious and sweet and perfect,…
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They are on a train to her house. She and her boyfriend. The second to last train home. They are alone in the vestibule and she is pressed up against the glass partition between the seats and the doors, and her boyfriend has opened her shirt and has his hand in her bra. Don’t, she says,…
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The first thing you can remember is the cicadas. Their sound rings through the air, picking at your toenails and at the corners of your eyes. You can’t sleep. They herald the rising and setting sun and sometimes when you step on the nature-strip just right they stop. But then the cicadas chirp again. Your…
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Sometimes I wonder if my grandmother really existed or if I made her up in my head. All I have are constructed and reconstructed memories of a mythical woman and her illness and the inter-generational impact of her life. My grandmother’s photographs hang in my mother’s bedroom. Ten photographs of different sizes; some in colour,…
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I lie awake, eyes wide beneath the lacing of moonlight filtering through unfamiliar curtains, listening to the distant wail of trams. The pub up the street is pumping out a bassy whump-whump and bursts of raucous laughter. A coil in the mattress feels like a knuckle in my spine. The thoughts in my mind feel…
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When my friends warned me about the overt sexist comments many young women experience while walking on the streets in some European countries, I wasn’t sure what to think of it. Naively, I laughed, dismissing the issue by claiming I would have some devious feminist comeback if any man was to pester me. This attitude,…
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(TW: graphic bodily descriptions) I remember that my mother and I were out running errands, but not much else. I can’t tell you the time of day or year, if the leaves crinkled as their rust-coloured corpses tumbled through the sky, or if the scent of summer honeysuckle hung so thick you could almost taste…
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There was a red mark on my skirt. My friend had told me as soon as I’d risen from my seat and I had no idea what to do. It was my first year of high school. I’d only been there a few weeks and my first month had been fine, but this was a…
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She’s fourteen – though she is often mistaken for twelve – and a mixture of insecurity and confidence is etched into her movements. A freshman in a tiny Texas town, she tiptoes through the halls of her high school quietly and curiously. She’s not quite sure how to carry herself – this body of a…
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