It was a question she’d repeated a number of times during their rambling peregrination, from the wide halls of the National Gallery where they’d looked at the coloured canvases of Sidney Nolan, his bushranger icon recognisable as an empty black letterbox, to the whispered aisles of the State Library, where the bush forge beaten and bullet cratered armour floated suspended in a case of glass…
Read MoreNearby the dog could hear the waves crashing against the shore, splashing their familiar taunts into his floppy ears. “You can’t catch us,” they gurgled teasingly, “you’re too slow now, while we are ageless still. We saw Tiktaalik crawl out from our depths. We saw the giant lizards of prehistory swim within us and fly over us and fight each other upon our shores. We are the endless ocean and you are just a little dog. We are too vast for you, too fast for you – you will never catch our dancing waves again!” His tail stopped wagging and he paused in his walk, blind eyes turning towards the waters as his nose sniffed haughtily at the arrogant salt spray…
Read More“Your secret society, this Illiterati, they believe that God is, quite literally, the Word. They believe God is language and that our world, indeed our whole universe, was created from it. We are story, creatures composed of language, formed of words, and words are the key to unlocking creation, of accessing the divine.”
Read MoreHe was made in an ammunitions factory outside of Kansas in the year 8076. It was the year the Kenyans tried to annex Zimbabwe again and the United Confederacy was called upon to manufacture appropriate arms for the impending conflict. The major weapon was propaganda. The major conflict, a form of sport…
Read MoreMolopod reached out delicately with one of her several hundred tentacles and carefully tucked the four bestial faces of her amalgamated childling into the soft folds of its sentient sheets.
“But mamma,” the fanged upper left hand face of her amalgamated child cried, “how do you expect us to sleep if we haven’t had a story!!?”
“A story,” Molopod sighed, “come now my pseudo childling, surely the combination of your disparately spliced genetic growth material places your internal body chemistry at a temporal development much beyond that of any lifeform that would require a story before bed.”
“But you promised,” growled the serpentine detachment in the lower part of the childling’s head, “you signed a contract.”
“You agreed to all terms and conditions,” continued the fanged upper part emphatically.
“And you signed it in blood,” came the high pitched squeal of the bat like face from the upper right hand part of the creature’s head.
Read MoreIt stood before them, more than twice the size of Baudoin, the tallest of their group. The shape was that of a man in all the important ways, two arms, two legs, one head – but the face was like the shifting dunes they trod upon, constantly melting and reforming as they looked on. Only the hollow eyes were constant, staring at the five of them as they stared back at it…
Read MoreOnce upon a time…
Read MoreHelena wished, not for the
First
Time that Timmy would wake
In the comfort of his coffin
And sigh in relief
At the still, dark dust and the
Solid pine walls
Of his small cemetery boat…
Read MoreI wear a wolf’s coat to keep me
Warm
Keep me
Safe
Keep the pack from smelling the sweet odour of my
Humanity
And tearing me into
Tiny
Red
Pieces
Of meat…
Read MoreThe year is 2023 and ongoing developments in artificial intelligence continue to change the structure of human societies in varying ways. Already the faded border between reality and fiction has become challenging to read, but now creativity itself is being questioned as a province accessible for humans alone…
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