Short stories

2024

A Star Chaser’s Child (Long Trek Press)

My mother was a wanderer, always chasing something the way the night chased the day across the sky.

A Gentleman Thief in a Floating City (unpublished; longlisted for Uncharted Magazine’s Novel Excerpt prize)

Son of a Star Chaser (unpublished; shortlisted for Uncharted Magazine’s Genre Flash Fiction prize)

2023

Sea-salt Memory (EnbyLife, 4th September)

You remember being young and being by the ocean.

You walk home from the beach with a layer of salt crusted on your skin. It’s still hot under the afternoon sun, blaring down and frying all of you as you hike up the street. You feel like a potato chip.

Thicker Than Water (An Unexpected Party, ed. Seth Malacari)

Evie stared at the ocean, and the ocean stared back.

2022

Legs (EnbyLife, 8th August)

In preparation for the tattoo, I shaved my legs for the first time in a year.

Technically, I didn’t have to. Only one leg was getting inked, after all. But it was weird to imagine one limb smooth and shiny while its sibling walked beside it, a mirror image save for twelve months’ worth of scruff. Maybe it could have been a statement. Performance art, even! Something something multiple expressions of the self can exist in the same body.

As I stood in the shower washing clumps of shin-fuzz out of a disposable razor, I mentally wrote half an artistic rationale for leaving my left leg hairy. But then I imagined the sensation of the scraggly calf brushing against the perfect smooth one—worse yet, against the tender healing skin of the new tattoo—made an involuntary ‘yurk’ sound out loud in my bathroom, and decided to just do ‘em both.

Coast Roads (SWAMP, issue 29)

We’re more than halfway to the beach when Moon asks me, ‘What do you do in the sea?’

I’m focused on the view out the passenger seat window—on the fields that unroll towards the coast like a lush green carpet—so it takes me a moment to register the question. I turn to look at Moon, who’s diligently watching the road as they drive. ‘What do you do?’ I echo.

I keep my voice low. We turned off the music about fifteen minutes ago, when we realised both Evan and Cass had fallen asleep in the back seat. Now it’s just us and the gentle, hot hum of the highway.

I wonder, suddenly, if Moon has just thought of this question, or if they were waiting until we were alone to voice it. Something about that makes my chest bubble.