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Why is My Son Obsessed with Trains?
My son is obsessed with trains and it is all my fault. What to do? Feed the obsession. Clothes, books, toys, experiences
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Zen & the Art of Washing Dishes
They say life is a series of imperfect facts with many things we can’t control. But the sequence of washing dishes is not one of them. Glassware first.
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Things I Never Knew Until I was a Parent
Last time I did a VIA Institute personality assessment, my score for self-consciousness was off the chart. Now I sing in the street.
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Panic Hour
It’s eight in the morning. An escalator pulls me down from the street into the intestinal darkness. Streaks of lightning blue rush past my left shoulder, Photoshop motion-blur. Same in orange on the opposite wall, like this is an immersive internet advertisement. This tunnel is the cable. We are the particles. A unitary quantum system with a single wave function. I adjust the weight of my satchel and start plodding into the dim crowd.
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The Benley Acquisition
Money is tight in regional New South Wales. How do two competitive shires deal with paltry funding and generations of rivalry respond to the challenge? A comic and quintessentially Australian short story.
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Bad Feelings on Good Friday
I hear a lot of people bemoan the secularisation of religious holidays. The Crucifix has been passed in for a chocolate rabbit. Children worship Santa, the deity of consumption, rather than baby Jesus.
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Storm
Lying on a white bed in a wooden room listening to the silence watching her read and there is an inkling of a rumble.
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Letter to my Accountant
Humourous posr about getting an undeserved tax bill when you’re young and poor and the joys of having it mistakenly lodged by an incompetent accontant.
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Love Letter to Bundanoon
To be honest, I wasn’t sure I’d like it. It was quaint. But dinky. No place for a city chick. The roads were narrow. You could hide an orphanage in the potholes. And it was creepy, all those doilies.
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A Moment of Nihilism
A self-proclaimed esoteric god that I used to encounter regularly told me once that the TV show The X Files, which was in its first season, was an attempt by the American Government to prepare people for the coming of the aliens and the Age of Aquarius. If it was an exercise in ‘citizenry preparedness’, it probably came a bit late, given the alarming number of Americans per capita who claim to have experienced a close encounter of the Third…
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The Fracture
A seven-year-old, abandoned by her mother at a carnival, rides a swing and witnesses a catastrophe below. Psychological suspense with supernatural elements.
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The 45-Minute Chair
The chair’s bamboo legs slide across the thin carpet. Henry pushes his thick, rose-tinted spectacles up his nose and lays a hand across his groaning abdomen. A slim, dark-haired waiter emerges through the Staff Only door and begins collecting Henry’s plates. A silver badge embossed with black letters spelling TIMOTHY hangs above the pocket of his white, crisply ironed shirt. “I hope you enjoyed your first As Much As You Like Meal, sir. P-please come again.”
