This story was written for a competition with the theme "thirty". It did not place. It’s a two hour drive to Steffy and Bert’s. Vron cries most of the way. The windscreen wipers commiserate. Her eyes are red and puffy when the house comes into view. It sits on stilts, the rain breeding thunder on … Continue reading A Birthday
This story was rejected (in record time) by the journal that I wrote it for. Although the characters really came alive for me, I haven't had all positive feedback from my chief support network. One criticism is that it's a bit slow-moving. I do wonder whether the premise is also slightly faulty. Anyway, it's 2800 … Continue reading Granny Shannon’s House
The following story was written for a West Australian Yarn competition. It didn't achieve the long list. It was the first short story I had written in a couple of years so I wasn't surprised. However, I will publish it here. Perhaps some will have the patience to read it. The dog follows his nose … Continue reading So Long
Daisy Days Come with me now, to the gate where the mist holds court on the driveway. And together we’ll remember the time you left with a goodbye, casual as daisies. You never came back. As the weeks passed, I swirled down down into the dark soil, looking for you where worms feed and the … Continue reading #dVerse Prosery
Feeling stupid after an email conversation, I go out to exercise the dog. The oval lies over-sheened with western sun. Light billows like a sheet, particulate and all-pervasive until I shade my eyes. The dog scoots, mostly ignoring the ball which I throw for my own exercise, walking on and to pick it up and … Continue reading Warp & Weft
I thought I would write a little report of our journey so far from the perspective of travelling with an electric car. So if such things don’t interest you, probably stop reading now. We are travelling from Canberra to Airlie Beach via the M1 which is approximately 2280km. It is not the shortest route up … Continue reading An EV Holiday
We stand by the school gate, pasted around with framed faces. She is talkative. He is European. And the other one is mostly silent, somewhat of a black sheep. I feel like a black sheep too, not even daring to hope for happiness. I lean against the fence, my aching hips and the how-to-vote cards … Continue reading Election Day
Unsheathed from its special box - Japanese steel, sworled and beautiful... and there! The pumpkin cubes easily, orange blocks forming a chopping-board city. Shush shush shush, the mushrooms fall into slivers which are scraped into the baking tray atop the pumpkin, and zucchini pieces topple in too, green-backed moons. Top and tail beetroots, the whiskered … Continue reading Dinner
In the yard that used to be for the cats, I provide shelter for one tiny chicken. It scampers between my feet like it would with its real mother, and I must watch my every step. It’s growing feathers at a rapid rate and knows how to clean them and how to take dust baths … Continue reading Chick ‘n’ Chirrup
Einstein In the south we’re faking it with an electric spring, bulb bright and crumbed with sawdust. To cheep feels like love and so we huddle over the warm box, giving lonely little Einstein our eyes, fingers, food, and the chickiest noises we can utter. Jerry from ACT Wellness rings to see how we’re coping … Continue reading Growing up cute…
Across the Sky On the couch, drenched in a purple sleeping bag, my daughter mutters “brothers these days!” and I have to agree. He’s a good ‘un, full bottle on the button pressing and unruffled as blue sky. I join in the niggling, first on her side, then on his and we finish all smiling … Continue reading Twiglet #273
Near the music school on Monday evening, the great oaks, arms as thunderous as Thor’s, are still mainly green. Sometimes a leaf drifts down, swooping from side to side to land, light and bright, on the damp grass. A man walks by, bent awkwardly from some medical cause, in a baseball shirt several sizes too … Continue reading A Monday in March
Write about the weather in Present Tense These last few days, everyone is saying “Thank goodness for the sun!” People are stretching like cats, long skin and whiskers pleased. It’s true the summer has been a wet one. Canberra wringing in a wet towel, warmth like dogs breath fogging up the sky. Mosquitoes are having … Continue reading #Go Dog Go Haibun Wednesday
The day I sat with Joanna’s group, it felt amazing. I put on my friendliest smile. The other girls just chatted like I was nothing new. Good. They talked about last night’s TV shows – Beverly Hills 90210 and X Files. And then they started on actors and the stories about them in recent issues … Continue reading #dVerse Prosery
As my eyes open to the grey stocktake of another morning, I wonder “Is it all still true?”. It’s not really hope but it still hurts when it goes away. I tell myself that I understand the facts. I drum the story like fingers on a desk. But even in the face of loss, only … Continue reading Mind Tricks
What does it mean to fail? I think, if you have supportive people around you, failure is rarer and less tangible. I have done less well in exams than I would like. I took 4 goes to get my driver’s licence (or was it 5?). I made a terrible error at work that I am … Continue reading The Feeling of Failure
When we reached the trig station, I took a wrong turn. We headed down a ridge, winding out of the trees and into land that must’ve once been pine forest but was cleared at least a few years ago. It was now full of purple-green blackberry mounds, stringy little saplings, the splayed denuded heads of … Continue reading My Morning
Our children are saying to us “What does it matter if this person is a boy or a girl? Who cares? A person is a person.” My daughter said it to me. And my friend’s daughter (ten years older) said it to her. In their generation, the garden is more important than the appearance of … Continue reading Haibun for Hope
Evening Drive Driving on hill tops, the landscape is generous – unfiltered mapwork filling up the thirsty eye. This evening the horizon is thickly sponged – dark cloud bruises, gleaming chrome sky, the felt silhouette of mountains and, in the foreground, rolling khaki with wave-crest fences. At a fork, I’m sent on a detour. Here … Continue reading #dVerse Haibun “Cold Mountain”
I wasn’t born this way. I’ve had to grow a lot of skin. But even still, I’ll pull the house apart for band aids. Sometimes at night, if the breeze blows just the right way across my nose, I can smell 1985. It’s jasmine sweet and ticked over with corrugated iron creep and the piney … Continue reading Grief
In year 3, we had Mrs P. I loved her and wanted her to love me. I took her gifts of apples, flowers and stories of my home life. Her skirts were the nesting grounds of a dozen cheeping girls. In year 4 we had Miss K. Together we buried the word “nice” in the … Continue reading Wednesday Haibun
Through the pine forest, tilled light in measured shafts. Pale weeds grab at it, such greedy luminescence. The mulch is thick underfoot and my own words reverberate in my ears “life includes death”. Right here on the forest floor, death is making life again - brown and rich as magnificence. It occurs to me that … Continue reading Haibun – In the Forest
A raindrop in a cloud thinks that’s life, floating there in sagacious blue, fraternising with other raindrops and the blessing of the sun. Floating there on the ratty, tatty edge of nothing at all. Not knowing of rain. Not knowing of its imminent fall. Then, quite suddenly, there’s swirling and grinding and the cloud’s in … Continue reading Haibun on a Raindrop
I am pulling weeds. Rip, rip, rip. Weeding where pavers butt and crack, where the beaten strength of human engineering gives way to wiggle; to root snake and trunk push… to Earth’s breath. My feet are surrounded by endless rectangles, like I’m sewn in with patchwork trousers, imitating the cellulose structure of plants. Do the … Continue reading January Haibun
We walked into Christmas in the slow way that days do when you’re waiting. By five pm on Christmas Eve I could see the drag on my son’s face. I thought this time thing, it needs a new bus driver. Two weeks of crawl and the long long night-light shadows creeping into the hall from … Continue reading Haibun Monday – Celebration
This wasn’t technically written on November 26th but I’m reposting it from November in 2019 as part of Fandango’s Friday Flashback.
In The Power of Imagination, I compared Eichmann to a cog in a clock, unaware of the bigger picture. This morning, when I re-read it, I thought about how it is not the clock that makes time pass. A clock is just a measuring device, like a tape measure or an odometer. All these human concepts. The birds have no clocks and yet they know when to do what. The nest-building, the partner-finding, the egg-hatching, the migrating. It all happens. All around them are clocks, I guess. Leaves falling, buds growing, sun-rises, rain falls, tides, moon phases.
Humans have our clocks and yet we seem to know so little. We know when we need to be at school or at work or how long it is since we ate. But we don’t know when or how to find the right partner, we don’t know how to prioritise raising kids…
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From where I stand, washing dishes in a rectangular plastic tub, I can see the roiling approach of buff-shouldered clouds – a bellicose sky. A shard of lightning rips a fierce line down the purple horizon and I flinch, searingly aware of my metal watch. I take off all my jewellery and put it in … Continue reading Camp in Finke River National Park
Written for Frank's Haibun Monday at dVerse - topic: Writer's Block Sometimes an idea flares in the brain – spontaneous combustion – and it’s big and bright and I bask in its wonderful glow. But when that’s used up, it’s easy to think that every idea will be like that – intense and consuming, shimmering … Continue reading Spark Blindness
August follows from a grey and fearful July – the closed hatch of cities in lock-down. Concrete and buildings hunkered under shifty, flannelette skies. The grime of recycled messages from haggard, mesh-faced leaders. Closed front doors, a stultifying blank. Resentment breeds as fast as the virus itself. Different areas, different rules. Anger like pavement cracks … Continue reading August – Haibun Monday
In the morning, after shutting the gate (to keep the chooks in), I turned around to see a handsome king parrot land in a shaft of weak eastern sunlight on one of the bare boughs of our pear tree. He chirruped softly and I chirruped back. He cocked a curious head down at me. I … Continue reading Photo Phrustration
Out of the Cave 