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things that didn’t happen
Sarah Moss
‘Suddenly, your heart began; suddenly in the darkness of your mother’s womb there was a crackle and a flash and out of nothing, the current began to run.’
Eat You Up
Kathleen Murray
‘Wasn’t it possible the mental shit would leave the kid’s brain, cell by cell, just by doing normal stuff?’
Navigation
Lisa McInerney
‘His aberrations are formless; he imagines his insanity as a sort of gaseous molecule, looking to react with bugs and glitches.’
Shifting Ground
Una Mullally
‘Living in the only democratic country in the world with a constitutional ban on abortion, I felt an acute and visceral shame.’
The Pigeon
Faraaz Mahomed
‘The pigeon and I have a very warm and comfortable relationship.’ 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize – regional winner for Africa.
Pure Gold
John Patrick McHugh
‘That icy fear of the morning after slithered back: why does summer always feel like it belongs to someone else?’
Our Private Estate
Dave Lordan
‘Dozens of votive candles held aloft by mourners in white suits in procession. So much white, as if death could be engulfed in it, as if death itself was not an all-engulfing whiteness.’
Cow and Company
Parashar Kulkarni
‘And now there were four of them stepping out to look for a cow.’ 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize overall winner.
Mayo Oh Mayo
Nuala O’Connor
‘Tonight there is a moon-rind, a nicotined fingernail, hanging low over the lake; above it, a Swarovski sparkler of a star.’
Black Milk
Tina Makereti
‘Despair sat on her shoulders where her wings should have been. Darkness consumed her, the quivering lip of a dying abalone, grease in the barrel of a gun.’ 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize – regional winner for the Pacific.
First Sentence: Mary O’Donoghue
Mary O’Donoghue
‘It’s the small stuff – and here I mean the odd particulate matter of daily life – that lets me access the sprawl of a place that wasn’t mine but has incrementally become so.’
