photo by Yasser Alaa Mobarak 

by Meredith Jelbart

I was an only child. I grew up in a place my father called Island Hill. It was not an island, but a house on top of a hill, in semi-rural Australian bush, around twenty kilometres from Melbourne. There were other children in the general area, but the hill was steep enough to discourage kids from wandering up to play with me; and to discourage me from wandering down and up again, to play with them.

I was not entirely alone. I had friends.

painting by Robert Rogers

by Sydney Lea

A friend from the dawn of our boyhoods is cachectic, a word unknown to me until I heard it from a doctor– a friend of similar longstanding– who’d recently seen him. “It just means he’s withering away,” the doctor told me, adding that our mutual pal had also dropped, as if overnight, into dementia.

I knew that in my own fairly recent talk with the man in question, he had kept repeating himself;

art by Catherine McGuire

by Bonnie Darves

I have a thing about dive bars. I like them, not just a little bit but a lot, and one of my sisters, Anna, is similarly afflicted. My mother accused us of frequenting them for less than noble reasons. “I don’t know why you girls insist on ‘slumming it’ in those places—don’t you know that you stick out like sore thumbs or snobs no matter what you wear?” What’s the point? she wanted to know. How could you tell her, in a way that she’d understand,