When the stars were rhinestones. When your car was a blue Holden god. When kisses spread to your back teeth, marathons of sucking. When we pashed through jokes, through tunes, through homework, through the leftovers we shovelled out our schoolbags. When you let me tattoo you with talk. Thirty-one exhilarating new stories from the acclaimed author of deleted scenes for lovers. 'A splendid collection, challenging and rewarding, with stories both memorable and revealing.' -Owen Marshall, NZ Listener 'This alive, pulsating collection is a masterwork of Antipodean goth.' -Loose Reads, 95bFM 'In this book it's almost exclusively women doing the wanting. And even when it's love it's always pinned down by lust. And it is wonderfully written. . . . Slaughter does it differently – vivid and intricate, visceral but also highly intelligent, changing all the time.' -Catherine Woulfe, The Spinoff. 'If Slaughter is writing from the black block in her chest, she is also speaking directly into yours.' -Charlotte Graham-McLay, New Zealand Books 'The language sparked like a cut power line. I was shocked awake every time I picked this book up.' -Grant Smithies, Sunday Star-Times Tracey Slaughter is the author of deleted scenes for lovers (2016), Conventional Weapons (poems, 2019), The Longest Drink in Town (2015) and her body rises (poems and short stories, 2005). Her novella if there is no shelter was published in the UK by Ad Hoc in 2020. She has received numerous awards, including the international Fish Short Story Prize 2020, the Bridport Prize 2014, and BNZ Katherine Mansfield Awards in 2004 and 2001. She won the 2015 Landfall Essay Competition, and was the recipient of the 2010 Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Waikato, and edits the journals Mayhem and Poetry NZ.