Do you know your Horntails from your Hufflepuffs?
FERAL means ‘domesticated gone wild’. And that was pretty much our plan for the summer holidays.
Tark perched in a tree and waited. He kept his eyes on the path that wound its way through the Forest. He knew it was just a matter of time. All he had to do was wait ... and commit highway thievery.
He spun to face me, and I felt my breath catch at the angry tension in his face. ‘Did you know?’ he asked, long fingers sliding over his bracelet’s charms.
I stared at him, and he moved closer, bringing the blood to my cheeks. ‘Spencer. Do you know what you are? What you could be?’
The best day of my life happened when I was five and almost died at Disney World.
This begins in January, and January is okay. It begins like December as though their join is seamless. Sometimes as though the bright days of summer will last forever.
Wynter was just raising her head to peer though the trees, hoping for a glimpse of them, when a low whistling signal from the road below sent her ducking again, her heart racing.
Everyone thinks it was because of the snow. And in a way, I suppose that’s true.
I’m sure having one or two parents try to figure out how to raise you sucks sometimes, but trust me, steering committees, focus groups, and upper-level executives approving everything is way worse.
A cocktail of emotions floods through him, as if someone has opened the top of his head and poked a high-pressure hose in. There’s shame, mostly, although that doesn’t make any more sense than the rage that sparks to life as his brain clicks into gear.
You can wish on snow globes. You could pick up ‘Blenheim Palace’, shut your eyes and shout: ‘Roof!’ Then shake. If snow falls on the turrets, like you said, your wish comes true.
The day my sister, Gillian, decided to pronounce her name with a hard G was, coincidentally, the same day my mother returned, early and alone, from her honeymoon.
It had never been just me and Tilly before. I mean, Tilly’s nothing like me. What if it wrecked everything?
How do you go about becoming famous if you come from a dump like Wilga Heights? I’ve probably got a better chance of ending up in gaol.
Martin family birthday breakfasts followed a strict tradition. First, there were Belgian waffles, made by Belinda, the beloved Hopewell Hotel cook. These were served up with an array of toppings: chocolate syrup, fresh lemon whipped cream, stewed strawberries, and powdered vanilla sugar. The air should have been thick with wafflely perfume. Instead, there was an acrid, confusing smell, undercut by a light touch of smoke.
Everything is hype. All the ads on TV tell you your life will be better if you get a new corrugated iron roof, or granite kitchen bench. Your family will be closer and more loving if you eat fried chicken, or tomato-based simmer sauces. You’ll be tougher and stronger if you drink lemon-flavoured soft drink or eat a fibrous breakfast cereal.
As it happens, this story involves a girl, a young and rather pretty girl, with the unfortunate (although admittedly highly original) name of Millipop Klompet.
So I, this random bassist in an average queercore band, turn to this girl in flannel who I don’t even know and say:
“I know this is going to sound strange, but would you mind being my girlfriend for the next five minutes?”
‘You will have a son, and when the boy grows up he will try to kill his father.’
I sometimes feel it right before something big happens— when I’m about to break a guitar string, or get caught sneaking in, or when my parents are this close to having a monster fight.
Once there was a little brother and a best mate – and then along came a girl.
The urn was the only thing in that place worth looking at. Maybe it was because I’d been up all night, maybe I needed to latch on to something in there to stop myself from passing out, I don’t know, I found an urn.
Cathy knew heat. Where she came from, heat stood back and laughed at you, then shoved a hand down your throat and dried you inside out.
Tansy had an impression of a massive, squatting presence, like a toad. The woman’s face was broad and flat, and her wide, thin-lipped mouth turned down.
On the first day of the festival, we honour the crows. We put out offerings of rice because crows are the messengers for the lord of death.
That was until the early hours of St Lazarus’s Day, 1906, when sleepers in those houses found themselves snagged by the rim of a great screeching wheel of nightmare.
Then you see it. One little thing is wrong. The front door’s wide open.
The name is an embarrassment. I’m not beautiful or delicate or sweet smelling. I’m not even pretty.
My father took one hundred and thirty two minutes to die. I counted.
My mother, Bev, named me after her favourite feminist, Germaine Greer. My namesake was brave and audacious, a sexual libertine and an authority on Shakespeare. Um...much to live up to?
That night, at midnight, he appeared on the footpath outside our house, wearing a leather loincloth with a black snake draped around his neck. He stood on Dad’s lawn and recited twenty different acrostic poetry renditions on the word ‘Debbie.’
The dream always began the same way. Zuven was standing in the centre of a clearing in the jungle.
You have to be so careful. One day you could meet the man of your dreams and you’ve got on a daggy T shirt, or haven’t washed your hair, or haven’t toned up your thighs.
But it was no good; the dark little kitchen came sliding into her mind again. What would happen if she’d left the jug turned on?
In the room where she woke late every day, there was a stain on the ceiling where rain had once seeped through.
A shiny black orb, no bigger than a pea, slipped through a hole in the sky.
They started laughing as soon as they saw him. Simon could hear them from miles away, and he knew he would have to walk past.
I’m magic, like my mother, but she never told me. She didn’t tell me that if I lose my temper, people might die.
In the month she turned fifteen, Sally Taverner put her skirts down for the first time, went to the opera, and met her double in the wake of a murder she herself had inadvertently caused.
Is it possible that my story runs deeper than a simple nature myth used to explain the cycles of corn planting?
‘There’s nothing here,’ Sandy remarked. The highway ahead was wet with mirage, and the car sang monotone in her ear.
I nodded and my guts heaved. I made it to the footpath before the stuff erupted from between my fingers.
If you stand on Cheviot Hill at Point Nepean, you can see the ocean on one side and the bay on the other
It was as if I had flicked a switch. Everyone in the room went quiet and sixteen or seventeen kids turned to stare at me.
For over fifteen centuries skolds had fought the monsters, so Rossamünd had been taught.
The big black limousine purred through the dark, silent streets of Madinatu es Salam.
It was my last year at school, our last year that began in the house on the hill at Hamilton, and it did not become the year any of us had expected.
Rumours started going around about Nick McGowan pretty much as soon as school went back.
Chapter One of Don't Call Me Ishmael! by Michael Gerard Bauer.
Check out our latest Chapter One, from The Betrayal of Bindy Mackenzie by Jaclyn Moriarty.
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