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CreativeFiction

New Home, Same Awful Attitude

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Not long after they leave, Will arrives. He is here to build my bed for me. I greet him with red eyes and a tired smile, he knows I’ve been crying. It’s just the two of us, surrounded by boxes and a hopeful future. We head into my bedroom where I show him the box of the bed frame. I bring the floor cushion into the room to watch as he starts unpacking. He tells me he has done this twice before, so my expectations are big. It took us four hours. Four fucking hours to build the frame. It
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CreativeFictionPoetry

alienated

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Every time that I hang out with you and them I feel so alienated but I feel like an alien would fit in more than me  because they are inherently interesting and I just feel like the most boring person alive   I can’t keep up with any of the jokes while the three of you go back and forth, faster and faster and I force myself to laugh  in grating harmony   I grapple with possible things to say but none of them seem worthwhile sometimes one of you says something I had thought of  and I resent myself
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CreativeFiction

Home, Sweet Home

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Content Warning: Violence There was a house up ahead on the left. Amidst the gloom of what was a cool winter’s night, it appeared tall and grand in what seemed like an abyss of nothingness for miles on end. There I remained, confined to its interior with very few visitors. It made sense to pass it– surely there were signs further down the road; why stop for help? Hence why I was thrilled to see the lost couple quickly pulling into the driveway.  The two-storey house, further away from the others down the road, appeared rather large with a decently
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CreativeFiction

Honeycomb Harbour

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  Words by Kiara Sharee It’s stuffy in here, the air is almost stifling. Strange, given that my window is rolled down, the car greedily sucking in the sea-kissed wind. It likes to tell me of its past travels and where it has yet to roam. Often threads itself between my fingers, enticing me to join it on its adventures. At times, I want to. At other times, it sends my hair whipping so fiercely that I can’t even see where we would go.    I can hear the ocean calling out to me. She rocks to and fro, sending
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Creative

Sleeping Beauty of Melbourne

Luna Park
This piece was first published in Lot’s Wife Edition 3, 2021. I spent the first 18 hours in Melbourne immersed in the deepest sleep I’ve ever had in my life. Sharing a room of 10 reeking bunk beds at the cheapest hostel I could afford didn’t even matter: this jetlag was all-consuming.  The days flew by as I remained in bed watching movies on my laptop, sheltered under the humid fort of towels that hung from the bed above my own. It is a popular belief that you make tons of friends staying at a hostel. But I had been
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Creative

We Haven’t Located Us Yet

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1. On Depression Street, there is a house painted pink. The house: old, renovated, Colonial. Crown-moulding on the ceiling. Pink: the colour of a hopeless-hopeful people, who won’t budge no matter how many times you tell them to. Pink people, you see, are dreamers. They live and suffer for their dream. Do their dreams ever come true? Does someone who’s asleep know that they are dead? This is the Twilight Zone. 2. Still reeling, like every particle and cell of my body turned into liquid love (Dove Cameron, 2018). 3. The first time you see her, it’s not love or
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CreativeFiction

The Library

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  Far above the towering mountains that stretched for the heavens, and higher than the strongest most fearless birds dared to rise, above the dark water-laden thunderclouds and beyond the delicate semi-formed mists rose the gigantic city of Theoria. Ancient and proud it had floated between the clouds and stars for countless generations, bustling with activity and progress. The streets were paved with stone, the houses a mismatched puzzle of brick and metal. Street lamps framed the sidewalks like silent sentinels, throbbing with artificial light all through the night, while the day was presided over by life. Children ran through
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CreativeFiction

Human Collisions

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The policeman swings his gaze over the railings into the grey river. Beside him, a mother crouches in a paramedic’s arms, a large pram rests on its side. Its contents are sprawled across the footpath; spare nappies, a bottle, a fleece blanket, a soft little giraffe. All except the baby. The river is murky with silt and city pollution; the policeman searches for the pale body and the red jumpsuit that hugs it. “Size 000…he’s wearing a red jumpsuit...size 000 from my Aunt,” the mother repeats. The bridge is made of unforgiving asphalt and steel. A greying woman sits in
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CreativeFictionMiscellaneous

Protected: ​Not Fine

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  This isn’t really a story, but the memory of one, preserved like dried flowers between paper pages. Boy meets girl has been told and retold. Boy dumps girl has variations too. But not boy abandons girl, or boy loses faith in girl, or boy reimagines girl as a monster and runs far, far away. To clarify, boy and girl isn't boyfriend and girlfriend. He wasn’t an ex, but an ex-something, an ex-maybe. An ex-almost. We were both the type that was easily detached from others, which meant people were surprised when they found out we were close. And they'd
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CreativeFiction

Postcards from the Middle

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  DAY THREE Two more days to go and I really hope Suzy learns how to shut up. Just stop talking to me. Fuck. I mean, how hard could that be? I get that we’re all here to ‘make friends’ and ‘learn leadership’ but there’s a line. Why isn’t there a workshop about knowing when to leave someone alone? “No, Suzy, I haven’t watched any movies recently.” Who has that kind of money? And time? God. Why can’t Annie ever bother me like that? I’d talk to her myself but she’s always surrounded by everyone else and I don’t need
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CreativeFiction

The Animals

The Animals (Sa Pasa)
  Kelowna Secondary felt enormous to Ahmed, too big to be an actual school. But in reality, because Ahmed’s year level was very small, and because the select-entry Christian College up in the hills had finished construction, the school was emptier than it had been for years. Over the scorching summer all the portable buildings had been wheeled away, and the playing fields now seemed to stretch out endlessly from the double-storey building, leaving it an island stranded in a golden, sun-dried sea. Ahmed met up with Ibrahim before school and was rendered speechless at first. Ibrahim had ditched his
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CreativeFiction

The Sea

The Sea (Julia Chetwood)
  I thought long and hard before deciding to move the fifth pawn from the left two spaces forward. Then I waited as the wind of the sea blew at my long golden hair, whispering a soft apology into my ear. ❖ ❖ ❖ I died some days ago with tears in my eyes – salty, bitter tears that threatened to overflow. Before I died though, my life was a utopian dream where animals from all walks of life lived together, each animal with its young by its side. But in my utopian dream, nothing was done to save those
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