Michael Fitzgerald

'So, was it hard to pretend I was "dead"? Well, my motivation was abundant; it was splendiferous, endless, you might say.' An American actress, renowned for being late, is living with her two cats in a modernist clifftop apartment in Sydney in the late 1980s. The recounting of her story is prompted by the arrival of an old typewriter and...

These are the last days of 1999. At St Peter's Basilica in Rome, as the world waits for the new millennium, Lucy, a young Australian woman, looks up at Michelangelo's Piet behind its pane of bullet-proof glass; a red kabbalah string circles her wrist. She has come with the mysterious parcel her recently deceased mother asked her to bring to...

'Do I look strange?' These were his last recorded words. That night Sosimo kissed his hands and laid them across his breast, knitting his fingers together like flowers. The next morning the household watched his coffin, held aloft by a dozen brown hands, disappear into an ocean of leaves. Every now and then, at a turn of the mountain, it...