I saw the boyish woman walking towards me along Paisley Street. Each time I see her I think she might look at me, know me and speak to me, finally, after all these months I’ve watched her from the window in my study that overlooks the street, turned away from my desk, tired or bored, while below she paces from the mall to the bridge just about every day, howling obscenities, squatting and smoking, pulling her pants down to wee between parked cars.

The things I want to say aren’t the sort of things you’re allowed to say out loud. You’re not even meant to think the things I think. But sometimes I think them anyway and sometimes I want to say them, so badly, that my chest fills with this irredeemable rage and I don’t know which way to look.

I’m a quiet man. I don’t talk much. I like a quiet drink. Sometimes a bit more, sometimes too much. I have this quiet spot at the Royal pub. Just a little spot around from the bar near the corner. They always serve me a beer as soon as I walk in. A bit of a nod, a bit of a wink, and then I slide on to the stool and rest my elbow on the bar. This is what I do. I watch people. They think I’m looking straight into my beer glass. Well, I am, sort of. But most of the time I am looking at people.

Tayla placed the cap back on the permanent marker and swivelled her foot around. When light shone directly on the shoe, you could see the difference in colour but otherwise the ink matched well. She’d get another couple of weeks out of that patch before it needed touching up again.

The hauntings are actually quite flamboyant here, though. Yeah, come in, come in. Not like my friend Moya’s house—it just has a tool shed that sometimes isn’t there and that’s it. So boring. Yes, you can keep your shoes on.

A week after Tom left, Gus was yawning through a morning piss when the patter on the roof intensified to a rattle. Before he could shake the last few dribbles into the toilet bowl, the rattle swelled into a roar.

She felt both sick and sensuous, all at once, felt she ought to call someone but secretly suspected nobody wanted to hear it. She paced from kitchen to bedroom, recalling the flimsy truth of the factoid her younger friend’s boyfriend had casually shared at yesterday’s picnic, when they’d found themselves not part of any particular conversation beside the warming watermelon, the voices of their peers swirling like bees drawn to more promising flowers.

A woman is lying on her back, disappearing into the sand. Bit by bit. First her belly, then her legs and lastly her feet. Her eyes are closed. She could be dreaming. She could be dead. From above on the boardwalk, Madeleine has an excellent view. A boy and a girl gleefully scoop and dump sand over the woman’s body. The mother must trust them not to get carried away and dump sand on her head.

I’m biking and I’m biking and this could be anywhere: Audrey Hepburn’s Rome on a mint-bodied Bianchi, or mid-80s Minneapolis on a hot pink BMX, or the Capetown M48 on a drop-bar Momsen. I’m pedalling and I’m pedalling, working my legs to the limits and when I finally catch the truck, I carabiner on, kur-klunk!

Although mothers and daughters were not an unusual subject, this triptych’s macabre, violent and sexual themes were unprecedented for the period. The first panel depicts a mother and teenage daughter reclining. Dark figures, which art critics have variously described as satyrs, devils or gargoyles, emerge from the mother’s mouth and hands.

Janusz tucks his mouth into his elbow, makes the shape of the word with his lips. He recognises the sound, insectile in the distance, pictures the plane on the runway, propellers whirling, ready to launch. He rolls his head so his cheek rests against his forearm, the open pages of his maths book a pillow beneath.

i feel you shiver-shift against my pillowed fingerprints feel the warmth of me slick your skin {dew-licked and humid} I walked to the gates of the Botanical Gardens in my formal pleated shorts, purchased especially for the occasion. I wanted this experience to be memorable. I wanted to impress.

‘We’re not going to tell you who the client is, because we don’t want your creativity, or your capacity for constructing a narrative, to be limited by a product or a brand. Because what we’ll be creating together this semester is more than that. It’s aesthetic, discursive. It’s embodied. Hopefully.’   Joe, our seminar tutor, […]

You died last Tuesday, while we were both sitting on the couch watching a YouTube clip about hummingbird cake. When I think about it, it’s possible you actually died during the recommended video afterward: Super easy beginner’s guide to peanut praline.

But to peddle hope is to profit from unfulfilled promises. Tarantino and Wright pivot to the ’60s defensively, exploiting our shared desire for something better to preserve their legacies without having to address the limits of their ethical worlds. Though it is less immediately obvious, with Utopia Avenue Mitchell exploits that desire, too.

I don’t make the doors. I just fix them. People always think there’s a special trick to it, some training I’ve done. When they ask, I smile but don’t give too much away. Part of the job is being mysterious. Clients expect it. You’ve got a door doing weird shit, you don’t call a repairman expecting him to be normal.