AustLit

'I’m standing in my underwear on Chestnut Street. The morning of Lunar New Year is sticky like mango left in the sun, ushered in with a herald of cicadas. The jacaranda tree behind me, over six metres tall, arches over with its purple blossoms and whispers good morning!' (Introduction)

'Through a surge of reproductive energy, the aquatic invertebrate Bryozoa bloom buds of larvae that wiggle and bubble out from their own body. Oceanic eddies then whorl them outwards; their amor- phous bodies reach out in an act of watery connection.'

'When I was four, I almost drowned. My scrawny arms had tired of holding onto the pink inflatable ring and I slipped through the hole in the middle, into the over-chlorinated waters of Galston pool. Ma said she’d plucked me out gasping and floundering like a trapped rat, but strangely, I have no memory of it. I only remember and occasionally dream of the space between my breaths—that transient, painless pause when everything feels right, before the body realises the danger it is in. Suspended in that soundless calm, I had opened my mouth, curious, to taste the elastic shades of blue that pressed in like thumbs, firm and supple but as comforting as my own fist. Even as the light from above paled and my chest grew taut, I held on, aching for more.' (Introduction)

'Dawn breaks like an open wound and spills onto my bedroom’s blank white walls and ceiling. Desperately, I cling to the sunrise as a temporal marker. I’ve been restless in the fortnight since my return to Australia, immobile in bed as my body gradually acclimates to the leap forward in time from Manila to Melbourne. But left to my own devices and bereft of the presence of work or education to structure my everyday, very little moors me to the present. The light scalds my sleepless eyes, a reminder of my abject tenselessness, as I try and fail to catch up with myself in the here and now.' (Introduction)

'The train is empty. Or maybe it’s just the carriage that’s empty. The absence of something is still absence, no matter the size. Like how some ghosts are smaller than others. But that doesn’t mean they do not cling on harder, claws digging into backs. Arms and chests too, if they can reach that far. Devi would know, does know.' (Introduction)

'Three months before my paternal grandmother dies, I sit across from her in my auntie’s apartment in Nanjing, China. Her hair is dark grey and tied into a low ponytail. She wears square, wire-framed glasses that match the shape of her face: a shape she has passed down to my father, passed down to me.' (Introduction)

'Winter swept in like a draught. It brushed through the streets in just an evening, stretching the air thin then sharpening its edges. Its breath pressed in on the windows, and theyblurred and filled with fog. Inside was filled with moving hands, knives and forks, and the static of chatter, warmed by Merlot and creamed potatoes.' (Introduction)

'Sometimes I imagine the escarpment watching—a slumped giant, trees sprouting up from its fingers, its green sigh winding down between the houses below.'

'Some people say that every person born left-handed was once a member of a twin pair. In twins, around a quarter are left-handed. I am left-handed, but I was born alone, and I came bursting out backwards with a full head of black hair and pink white skin. I had big hands and feet like a Labrador, with strokes of wiry fuzz decorating every inch of my skin, veins flowing all over my flesh, like a cow udder. My mum says I had a twin early on in utero. Before we had hands, we were one bundle of cells burbling like a creek. She would tell me about my sibling and who they could have been in soft whispers before bed, cradling me so close in her arms that I could have sworn her heartbeat was coming through the walls of my little room.' (Introduction)

1. All my crushes—both fictional and real-life, childhood and contemporary— have been solid people.

'OVU came into your house yesterday. A large ostrich-egg being—silent except for the calming, deep, meditative sounds it expels from the speaker hidden beneath its cream, porous shell. Hard and smooth, like glazed ceramic. Slightly warm.' (Introduction)