Where Flowers Grow

A comic panel featuring a bugs, stars, and child eating cereal. Text reads: "Mama, how do taste bugs get into your mouth" she chirps between pecks of Cheerios. Beneath the table her four-year-old legs swing with emblematic childhood energy.
A comic panel featuring a blue fact, a xylophone, a canister of Play-dough, and bugs. Text reads: "Her query breaks through the hefty veil of exhaustion, that insignia of early motherhood (from highchair, her brother squeals) and I smile.
A comic panel featuring a person with long hair hugging a child with a ponytail. The text reads: "For just a day to be her, to have flowers blooming in my bed and beetles building cities on my tongue."
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Sharleigh Crittenden is a Wiradjuri writer and mother living on Wangal Country, Australia. Her writing has been published in Australia and internationally, including in Going Down Swinging, Aniko Press, PortsideReview and Thread. Her writing has been recognised in shortlists and prizes, including the inaugural First Nations Storytelling Prize (2023), the Short But Deadly Flash Prize (2024) and the Nakata Brophy Poetry Prize for Young Indigenous Writers (2024). She is currently writing her debut novel and was awarded a Magabala Creative Grant (Magabala Books) in 2023 and a First Nations Fellowship (Varuna) in 2024.

Helena Pantsis (she/they) is an editor, writer and artist from Naarm, Australia with a fond appreciation for the weird, the dark, and the experimental. Her debut short story collection, GLUTT, was published in 2024. More can be found at hlnpnts.com.

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The Rumpus publishes original fiction, poetry, literary humor writing, comics, essays, book reviews, and interviews with authors and artists of all kinds. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers our readers may already know and love. We want to bring new perspectives into the conversation that will make us all look deeper.

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