As always, our short stories are motley of the imaginative, the unconventional, the unusual, the confounding... The Sensuous Marriage by Simone Sachs is a ritual of love and loving; a haunting tale of erotic journeys and consumation. The image of Bucephalus, central to the narrative, captures the imagination of a sensitive reader, and throws up interpretative possibilites, one of which is the eventual triumph of Bucephalus, then a fruitful marriage. Drowning the Charge by Neil Grimmett is a witty and mordant tale with tight dialogue. It is set in an Explosive factory that challenges deeply the human strength and character, and leaves no room at all for human error. A Slip of the Tongue by David Hurley deals with a very disturbed young man and daytime TV, and the capacity of the human mind. It is a disturbing tale told with artistic vigour. In Let’s Do Lunch by John Birch a phone call from a former employer raises hope of reconciliation and a longing for new challenges, but he hasn't reconed with the cruelity of the capitalist world where there is nothing like a free lunch. The Sandman by Sandra Jensen is a story told with nightmarish intensity from a child's Point of View. Set in apartheid South Africa, it explicates the inhumanity of apartheid policies and the psychological effects on the individual. And in Relic by Kilby Smith-McGregor the wooden arm is the centre of the story and therefore symbolic. So a reader who wants to understand the thematic import of this story must try to unravel the wooden arm. That's what I did. And like Kravitz, one of the characters, there is something I find disturbing about the wooden arm: a relic of a disintegrated family.