AustLit

'When he left the country, her father's bones remained. He packed them in a wooden box decoupaged with butterflies. Brian from Ballarat - nature photographer, only friend left in Australia - was happy to give that secret box a home. Over time, he took the bones from their butterflied hiding place and displayed those private things on his mantelpiece with cabinets of dead moths and blurry photos of the sea. The butterflies peeled from the empty bonebox. Dust took to the cracks in its wood. It stopped being a memory and started being an object, so Brian put it in the garage with his grandson's bike and other things he didn't want to fix. Spiders crawled inside. The box gave them a home. But the bones remembered their future. Brian was just one thread in their meshstretch of history. The bones remembered their futuregirl - several threads unwound to make a tear. They wanted to speak her onto 'Cassaurina Beach'.' (Introduction)

'It was summer when I began to love Cecily. Leaves curled. Shoulders were brindled and browned. Asphalt melted and stuck to the soles of old sandals. Heat came up from the pores in the pavement and down from the bluewhite sky. Everything smelled. The wind was burnt and bodies were saltysour with sweat. Trams moved slowly. The air was denser, gelatinous, you had to push through the thick of it. When it was dry, the heat sucked you up from the inside, drinking the wetness of you, so you were left crisp and fragile like cicada skin. When it was wet, the heat was drowning...' (Publication abstract)