She chews the pen until her teeth ache, the plastic splintering faintly under the pressure. The ink is metallic, bitter as it seeps into her mouth. The paper beneath her hands is soft and damp, its edges curling inward as though retreating from the weight of her touch. Bread. Canned beans. Powdered milk. Each word…
They have escaped to this region on the recommendation of Josh’s friend, who has family down this way. Josh and his partner, Matt, don’t think they know anyone else who lives or holidays here—not regularly. The whole environment is abnormally clean, the air and the freshwater springs, the bush, the burnished beaches, the sea and…
Your beautiful piece in the current issue of takahē, “fog/fugue,” talks about what feels like addiction and the process of taking back power. It’s both dark and hopeful, I think. Can you tell us what was on your mind during the writing of that piece? The story came about because of an actual experience of…
Ezra has all of his teeth. This is not particularly important but considering his peers, it is noteworthy. The other guys on his logging crew are not so dentally successful. They ride together with chainsaws and fuel cans in a flatbed truck to a forestry block almost exactly like the one they’ve just left. The…
The east wind is blowing the day Meg finds out she is pregnant. She leaves the remains of the pregnancy kit strewn across the floor of the public toilet, strides out across the carpark and follows the gorse-choked path to the ocean. Standing on the dune, wind and sand whipping her face, she stares out…
They’re not even flies. They’re a family of elateroid beetle with more than two thousand named species. Many, but not all, are light-emitting. In Japan, they’re called hotaru but the scientific name is nipponoluciola cruciata. I learned all of this from Shun. ‘Let’s go for a drive,’ he suggested. He spoke in English. It was…
Pick up the potatoes and place them in the sink. Don’t get nervous. Let them lie down, next to each other, calm and still, all by themselves. Then try brushing them off, one by one, rinsing under running water. It can be done. Don’t think too much. What lies before you can only be summed…
The English Flower Garden, it’s called. Not many flowers in this late Autumn month, though. A few ragged roses, a bed of irises, something white and anonymous in a couple of borders. He and she walk a gravel path to the mock-Edwardian pavilion that faces lawn and ornamental pond. Around them, trees shiver in the…
(Excerpts from the diaries of Officers Jeffrey, McKenzie, Robinson, McGregor, Draper) 1 1400 hrs. From the ship the rocky cliffs and shores are visible, but only intermittently as gales play with the clouds, lifting them for periods of thin sunlight, then dropping them, plunging the horizon into grey foggy thickness. Eventually binoculars and drones…
There were not too many white people left, if any. Not real white anyway. There used to be before the Edict was enforced. Nowadays the only way to sight them was in a circus somewhere, or in the nearest museum where their atrophied carcasses were on permanent view in the history collection. And everybody knows…