Cirrus@Austlit

'Sissy had never been on a holiday and didn't know a child on her street or a classmate at Sacred Heart School who'd travelled much further than the local swimming pool. At best they'd enjoyed a tram ride to a picture theatre in the city, maybe once or twice a year. A girl in the same year at school, Ruby Allison who lived behind the dry-cleaners with her mother and two older brothers, came back to school after the  previous summers holidays and told a story that she had been to the ocean over summer.' (Introduction)

'The wheel rumbled over a piece of roadkill. Ruth glanced in the rear-view mirror, but all that remained was matted flesh and fur.

'She angled the mirror to check on her husband. Slumped in the backseat, head lolling with the motion of the ute, his eyes slitted in that way that made her feel he was watching her — even when he slept.'  (Introduction)
 

`Gimme an axe.'

'The woman blurted this order across the formica counter. When the shopkeeper turned and saw her brimming eyes he took a hasty step backwards. His rancid half-smile, insincere to begin with, vanished into the gloomy corners of the store. It was still very early. Outside, tucked beneath a ragged hibiscus bush, a hen cawed a single, doubtful note. Inside was nothing but this black girl and her highly irregular demand.' (Introduction)

'When we get home from school my brother's dad, Jerry, is out the front, leaning against a truck that has a trampoline strapped to the back of it.' (66)

'This suburb has not that many trees. A few blocks away I can see the orange neon sign, a petrol station. I pull the car over on the side of a road. We sit in silence for almost a minute...' 

'On morning TV, a politician is promising to build a wall. The wall will divide Australia across the middle.' 

'The first girl is taken on the second weekend of the school holidays. Her name is Julie-Anne Marks; she is nineteen, she is beautiful, and she is gone. Everywhere we look Julie-Anne Marks is looking back at us. Just the one photo at first – the one her parents gave the police the night she didn’t come home. Julie-Anne Marks is stuffed into our letterboxes, pinned to every bulletin board, taped to every telephone pole. She takes up the whole front page of The Messenger – a full page in colour, block-capital headline. WHERE IS OUR JULIE-ANNE?' (Introduction)

'I’m scrubbing the word SCUM off the front door of our house. I wipe so hard that my wrists start to ache, but the red letters remain bold and bright, their edges dripping as if they’re bleeding.' (71)

'In year 4 We built a fox. We made it out of facts, so it was bigger than a real fox, and slinkier. It prowled between the bushes in the scrubland behind the oval. We pretended to play cricket, but we were watching the shrubs swish. We lost score each time we thought we heard it padding.' (83)

'His name is Paul or Peter, I forget. We sit together, squashed among a couple of dozen others like the human luggage that we are,  below the deck, where years of putrifying fish have left their stink. No windows. Someone's puked. An infant cries.' (Introduction)

'We are wading out, the five of us. I remember this. The sun an hour or two from melting into the ocean, the slick trail of its gold showing the way we will take.'

'It lies on the crisp hospital sheet, absolutely grotesque. Dr Arnold tells us it's called a fetus in few. Our son's unformed twin. Most likely joined via the umbilical cord in gestation, now just a jumble of elephantine bone and skin, about the size of an apricot. Three canines — there's no denying they're teeth — protrude in a jagged line across its circumference. When we first saw it after the operation there was a shock of hair pressed to its side, still moist from having Thomas's stomach juices washed away. It looked like the slick of hair and scum drawn from a shower's plughole. I gagged, felt nausea water my mouth. But the hair, the colour of wheat and nearly ten centimetres long, is dry now, almost glossy. It looks like her hair. Like Hannah's. ' (120)