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Man, this is a beautiful and tragic piece of memoir that perfectly captures the loss of a break-up only to be met by the loss of something so much worse. Mike Day's writing is accessible and honest and ultimately very heartfelt and I can pretty openly admit to shedding a tear or two by the end.On the last night you were cryptic and withdrawn when I arrived outside the back gate of your real house – the one your parents lived in – in the early hours of the morning. I was drunk and riddled with anxiety as you led me through the steep garden. In your room we tried whispering in the dark for a while, but ended up having careful, ‘don’t wake the parents’ sex. Afterwards, you said I had to leave and we had an argument that I can’t clearly remember. I left, and we didn’t see each again for a long time.
Josephine Rowe is an Australian flash fiction writer with such an awesome, unique voice. I had the pleasure of seeing her read last year at Emerging Writers Festival and it's pretty amazing seeing the progress she's made career-wise since. I mean, publication in The Paris Review is pretty darn impressive. And well-deserved too. Rowe has such a sublime way of writing and capturing small moments with big implications. Her short short story, 'Brisbane', is a near perfect example of this.And what I’ll remember of this time is split vinyl and continental breakfasts, fights about who gets the passenger seat, a wallaby cracked over the head with the jack handle and none of us talking till Lismore even though we know she’s done the right thing.
One of my favourite books of recent years is We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. There was something so tantalising, so exploratory, criminal, heartfelt, dastardly to it all that had left me almost sick to my stomach (particularly with a few of those final scenes - you know what I'm talking about). Shriver managed to worm her way into the heart and mind of a killer, not to justify his actions but, rather simply, to try and understand it. This is a part of narrative that recurs over and over, from shows like Criminal Minds and Law & Order through to books like Lolita, we as writers, readers, society seem to have a need to enter the minds of bad people.One peculiarity of this house is the number of doors the rooms contain and, a further peculiarity, how all these doors are always locked. A house full of locked doors that open only into other rooms with other locked doors, for, upstairs and downstairs, all the rooms lead in and out of one another like a maze in a bad dream. It is a house without passages. There is no part of the house that has not been marked as some inmate’s personal territory; it is a house with no shared, no common spaces between one room and the next. It is a house of privacies sealed as close as if they had been sealed with wax on a legal document.
I'm pretty in love with Seizure's Flashers series (and not just because I was published in it). It really is an exciting series catching new and old voices alike. This tiny work by Rowena Lennox is beautiful and so, so emotive, reminding me in no small part of Hemingway's shortest short story ever told. She captures this sense of domestic ordinariness in all it's joys and tragedies so charmingly that it's hard not to want more of it, or, at least, more of her writing generally. It's pretty darn lovely.I was neither joyous nor innocent on the day we bought the change table but I cry while I am cleaning it because we bought it on the day my brother died and we bought it before we knew my husband had a tumour in his neck. I cry because things have changed and I want to be the person I imagine I was on that day: a 32-week pregnant woman looking forward to having a baby, my husband and I seeing our future as fairly straightforward. I was never that woman and only now, after things have changed, do I see that I might have had the potential to be that woman.
