Author: admin

“All the same.” I swallow and nod. I will try. Back down the hill we go. God I am over this hill. It’s not just that it’s a hill, and it’s painful to go both up and down. It’s also that it’s so loud. It is a tunnel for the wind to shriek along and…

“Sorry.” “He’s not angry. You don’t know him at all if you think that.” I meet his eyes. “I’m sorry, mate. I didn’t mean anything by it.” I turn back to the grassy path, thinking that maybe Orly will go home now, but I hear his footsteps behind me. “We’re looking for something called luminol,”…

“For when we go back. It’s the diversity of the vegetation,” he explains. “The Lomatia tasmanica is a clone plant that only propagates by dropping branches and creating genetically identical plants, and it’s been doing this for forty-three thousand and six hundred years.” I stare at him. “So?” “Don’t you want to live near that?…

I stare at him. “You right?” “Get up, come on.” “Why? What’s so urgent?” “Nothing, can’t you just come and watch me do my school?” I rub my eyes. “As riveting as that sounds, I’ve been given tasks.” “Ohhh. You’re one of us now.” Raff stops by the door on his way downstairs. “Yeah, you’ll…

I could never resent my mother for that. I am grateful she did her best. But the accident that came after was something else entirely and the truth is I have blamed her for it; I told myself I didn’t but under all the layers of hurt I held a simmering fury for her neglect….

I smile. “I suppose it was kind of the main thing to say about us.” “What was in it?” Orly asks. “In the nature corridor?” I don’t know where to start, so I begin with the trees that were already there, the snow gums of course, but also the mighty ashes, some of the tallest…

“Including you, Dom?” “Oh, sure.” He looks away from me to the corner of the room. It is empty, but he stares at it. “Me most of all, I’d say.” “Do you hear the voices?” “I only hear one.” I don’t need to ask, but I make myself, because I think hearing it from him…

“And what’s that then, lying around?” “I dunno, maybe. Why can’t I just lie around? I don’t owe anyone suffering or working. So much fucking working.” “I have no idea what you’re on about,” he says flatly, a man who has clearly never not worked a day in his life. I spread my hands. “Look,…

Is this how it will feel when the world starts to crumble? Like you can’t see where you’re going, and at any moment you could lose your people and be left to wander alone? We hear the sound before the lighthouse appears. The long, slightly mournful notes of a violin drifting through the fog to…

But there were eucalypts, three of them. My favorite trees on the land. They were a fraction too close to the house, but I couldn’t cut them down for that. I loved them too much. In the end everything burned for those eucalypts. Because the flames, they leaped. They flew farther than I’d ever imagined…