Short Stories

The fitness industry profits from making you feel like you’re not doing enough. Here are eight widely repeated exercise myths — and what the science actually shows.

Lasting organisations are built by people more interested in the mission than their own centrality to it. Abel Prasad on leadership, decision-making, and the one piece of advice that matters most.

In her father’s archive papers: a letter written six months before he left, describing the decision to go — and then not going. Nadia spent a November evening trying to understand what that meant.

She hadn’t left her house in eight months. The bird that arrived on her windowsill was on fire — and completely calm about it. Twelve centimetres, it turned out, was where it started.

He could fix anyone’s wounds except the ones he’d watched himself make. Then an old man in a garden centre told him he had the hands — for the old work.

The moths came in the first October after Liam died. By the eighth night, they had arranged themselves into a path — and at the gate, Maree found something waiting.

Eleven maps appeared on Declan’s kitchen table the morning after he stopped eating. One showed a road on Phillip Island marked simply: The one you were going to take.

A flat tyre. A creek in the Yarra Ranges. A shape in the water with eyes the colour of lichen. A woman who hasn’t slept through the night in three years.

Edinburgh, 1888. Professor Mure is found dead on his own dissection table. Dr Agnes Blackwood has approximately four seconds to decide what to do about it.

A forensic accountant. A dead sister. A consultancy fee that makes no sense. Oslo in November, and a list that was meant to be found.