Curtis McCoy was early for his ten o’clock meeting so he carried his coffee to a table by the window where he could feel the watery April sun.
Sam stares up at the slowly lightening ceiling and practises her breathing, like the doctor advised her, as she tries to stop her 5 a.m. thoughts congealing into one enormous dark cloud above her head.
Like many others, I did not see it coming. But William is a scientist, and he saw it coming; he saw it sooner than I did, is what I mean.
Death always visited me in August. A slow and delicious month we turned into something swift and brutal. The change, quick as a card trick.
Te Hoia know the concrete wall has already started to boil under the sun.
One violet twilight, I sat motionless on the grassy edge of a small neighboring meadow.
“Edi. Are you sleeping?” I’m whispering, even though the point is to wake her up.
At some point when I was a child, my father started using a cane to keep himself balanced when he walked.
“Anything strange or startling?” That’s how my da, Bob, opens our conversations.
Ki nga whakaeke, haumi. Join with those who connect the waka together. Find your place, you are part of the action. Our entrance onto Hina’s moon stage begins our lunar journey. This is our whakaeke.
Henry Appleby shook his head and flapped the page with disgust, reaching for his glass of ale nearby.
If you had set out in the summer of 1660 to travel the four miles from Boston to Cambridge, Massachusetts, the first house you would have come to after crossing the Charles River would have been the Gookins’.
On the way to school in the car is an opportune moment to use te reo Maori with the kids because they can’t go anywhere! You have a captive audience! Having fun while learning, especially with kids, always works best.
‘Is it a hanging?’ an eager newspaper delivery boy asked no one in particular.
If every man is guilty of all the good he did not do, as Voltaire suggested, then I have spent a lifetime convincing myself that I am innocent of all the bad.
I initially considered writing a book about resilience for personal reasons.
Number two highlight of my thirty-ninth birthday: an extremely fit policewoman calling me interesting in front of some very hard to impress neighbours.
‘I don’t need make-up,’ says Ron. He’s in a straight-backed chair because Ibrahim told him you mustn’t slouch on television.