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My people came down from the mountains, brittle ghosts armed with blades and hacksaws. They were big eared, small-footed and had red-knuckled hands. They carried no expectations. The men were tough and canny, ready with violence, religiously upright, but secret drunks. The women bore the men, bruised and joking.  They were hard and selfish people, except perhaps one great-grandfather. Imagine…

He said he was sure the house they’d stayed in had been halfway between a rock at the end of the beach and the Māori pa site. He remembered paddocks opposite where the owners kept their horse. And a garden full of lemon bushes and a path that led down to the beach. The librarian brought out maps and summoned…

A week after she married him, she cut her hair. The scissors made a hungry sound working their way through the curls. You cut your hair, he said, when he came home. Nothing more. She thought he might have said, You cut off your beautiful hair, but his mouth could not make the shape of beautiful, even then. She kept…

I was alone in a second-class car on a train out of Madrid, bound for Barcelona. Yesterday I’d spent twenty minutes standing in front of Picasso’s Guernica, which was black and white like old war photographs and far larger than I expected. I was twenty years old. No painting could make me cry back then, at least on the outside….

The first time I saw Freddie Mercury in our elevator, he caught my eye and flashed me a grin. “I’ve seen you at the Wine Vine,” I said. Everyone in the neighbourhood called him Freddie, because he was a dead ringer. Small and fierce, with big teeth and a clipped moustache. He even dressed the part, rocking skin-tight white jeans,…

On top of my grandma’s dresser were three heads. Even though they had no eyes, I was sure they were watching me as I played with Grandma’s jewelry and sneaked peeks into her drawers. I named them Flora, Fiona, and Frances and made up elaborate stories about their elegant, glittering lives. Every morning, one of the ladies would be hairless…

The morning after the moon explodes, Marla wonders if she imagined the whole thing. She rushes down the stairs, two at a time, hoping the chaotic images flooding her brain are memories leftover from some surreal nightmare. But no, her mother is pacing in front of the television, cigarette dangling from her lips. Phone cradled between ear and shoulder, shouting…

The rain has let up and she’s walking her dog in the neighbourhood park. Broadleaf maples tower above the trail forming a canopy, leaves gleaming bright green, scrubbed of dust. Streams of golden pollen pool at the trail’s edge. The air smells washed, new. There’s a word for it, she thinks. Petrichor. She says it out loud. Pe. Tri. Cor. Her mouth…