And just as our Tribes were poised to rush against each other, as their numbers increased and resources dwindled, and storms grew more violent and more prolonged – finally the planet Beelzabaloola reached down and made contact. It had always intended to do this, if the need got great; and…

It is the time of the black ants dying. They topple like old men on long legs gone suddenly useless; lie folded in on themselves like fragments of blackberries. Penny does not know what seasons they observe; she doesn’t know their ceremonies or their marriage rites, or how long they…

Mrs Brummel named her three children as follows: 1: Lionel Brummel That was okay, nobody minded, nothing strange about that. Her husband continued to nod over his newspaper like a genteel, old-fashioned toy in the corner. 2: The next son she named Tiger T. Brummel. The T. didn’t stand for…

Hadleigh Jennings in her 37th year fell for a country-western singer. She loved his thin dry lips, which made her think, paradoxically, of unlikely springs in arid mountain ranges, something so important nestled near-hidden. Her inside went all funny when she saw him, and he seemed to her valuable then,…

He had unzipped the lower part of the legs of his Goretex hiking pants and stepped out of them, while he leaned against a rough stone wall. Then he had folded them and pushed them into his rucksack, pulled its drawstring tight again, and gone on. His long legs, suddenly…

1989 They had parked the camper in one of the spots by the river – paid their $5.00 at the entrance, into the hand of a cheery ranger in khaki who stood in a kiosk behind a wooden counter – and now it was evening, of a hot June day.

There was once a woman who found herself at 16,000 feet in a fabled mountain range, hiking a rocky track that barely clung to a steep slope, and failing badly with the altitude. Her companions, two men, were hale and happy and stepping out, but the woman felt herself to…

People had been shrinking – becoming smaller and smaller – for a few thousand years; while other creatures slowly increased in size and overtook them. Mosquitoes were as big as VW Beetles used to be, and were such a menace that people carried special weapons just to protect against these…

He had a low forehead, orange-red hair, sparse and hanging like that parasitic vine, dodder. His skin was dead white. His lips were long, and thin as earthworms. His chin, lifted in defence, was square but narrow, with a little cleft. The stubble of his beard was orange too. The…