Cirrus@Austlit

'It was a FrIday afternoon when Professor Charles approached my desk, placed upon it a large book and a piece of paper and said, ‘Have a go at mapping this.’ The book was The Rat Brain in Stereotaxic Coordinates, 6th Edition and the paper depicted a coronal cross-section of a rat brain. As a seventeen-year-old ostensibly employed in his ofce to scan things, I was unqualifed for this particular task.'  (Introduction)

'Right now, In the space of this page, I am locating myself somewhere—but the here of the page is several places: I am here where my hands are touching keys and letters are resolving crisply on the screen, which holds an image of a white page but is not a page; I am there where you are reading these letters on another screen, in another room; or perhaps you are holding this issue of Voiceworks in your hands and the words have weight as a physical artifact, forming a written place, the pages snapping between your fingers.'  (Introduction)

'Yuna calls out From across the room. 

''Jagiyaaa.' She says it for the second time. It's the Korean equivalent of 'bae' or 'baby'...' (Publication abstract)

'Nan is driving me to school because Mum lost her licence for drink driving. It's my first year of high school. She's tired from taking care of me and my cousin. Starting to forget things. Around the corner from school she rear-ends the car in front of us. The bonnet of the car crumples. Her teeth fall out into the footwell. I get out of the car. Blue fluid is leaking onto the ground underneath it. She refuses to get out until she finds her teeth. I insist I am fine to go to school. I get to my locker and start to cry a bit. A pretty girl from my class hugs me in the way you hug people you don't know very well and I choke out 'car crash' when she asks what happened. I start taking the train to school.' (Publication abstract)

'Bev says that you dissolve during starvation. She says calories get saved for vital organs and the other parts of you stop operating, so this is why you feel cold and your hair rips. This is why you cannot concentrate, or grow bones, or be fertile. I suppose that this is also why my dreams stopped...' (Publication abstract)

'I used to ride everywhere. From the age of sixteen, when I moved out of home, I'd cycle up the hill and over the highway to uni on my old Kmart mountain bike with the milk crate strapped to the back. I'd ride home from the supermarket with plastic bags hanging precariously from the handlebars. I'd hop on my bike to visit friends, whether they lived around the corner or on the other side of town. Eventually I started riding for fun too, taking long, meandering adventures along the coast on weekends. But I really got into riding when I was eighteen and lived in Vancouver for a year on exchange. My daily commute took an hour and a half, through the suburbs and up a mountain I could see on the horizon from my bedroom window. When I reached the summit, steam would rise from my body and dissipate in the thick winter air. It was quicker on the way home, of course, hurtling down the slope with stiff fingers clutching at the brake levers, a terrified grin making my teeth chatter.' 

 (Publication abstract)

'My Brother gus looks to be asleep, but I know he's awake. His head is propped up before a very large TV, the only source of light down here, that spills blue shapes out over our bodies. His eyes make slits on his blue face, but I know he's awake. Above our storm shelter is four feet of dirt and a warm evening, damp and exciting. The sort of evening that would have once inspired all-night-and-the-next-day parties. Maybe we did grow up in the right corner of the world, and at the right time. Maybe those were the days, but maybe the days are now...'

 (Publication abstract)

'On 7 September 1891, a young woman named Jessie A. found two unfamiliar doctors entering her bedroom. They would have been middle-aged men who regularly tended to the inhabitants of rural Alexandra. Her father had called them to the house to certify his suspicion: that Jessie was 'not right in the head'.' (Publication abstract)

'I said I Felt like going away. Keith suggested the place. I don't trust myself to drive at the moment, so instead I read in the passenger seat, or sleep...'

 (Publication abstract)

'She didn't have visitors very often, to tell you the truth, much less young, uninvited boys. So on the pale Tuesday morning Maddy unlocked her front door, stowed her umbrella and coat away neatly and discovered him in her sitting room, she was far less surprised than she probably ought to have been.'

 (Publication abstract)

'A few years ago, I had come across an article, 'Nature Has a Formula That Tells Us When It's Time to Die', by Robert Krulwich. It was amazing, how the immensity of life could supposedly be condensed into a singular mathematical formula. The mass of an organism multiplied by its metabolic rate was equal to its mass taken to the three-fourths power, a formula which transcended the distinct characteristics of seven hundred species. The tremendous developments of research left me bewildered, that the essence of death was able to be epitomised through such a simplistic manner. I think my cousin Steven would have been as equally fascinated by the article.' 

 (Publication abstract)

'When I was Nine, my mother suffered an exacerbation of a disease we did not know she had. Part of the protective sheath of myelin insulating the axons of the neurons in her central nervous system broke down en masse, causing a lesion in the right hemisphere of her brain - an area responsible for, among other things, motor control in the left side of her body. She had been under attack from her own immune system for an unknowable period of time, the myelin having been incorrectly identified as a potentially dangerous foreign body. Connections warped, fizzled and cracked as their insulation eroded. During a seminar, the left side of her body stopped working. Ever the professional, she finished teaching the class before being rushed to hospital.' (Publication abstract)