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…
Chills wrack my body and my head pounds, throbbing in time to the beat of my heart. The sound of the ocean vibrates around this hill. I try so hard to hang on to the susurration, but it doesn’t ease my mind. Nothing helps. Nothing but her. The fog rose just over an hour ago,…
The husband is standing in front of my register and he looks incredibly uncomfortable. We are unnaturally far apart, and he shuffles his weight from foot to foot. He studies the drink fridge intensely, as if Sprite is an exciting new seasonal flavour, while running his fingers repetitively through his short greying hair. It’s been…