Cirrus@Austlit

'Lee Battersby’s "Pater Familias" is an example of the flash fiction medium at its best. In it, a retired surgeon meets with a young visitor and describes an archaic form of late-term abortion called "craniotomy" .... The story moves with a crackling economy of language and, when its inevitable surprise ending appears, it’s not as a punchline-style twist, but as a slowly dawning sense of horror that will leave you gutted' (Tim Kroenert, Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus).