T3ESSAYS

Beyond the whirly-gig clothes line and down a grassy slope two kauri stood like a pair of giants overlooking the bay. I knelt between them, clearing a circle, feeling for the damp dark earth that lay beneath fallen branches. Dirt gathered in little brown wedges between my skin and fingernails.…

The artist has said he uses his paints to search for his subject, layers the colours up, and then slaps them back as if it's some BDSM game of peekaboo. He works his pieces until they surprise him. This time, though, I’m surprised because it’s my face hanging there on…

I’m not sure when my warranty ran out, though, as they say, your parents don’t leave the hospital with a baby and an instruction manual. No exchanges. No returns. You make it up as you go and do your best — or so I am told. If I could guess,…

One night a goblin told me I was going to die. Unusually for me, I awoke on my back, immersed in blue light. My mind had woken up before my body, so all I could do was stare past my open door into the hallway, at the bureau with the…

The kauri tree didn’t last long. They scattered Alan’s ashes on a rosebush at Purewa, but Dad wanted a gravestone, or a plaque – something permanent, closer to home. Across the road from Howick Fire Station, leaves withered up into smoky carcasses, blew away with the wind. The soil, Dad…

They buried my brother before I was born. Four years, nine months and twenty-eight days is the space between his last and my first breath. I was flesh, a beating heart, chubby-cheeked with a permanent frown, an extension of his name, presumably cocooned in cotton-candy pink at Lautoka hospital’s maternity…