HEAT Series 3

Each mouthful was the same, another northern Italian dish informed by butter, challenging her imagined ideas of this country. She hadn’t felt anything in Milan yet that she hadn’t already felt at home. But when she got to the bottom of the plate, she had the thought that to be a tourist is to be a spectator, and that to be a spectator means making a wordless oath to passive observation. Which was a role that Helen had never respected in anyone she’d ever known.

Very few people are willing to say: I’m nobody, or what I am is not in any way fixed from moment to moment. It’s a very stressful idea.

That’s it. Enough! I will no longer say hello to the man from the piazza. From now on, I will turn my head, or pretend I haven’t heard him greet me, or I may even glance at him with a disgusted expression. That’s what he deserves. He thinks he can make a fool of me. I met him right there, in front of my building on the corner of a small piazza.

The Levys tried to live with Villana, and without their mother. At first, there was some pleasure to be found in watching Villana navigate domestic life. She laughed like she was being murdered. She ran like every bone in her body had been broken. She sang like a collapsing star. She tore the mattress in the guest bedroom open and slept inside it, her wretched body compressed and folded up among the springs.

For a moment, the scholar looked at the blank sheets of paper from where his writings had now disappeared. He had written some serviceable prose to theorise about the rhyming patterns in a volume of classic Confucian poetry, but Wu’s beauty was better formed and more persuasive. The scholar put down his brush and walked over to Wu, who smiled and raised his head to meet the scholar’s kiss.

I would like to state, for the record, that Dr Routledge did not ask me to send this email, nor ask that I intervene on his behalf in any way. I write to you of my own accord, for the simple reason that I would not be the student, nor the person, I am today, without Professor Gavin Routledge.

While that was an intriguing/boring story, I was more interested in what my readers would be interested in: Hollywood and its sucking up of Australian talent, making them so popular they were like craft spokespeople, with indeterminable accents, paraded at black tie parties like weird big talking cats…

HAPPINESS. What an awful person! I love my dragon / When it’s There with its yellow eyes flashing like sunshine / It knows ALL About being eleven…can cough up bits / Of food in all kinds of River shapes.

My grandfather spoke more…more in
pastiche when he became widowed. Came down the Paris
boulevards looking for a mouldy stick.

How to believe in a God who brings suffering into the world and grants us peace without considering our sorrows, thought Jacinto, tottering like a small child. In one hand he held a half-empty bottle of rum and in the other the revolver he took from his mother. More than thirteen years had passed since his father died; in all that time he had never felt as alone as today, when Francisca confessed to him on her knees that the child wasn’t his and she was carrying a monster in her belly.

The mother focused her shouting on the feathered-hair lady, who shrank further in horror. Good girl, I thought. She’d properly identified the threat: it wasn’t the boys holding her down, not the crowd, but the moral centre she had to subdue. When you try to make people understand, they roll over you. Her only chance was force.

He bolted, his body casting crazed silhouettes that led the way. Starlight. Shrubs. Tussocks of grass. A soft, sandy floor to run upon.

When I tune into the auction behind my screen door, the river of words I hear is not allegro. It’s not even andante. My neighbour’s auction is surely largo. Or, it is lento. Is our bard any less terrifying? No.

with a mortar and pestle
into stuff almost as stiff
as his great aunt’s bustle

she favoured a mare that was an easy doer
and could be turned out without being coddled.

Conjoined in death as in birth,
Chang and Eng are still dancing cheek to cheek