That home was our underworld.
Pained, icy cave—gaping fissure.
We happened there by chance.
The stars aligned in such a way,
And the archer’s honed arrow bound us there.
So we walked that line together,
Father, child.
I never questioned it.
I don’t think I ever knew what I was escaping, or going towards,
Or what I was too scared to face.
I thought that if I kept to you, I would be free.
I thought that everything would be perfect,
Like the families I saw at the shopping centre and on TV
I never thought about the yelling,
Or the things you did behind closed doors,
Or the fights you’d have when I was meant to be sleeping.
So I led the charge.
I tried to lead us out of that underworld,
That hell of screams and bruises and suffocation,
To some kind of heaven.
I was too young to know better.
I wanted what everyone else had—love and feeling and want.
Even if it wasn’t real.
At some point I looked back.
I saw the cracks in the walls
And the dents in the paint where things had been thrown.
But there was no you.
In the midst of losing everything and wanting barely anything,
I lost the one thing I couldn’t control.
Maybe I looked at you the wrong way.
Maybe I shouldn’t have looked at you at all.
Maybe I should have stayed on that course,
Blindly, aimlessly.
Kept pretending.
Maybe I should have ignored the signs.
I should have given up.
I am still here and I can’t escape,
And all that I want and love is left cascading from my hands.
Still, I remember.
I remember those long nights
With your hair swept this way,
And your mood swung the other.
Your pungent Deep Heat muscle cream that we all hated.
The joy we found in the simplest things.
Our so-called ‘boys club’,
When we’d walk to the playground or sit in McDonalds parking lots—
Those taunting glimpses of what could have been.
Now, there is a mark from where you left us.
It takes the place of the spot on the wall where you held me,
And that patent suede armchair which no one else sat in.
We threw it out in the end.
Yet, despite all this, even though I am alone in this hell-hole,
I hold on to what I don’t have.
I cry about it in empty classrooms at lunchtime
And in aisles at the supermarket.
I want a life, and love.
Is that so much to ask?
For some stupid reason, I want it.
Even if it isn’t real.
The Procurement Officer stood in a pool of red light, unsteady. The LEDs blinked gently in the darkness, their glow pulsing like a slowed heartbeat. The extractors groaned far in the distance.
Fifty nights. Fifty goddamn nights. He’d flown in from Handan fifty times, each flight stretching longer, each exit at the gates leaving something behind. He’d have stayed forever if he could. A mind left alone too long starts reaching, clawing for company in the only place it knows—memory. It’s not a refuge, but a trap. The night before had proven that.
For a brief moment, the Pilbara fell silent. The only thing the Officer could hear—could feel—was the current pounding at the base of his skull. The red sands of the day faded to muddy grey. Overhead, the stars shone bright, as the land beneath became a void, an ocean that surrounded the post, met with the red little blinks that cast shadows between the stairs that led up to the tin-roofed office.
The road-trains that passed through here could grind metal into dust-pitted concrete, grind his nerves into something fine and jagged. Checkpoint Two and its delights had kept him satiated, docile, for those fifty days. No longer. Q4 projections from Anshan. Potash out. Iron back in. Unprofitable. The only thing that kept this place running was entropy. A 14 percent salary cut. These numbers twisted inside his skull, circling him as a bird does to the dead. Debts, deductions, subscriptions. Nights out at Goldies, the pale prostitutes with short hair and fat asses that staked out empty men with no mouth and no tongue to say ‘no’. Men like his station boss, disgusting men like him, who’d keep their mouth agape and their cocks hard at the touch of a foreigner. Drinks and emptied balances, ‘networking’ and guanxi.
Outside, the wind began to pick up, howling and gently shaking the shoddily constructed office. The thin pillars began to groan under stress, a gentle hum passing through the interior. Through an open window dust had entered, causing a set of stained papers to fall out of kilter, spreading across the floor. The generator continued to hum, and his teeth started to chatter as the day’s embrace became absent.
As he faced out towards the pitch-black hills that surrounded his station, the Procurement Officer began to wonder who’d take over from him, if this office would still exist in fifty years, till the end of reparations. He began to trace his knuckles with the tips of his fingers, feeling their soft surfaces and the coarse dirt that etched itself in each pore. Those scabs, his fingers hovered there, pressing slightly. Yesterday. The unbearable heat, engines and barks. That moment at Checkpoint 2. The Supervisor’s voice was the first thing to break through the hum of the aquifer pumps.
Three pale men with red faces, in reddened plain white shirts and one Work Supervisor in cyan, orange and yellow, visible in the dark and dull during the day, whose colours contrasted against his dark skin.
They barked like a pack of kelpies, feral and restless, outside the office, in the shadow of an old Japanese truck two decades past its prime. The Supervisor brandished the map like an artifact, its edges curling with age and the red lines bleeding through the folds.
“Look mate, right here.” He stabbed at the paper with a calloused finger, nails dirty. “This has been marked sacred for the last thirty years”.
The pale men stared. Blank. Hollow. Not hearing, not seeing. They wait for the problem to disappear, like the ones before.
“Are you lot fucked in the head?” The Supervisor’s hand jerked in frustration, as if trying to sketch his understanding into the air around him. “More Potash? You think the market wants more Potash?”
The white shirts shuffled closer, tightening the space. The Procurement Officer continued to watch a few metres away, half-dazed as his water ration left him most days. The Supervisor brandished the map like a sabre. When the smallest of the pale men reached a hand to calm him, the reaction was swift—a snap of paper, a slap across the wrist. The small man recoiled, stumbling two steps back not from the pain but shock. The sound of metal on metal, distant clangs from the site, rang out as the soft pitter-patter of boots in the dirt went about.
The others hesitated, unsure if this counted as a corporate incident of violence. The fat one, red-capped and sweating through his shirt, tried to play it easy. His paunch jiggled as he took steps slowly forward.
“You’re right mate. But what choice do we have? Production plans are made months in advance.”
“Before the price change!” quipped another, red shades masking his gaze, foot slowly grinding a dirt mound into further mush.
The red cap man scowled. “Let’s just make this work, mate.” He exhaled slowly, like his resignation was not his own. As if production plans weren’t of man but cosmic in nature.
Then the blue pickup came. Sleek. Brand new. A JAC model that belonged to yuppies in Shanghai, not out here. Why was it here? Its occupant stepping out had no right to be here either.
His suit was black. Too black. Ill-fitting to the Pilbara. The sun weighted itself on his back, soaking in through the pores and trapping sweat in the seams. He walked easily, as if the dust hadn’t already begun staining the bottoms of his pants. Hair slick, skin too smooth. He scanned the scene, found the Procurement Officer, and winked—a flash of teeth and glinting sweat. The Officer, half-thrown by recognition of his own, lifted a hand in a half-wave, feeling a joke.
Then the others saw him.
“Schedules, forty minutes ago, night shift and expansion. What’s happened here?”
Silence. Glances back toward Lake Disappointment. Then, slow and docile, the men got in line.
The black-haired man clicked his tongue, his youth coming across as arrogance. “Gentlemen. Was this not an opportunity for you?”
The voice had been carved and polished in Oxbridge. Smooth, dulcet, cutting like a razor. “Need I remind you we’re very lucky to be here? Lucky to still have our jobs after these dogshit months? No?”
The men refused to answer. The hotshot grad smiled anyway.
“Sacred land,” said the Supervisor, stepping forward and standing his ground.
The HR grad’s expression barely shifted. A flicker of disbelief. “What?”
“Registered. Right here.” A tap on the map. A little attitude on the side.
The grad snatched it, the clashing of two tight grips tearing the paper at the seams. He glanced at names. Locations that had changed, renamed or erased.
“I don’t get it,” the grad said, voice laced with hesitation. “If I may,” he examined the Supervisor from head to toe. “If I may, why do you people—so old—keep coming up with new problems?”
The grad leaned in close, closer than he needed to. Close enough for the Supervisor to smell the tuna and rice on his breath.
The old man didn’t flinch, loudly whispering.
“It’s not new. Western Australia Geological Survey, 2037. Plain letter.”
The white shirts stepped back, subtly, hoping to fade into the background and not be considered a part of this anymore. Hoping, perhaps, for a sudden vacancy on the site.
The grad exhaled, internally resolved. He rubbed the dust from his hands onto his breast pocket. Then he stepped back, eyes shifting to his pristine pickup.
“There is no argument here,” he concluded, straightening his shoulders and puffing out his chest. “There is no sacred ground for the conquered. This isn’t part of Western Australia anymore. Your argument lacks…historical and current precedent.”
The Supervisor’s fist clenched tight. “Martu blood’s been spilt here long before yours. Far longer than any of us. There’s your precedent.”
He shrugged off his high-vis vest, letting it drop to the dirt, stepping on it.
The grad didn’t blink. He pointed—first to the office, then to the men in white shirts.
“So was ours. And theirs. More recently, in fact. Fair’s fair.”
The trio softly nodded quickly in unison, keeping their eyes to the floor. The Procurement Officer moved toward the railing, his jowls puffing in the heat. The others, looking at the new silhouette in their peripheral vision, winced at the glare that bounced off the steel.
The sun continued to lower, and the dust thickened the air. The wind no longer stirred.
Somewhere, beyond this site, the world is liquid. But here, time was stretched thin, made brittle. Whoever broke it first took ownership.
Yet no one moved. No one spoke. The clangs in the distance continued, dull and endless.
“We are currently getting word that the death ray has completely wiped out all life in Sydney! Repeat, all of Sydney is gone! If the pattern continues, the aliens will now reposition to target another population centre. The only thing we can do now is hug our loved ones and pray for salvation. We at Channel 12 will keep broadcasting to the very end. Reporting to you live, I’m Michael Pancake.”
The five people all stared at the TV screen. You’d think that the world ending would bring greater commotion: screaming, wailing, weeping—but the living room was silent, save for the soft noise of quickened breathing. The shock had left every member of the board game group frozen. They watched as the TV replayed terrifying scenes of annihilation, their faces unrecognisably contorted by the mix of horror and disbelief. Cal covered his agape mouth with his hands as Susan rubbed his leg. Halle, eyes still fixed on the news, slowly tilted her head onto Deron’s shoulder.
Looking around and seeing the two couples comforting each other sent a pang of sadness through Barry’s body. He ached for someone that he could lean against in these final moments, cry with as they took their last breaths, just hold once more before the end.
Barry’s wife, Liv, had left him for a contortionist almost a year ago.
He hadn’t recovered from the separation. It wasn’t necessarily the loss of his wife but more the jealousy that she was happy and he wasn’t. She was the cheater, she fucked up, and yet she goes home every night to be wined and dined by a bendy Frenchman, while Barry spends his nights eating bulk-bought party pies and pretending he’s only crying because it’s an emotional episode of SVU. Then again, after Liv left him, the couple moved to Sydney together, so maybe it evened out.
Barry hadn’t felt like leaving his house in a while, but had forced himself to attend game night. It had been the first one he’d gone to in a while. He and his wife had always gone together, and, honestly, they were more Liv’s friends than his. But everybody there was too polite to rescind his standing invite, or tell him it was more ‘couples night’ than ‘game night’.
He was looking sadly into the almost empty bowl of chips when everybody’s cellphones started beeping. It was an emergency alert, instructing everyone to take cover and remain calm. That ‘calm’ was short-lived when someone turned the TV on to see every station reporting our extinction, the last tragedy of our species. Humans had brutally conquered the world and used our intelligence to kill, subjugate, or bend every living thing to our will; perhaps we should’ve expected that when we encountered beings greater than us, they would be equally merciless.
“Jesus Christ,” Susan said, piercing the stunned silence the group had been sitting in. As if her voice had been a switch, everybody started to unfreeze, finally reacting to the gravity of the situation.
“This isn’t real, there’s no way, it can’t be…” Deron trailed off. As he held Halle, who softly cried into his chest.
Cal paced around the room, “Oh my God, I need to call my sister.” His shaky hands struggled to dial the number.
Barry struggled to get breath into his chest, his mind raced, and his eyes welled up with tears. At first, he hadn’t let himself believe it; it must have been some hoax, an elaborate prank. But seeing the terror on his friends’ faces had rendered his denial pointless, and continuing to watch his friends now only worsened the panic. Halle ran her hands through her hair, trying in vain to soothe herself, Cal’s voice wavering, talking to his sister, Susan’s chin quivering, her attention still on the TV, Deron, who—Wait, what’s that on Susan’s face…?
Right on the corner of her mouth was some gross little green splotch thing. Ew, what was that?
“We’re all going to die! We’re dead!” Cal wailed, standing beside Barry now that his phone had lost signal.
“Yeah man, totally,” Barry absentmindedly replied, squinting to get a better view of the thing on Susan’s mouth. Eugh, it was disgusting. It must’ve been some dip from earlier. Barry wasn’t surprised she got dip on her face the way she was gulping down those corn chips. At the time he did think: damn Susan, there’s really not enough corn chips for you to pound them like that.
Everybody else must’ve noticed it, right? It was really obvious, like a little wet slug was slithering into her mouth. This was so weird, why hadn’t anybody said anything?
“Oh my God, all of Europe’s wiped out!” Deron yelled from somewhere.
Barry figured he should say something, right? I mean, if this were his last moment, he’d not want dip slathered all over him. Then again, what if him pointing this out embarrassed her? No, that wouldn’t do. This situation required subtlety, a delicate hand.
“Hey, here’s a thinker for the room,” Barry announced.
“Please God, why?” Deron was on his knees, tears and mucus streaming down his face.
“What’s everyone’s favourite flavour of dip? Remember how we were all eating dip?” A wry smile crept onto Barry’s face as he asked the question. This was a really good strategy.
“What?” asked Cal, the only one who reacted.
“Remember the dip we had earlier? Remember that?” Barry said loud enough so Susan would still be able to register it (if she ever looked up from the TV, I swear we are all just on screens so much, like missing all the beauty of life).
Halle ran to the bathroom to vomit. Okay, this wasn’t working. Barry needed to be more explicit.
“What are you talking about? Everyone we know is dead; how can you be talking about dip when everything is so horrible?” Cal raised his voice.
“So horrible, soo horrible,” Barry said, staring at Susan while slowly rubbing the side of his mouth, hoping she would catch on. “Yeah, all those people dying…just horrible. My goodness, yeah, it just makes you want to put your—your hands to your mouth in disbelief.”
“Obviou—” Cal started.
“Susan? Right? Just like a total hands to mouth, disbelief type…deal, right?”
Susan turned her head to make eye contact with Barry, a confused look on her face. “Uh, yeah, I don’t… I guess.”
Rapidly becoming frustrated, Barry decided to become slightly more overt with his hints.
“Christ, Susan, you have a giant glob of dip on your face, and we all find it disgusting and super distracting. Get it off your face so we can focus!” Barry screamed. His voice cracked, and he was really hoping Deron didn’t notice.
Susan finally wiped it off.
After a moment of silence, Halle, chin covered in vomit, started talking again. “What are you talking about, Barry?”
“Don’t lie Halle. Everyone thought that mouth thing was super gross, and I was the only one who said it. First she eats all the snacks, then smears them all over her face.”
“Why are you talking about snacks right now?” Deron asked.
“Oh my God, don’t get me started on the snacks,” Barry said, finger quoting the word snacks. “Who invites people over for the whole night and gets one—one bag of corn chips? I mean, really, Deron, you have like a whole house for your car and—”
“A garage?”
“And you won’t even pay for two bags of chips and a soda?”
“Well, to be fair, you ate a lot of them, Barry,” Cal interjected.
“You shut the fuck up, Cal! Nobody asked you; I ate just as much as anybody else; yes I did.” Barry shouted him down, fearing he may be losing popular support.
“Jesus, can you just stop, Barry?” Halle yelled.
“It’s a new thing of dip, an unopened bag of chips. You were clearly at the store, preparing for tonight, and thought that one bag of chips was all we needed. I mean, honestly, it—it’s just poor manners, you—”
“Poor manners?” Halle repeated, incredulously.
“Yes, it is poor manners, actually,” Barry continued, “when people come to a whole-night hang sesh, everybody expects the hosts to provide enough food, and this was not enough food, obviously.”
In the background, another, presumably terrifying, report had just concluded.
“What are you—”
“Guys!” Susan interrupted, “Look, this is an emotional time, but—”
ZAP!
Suddenly, a blinding flash of light pierced the house, so sharp it drowned out everything. Nothing mattered anymore. There was no argument or escape, no pleading or crying. It was too quick to react, to gasp, even to know what had happened. But inevitably, the death ray struck them, and they simply, quietly…ceased.
Barry, in his final millisecond of life, was left with one, unshakeable thought that followed him as he slipped into the inky black void of death;
Wait, did that news reporter say his name was Michael Pancake?
Evie didn’t know where she was.
Her hand brushed against the discoloured bruises blemishing her delicate skin. A surge of fear rushed through her body; she remembered the men from the morning who had dug their calloused fingers into her arms when dragging her away, and the desperate pleas of her mother which were drowned out by Evie’s own relentless wailing.
The day had begun blissfully. Evie and her mother sat around the oak table and admired the simple cake before them. It wasn’t much, but they didn’t mind. They were just happy to be alive. The dusty photo frames hanging from the walls enclosed pictures of a family long gone; the laughter now replaced by memories of crippled bodies suffocating to death, or tearful visits to the graveyard, lilac peonies in hand. Her sister’s favourite. Evie was counting the thirteen candles atop her cake when the men arrived at the house.
Now, she was alone in a strange room surrounded by unfamiliar medical equipment. Evie breathed heavily as she stared at the plain walls that entrapped her. The taupe curtains draped across the windows shielded the world from witnessing the horrors unfolding within. Evie’s hands slowly glided across the cold metal railing that caged her in the bed; she was a prisoner.
Tears dripped down Evie’s rosy cheeks and fell to her lap like pellets of rain during a ferocious storm. She desperately longed for her mother to come and miraculously spare her from her inevitable fate. She didn’t know what to do without her. As Evie patted the small lump concealed in the pocket of her floral cardigan, she was reminded of her mother’s warnings. At least it was still there. It was only when she heard the sound of approaching footsteps that Evie hastily wiped her face. An older woman entered the room pushing a trolley. Maybe she can help me, thought Evie wishfully. But, as she began to speak, the coldness of the nurse’s face silenced her. Evie shuddered and pressed her quivering lips together tightly as she watched the nurse prepare a series of injections.
“The insemination procedure will begin shortly,” informed the nurse absent-mindedly as she left the room.
Whilst surrendered to her despondency, Evie glimpsed a petite woman with flowing auburn hair alike her mother’s walk briskly past her door. Hopeful, Evie jumped out of her bed and ran to follow the woman down the hallway.
“Mummy…Mummy it’s me!” screamed Evie.
Startled, the woman spun around. Her face was puffy, and her eyes were swollen and red from endless crying. She offered a weak smile and gently whispered, “I’m sorry,” before leaving to enter another room.
It wasn’t her mother.
Sobbing quietly, Evie’s shaky legs gave way, and she fell to the ground helplessly. She clutched her cheeks with her small fingers and cried hysterically into her lap. Ever since the announcement, she and her mother had silently prayed every night that something would change before it was her turn. But nothing ever did. One by one, the girls with whom Evie had spent her formative years braiding hair and playing make-believe began to disappear. If the virus didn’t claim them, then the government did. They were told that it was their duty; that this was the only way to return the world to how it once was. None of them wanted to do it but that didn’t matter.
Evie stayed crying on the ground for some time. A chilling scream cut through the still air. Moments later, another followed. Evie leapt up in terror and ran towards the source, peering through the window of the room the woman had entered before. Inside, she saw a girl just like her. Yet, this girl seemed different. Her eyes were empty, and her face was pasty and drenched in sweat.
She was giving birth.
The girl’s legs were propped up on the bed with a pillow slipped between her bent knees. Her hands were clenched in small fists that desperately clutched her surroundings for support. The woman from earlier sat stiffly on a chair to the side. Scrunched up tissues littered the floor at her feet as she winced at the sound of her daughter’s anguished screams. Eventually, a newborn baby’s cry interrupted the commotion of childbirth.
“No sign of infection!” exclaimed a nurse.
Suddenly, everyone’s attention turned to tending to the baby. No one was looking at the young girl anymore, except for Evie.
The girl was trembling on the bed as she hugged a pillow tightly to soothe the pain stabbing her stomach. Her legs, still spread apart, shook uncontrollably. Her mother quietly placed a hand-embroidered blanket next to her, the threading of the blooming flowers tearing at the seams. Droplets of blood began staining the girl’s hospital gown as she pleaded for the nurses to help.
She was ignored. The blood began gushing out of the girl, soaking the once white linen bedding. The remaining strength of her legs dissipated, and she collapsed on the bed. Her screams of pain became more sporadic, more urgent. She continued to bleed out. Slowly, Evie watched the life leave the body of a girl just like her.
Evie yelled. She screamed as loudly as she could until her voice was raspy and strained. Soon, the girl was lying in a pool of her own blood as she succumbed to her pain.
Evie couldn’t stop watching. The dead girl sprawled on the hospital bed like a delicate flower torn apart. The mother crumpled on the floor in tears. The nurses and military officers marvelling selfishly at yet another ‘clean’ newborn. This was her future. This was everything her own mother warned her about.
In that suspended moment, Evie knew what she had to do. Her hand rummaged through her pocket and produced a pale-yellow pill. She looked at it expectantly in her small hand, the smell of bitter almond in the air.
It was her mother’s birthday present for her.
Comments Off on Zelda & Scott & Stars & Ambition-sickness (&c., &c.)
We spent our time picking stars from underneath our fingernails, revelling in what we came to feel was our birthright—the kingdom of the young and glittering who wore satin gloves by day and scarlet lipstick by night. We were wild and beautiful and full of all the arrogance that must always come with privilege and genius. It was our kingdom—everyone said so—and we ruled it with every bit of the riotous abandon necessary to maintain that glorious fever which was the Jazz Age. We drank and danced and laughed (and drank and danced and laughed) until the starlit nights betrayed us and dropped poison in our champagne, broke our hearts and then our heads, and the iridescence of the city was the end of the world. How I mourned its loss.
He was drunk on success and I was sick with ambition. I was sick with ambition; ambition crawled hunch-shouldered in my gut like something living, and I wonder if it might have sprung up golden and breathing with a little nourishment. But he told it to be quiet, and it sat between my organs and squirmed and festered and the rot set a toxin in my bloodstream. And the toxin was ravenous, so that when I kissed him it seeped into his tongue and spread in little black tendrils beneath his skin. I shed little black tendrils in my sweat when I danced and I pressed them into ink to write with, and mixed them with water so I could paint.
And all the while, we were passionate and bold and electric. We drove in cars we couldn’t afford and lived on moonlight and words and jazz music played in nightclubs. I was made of stone and water: a heart and soul cursed by their own nature to erode. We were hunted by our selves, a pulsing synergy of passion and youth and ambition destroying us slowly. Artist and muse. Infinitely restless, restless into infinity.
The night the clock started ticking, I was at my desk, slaving away at my philosophy essay.
I was so absorbed in my work that I didn’t exactly notice it at first. It was only when I looked out into the abyss of night beyond my open window that I realised that a clock was ticking somewhere in the darkness. Every second, a tick, tick; it couldn’t be anything else. How odd, I thought. There certainly wasn’t a clock anywhere in the garden. The neighbours’ houses were too far away for me to be hearing the ticking of their clock so clearly. Puzzled, I turned back to my essay, as the deadline was too pressing for me to ponder a phantom clock. Perhaps I was simply hallucinating from lack of sleep and an overdependence on caffeine.
But over the next few nights, the ticking persisted whenever my window was open in the early hours of the morning. The second time I noticed it was when I was half asleep, my pen limp in my hand, my head drooping. I was aware of the room around me, whilst slipping into dreams of running away from my desk, from my essays, from the routine exhaustion. I had just gained a dreamy sense of freedom, like my soul was floating through clouds, when the ticking invaded my mind yet again and brought me back to the real world; the one with inky paper on my desk, of cramps in my hands, of heavy eyes and bitter coffee.
Annoyed, I slammed my window shut and went to bed, too tired to go outside and search for the damned thing. My dreams that night were nightmares. In each one, I searched for the clock in all sorts of unlikely places, turning over stones until my hands were raw and bleeding, tearing bark off trees, uprooting flower bed after flower bed and plunging my hands into soil filled with spiders and centipedes, the ticking ever louder, but the clock only ever turned up right at the end, when something seemed to snatch my soul from my body. And, then there would be a hyperrealistic scene of me sitting at my desk, scrawling out the same sentence over and over, yet I could never read what it was. I awoke unrested, glaring out at the dewy garden and the clock that, according to my subconscious, resided somewhere within.
The next night, as I studied, I was reluctant to open the window. But the air was so stifling that I slid it open begrudgingly. The clock came soon, ticking somewhere in the dark, and it annoyed me so much that I decided to see if I could find it. I went downstairs to the back door and stepped onto the damp lawn, branches of trees ghostly white in the moonlight hanging over my head. The ticking persisted but was fainter and fainter. I started in one direction, hoping that the ticking was getting louder, but just as soon as the volume seemed to have peaked, it died down, and I was left shoving aside the scraggly branches of bushes, searching in vain for the source. It started again, seemingly from near the dry bird bath ten metres away, but though I hurried, kicking away the leaf litter around the base, expecting to stub my toe on it, it was nowhere to be found. The ticking died down, and though I listened hard in the silent night, I heard nothing yet again.
Until I heard something under the oak tree nearby, and hurrying over quickly, far too quickly, I slammed my head into a low-hanging branch and was knocked unconscious.
It took some time until I came around. In some ways, it felt like the best sleep I’d had in a long time, but it still felt unnerving, as if my consciousness was separated from the rest of me. I cannot remember what was going through my mind, yet I felt as if something was happening. The first thing I thought of when I came to in the lounge room, my concerned mother leaning over my head, was that the essay I had been hurrying to finish last night was half-done at best and that unless I finished it in this very hour, I would certainly fail to meet the deadline for it. I tried to sit up to go upstairs and finish, but I was forced to stay lying on the lounge and rest. I became furious with my mother, tears of frustration and desperation streaming down my face as I thought of my impending doom.
The following weeks were an onslaught of deadlines. I didn’t dare open my window as I worked for fear of hearing the clock again. My mother had laughed when I told her how I managed to knock myself unconscious and then told me sternly that I should be getting more sleep to stop hallucinating. She was right, of course, and I did try. But the fear of the ticking remained and made me feel on edge whenever I worked at my desk or walked through the garden.
I heard the clock again after sleeping for half the day. It ticked in my dreams, as usual. Even keeping my window closed didn’t seem to rid me of it. It was late in the evening, and my mother had just retired for the night, but I decided to get a few more things done for a looming application deadline before I, too, went to bed and tried to be well-rested. I did not intend to let the clock into my abode. It just so happened that a wasp came into my room; there was a nest under the eaves that had not yet been dealt with, and I assumed it had entered the house during the day and was thrown out of its natural rhythm by the lights. I was not terribly enthusiastic about sharing a room with such a vile creature, so I hurriedly opened my window as wide as it could go and then, with a broom, carefully tried to nudge the wasp towards it. When it finally complied and flew out into the night, I breathed a sigh of relief before hearing, in the newfound silence free of buzzing and my terrified squeals, the ticking, once again.
I froze, horrified. I was well rested, so I surely couldn’t be hallucinating. I wondered about waking up my mother to prove to her that I was not imagining things, but recalling the scornful look on her face when I told her about my phantom clock, I was put off the idea. I stood still for a few moments more, deciding what to do, before resolving to have another look outside for the wretched thing. I would be calm this time, collected and in charge. I first decided to search around the house a bit, in case I’d been hearing one of our own clocks through two open windows. But as I went around and listened to each of them, the resonance of the ticking was distinctly different. The grandfather clock was deep, the kitchen clock almost silent, and I could not find any unused alarm clocks in drawers or cupboards that might be to blame. So, with a sigh, I went into the garden again. Sure enough, I could hear the clock; its ticking high-pitched and light, almost playful or teasing.
I struggled to remain calm, idly pushing aside leaves with my foot and pushing aside branches with one finger until, eventually, the turmoil in my head got to me, and I kicked a mound of dirt in frustration. From then on, I searched savagely for this cursed clock, my hands getting scratched and bloody as I shoved aside undergrowth and tore up stones. The ticking persisted, persisted, persisted.
When I finally found the clock, it had just stopped ticking. Both hands were stuck on 12, completed, done. That was when I realised I had failed to accomplish this deadline — the only deadline that mattered. The other ones were irrelevant and I should have known, should have broken away from being so consumed by them before I became cursed forever to be a slave to them. Now I had crossed a line of no return, and any spirit I may have had left surely died.
So, I went back inside, washed my hands, and sat down to work on my philosophy essay.
Aana sat by the window, the golden light of dusk spilling through the curtains. She held a small, delicate flower pressed between the pages of an old leather-bound diary. It was a memory, a whisper of a time long gone, but one that would always be with her.
She could remember, as if it were just yesterday, the scent of the flowers that filled their home, coming from every corner of their garden. It was a ritual, a part of their lives that had been woven so deeply into the fabric of their days that it felt like it was always meant to be. Her mother, Zhara, had always tended to the flowers with such love and care. There were roses, jasmine, daisies, and marigolds — each a symbol of something, a quiet reminder of moments shared.
But what Aana cherished most were the flowers her father brought home every week, without fail. “For you, Zhara. For you, Aana,” he’d say, his voice full of warmth as he handed them over. Her mother’s smile would bloom in response, her eyes sparkling as though she were falling in love with him all over again. The flowers, though fleeting, became a language of their own in their home — a language of love, memories, and connection.
Her mother never let a single one of those flowers fade without a trace. She carefully pressed them, preserving their essence in books, between pages, in a delicate ritual that both marked time and stopped it. “Flowers can be more than just beautiful, Aana,” she had told her. “They are memories, little markers of our love, of the moments that matter. And we should hold onto them because those flowers will never truly fade if we carry them with us.”
At the time, Aana hadn’t fully understood what her mother meant. But now, as she traced her fingers over the fragile petals of the pressed flower, it all came rushing back.
It was after the accident — the one that took her father away far too soon — that the true meaning of her mother’s words became clear. For a long time, it felt like their world had stopped, as though the joy of those weekly flowers had been cut off. Yet, her mother had kept those flowers, carefully preserved in their pressed forms. Now and then, she would bring them out, showing Aana how each one held a piece of their past — a memory of the quiet, enduring love her father had so selflessly given.
“The flowers,” her mother said one evening, voice thick with emotion as she traced the edges of the delicate blooms, “they’re not just reminders of him. They’re pieces of him. Every flower carries his presence, even now. They’re not gone; they’re still with us — always.”
At that moment, Aana understood. The flowers weren’t merely symbols of affection — they embodied a love that surpassed time and loss. The memory of her father, captured in the fragile folds of each petal, lived on. Whenever she felt the ache of his absence, she could reach for those flowers — the pressed fragments of time — and feel his love wrap around her like a soft embrace.
As she held a flower in her hand, Aana could feel his presence, like a whisper. He had given them the gift of memory; those precious flowers would always remind her that love never truly dies. It only changes form, becoming something that lives forever in the heart.
Peering, the darkness pierces our abode.
You told me it was nine.
The damp eyes of a child
Stare longingly into the street-lit black.
There is deception amongst the darkness.
I wait for the cold bull
To emerge from it.
Welcome to our China shop.
You’re back, Señor.
It’s too cold to run to you,
So we wait as you walk to us
With your Santa-sack.
Inside Pandora’s Box
There is a chess set,
Inscripted with a language I can’t read
And such a stoicism I can’t reach.
I was baffled by such a grandiose,
Complex thing.
Veiled in thin squares of Mexican wood,
I could feel it looking, poking at me.
It was almost talking to me.
It was enticing, scary.
I was a child,
Obsessed with the material things.
Times were much simpler then.
I remember you playing with me and that forest of baby pawns.
I didn’t know the rules.
I still don’t.
You always played with me, no one else.
Perhaps in secret, you did.
You carved that chess set out of yourself.
Adam and his ribs are jealous of you.
O, where is my queen?
I gave her up for the sake of you.
Gold, frankincense, and myrrh,
The baby gave to God.
It wasn’t just her:
Bishop, knight, the other pawns.
I was an addict, hooked
To that horrid game.
Too often I gave up.
I wanted to cry, storm out, inevitably relapse.
But as I turned towards the exit,
You were always there.
Your world consumed me.
It scared me.
You dressed me in Isadora’s scarf.
You lodged a chess piece in my throat.
You were the matador.
You were the opus.
The picture always escaped me,
But I’m sure it was splendid.
You never expect to come home to that.
A part of me died, but you
Were burning, alive.
I knew this was the end.
I began to cry out.
Why end like that? Why live like this?
You might as well have been dead.
My only souvenir, the chess set.
I could barely see it.
O God, resurrect me.
You coaxed me like an old, steaming Aztec.
Yes,
Huitzilopochtli, it is I.
Would you like my tona?
Too late, you already took it.
I lay dead on the chessboard altar.
And him, Moctezuma.
No one knows where he went.
No one knows where you went.
Perhaps he choked on the roble chess set.
It’s my turn now.
I want to kill you.
I want to writhe in that sweet blood-nectar.
I want to, but The Scream terrifies me.
I will avenge you.
I will knock your king down.
“Checkmate,” I will cry.
I will always cry.
I will always love you.
I will always cry for you
With a pained Niagara,
And The Scream.
O, The Scream. It pains me.
It knocks the pieces off their perch
In desperate agony.
I am in the sand reaching out to you
Like dust particles in a baby’s hand.
Take me, Glaucus,
With your sandy hooks,
Your shiny knife.
Rip me apart and let The Scream escape.
Please, please, please, I cry.
Why won’t you do it?
Why leave it to me— I don’t want this.
And so, I take that gorgeous knife,
Raise it like an Aztec,
And plunge it into your eggshell heart,
My tears swept into the blue abyss.
That chess set now stands in a corner,
On a shelf,
Dusty, with pieces missing.
Still, they all lead to you.
i want a new body, one
which would walk me all the way to buy milk
as if i had no body at all. a body
which could disappear into the soft
blue depths of morning, or
the avenue’s bright spring,
forgetting itself. a body
which is like being upside-down, in the sense
that you are always upside-down,
but to notice, when there
are gang-gangs hanging with
their white-edged feathers, or
bougainvillea branches trailing the pool fence,
wouldn’t cross your mind; a body
which, like being upside-down, i would create
by rolling like a child until
i could see it, and i would know
its truth, even in
its strangeness.
Tick. Tock. Tick.
The clock mocks me, each tick like a tedious flash of what I was, what I could have been. My teacher’s voice reverberates and echoes in a hypnotising cascade through the classroom. Bored, I peer down at my phone and gaze over the folders of my life, a childhood and a world at my fingers. Stuck. Frozen. The comforting smile of my grandmother is hidden somewhere here, barricaded by metal and plastic, waiting to be displayed behind tempered glass. The reason for my existence, my knowledge and my place on this earth, all packed tightly into a human vessel, now held in my hands.
***
I was born into a busy place. In this world, smoke and gasoline smothered the air, the summer rain was my contentment, and the people spoke with loud voices. Motorbikes roared to and fro and in and out of the house, and aunties roamed about in organised chaos. Summers were scorching hot, and the humidity clung like moths around an open bulb. I lived in it for as long as I knew and to me, this world made sense.
But the idea of leaving it did not. The idea of why my world was no longer safe, didn’t make sense. The idea of why I had to leave my world by myself didn’t either, but the haunting plea in my grandmother’s eyes made it make sense.
This new place was upside down. A wonderland that I did not understand. The air was cool and light, absent of gasoline. The sun rose and set over the horizon, and I was able to see it. The birds sang in the morning mist and I was able to hear it. School was a foreign land of strange words and people I couldn’t decipher. People moved slower, walking through me as if I wasn’t there at all, as if I walked on the ceilings.
But eventually, I started adjusting and the outlandish became ordinary. Each conversation I held made a trophy in my mind and the slivers of sunlight I started to let in sparkled upon their surface. They built up, the bronze, the silver and the gold piling up. My memories and my grandmother, my world and my home, slowly lost its place in me. Being buried beneath much flashier achievements and westernised behaviours. Contained and locked away like forbidden treasures, its remains were plastered within the walls of my camera roll as it peeled off my mind like old paint. As more of this new world made sense to me, the place of roaring motorbikes and organised chaos became my new upside down.
***
Clicking on a photo of my grandmother, she unfolds from code. She is sitting under a struggling light bulb that is barely able to illuminate beyond the circular wooden table and plastic stools. Her eyes flash glimpses of doubt and desperate yearning. Each plea etches deep within the valleys of her face and ingrains a permanent gloss over her tired eyes which she masks with a loving smile. She holds me in her arms. My toothless smile, chubby arms and mischief, held in her lap.
Would she be happy that she is encapsulated in pixels? If she saw me now, would she recognise me? Would she recognise my disfigured face?
The clock continues to tick, the teacher continues to speak, and the children continue to laugh behind me as the bell screeches for the last time that day. Without realising, my hands are cramping, clinging onto my phone as if it was her face. My fingers are white and my palm patches with red and white spots. I let go, hoping to run away from this uncomfortable reckoning with myself. The reckoning that in her passing, she took the last bits of my world with her. The world that I didn’t hold onto, the world that I let become my upside down, the world that I was too cowardly not to keep. I hold her in both hands for another second before the screen goes dark, before the kids start running out of the classroom, and everything goes back to the way it was. I tell her how sorry I am that her hopes became buried and lost in me. I tell her before running out of the classroom just like the others.