– Stuart Snelson His father he saw every other weekend. Fresh air and education were his watchwords. Activities invariably lined up; their time together was linked to strict itineraries. His father cut the fat of distraction. It was the beginning of the mushroom season. His father hoped to ingrain a joy of foraging, his son…
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– Diego Baez “What are you wearing?” She’d taken a seat to my immediate right. Now six of us overwhelmed the four-top, a fart’s waft away from the restroom, in a corridor that serviced the bulk of the sports bar’s foot traffic. “Excuse me?” she all but shouted over the six televisions screening six different…
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– Gillian Best The customs official asked me the reason for my visit. Business or pleasure he said, in the surly grey English morning. Neither, I replied. You are English, he said. This is an Australian passport. Yes, I said. I’m coming home. It is neither business nor pleasure, it is a requirement. He looked…
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– Lynn Mundell The dreadlocked beauty remarkable for having won her trip on the Internet hurried to her cabin and didn’t come out again. Deep into the cruise, half-eaten plates of sashimi stacked up outside her door. Damp seeped from her room to the cabin below. Once, the porter found a set of wet footprints that…
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– Audrey T. Carroll Caroline had stayed around long enough for the funeral.  She even stayed a week after that.  People had been telling her that she was young, that she’d bounce back, that it was better to have loved and lost.  The encouragements had ceased the day after Jared’s funeral, and then came the awkward…
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– Karl MacDermott Mother is in hospital. She isn’t very well. She is eighty-two years old. She has recently been diagnosed with vascular dementia. The medical term is vascular. They leave out the next word. Dementia. They are discreet like that. Understated. Play things down. Like being diagnosed with lung cancer and told you are suffering…
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– Noreen Lace I received a letter quite recently from a woman who’d read my book and came across my biography in the back. She said she’d come from the same hometown and wondered if I might be the same David Wright who was in her remedial English class in middle school.  Ah, yes, guilty….
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– The Man in the Black Pyjamas This is a story about planes. This is a story about two brothers—One and the Other—who used to lie in their back garden and watch the planes this story is about feel their way like jellyfish across the night. This is a story about that garden. This is…
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– Clare Kane May 1999 Dina runs back to the house from the paddy fields, where she has been working all morning. Her sister is leaving today, packing up her kindly smile and bony arms and taking her affection elsewhere, to a city whose name Dina can’t pronounce. Her sister stands proudly at the doorway…
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– Kelly Pells Bones like pieces of shattered glass stuck beneath the skin. Eyes pools of bottomless black. Hunched shoulders and rasping breath. Thin lips drawn back from the teeth so they seem perpetually bared. As if he is smiling. Always smiling. This is Effie’s view from between the bars of her cage. The boy…
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