Hanging a round

Moata McNamara

Having been asked for something on circles
They arrive
The yellow end of the screwdriver handle
The roll of purple masking tape
The magnifying mirror for making small stitches
The wooden lid of the soy candle
The top of the chalk paint pot
The roll of green twist ties for the garden
The many white lids of pill bottles
The mouth of the glass of chorophyll
and the bottom too
The cordage on the Xmas tree
The roll of paper raffia for twining
The dome on the pencil case
The yellow eyes of Slinky Malinky
The black plug on the white acrylic tube
The lip of a test tube vase
The push part of a ball point pen
The letter O in zoom
And the zero time remaining
The scroll of washi
The dots on my shirt
The rings on the binder
Like the jar on the hill in Tennessee
The world comes to life in a circle

About Moata McNamara

A long ball

Tim Jones

Football kept them sane. They played keepie-uppies. They practised dribbling. Whoever was pulling the sledge contributed an occasional header.

This was an awful place, thought Scott, but there was something about a perfectly weighted free kick from twenty yards out, clearing the wall then dipping viciously into the top right corner, that kept fear and hunger at bay.

Besides, if things got sufficiently desperate, they could eat the football – leather, laces, the lot. Short commons, but better than nothing.

Snap out of it, Scott told himself: things would not get that bad. They were five scions of Empire, full of British pluck, on their way to the Pole to plant the flag for Science, King and Country.

Wilson, Evans and Bowers: good chaps. But Oates needed watching. While the others proved their manhood by chasing long balls up glaciers, Oates preferred a possession-based approach, keeping the ball close to his feet. He played for hours that way, never giving the others a chance.

“You play like a damned Spaniard,” said Scott. Oates stalked away, muttering.

They were snowed in for ten days by a blizzard. After it cleared, Scott found the football, stepped over the frozen corpses of his companions, and went outside. The sun glowed brightly on snow and ice. The Pole lay not far ahead.

Scott dropped the ball at his feet and began to move forward. He was in acres of space, and all he had to do was cross it.

About Tim Jones

To trust the hungry sea

Judy Darley

It’s seeing our South Pacific island slowly eaten by waves and getting an email from a journalist asking me to “please describe your traditional handicrafts.”

It’s the email swooping in from a cold country snoozing halfway around the world and thinking this is my chance to speak the truth, but all they want to know is “How do you come up with the patterns?” (we craft from our hearts), “How it is passed on from generation to generation?” (with love and resignation), and “What does the future hold for your handicrafts?” (what future?). 

It’s flexing my arthritic fingers and daydreaming my reply as the WIFI flickers off and on and lightning spears the horizon.

It’s breathing deep to bury angry tears so they don’t add to the waves already drowning next door’s garden and lapping at my gate.

It’s being asked for photos of our cultural gatherings to publish in a glossy magazine, and considering sending a shot of my grandkids’ submerged school instead, or of my family packed up and waiting to board the ship that will carry us from the place where our ancestors thrived for longer than recorded history. 

It’s typing a reply humming with expletives that would make my grandkids squawk, but deleting it instead of pressing send. 

It’s knowing that someday in the near-enough future, the raindrop on my pulaka leaf will complete its journey and come for their land too.

About Judy Darley

The world idling by

Gerri Brightwell

With evening comes stillness, and I sit on the balcony with my tea half drunk, a book splayed on my lap. Already the undersea light is turning the spruces across the road into shadows. Against them a pale smudge shifts, sharpens into an owl, huge and magnificent, gazing down at the world idling by – a woman walking her dog, a runner slow-jogging past. Me, I’m still savouring this moment, ridiculous human that I am, when the massive wings of not one owl but two unfold and they plunge through the branches as a squirrel, scrabbling, frantic, tries to outrun them.

About Gerri Brightwell

Peripheral vision

Deb Jowitt

A hawk soars on the updrafts, eyes fixed on a rocky outcrop below. The body of a boy lies there askew, face turned towards the sky. Climbers reach him as the rescue team let down ropes. At a signal, they wind the winch, and the climbers watch the lifeless form dangle on its last journey to the top of the ravine.

               The hawk glides past, all-seeing.

The woman can’t work out which way to turn. The track curves back on itself, like a koru returning her to the iron gate she latched with trembling hands minutes before. She crosses her arms against her chest, slows her breath. Remembers strobe lighting, loud music, gyrating bodies. Waking curled up in a strange room. Car wheels on gravel.

               There must be a road out of here. 

The first bullet parts the soft grain of the cedar door. The second pings against the corrugated sides of the rusting shed. The man keeps still, crouched behind the wall that juts into the soft foliage of the neighbouring property. He doesn’t feel his aching calves, or the thumb he burnt on the blackened camp oven. A cat, hunched low, arcs across the open ground. 

             He returns fire; the other man falls.

The hawk tears stringy roadkill from soft black asphalt. Takes fright as a car approaches. Watches a lone woman walking. Cruises the deep ravine. Uses his sharp eyes, beak, claws. Hones his knowledge of death, miscalculation, misfortune.

            Takes the last updraft. Flies the long way home.

About Deb Jowitt

 

The last time they used it

Keith Nunes

I was in Marseille in 1977, getting drunk in a bar during my Big OE, when the French last used the guillotine. They executed a Tunisian migrant in the Baumettes Prison in the city for the torture-murder of his girlfriend. I found myself in the Dernier Metro café on the Boulevard Chave with a saltimbanque I’d rescued from the wet streets. His acrobatic busking had caught my eye and we made conversation, me in subpar French, and him in commendable English. A radio station announced the execution was completed and the bar crowd cheered and clapped. The man was infamous.

“It will be the last beheading,” said Laurent. “It has run its course.”

I brought up the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. “That’s the only knowledge I have of the guillotine,” I said. “I thought it belonged solely to that period.”

“We French called it humane, but now it is seen as butchery.”

Spontaneously we caught a taxi from the café to the prison. We stood outside the fort-like walls singing Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’.

A prison guard called out, in English, “You will be executed if you keep singing so badly.”

We ran off into the pouring rain, laughing wildly, tripping, getting up, falling.

I lived on the streets with him for a month. Emaciated, I finally asked my parents to buy me a ticket home.

Laurent sent a postcard. He’d drawn a perfect circle in red pen. Circle back, he wrote.

About Keith Nunes

A long run

Sean Johnston

Near the end, there was a scene where some shit was done that far exceeded the shit that preceded it. After some time, we pushed our plates away, looked out upon the lake, and dwelt in our silence despite the clinking of cutlery and the polite conversation at the tables around us, even the burst of laughter from the foreign students passing on the boardwalk. The bedroom at the end contained very little: a cup and a pitcher on a nightstand, an old bible on the other; from one of the children, two carved maritime elders on the dark chest of drawers; a heavy blanket that was also a gift. No note.

About Sean Johnston

Compass set

Kay McKenzie Cooke

In my pencil case, a compass set, the end of its needle sharp enough to draw blood. At breakfast, I visualise using it to stab the placid pool of calm my sister possesses.

Instead, I reach over to where the tip of her nose floats like a pink island in the middle of a sea of freckles and pinch it. Hard. True to form she doesn’t react, but silently leaves the table and, picking up her school bag, sets off for school.

A bit later I’m on my bike, swooping down Gore’s Broughton Street hill then into Irving Street, zooming past the house where Nana lives at 24. The same route my sister and I take every morning, down bright, summer streets of smooth green verges, each equidistant, Council-planted cherry tree holding its own quiver of leaves the colour of old blood.

At the unexpected sight of my sister’s bike outside Nana’s, I stop. I know she’s in there. Crying. Because of me. I go in to face the consequences. Except, without word or embrace, Nana simply draws us both away from where a mutual and dark grief circles. Nana needs no compass set to draw a perfect circle around us on this misshapen morning. It’s not been a year since our father died. I look out the window to where I’d flung my bike onto the lawn, its back wheel still spinning in a kind of perpetual motion that if not stopped, will keep turning. Forever.

About Kay McKenzie Cooke

All year round

Rob Walton

Ashleigh’s making a wreath. Joshua’s making a Pavlova. They haven’t said it’s a competition, but it clearly is. Business as usual, whatever the season.

He looks through the oven door and frowns. Looks at the timer on his phone. Gets back to his new knife, an early present to himself, returns to the reds and greens of the Christmas fruit. Two hours until the guests arrive. He sweats.

She has decided against a circle template, says her crafty eye is good enough. She weaves red rags and Douglas fir clippings. Tries to attach the deep scarlet stamens of the pōhutukawa flowers her mother brought them. It’s going well, but not quite well enough.

She tells Joshua the kiwifruit slices need to be rounder, he needs to make the strawberries spherical. He bristles.

“The core isn’t round. I can’t change that. The seed pattern isn’t exactly round. You’re not being – “

“– Less than two hours, Josh.”

She shortens his name when she softens.

“I’m counting the minutes. And I’m trying –”

“Yes, I know, and I’m avoiding the old joke about that. Oh, I, er, nearly forgot. There’s a ring in the wreath. If you want it.”

About Rob Walton

Parasympathy

Angela Trolove

The hot water cylinder understood.

A woman, living at 122 Tomahawk Rd, kept thinking of how wonderful her colleague was, how wonderful, how beautiful, the force he was, how desirable. Even after she learned he wasn’t single she kept thinking this way, screaming in her car at night.

One morning, she woke to a low rumble. Off from the corridor, the water in the cylinder was boiling. She went into the bathroom, turned the shower on cold but boiling water rushed out, steaming up the room.

A week later, she stood by the hot water cylinder.

“Do you know this part?” An electrician held up a plastic box with a wire coming out of it. He wound its rod. “Should hear a click.”

She listened.

He shrugged. “Does nothing.”

He shone his headtorch on the mottled steel, “And, I’m afraid, your element exploded.”

“It exploded,” the woman whispered, the woman who had typed into her phone, ‘learn to cry’, who had drowned her head in a fishbowl, whose brow had collapsed in on itself, who’d shaken herself out on the spot, who had walked the lovelorn meseta and the plains and napped on lawns and incubated hope and crushed it, giving and taking it from herself like a child gifting something his mother.

“The thermostat was shot. The element blew,” the electrician said and the woman rouched her chin.

About Angela Trolove

You’ll take it

Terena Elizabeth Bell

First, we take the gun? We could take the weapon right out of his hands, but then he’ll just use his hands. He’ll place them, one on either side, and we cannot take his hands.

And so we take the trigger, what sets him off today: a long line at Walmart, his sandwich made wrong, missing the start of the game. We prevent everything that might make him mad, then we might stop the blows for a day.

We might stop the blows, or we could make them worse: a roulette ball, we don’t know where it lands. Fire and hammer, tension and spring, a chamber right through to the brain.

Tighter and tighter, the days, they compress, then that’s when we take the gun.

About Terena Elizabeth Bell

Dancing about architecture

Hayden Pyke

These workshops were small, exclusive, students huddled around tables, someone always wearing a scarf. And here was Piopio, which is what we called him back then, skinny legs poking out of his stubbies, walking in late.

I gave a lecture on how Hamilton failed to consider Le Corbusier – I had actual drawings. Piopio sang a bloody song. I watched our teacher shake his head.

When I saw him next, years later, he wasn’t at a firm but doing admin at the council. I took him out for a beer to console him really and, well, that’s how we ended up flatting together.

I want to tell you I believed in him, but I didn’t.

I moved away – London, Singapore – married, divorced. We were Facebook friends. One day, I got this email with a subject line like, ‘thought you’d be interested’.

There were photos, some kids leaning against a fence and one of his mum, graceful in the half-light. The last few photos were of a marae built in a perfect circle. Every proportion balanced; every detail considered. I saw an ultra-sleek kitchen which I now know is the wharekai. I saw Piopio washing dishes.

If this is your first time here, don’t look just at the buildings, these spaceships of history, but at the land itself. Because Matua Piopio, and his whānau are connected here in ways us architects rarely understand.

Hell, he shouldn’t have invited me here to give this speech really. I should’ve sung a bloody song.

About Hayden Pyke

Pushing of thumb

James Claffey

The MacArthur avocado sits heavy on the counter, its skin thin as an old scar, waiting to be sliced open. I push my thumb into its flesh, soft and yielding, and think about the space between what’s visible and what’s not. In the branches of the camellia bush a garden spider works the morning air, its body slow and steady as it builds, thread by thread, an invisible map of patience. I hear the almost hum of its effort in the quiet of the garden, the way the spider knows the weight of the world without question. Dry leaves, brittle in the breeze, scuttle across the yard like forgotten stories, curling and spinning in the wind, their crisp edges brushing against the earth as if they’re trying to remember their way back to the bare branch.

A flash of light splits the sky – a launch from nearby Vandenberg AFB, a trail of fire and possibility, climbing toward the unknown. It’s impossible not to feel the way it pulls at something inside you, a promise of escape, of reaching beyond the limits we’ve placed on ourselves. But as I stand there, watching the leaves scatter, the spider spin, the softening in my hands of the avocado, I wonder if the real magic is in the waiting, in the stillness between the launches, the climbing, and the unravelling unravelling. It’s in the way everything is constantly moving, always becoming, even when it seems as though nothing at all happens, everything happens, and I am whole again.

About James Claffey

Fair Delhi

Anna Hoek-Sims

Chaiwala and beggars and hawkers pester at each traffic jam, vying for a glimpse of your whiteness. Billboards flash past – radiant women with skin-bleaching products offer glimmers of hope: cast away your darkness. You stop at a four-lane intersection beside flaming woks of ram ladoo and parathas. Tendrils of smoke caress your sweat. On your other side, a mother climbs out of her tuk-tuk and takes her child over to the gutter to shit. Out of the very corner of your eye, you notice a man in his fifties leaning against the red light. A greying kurta flaps against his body. He looks up. Locks eyes with you. Glances down at the men sprawled around his feet. They turn to stare as one. The light stays red. He approaches. Speaks in tongues to the driver. Points at you. The driver shakes his head. The local gesticulates. The driver doesn’t blink. The light stays red. You pepper the driver’s back with prayers to gods you wish you knew. Scrutinise his straight black hair. Attempt to connect telepathically with him and his rearview-mirror-eyes. He doesn’t see you. The local tries to drive his bargain home. Turns to you. His eyes roam from your sandaled toes to your bare knees, to the pounamu nestled between your breasts. He bares a holey leer. The light turns green. Your tuk-tuk surges forward in a sea of horns and metal. 

You pay the driver five times the fare. 

About Anna Hoek-Sims

Reflection

Mazz Scannell

I am working on my school science project, ‘the acceleration of a vortex into the unknown.’ Outside my bedroom window the winter lights flicker against an inky backdrop. The window is bi-focal; the distant stars magnify and distort in the thinning uneven ancient glass and then again, reflect back to the windowpane from the mirror above my dressing table. A comet arcs across the sky and I am mesmerised by the quietness of its fall.

A small fox slinks from the pine trees and tiptoes across the grass. The whirlwind of water on the page is forgotten as I hold my breath, three floors up, hidden behind a flimsy lace curtain. The fox throws itself on the ground and calls to the sky in her sharp fox bark. From the treeline, three small shapes bounce over the damp lawn and fall about, pulling at her fat bushy tail and its discrete white pom pom.

Below, I hear the back door open with a small squeak. The foxes are suddenly alert in the cold starry light. The gun cocks as the shapes fly over the grass, hiding in the shadows of the trees.

My father mutters in disappointment as the door slowly closes, the snick of the lock as loud as a gunshot. I look up, imagine the hiss of gasses as the bundle of ice and rock travel through the crystal air, the comet falling across the horizon, its gasses swooping down like a sparkling tail in the sky.

About Mazz Scannell

Struck by the moon

Sherryl Clark

She’d been away again, but this time the treatment hadn’t worked as well. It showed in her brooding, silent for hours, then a splatter of acid nastiness.

I was a child. I’d been coughing for so long, I hardly noticed it most nights.

She loomed over my bed. ‘Stop coughing.’ I couldn’t. Her dark presence made me worse.

She went away, came back. The full moon rose, or the clouds moved, I don’t know which. ‘Open your mouth.’ A large tablespoon, shining in the white light. I almost choked on the emulsion, the cod liver oil coating my throat with slime. My stomach heaved and I swallowed again. The punishment for vomiting … I didn’t dare.

The moon watched, its face as hard as hers.

Years later, driving with a friend in the country. She was navigating and we were lost, hours and miles out of our way. I swallowed my words, took the map, turned inland, knowing we wouldn’t make it that night. We drove on, floating across the fog in a world of black trees and yellow eyes lit by our headlights.

Then the full moon rose, luminous orange, and it was as if we were chasing it, a huge ball just out of reach. It cast a spell on us. We fell silent, entranced. I wanted to stop driving, but I couldn’t.

Some people say they can’t sleep when the moon is full. The moon and me – we’ve come to understand each other.

About Sherryl Clark

When the cherry trees blossom, we will bury Mama

Chris Cottom

After Lukyan lays her on the floorboards of our icy bedroom I send him out and strip her without ceremony, my tears trickling onto the belly that held me, the breasts that suckled me. Chiding myself for hesitating, I sacrifice an embroidered scarf for her modesty before locking the door and telling Alexsey his Babciu is sleeping. I spread her clothes on the cave we’ve made around the stove, and crawl in, praying that tonight Lukyan will find a few sticks, even the beading from a window, so we can light it.

I believe in the wisdom of Comrade Stalin, in the might of the Red Army, in the fortitude of the Soviet people. I believe Mother Russia will not let her children starve, that our heroic soldiers will smash the encirclement and slit the throat of every fascist from here to Berlin. I believe Leningrad will see springtime again, that the iron-hard earth will thaw and bloom. I believe, when the cherry trees blossom, that we will bury Mama.

About Chris Cottom

A witch and a wheke nudge the world a little

Heather McQuillan

Nets haul up empty, baited lines are dragged down and their children wail with bloated bellies. From my shack near the summit, I watch wind wraiths ruffle the harbour’s surface but beneath is a swelling, a bruise. Bells clang to call back their boats. Not all return.

They correlate me, the teller of tales, with this horror in the harbour and haul me down the scoria slope to face judgment. Long into the night, I listen to their conjectures – portents and phantoms; denizens of the deep; devils. They say it is either this or die. I choose the either. As plump Venus rises, I paddle my canoe to the harbour’s heart.

Words can make a heart beat faster, make you sweat, make you weep but what are words to earth, water and air, to fire, to the wheke? Still, I weave words, cast them out and to my surprise, the water whispers back with a concentric circle ripple. A flick of orange. A flash of rust-red. A tentacle rises above the heave and the hurl and another reaches, curls, grasps. The hillside shudders. Rocks leap. A surge washes me back onto the stony beach. 

In daylight, the sea is blue-grey and the hills scarred. In the middle of our curving harbour, an island steams up from the brine all raw rocky outcrops and lava arms reaching towards the channel that leads to the open sea, and beyond that to the trench from where it came. 

About Heather McQuillan

It’s down to this

Lynn Charlton

It’s not often you see a tiny, baby worm. I moved the bag of potting mix and there it was, in the damp patch, sliding along the grooves in the wood, as thin as a hair from my head. Big brother or sister was nearby, grooving along.

The morning sun was hot and ready to desiccate, so I slid a small leaf under them, careful not to squash, putting them in the little Buxus hedge surrounding the three standard topiaries I had somehow kept alive for twenty years.

Go forth and multiply, take your place in the circle of life. It’s your turn.

I gave them that vibe, hoping they’d know I wished them the very best, and knew that they too, were working to save the planet and all of us who live here.

About Lynn Charlton

Holding pattern

Lisa Wiley

I keep circling back to you like an airplane  looping over a sprawling metropolis – giddy, doing circles over and over the tiny fireflies of skyscrapers and homes where the mighty sea is a large pond from the window seat – hoping not to run out of jet fuel waiting for weather to clear or a nod to land but not wanting the wheels to touch down until my thoughts are centered until I know what we are and where we stand and we will never be just friends since I first saw you decades ago on a tennis court, shared ice cream at the mill because we always pass for a couple in anonymous cities where we wait for each other outside dressing rooms and you can never have too many continents or children or couscous or Casablanca so I want to stay here suspended between land and clouds and silly emojis where the dream of you is real where our minds and hands lace above the turbulence of everyday life. 

About Lisa Wiley

Cirque de Morte

Jeff Taylor

I’ve no choice but to retreat to the innermost lane, where I’ve been trapped for hours now, with exhaust fumes burning my nostrils and befuddling my brain.

Some holiday road-tour of France this has turned into! 

The infamous A516, the biggest roundabout in Europe. Ten lanes wide, a kilometre circumference, a dozen on-ramps and exits, all clogged solid with fast, nose-to-tail, traffic from hell.

Distracted by my Bluetooth playlist, I’d got caught in a no-escape lane feeding into the whirlpool vortex of what’s been nicknamed The Circle of Death.     

I’ve tried several times to make a break for it, and two hours ago got out as far as the middle, my best attempt. I got excited and was about to continue my escape run to an exit (any exit would’ve done) when this thirty-two wheeler driven by a tattooed, shaven-headed, sumo wrestler was on my outside. He drove angry, like he suffered from piles while trying to give up smoking. Then a campervan with a back window of jeering, feral kids giving me fingers was in front, and a busload of scowling drunken football supporters whose team must’ve lost was in my rear mirror.

I’m back in the innermost lane, almost out of gas, and I can see all the rusted hulks of other vehicles that have never made it out parked on the grassy centre.

It’s the corpses of the drivers that worry me the most.

They grin knowingly at me, in their various stages of decomposition.

About Jeff Taylor

The fall

Anne McMichael

The child fell. A hiccup slip. Flailing arms, legs. A sharp inhale. A squawk.

The air stilled, slowing movement, time. Birds fell silent. She watched herself watching the child fall, its small, soft body bouncing off branches, twisting, turning through sunlit leaves. 

The mother couldn’t move. Exhaustion anchored her to the deck chair. Earlier she’d pleaded, “Come down, Ava.”

“Going to the tippy top, Mama.” 

“Don’t you dare!”

She closed her eyes then, thinking, “Fall if you must.”

This insatiable child, her need to be visible, sucked the energy from every warm, soft part of her mother’s body. All day, into the night. She was a mercurial child, disappearing in a split second, bringing out neighbourhood search parties on more than one occasion. 

The mother saw herself walking alone along a tree-lined street, soaking up the sunlight, lost in thought, reaching the soothing water’s edge of a swift, flowing river. Inhaling its pungent energy. She felt the river’s pull, drawing her in till the muddy, silted water rose over her head, floating her peacefully down to the sea. 

Muffled thuds opened her eyes. The child somersaulted, circling like a sycamore seed pod, narrowly avoiding the last branch, the rope swing, the brick edging of the sandpit. 

The child lay motionless on the warm, green lawn. Somewhere in the pit of her stomach rose a piercing scream as she launched herself off the deck and ran. The child was struggling to breathe, winded, eyelid’s fluttering. 

“Mama,” she gasped. “I fell.” 

About Anne McMichael

Liverpool Street station

Laila Miller

You step over the gap, heft your suitcase, scan the crowd for an exit, dim signs that say Moorgate and Wormwood, arrows that point to narrow stairs your suitcase is not going to like. A woman pushing a stroller ballooned with bags comes at you, stops, wipes her wrinkled mouth with her orange scarf and you hear her breath rasp while the toddler in the stroller picks chips out of a bag, licks her fingers, takes a drink from the woman, can with a straw. It’s eight in the morning and this is breakfast. You imagine this is the grandmother, wonder how many years they’ll have together and where is the mother anyway, she couldn’t be sicker than her own mother standing here sucking muggy diesel air, or maybe she could. You think about your mother, by the highway, under the pine boughs. Is she there? You don’t think so. When you’re home, putting out the garbage, she’s there. She sets up little whirlwinds, makes paper scraps float down the driveway, onto the road, and you run and catch them like a child after a leaf, four houses down to stamp a flutter because she’d never let you litter, and she thinks this is funny. It never happened when she was alive, and in the same second you know this girl will always have her grandma, a baritone rumbles your eardrum, Circle Line, it says and you look and it’s your son, guiding you up to the next train.

About Laila Miller

Circles and squares

Monique Schoneveld

I sat in the art room with Sooze. She drew squares on her paper and filled the insides with windows and doors.

I drew a circle with a black felt pen and within the circle, at the bottom, drew another circle, and then another inside that, to form a pupil, which could watch over me and keep me safe.

“Who’s it watching?” asked Sooze.

“You,” I said, “and them.”

I drew more eyes, until the paper was covered in disembodied irises that I coloured red and blue, and pupils which I coloured black.

“I’ve never seen a red iris,” said Sooze.

“Then you ain’t seen the devil yet. But he’s here. He’s watching.”

Sooze drew an iris of a different type and coloured it purple.

“They won’t let you out if you talk like that,” said Sooze.

I coloured another iris, red. And then another. Soon all the irises were red, although the ones that had been blue had a purple tinge to them.

“That looks angry,” said Sooze.

“That is angry.” My voice crept through clenched teeth. “That is very angry indeed.”

Sooze took her picture and asked a nurse if she could hang it in the lounge area. I took mine and Blu-tacked it to the wall of my room. It would protect me if they came in. Warn me if they were bringing in a needle. I picked up the black pen and drew a mouth at the bottom of the paper.

About Monique Schoneveld

I hate dictionaries

Kai Abellon

You look up something like malignancy and it says: The quality of being malign. If I knew what malign meant, I wouldn’t have looked up malignancy, would I?

 Adults can’t give straight answers. Why is that?

 “B7,” said Aunt Betty. “Vending machine’s by the nursery, dear.”

 I was to turn left from the lift, walk on till a nurse’s station, then keep right for the nursery.

 The alcohol stench used to make me sneeze but not anymore. Now the smell of regular air felt lonely. Faces that coloured the white halls were familiar, but we never spoke. It’s hard to talk to people in pyjama gowns, you know.

Automatic doors took me to a room where counters huddled round a massive beam labelled ‘Station C’. Heads bobbed up and down those counters like horses on a carousel.

 I was lost now because round rooms don’t have corners – any direction could be left or right from where you looked. I kept right as best I could till an escalator. Did Aunt Betty mention one? I went up anyway.

Mum was adventurous like that.

“Bus or train?” We’d ask on the way home. She always replied she didn’t know. Sometimes we took two buses just to watch Sundays go by. Sunday School will be impossible now with Mum’s malignancy.

“Excuse me,” Mum always said to say it when speaking to someone for the first time. “Where’s the nursery?”

 “Which wing, love?”

 See what I mean? Never a straight answer.

About Kai Abellon

Playing Mozart

Jeff Friedman

One rainy day, Mussolini entered a monastery with muddy boots. He announced himself Mussolini and said his tanks were coming soon. He had no moustache so the monks didn’t believe he was Mussolini. Without hesitation, they grabbed him and removed his muddy boots, his big ugly feet muddy also. They stuck his feet into a bucket of cold water. Then they tonsured him and handed him the bowl, his hair on the floor. They stripped him and gave him a robe. When he looked at himself in the jagged piece of glass attached to the wall, he thought he might be Mozart. The monks laughed, but when he began to play The Requiem on his invisible piano, they lit candles and swayed back and forth as if at a funeral for themselves.

About Jeff Friedman

The homestead

Lynley Soper

Once, I raced up these steps. Today I need Hana to help me, and to settle me in this chair on the verandah like I’m an old woman.

I am an old woman.

Two husbands. Five children. A life lived. 

Hana knows to leave me here on my own. She’s always been the smartest of my grandchildren.

And it‘s the light I’ve come for. That muted, early light before the sun. When the ridgeline is sharp and the bush across the valley deep with shadow. 

I don’t hear so well now but I hope there’s still birdsong. Dad slept out here when he was a boy. Reckoned the dawn chorus in the bush was so loud it woke him every morning. 

My life began here. On a midsummer’s day when the house was too hot and Mum wanted her first child born in view of the land.   

I should have come back sooner.

Wanted to after George died, but the forestry had the place by then. Bloody wonder the homestead’s still here.

Hana – and her Jack – they’re here now, doing the house up and living off the land. Mostly. Pretty much how we grew up.  

She wants her baby born here too. A life ends and another takes its place. As it should.

I think I’d like to go up the hill to the graves today if Hana doesn’t mind taking me. Pay a last visit to the old ones. 

Let them know I’m home. 

About Lynley Soper

Your Netherlands (here) – My Aotearoa (there)
a true story of hemispheres

Cathy Silk

Waves of vibrant sea-green break and become flecked with sun-silvered lace.
            here,           flat           crowded          greyness

A coastal breeze sandblasts my forehead, nose and cheeks, scuffing my hair into salty tangles – the cobwebs in my head lose their footing.
             incessant          grey          smog

My jandaled feet crunch through the bay’s shingled sand, while the sun muscles its way out from behind a cloud.
           yes, I know that all of Europe is       literally       on       your      doorstep

I squint in the radiance which stretches the hazy horizon.
          but what about           my life          my family          my friends?

My eyelids are lined with perpetual frescoes of mighty kauri forests, blossoming kowhai, burning Decembers.
          not to mention  increased           terrorism          war

While the breakers pound rhythmically in the bay.

          I feel your warmness next to me
          and the rhythm of your sleeping          breaths

The sun, reclining splendidly in the seam between sea and sky, casts the bay in pink gold.
             outside         our         window
             cold nights freeze and creak
             wintry jaws swallow them whole
             dawn’s first breath shivers

About Cathy Silk

Skin

Pam Morrison

Draw a circle. Make it the container of you. What is on the inside, and what’s on the outside? The instruction comes from the art therapist to our small group of participants, all shaking our way out of mothering small children. Who are we now?
 
I pick up one blunt crayon and hover over the empty slice of butchers paper, ripped at each end. How big am I? Where are my edges? Am I a dot? Perhaps my circle is bigger than this slab of paper, bigger than this musty upstairs room, flinging itself forever outward like the universe?
 
Others are busy. Their arms, their hands look so confident, circles arcing around and around then joining up, perfectly. I hunt in my jar for the stub of a pencil that I’ve seen through the glass. Here we go. I’ll copy and make it the same size as theirs. How fragile it looks, the soft grey lead only just making itself known.
 
I reach for a clutch of colours, splay them in front of me. Something is taking over, shunting my critic sideways. Strokes become patterns become kaleidoscope. I’m dazzled by my own wild hand that has come out of its burrow. Unselfconscious. Unafraid.
 
Two minutes to go, says the art therapist, The heart pumping in my fingers slows its beat. I pull up from the paper that has filled itself, straighten my stiffening back and look at what’s happened.
 
I am amazed. But I am confused. Where is my skin?

About Pam Morrison

Dysgu Cymraeg | Learning Welsh

Faith Allington

I never knew my kin, but I still want to belong in some small way when I arrive on your shore. Not all distances can be translated. Hwyl means goodbye but also a sail, but also a fervour. I imagine the filled sail, watching from shore and knowing there might not be a return. A few words root in my brain and bloom on my tongue. Then my impatience spills and I yearn to write my own stories, conjure my own owls and girls made of meadowsweet. Cyn y blodeuo – before the blooming. But the word furl eludes me, as in tightly furled, as in poised to unfurl. Sometimes it comes back as furry, other times as furnished. All the ways we exist between languages. Agor is to open, but also to cut – will you open to me or will I cut myself on the sharpness of your beauty? I dream that night of finding myself beside the foaming waves of the sea, like flowers opening on the shore, like I am returning to a place that made some part of me.

About Faith Allington

Round, Full 圆满

Vera Dong

It was in the 1970s. Mother wanted a large round table – so our two grandmas, two grandpas, maybe uncles and aunties, and four of us could sit in a circle, drinking tea, cracking melon seeds, and savouring six cold dishes, six hot dishes, and one big pot of chicken soup. She would have to work at her honeycomb coal stove for weeks and save for months with money and ration coupons.

I thought that our little square table was perfect – just enough room for four bowls of steamed rice, one stir-fried veggie, one pickled radish, and one dry bean soup.

Mother learned that the canteen where our auntie worked would be closed for two days for the Autumn Festival. She decided to borrow one round table for one night. Mother took me, Father took Brother, and we rode to the factory. On the way back, one side of the table was fastened to the bicycle seats with a long rope looped tightly around the surface and bottom. Mother and Father pushed the bicycles; Brother and I walked behind, holding the table’s edge.

My brother, nine, and I, six, raised our arms during the three-kilometre journey back. Mother peeled a White Rabbit milk candy, let me take a small bite, and put the rest in Brother’s mouth. Father, Brother, and I felt embarrassed by the sideway glances and the disruption we caused in the bicycle sea.

Mother paid no attention. Her big strides, flushing face, and swaying pigtail kept us moving.

About Vera Dong

Friday night

Lee Thompson

Friday Night. Alive with all the intrepid excitement, in my slightly broody way about the local church hall dance. A neutral zone, with my own air of personal ownership. Keyed into looking good, cool, distant and fashionable.

I hung around as my mother ironed my shirt. I gazed at her indifference, a small reddish face masked in dissatisfaction, as she cut across the shoulders of my pink fashion shirt, leaving a crease. My sharp admonishment for her detachment brought the acerbic reply of Do your own ironing.

My mother, bellicose and surly, unlovely, thinking it was that time of the day, of putting on lipstick and tossing off a small glass of sherry. A touch of losing herself in aimless married chatter and gossip, dancing to the radio, prescription boredom, an endless preoccupation of living with herself.

We faced each other over the ironing board. Our revolving circle of discontent, our alchemy of no lost love, her unmotherly compromise, a brief show of how to iron.

Independently, I worked out an intense and diligent acumen, moving this instrument as if I were a blacksmith working with an anvil, the hot metal, the careful strokes through the right heat. Manoeuvring my shirt, I cut in the lines, creased the neck, admired the pink, thinking of whom I would become in my fashionista sense of social ploy.

I held it up. My small victory for local festivity, knowing, in that moment, that no one else would notice.

About Lee Thompson

Horseshoe

Guy Cramer

Maybe it’s a thing of the past, but your dad bought a metal detector and how often do you get time to spend in silence where he won’t ask questions about the direction of your life? Park, tighten your laces, it’s going to be a hike. You hear the detector like radio static. Both of your inner children are reminded of the thrill of the hunt. The detector starts pulsing, singing as you feel around the grass, touching a rough metal object. A horseshoe. There’s no telling how old it is. Your dad thinks it could be from the 1950s, he says this area used to be a summer camp with cabins and trail rides when he was a kid. Your dad hands it to you. “Maybe this will bring you good luck,” he says. You try not to read anything else into it, as if his tongue was wetting a page, knowing exactly where to find the failures in various chapters of your past. The horseshoe is not a complete circle, there’s a comfort in knowing some things have a beginning and an end. “I’ll hang this up for all to see,” you say unashamed. The steel, now brown as leather, the holes, like every lesson life left in you. You turn to him, wanting to ask if he found you kicked down, bent in half, would he still stop, pick you up, hold you to the light, marveling how they don’t make ’em quite like you anymore. 

About Guy Cramer

Best in show: Zinnia Lilliput, Double Pom-Pom

Sue Barker

After the lawyers, Tom drives home fast, slamming both car and front doors before doing thirty minutes on his spin bike, mostly out of the saddle. Then a cold shower and a whisky. A divorce should be simple – combine assets, split 50-50. He picks up his trug and clippers, stepping through French doors into the dusky garden. He pauses to breathe. The lawns, freshly mown, automatic sprinklers just finished; the sun in shafts through the hedge. But what’s 50% of the art, the share portfolio, the child, the dog? He clips one cerise zinnia, placing it in the basket. Back inside he smooths white plastic over the table, half-fills a test tube with water, slots the stem in. He lays tweezers and manicure scissors beside. Three blooms for an exhibition, but just one tonight for practice, for diversion. He needs more patience. That’s what she keeps circling back to – his impatience. With their kid, with her. Mostly with her. God, how much fawning is necessary.

He knows the zinnia’s form must be faultlessly round, all withered petals removed or invisibly trimmed, the centre of the corolla tight tonight, to be identically open tomorrow – theoretically, competition day.

It’s turning into a competition alright, where only the lawyers will win. Cut-throat.

He carefully trims the flower to perfect symmetry, knowing most points are given for size, colour and form; the highest scoring overall presentation – a flawless bloom. 

He takes a photo, crushes the flower, sweeps the detritus off the table.

About Sue Barker

A family story

Lucy McCahon

My grandmother’s grandfather’s grandfather clock was at least 150 years old and had survived transport from one side of the globe to the other, a three month voyage. It was the only thing of value he brought from Britain, as the youngest son of minor gentry, and family legend says he didn’t unpack it for six years after arrival, for lack of anywhere to put it. 

Most migrants from Britain wanted to bring Britain with them. My great-great-grandfather wanted to be British but living in the south of France. But he hated the idea of being surrounded by French people, so came to a sunny part of New Zealand instead. 

He started a lemon orchard and poured all his anxieties about who he was into making it a lemon empire.

In those days the Italians down the valley were growing tomatoes. There was a family of Germans who were delighted to be trying to grow oranges.

Frost covering was necessary for lemons but required less as time went on, and hardier varieties were chosen. Then finally in the twentieth century, the Meyer lemon arrived. 

My grandmother celebrated the first successful Meyer lemon harvest by making lemonade and limoncello. I think she knew she wouldn’t live to see another harvest. The day we would traditionally put up the frost cloth, she danced on her grandfather’s grave. She was buried along from him five months later.

The grandfather clock no longer ticks, but still stands in my front hall.

About Lucy McCahon

Three point eight billion light years away

Sara Crane

Guyon laid his carrot sticks out in a neat row. He nibbled the tip of each one so they were exactly the same length and stacked them up like a Jenga tower.

Cary sighed “Just eat them, love.”

Guyon rearranged the carrots.

“It’s just not right
I can’t sleep at night
the universe goes on forever
no matter what the weather
and I can’t sleep
because I keep
thinking about it!”

Malia gushed milk over her cereal so that it splashed over the edge of her favourite pink bowl.

“Stop! Right now.” Cary grabbed the carton and knocked over her coffee. The cat jumped up and started licking the milk, Malia stroked him and he purred loudly. She picked out the lumps of cereal with her fingers and sucked them gustily. Then she moved the bowl so the cat could lap up the milk more easily.

Cary sighed and made herself another coffee.

Mornings.

Guyon thought some more about infinity. His head hurt:

“The stars are so far away
and they don’t know how to say
I’m dead, I’m dead
instead
they just keep on winking
and blinking
and sinking
I wish I knew
a few
more
tips to understand the universe.”

Malia howled like a wolf and wiped her milky hands on her unicorn pyjamas.

Cary made more coffee. Cleaned up the bench. Didn’t feed the cat. Twisted her mother’s eternity ring around her middle finger. Put the remains of the carrots in the compost.

About Sara Crane