THE HIGH PLACES

Collection forthcoming from Penguin Australia, Faber & Faber US, & Sceptre UK

Henry Taylor had always known he would have money one day, and this confidence was vindicated when his mother won the lottery on a Thursday in August of 1961. Still, he wasn’t sure he could afford to quit his job, so he went in to the office the day after he heard the news.
'Art Appreciation', the New Yorker

What a terrible thing at a time like this: to own a house, and the trees around it. Janet sat rigid in her seat. The plane lifted from the city and her house fell away, consumed by the other houses. Janet worried about her own particular garden and her emptied refrigerator and her lamps that had been timed to come on at six.
'Mycenae', Zoetrope: All-Story

When the movie people left, the town grew sad. An air of disaster lingered in the stunned streets - of cuckoldry, or grief. There was something shameful to it, like defeated virtue, and also something confidential, because people were so in need of consolation they turned to each other with all their private burdens of ecstasy and despair.
'The Movie People', Best Australian Stories

The wife was driving on the night they hit Mr. Ronald.
     "My first drive since getting married," she said.
     "First this, first that," said her husband.
He looked at her, sitting high in the seat: her hair looked flimsy and blonde in the late sun. It was ten-thirty and still light. These were the days for marrying - the long days, and the summer.
'Exotic Animal Medicine', the Missouri Review & New Australian Stories 2

When I tell our husbands the story of the bad-luck Americans, I begin with Edith because when the Americans came, moving into the airstrip out of town, expanding it with new buildings and sheds and hangars, bringing with them a brass band that practiced in the streets of a Saturday, I thought of the planes that hummed over our newly crowded sky as tiny Ediths with their parrot faces pointed toward the sun.
'Those Americans Falling From the Sky', Zoetrope: All-Story