Even in the summertime the sea here glistens a chill, leaden blue, the late afternoon shadows darkening the water.
Yes, quite a lot of people do ask me how I lost the little finger of my left hand.
I was twenty-four when Christian was born, much younger than I’d ever expected to become a father.
Alone in the quiet of Wish & Co after closing time, Marnie Fairchild decided to give it a try.
Do you remember when I was a hero, Eddy? Back when everyone thought I saved you, before my face looked like a broken dinner plate.
Before Mazer invented himself as Mazer, he was Samson Mazer, and before he was Samson Mazer, he was Samson Masur...
Six twangy notes of guitar were all it took for every man in a hundred-metre radius to unbuckle his belt, drop his pants and do a dumb dance in his undies.
Alice Kent turned up the volume on her car radio as Eric Clapton, playing her favourite number, ‘Layla’, came on.
I stare down at the young man who stands below me ankle-deep in the mud of the banks of the Thames.
Yia-Yia knew many stories of gods and heroes, giants and nymphs, and the Three Fates who spun and measured and cut the thread of life.
Last week’s performance by the West Moonah Women’s Choir at the Festival of Voices offered up generous serves of the ‘singalong, sway and smile’ repertoire the choir’s audiences have come to rely on.
We’d been driving for about seven thousand years. Or at least that’s how it felt.
There was no possibility of walking to the library that day. Morning rain had blanched the air, and Miss Darlington feared that if Cecilia ventured out she would develop a cough and be dead within the week.
My fifteenth birthday is stinging with a blistering heatwave. Balloons and streamers are dangling off the clothesline, motionless.
One morning in March 2014, I woke up and wondered just how the hell I’d got here. I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a one-room sleep-out at a community home in South Auckland, with rapists and drug addicts as my neighbours.
‘Jason Mott?’ ‘Yes. Here. That’s me.’ I stare down at the young man who stands below me ankle deep in the mud of the banks of the Thames.
I was arrested in Eno’s diner. At twelve o’clock. I was eating eggs and drinking coffee.
Charlie’s ugly Crocs stuck to the mats on the floor behind the bar, making a sticky, squelching sound.
Jun Chu stood on the deck of a three-masted junk given the auspicious name Silken Dragon.
Cristabel picks up the stick. It fits well in her hand. She is in the garden, waiting with the rest of the household for her father to return with her new mother.