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…
Tara Black is a cartoonist and the author of the graphic novel, This Is Not a Pipe. They have been known to post comics and graphic recordings at substack.taracomics.com.
Cartoonist Sharon Murdoch finds solace from covering the daily parade of political swine by literally shrinking her subjects down to size. She explains this system when I ask how she keeps herself psychologically intact when facing a daily diet of malice, lies, bigotry and bombast from the current coalition Government. It’s been a rambling, revealing…
Urinating on my bedroom carpet as a child some thirty years ago had been intentional, though not malicious. I’d been going through a curious phase and discovered rather quickly that the bodily process responsible for urination was indeed voluntary. When I told my mother about it she barely stole her weary gaze away from the…