In no particular order. Those without dates are likely from 2017-19.
Found Footage 1
The only way he could think to describe it was “round.” Standing in his garden amongst the flowers, he had watched it fall from the sky.
She washed ashore on the other side of the world, plucking seaweed from her hair as she lay amongst the barnacle-covered boats. The harbour was deserted, the body of water nestled between rolling hills, buried beneath a blotted sky. Where had she left her crystal?
It was buried in a crater, now puddle, of its own creation. He sloshed his hair to one side and knelt down beside it. Beneath the plashing rain he could hear the gulls calling, could smell the salt. He hadn’t been to the beach in years.
She couldn’t read the signs around her. She’d wandered up a road, past some shops, and found herself in a small bay. A man with a grey-green beanie emerged from a Hilux; his dog sniffed her shivering feet. “Get out of it,” he said. She wasn’t sure who he was talking to. Across the water, up a hill, children chased each other around.
He went inside and found an old plastic bag, pulled out a receipt for the parts of a meal he’d forgotten he’d ever cooked, sausages, potatoes, gherkins, and went outside again. He reached down, bag over hand, and unearthed the crystal ball; it was the size of his fist. In his living room he placed it inside his fish tank where it knocked against the glass to lie beneath the coughing filter.
A year later, she fell pregnant.
2022
Found Footage 2
Ricochet, flash, a boom and a roar, he rode. Bones shook in his body like charged armour. His face was streaked with black ash, his hands covered in blood.
He had been here before. Not merely this strange country with its blue flowers, or even on this horse with its speckled grey coat. No, he’d been in this exact state of mind a thousand years ago on a planet called Callithope, tearing through a field of fallen petals in a bid to save his honour. Only, the colour of the flowers was wrong.
All that had started in the house above the cliffs, its windows rimmed in rock and its roof lined with diamonds. He’d built the house alone, placing each brick in a way that would collect the planet’s brutal rain and send it splashing in a violent tumult against itself. The slope of the roof would then carry the water away down past the windows like a waterfall, disappearing into the sea below.
It was a horrible way to die. She’d been the love of his life for so long; they’d spent lifetimes together.
He had found her dismembered, half hanging out the window, her body torn by the rushing water. He’d screamed and threatened to follow her, but no. That wouldn’t do. The killer had left an orange flower on the windowsill.
2022
Found Footage 3
Is it fair to fight for something you don’t believe in? To fight for your life, to stay alive as the world burns around you. Why are you doing this? You wish you knew. You wish you had the courage to ask yourself.
You are doing it for them, but you do not know who they are. You pull your sword and pull that trigger and flick that switch. The machinery makes music.
Others question you. Their words make sense, their premise does not. You wish it did. All that you understand is the war. All that you understand is the blood pushing its way through your fingers.
The mud, the clouds, the horizon, the torn buildings and broken arms of iron bracing. You smell the smoke and understand. It is not your place to judge.
And they see every footstep. They feel your pain. They taste the fear in your mouth as the very words that deny it spill out like entrails. Of course you deny it.
In all these ways, the battlefield speaks to you. You close your eyes and listen. Where have you been? In the trenches, in the forest, the misty hilltop shrine, the desert, the snowy peak. You listen and you smile as you take another step forward and you see yourself, a mirror, doing the same. They’re always new, always you, always asking the same questions.
They never let you answer.
2022
Found Footage 4
The streets unfold as if they mean something. Neon rushes by and your head hangs out the window like something possessed. You wonder if it was all worth it.
Those rings of fire around which you cooked your meals. The foul taste of a cigarette, the parties, the cars.
You walk to McDonalds, stamping the cold from your feet. A mangled fantasy lies behind each fence, amongst the barking dogs.
She’d argued with you the night before about her friend, who you thought nothing much of, as you stared into your own reflection.
In McDonalds you talk to the kid behind the counter. He has a life like yours, but he dreams of being a lifeguard. You’re pretty sure he spat in your cup. Outside, you tip your coffee onto the grass as an old woman glares in your direction. It’s New Years Day. You wonder what mood the bus driver will be in, what the seats will smell like, how long the year will manage to hold itself together before it falls apart like an old blanket, that one there in the window.
2022
Fragment 1
Is this what happens when tragedy becomes an identity?
“It changes you, that place. Its just at the end of, ahh… That street. You know the one, down there, like, at a right angle to all the others. You have to hop a fence and go down that alleyway.” He shrugged. Stoner wisdom: “You’ll know it when you see it.”
Is it a ghost or some sort of essence of the city, something that rose out of the cracks and spaces and formed a life of its own before anyone noticed?
People try to deny it. Forget, rebrand, move on. It can’t be that hard to find, surely. But nothing even feels close. It’s worst right at the epicentre, at the heart of the city. Modern, fake. It’s trying too hard. No treasures; all new.
Are you a writer, or a hunter? A collector maybe. Catch each spark of inspiration in your hands like a moth. A small and tender blaze you must nurture into a fire.
The interstitial spaces, the liminal, the peripheries, saccades and cul-de-sacs. Where a moments notice, a sideways glance, means the world.
Conversation drifts down the street like a lost letter.
Fireworks in the mind’s eye. Words that teem with life.
Fragment 2
Sometimes I think the world is an easy place to capture in art. A not-quite aesthetic, a shape, a colour. The rolling brown grass of the countryside. The globe of a map. The flow of society.
What does it even mean to write science fiction in a world that is the future. That is the network. Did every generation feel this? Trapped like a fly in a web which is also the spider and is made of other flies.
So what do you do? You go further into the future.
But future is just an excuse for fantasy.
Because you don’t extrapolate. Extrapolation leads downwards. You want to move linearly, across, in order to examine the present.
The contemporary novel would have to be written from behind the screen. The novel is trapped there. Screen or page or picture. Behind that screen where identities lie. The particular truth, the finger on the pulse.
Optimistic that this whole illusion will shatter. That you will find some peace. No longer be woken by the buzzing of social obligations and work.
These grand ideas of who we are.
Fragment 3
The story is about free will and dreams.
A comparison is made to how in ‘real’ life you think you have free will but in dreams there is a marked distinction between lucidity and non-lucidity. Yet, written from a certain perspective and with particular skill, a non-lucid dream can read as a lucid one. “You move to the left…” Marking the fact that whether we really have free will or not is somewhat arbitrary if we cannot even tell for ourselves; as a story can be written where a character is unable to tell if they have free will or not. Lucidity is just a state of mind. Fictions are just another way of dreaming.
Fragment 4
You read these stories set in other cities and they are all so dense and so much happens there. And then you turn around and want to write about your own back door and it is all so sparse. Small towns dot the countryside like scattered buttons, threaded by roads and rivers. Your idea of fun is driving around trying to find something to do and never doing anything. Not so much a city but an extended suburbia.
Your childhood spent wandering shops and city streets that no longer exist. The city is new.
Yet you can turn the corner and find magic.
Godley Head in the middle of the night. Govenors bay on a clear day. Kaitorete Spit in the early morning as farmers send smoke signals to each other.
You want to open a door down a back alley and find the hidden city. The underground. Bars only remembered in a half blind haze. Cafés you can’t recall.
You want to turn memories into moments.
Fragment 5
When the house was quiet I would find you staring down at your feet wondering just how you came to exist in this body. You used to dance for hours.
Fragment 6
We still don’t know how time travel works. Glimpses crash in like waves under a dark sky. It’s not cohesive or coherent, just different people and different places. I am cursed. We don’t know how it works, but I know they are telling me something. Me. Days, I don’t remember them all; thoughts that each feel like a fresh memory: Waking cliffside to a cold wind that catches my sweat. A narcoleptic cycle of jagged sleep. Waking, each time to a new world, a new body or lack thereof, each time however briefly. I have my own thoughts, it seems, but the ability to act on them is as chanced as the rest. No, not time travel, not even just travel. A participant. Drug us up and send us out, they preached. In. Sideways. The first of a new generation of soldier. Spy. It’s not going to happen — but that’s another story. I was the first. The one and only. Glorified Guinea Pig. Shat back out by the universe. My only task, at first, was to take it all in. Observe. Remember. I can recall the briefings, the stuffy rooms with stained whiteboards. Old algebra. Telling me to look for the details. Nothing in particular, it would distract. Then, off course like a moth to a flame. Kept in the dark, of course of course. What they wanted, they said, would fall out of it all. Newborn. They knew the rest. They’re gone now. Or, I am. Those sergeants, those old men in tight green suits. Those doctors in lab coats with oily, polished black shoes on speckled blue-egg vinyl flooring. I’d disappeared from my hospital bed, gone just-like-that. I read about that later, apparently there was a search. Whether or not that was before they took me, I don’t know. Ripped me apart it did. My time with them is just another fragment. But, you know, details.
Fragment 7
The story is about extremely intelligent children.
They are just like human children, except smarter, and they only live so long. They know they are going to die, which they call ’transforming.’ They have absolutely no sexual drive at all, no need for relationships or social contact.
These children seem to drive all the technological and political change in their world. The adults are remain unseen, and apparently let this happen.
The children only live fifteen years or so, before they get the overpowering desire to descend underground and hibernate.
At this point it is revealed that the adults are beasts. They are much bigger than the children, and have been seen throughout the story being looked after by said children, like farm animals. They were, until then, unexplained. They look like big boars. They are hypersexual and fight a lot. And generally cause a mess.
The adults are well looked after, considering.
The children know this fate awaits them. They hate it, but they can’t fight it, a necessary part of their lifecycle. They have art and beauty and music in their life, but they know they will trade it for a paddock.
Before their civilisation established itself, the adults would protect the community from the dangers of the wilderness. The job they were built for. Now, they just circle their yards, each with an inexplicable sense of loss on their face, like a mother duck who’s lost her eggs.
Fragment 8
Tracer
Villanelle
Poetry Experiment
Forms of flight that can’t adjust
To relationships planned out in trilinear;
The geometries between us
Weightless abstractions, variations of lust
Technical drawings on paper stained sepia
Of forms of flight that can’t adjust
.
Brushstrokes of blue, white dust
A marble sculpture, I don’t envy ’er
Caught in the geometries between us
.
Like birds of metal, each truss
Each blade; rotors beat against heavy air
Forms of flight that can’t adjust
.
To city streets with balconies of rust
And locked in cages not any steadier
Than the geometries between us
.
As eyes meet over a half-eaten crust
Lives intersect across the cafeteria
Forms of flight that can’t adjust
To the geometries between us
2021
(Thanks to Vana Manasiadis for the prompt for this piece, and to the rest of the 403 class for reading this (and Lifecycles, The Nightmare Bug, Connections, and Inhabitance) and providing feedback.)
Fragment 9
Connections
Dialogue Experiment
Interior: New Year’s party. Two characters on the couch, teenagers. It’s a crowded room but people are giving them space to talk.
Girl: I want to leave.
Boy: Yeah, it’s too loud here, not my scene.
Girl (looks at Boy): It’s not that, it’s the company.
Boy: What did Sartre say? That Hell is other people.
Girl (rolling her eyes): People are the worst.
Boy: It’s about judgement.
Girl: I’m not judging you.
Boy: Sure. That’s not what I mean, though.
Girl: Then what?
Boy: We judge ourselves based on what other people think of us. People look at you, see you as an object, they judge you and you end up internalising that, judging yourself.
Girl: What do you mean ‘you?’ Do you mean me?
Boy: I meant in general. But that includes you. Me. Everyone here.
Girl: So, you do mean me. I’m an object.
Boy: No, but you judge yourself as an object. Because that’s how other people judge you.
Girl: Thanks.
Boy: I don’t think that. That’s just what Sartre said.
Girl: But you still said it. So, what do you think, then? You’re seventeen, I didn’t sign up for this.
Boy: It was just a statement.
Girl: It’s never ‘just’ a statement with you though, is it?
Boy: What does that mean?
Girl: I’m not as good as you because I can’t follow your train of thought.
Boy: I wasn’t saying that.
Girl: Did you need to?
Boy: I’m talking about this party, not you.
Girl: What does judgement have to do with the party? We’re just here to have a good time. (She nods her head to the music.)
Boy: But it’s more than that, now.
Girl: More than people here judging each other in an endless spiral of doom? Sure.
Boy: Yeah. Look at everyone, dancing, drinking, smoking, all just to save face.
Girl: Nah, I’m pretty sure they’re just here to have fun. They’re not thinking about it.
Boy: They should be.
Girl: Speak for yourself.
Boy: It’s not just the party, though. We all keep up appearances.
Girl: What are you trying to say?
Boy: I…
Girl: What? See, it’s always games with you. Say it.
Boy: That time you went out for dinner with Bill’s parent’s, it ended up on Facebook.
Girl: Seriously? That? And? He’s a family friend, I’m not going to turn down a free meal.
Boy: But people would see that and wonder why you’re in public with another guy’s parents.
Girl: How did you see that anyway; you don’t even have Facebook.
Boy: My mother of all people saw it and asked me about it.
Girl (sarcasm): Oh no, your mother doesn’t approve of me. Whatever will I do?
Boy: It’s not just her.
Girl: You’ve had too much to drink.
Boy: If my mother saw it then everyone at school would have seen it too and they’d wonder why you weren’t with me and what that means about us.
Girl: If you actually trusted me, you’d know it didn’t mean anything.
Boy: I do trust you.
Girl: So?
Boy: It’s just not a good look.
Girl: I’m not concerned with ’looks.’
Boy (looks at the ground): I am.
Girl: I know.
Boy: And you don’t care?
Girl: I have better things to care about.
Boy: Like what?
Girl: Like enjoying this party.
Boy: I thought you said you wanted to leave.
Girl: I did.
2021