Free stories

Free stories

Below you’ll find links to short stories and novelettes that are available online to read or listen to for free. Enjoy!

 

Aurealis Awards 2025 shortlist

Aurealis Awards 2025 shortlist

Delighted to learn my tragic, magic realist magpie love story – The Beautiful Thing You Once Were – has been shortlisted for an Aurealis Award…

Sign up for my newsletter – get a free story!

Sign up for my newsletter – get a free story!

I’m excited to share that I’ve set up a newsletter over on Substack. If you want to receive a steady(ish) stream of insights, inspirations, obsessions, updates, recommendations and fascinations, as well as the occasional giveaway or free story, right into your inbox, then I’d love you to subscribe!

The Black Massive

The Black Massive

It was a banging scene, back in the day. Before Cadman came out of the shadows, touting his weird black shit.

Our Last Meal

Our Last Meal

It used to be our favourite lookout. Our hangover lookout, Sallie called it…

Old Growth

Old Growth

“Look, Dad,” says Mika from the back. “Look at the faces!”

Old Growth

Old Growth

“Look, Dad,” says Mika from the back. “Look at the faces!”

Scott adjusts the rear-view mirror. The last he checked, Mika was slumped in a chaos of Lego, two minifigures squabbling inches from his face. Now the boy is fully upright, forehead pressed to the window.

“What do you mean? What faces?”

“In the trees,” says the boy. “Bubbly heads poking out of the bark. Look, Dad, can you see?”

“What’re you talking about, retard?” Ashley is scooched way down in the passenger seat, semi-foetal with her toes on the glovebox. Scott would think she was asleep if it weren’t for the dance of thumbs over the screen of her phone.

“They’re probably galls,” says Scott. “Some trees grow them in response to bacteria, insects, that sort of thing. It’s a kind of symbiosis: the trees grow galls to protect themselves, but the galls also protect the wasps, or the greenfly or whatever, by drawing them in, growing around them.”

“Ha,” says Mika and smiles, stares out at the milky light strobing through the trees. “Galls.”

The car climbs, clings to the narrow snake of highway, winding upwards, out of the rainforest and the stop-motion fireworks of ancient tree-ferns, up into the dry alpine region and the edge of the burn zone…

Old Growth won the SQ Mag Story Quest Short Story Competition 2016 and the Aurealis Award for Best Horror Short Story in 2017.

Read the full story for free online in SQ Mag Edition 31.