And it was under these conditions that a student asked me something curious: “Nathan, how do you know our names?”

This year, through a surge in popularity I can only in part attribute to the dry wit I inflict upon my poor students each lesson, my cohort exceeds 430. Workshops and labs run in excess of 90 per session, a jumble of ever-changing faces with whom I spend precious hours each week across a mere three months per semester. Under such circumstances, knowing each name is certainly not to be expected and sadly not the norm.

The student so inquiring happened to be part of a table who, an hour or so earlier, won the not-at-all-scientific round of trivia in which I begin each class. Smart and attentive, they’d caught onto something I’d begun to let slip casually each week: I know all their names.

She continued:

“We’re just baffled and amazed. We don’t know how. We’ve been toying with theories about this. Conspiracies, if you will. The leading one is that you printed off pictures of all of us before semester and have spent every day memorising each name and face.”

I laughed. “Your theory is incorrect.” Then I turned away and ignored them for the rest of class2.

The reality, you see, is that she was closer to the truth than I dared to admit.

A thousand years ago, under the encumbrance of a pitiful PhD stipend and fearing that I would not have the finances to support the exuberant lifestyle I so desired, I worked to earn money by roaming bars, weddings, university balls and such and spreading between my palms playing cards in order to perform the varietal of magic known professionally as close-up. I may have mentioned this before. I forget. Those years of gigging were, without a doubt, formative. Life-changing, perhaps. They taught me many things, not only about myself and misdirection (and the liquefied coat of confidence that the consideration of the precise moment to execute a diagonal palm shift3 or side steal can elicit) but about people and interactions and how magic need not rely upon props and prestidigitation but instead can come from the simple act of knowing. Of knowing a name. To know a name is power. To use a name is beauty.

I would, at each event and regardless of the size, strive to remember the name of every person I met, proclaiming when I introduced myself that come the end of the evening I would ask everyone to stand in a line and recount, one by one, each name, accelerating as I worked down the line and exclaiming with great theatrics the appellation, sobriquet, or denomination each guest had let slip from their lips hours prior. This was, of course, ridiculous—I never did such. And yet the excitement the possibility of this precipitated in the guests was unexpected. I felt aroused by this additive power, and soon began to toy with how this could elevate further the magic I was delivering as I drifted from group to group like a meandering swan.

“Now Graham,” I would say, placing my hand briefly upon the fine velour of his jacket and letting my touch linger not a moment too long. “Graham, would you mind returning your card to the deck?” To which Graham, admiring the brevity with which my hand had enjoyed the curve of his arm and placing the card back precisely where I desired, all but forgot that five minutes earlier he had divulged his name. He would smile and state: “Remarkable. How is it that you know my name?”

And so it went, each such experience allowing into my life the knowledge that a name is a gift, that to speak someone’s name in kindness is to reflect a part of them back upon themselves.

We have circled, I realise, far from my original point. Did I really print out each student’s name and face, lining the walls of my office and working tirelessly each day to commit them to memory? No. That would, I fear, create some concern amongst my colleagues. The reality of it is far simpler and immediate: there are short portions of each workshop when, having broken from the tedium of my voice, the students complete various tasks on their own, and it is during these moments when I ascend the room’s great dais4, consulting briefly the university’s database and spending those quiet moments committing faces to names and names to faces in much the same manner and with the same tricks of memory as when, in some other life, I used to perform5. It is a little repetition that occurs each day of the week and that now, six weeks in, grants me some reserve of recall that can be summoned in a casual, offhand moment: “Very good, Dominic, that is correct,” or “But what, Junho, do you think would happen if we increased the concentration of carbonic diamide to six molar instead?”

And so if there’s any actual point to this post it is this: when you meet someone, ask them their name. Retain it and use it and enjoy the special gift that it brings. Smile and be genuine and greet them with the grace and decency that they may not otherwise find in this sour world we are currently entrenched within.

(And if you happen to read this (Christ, I hope not): Hello Emily and Caitlin and co. Now you know.)

Previously in this series I have written on the importance of insects, and on the importance of pencils.

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5

It helps also that in the first week of semester I asked the students to write their names on their tables and introduce themselves to each other; but as with dear Graham such a memory seems to have leaked from their minds.

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Previously, I have written on the importance of insects.

Lately—by which I mean the last several years—I have taken to carrying a pencil with me at all times. It is a stout instrument, its sleek body gliding readily between my finger and thumb, with one end sharpened to a pristine point, the other bearing an eraser, the rubber nub clasped tight by a metal ferrule. It lives in my pocket, or sometimes in the zip of my bag, never far out of reach except for at night, when in the moment before bedtime I lay it horizontal on the living room table so that it may recuperate the same as I from the day’s events.

The pencil, I have come to realise, is superior in the arsenal of the would-be notetaker, decipherer, margin-scrawler or idea-depositor, the one whose very task—even if for the most fleeting of moments—is to capture something, to hold it before it escapes from the air, and to then birth it upon the page.

The pencil, complete with eraser, dares to ask what if? What if I were to write this? What if I were to underline these words, this passage, this entire page? It breeds what ifs?, a capability entirely unlike the pen, whose sole task is to ask but are you sure? In other words, the pencil enjoys what a pen cannot. Where the pen leaks and bleeds its insides, draining itself as though mortally wounded until with each stroke nothing is imparted except the dry scratch of its nib, the pencil simply … gets smaller. Its very diminution is a record of its use—a record of your use of it. To witness the shortening of a pencil is to accept that you have been complicit in its role. I take great solace in this fact.

It comes as some delight, then, that thinking about pencils and upon reading back through the archive of SLAKE (an act that I sometimes allow myself to undertake) I note that a story about a type of pencil sits as my most read. Like everything I have written, I have no memory of having written it at all. There is equal delight that it is the one story that I wrote entirely in pencil as a first draft, transcribing it here only afterwards1.

*

Over the last month I have been leafing through Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus. For some time now I have been scared to read more Wolfe, worried that no other work could stimulate my mind as did his The Book of the New Sun. And whilst it does not reach those unassailable heights, this book is nevertheless a mystery that asks you to surrender yourself to its story: three interconnected novellas spanning the twin planets of Saint Anne and Saint Croix, dealing with colonisation, the meaning of self, memory, identity, probably other things I am too stupid to comprehend. It is a puzzle box, each story wishing to be annotated and written over, the notes crossed out and erased and then reformulated when later chapters act to orient the reader so as to understand what has been written in pages prior. This is, I am sure, not what everyone wants from the experience of reading. Your ideal may be different from mine. Or perhaps it is the same. Regardless, as I read, my pencil descends, like a water fowl lowering its beak in search of food. It pecks at the page’s fibre, lingering as my thumb and finger allow the graphite its momentary chance to leave carbon upon the former flesh of trees. Withdrawing, I look at what I have written, or underlined, or where simply an exclamation point has found its place alongside a passage so idyllic it sits as oasis, the many words that clamour nearby jealous of the luscious waters of prose.

*

The pencil, as it turns out, materialised in the 1500s. Like all great discoveries, it happened by chance. A storm uprooted trees in Cumbria, England, revealing a huge deposit of pure graphite—a find that was, and likely still is, incredibly rare. The graphite was of such astounding quality and quantity that it was hacked out and inserted into the hollowed trunks of the storm-felled trees, each one becoming a gigantic stylus that was hauled for hundreds of miles across land and sea to where the precision craft-workers of Nuremberg lifted the logs, each filled with their slate-grey marrow, and set about slicing them into hundred and thousands and millions of pencils—a practice that continues to this day.

(OK. So that isn’t true. Some of it, in any case.)

The point is that a pencil has remained largely unchanged. In an era of digitisation, a piece of wood and graphite has remained in stasis, and its use in elevating my reading experience is panacea to the screens and distractions that bombard my eyes. As I finish typing this out, the stubs of pencils that litter my desk remind me of what I have grasped from the air and transferred, thoughts and feelings that remain bound within the books on my shelf.

When I die, the feelings of what each book elicited will be carried forward to a new reader. And even if no one inherits these books, if the pages are burned or buried and left to rot, nature will thus claim the graphite that I etched upon each leaf, whispering the words into the sky or soil, allowing some part of me to live on.

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Not just on the outside but the inside too, each room with a ceiling so high it eclipsed anything I’d ever seen. Higher, even, than those in the Stately Homes I’d been dragged around as a child. Not that I paid much attention to the height of such walls, of course, my eyes back then too busy with locating as many objects as possible from the sheets of I-Spy held clutched in my hands, the game, I imagine, some vain attempt by the National Trust to prevent children from becoming bored to literal death, the printed A4 sheets handed out by the ancient staff found lurking in every corner.

It was an estate, is what I mean. Jenny Barrow’s house was an estate. I was too young back then to know what that meant and what it said about Jenny and her family—about the gulf that separated her own life and mine—but she was, by virtue of some peculiar series of events, my friend, and for whatever reason often invited me in to her house, be it at weekends or after school, where we would sprawl on her bed and chat and watch music videos on MTV or VH1 (her family having an antenna affixed to the side of the house that allowed hundreds of channels to be beamed in through the wall that I could scroll endlessly until told I must stop), and in the late afternoons we would watch movies she had recorded or rented, the VHS tapes scattered about her room like obsidian bricks. Jenny's parents, unlike my own, didn’t care about age ratings or warnings, and so films stamped with an 18 or that most alluring of capital R—films I otherwise never would have seen—were fed daily into the VCR’s hungry mouth and we'd scare ourselves silly as the last of the autumn sun fled below the windowsill and allowed the dark its turn inside. And sometimes, after a film finished or if we couldn’t decide what to watch, or simply when there was a good track on MTV we’d seen a hundred times, we’d roll over and stare up at the ceiling, its ornate pattern so far above us it was like we were floating on the surface of the ocean and gazing down on a type of coral the light could barely reach.

I remember those days clearly, as though they were yesterday, when in fact the distance of time travelled between then and now has observed more yesterdays than I care to know.

*

“How do the ceilings get cleaned?” I recall asking one day, realising I'd never thought about this before. “Does someone get up there on a ladder?”

A strange expression flashed across Jenny’s face, a hint of something that might have been fear. Then it was gone, replaced by her usual indifference.

“They do it,” she said.

“They? You mean the maids? I didn’t think you had any maids?”

This was, as far as I was aware, true, for I had never seen any in the house and it was Jenny’s mother, proud as she was, to be the one found vacuuming or dusting the halls, or more often than not in the kitchen, baking cakes or slices that she'd offer us on trays as she slid from room to room.

“They?” I asked again, probing.

“They do it,” she repeated, lowering her eyes. Then she rolled off the bed and stared blankly at the television, not saying a word until Money for Nothing completed its fifth showing for the day on VH1.

A week or so later I stayed over. It was the first time. It was also the last. When I think back on it, there was nothing there between us, nothing romantic or sexual—if anything, our friendship being more like that of siblings—and in any case my mind was keen on only one girl, an inescapable being who inhabited the school I spent so many of my years attending. If I'm honest (and why else would I be recounting this here?), I'd been nervous to let my parents know. Not because I was worried they'd refuse, or that I was somehow too embarrassed to be asking to stay at a friend’s house, a friend who just happened to be female … no, it was the opposite: I was worried that they'd be glad, that this would be a relief for them. That they’d want me to stay over. But all mum said was OK, that’s fine, I can pick you up in the morning, just let me know when. And that was that. It was a Friday, and in my bag I took a change of clothes and a toothbrush and when the final bell rang Jenny and I waited outside the school library to be picked up by her mother in her fancy car, the model or make something I can no longer recall, it possibly being a Rolls-Royce.

And so it was that that evening, the night I stayed in her house, I found out what they were and why Jenny’s face, in that moment when she answered my question, had contorted in such a manner so unlike its usual inexpressive self, answering with just three words something I could never hope to explain in more. They were a series of things that existed deep within the walls and that, at some point each evening or perhaps only once a month, slid out and moved up towards the ceiling, their bodies never completely extracted from the bricks and vents, great serpentine things, formless and without face or limbs and moving endless in the impossible night, things that worked their way across the plaster and paint as though seeking some hidden nutrients that remained invisible to the human eye.

I didn't sleep at all that night. I just watched as these creatures emerged and then retreated, secreting themselves once more within the walls. I didn’t sleep and in the morning I called my mum, Jenny knowing, I’m sure, of what I saw and that I would never return.

And now, all these years later, as I find myself in a house with ceilings so similarly high that I cannot reach them without a ladder, the action of changing a light bulb having become anything but trivial, and with vents not in the walls but set into the corners of each room, deep ducts that extend beneath the house to passageways unknown, I lie here listening, listening intently for the sound of something slow and silent, a dark and shadow-filled thing capable of working its way along the walls to suck at what it finds, unaware of the boy who is now a man who watches it move and then retreat before the break of day. I lie here and listen, the room so dark I cannot see, my ears attuned to all that we can never know.

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I have arrived.

I thought to write you on the journey but couldn't. You must understand that I tried. I was too anxious, too afraid of what I might say or what might happen whilst I wrote—you know how I get and the things that trouble my mind—and so I simply could not, or found when I tried that I was unable. Once, when I sat in my cabin and made to speak, I could do nothing to make the words appear, the page holding only my tears.

But now I am here. That part of this is over and I am here, writing you now with this letter. This first letter, for this is day one—that is what I’m calling this, not labelling the day that I left as such, that day being so long ago that it has begun to lose itself entirely, like it drifts from my body as the blood of each month. Does it feel like this for you, or is it still the same? Do I remain frozen, perched upon the horizon, or does the ship instead turn and drift back?

Do you understand what I mean when I say this? Do you, Yul? I do not know if you do, and such thoughts plague me like wraiths.

I wish I could hear you speak. All I hear is this pen and the sound of the waves that lap without tiring. I have taken board by the shore, within a house of wanderers, their faces as different as their names, their skin as marble or onyx or glass, each with a tongue that holds the mystery of their homes. This city stands as a conflux of peoples, of traders, of exiles, of the abandoned and newlyfound. It is a vast city, Yul, vast and strange, with insects so large they speak in sounds I cannot understand, or perhaps they are ones I am unwilling yet to learn. I see some who speak to them, to the tallest and most upright of their kind, exchanging clicks and movements, twitches I cannot bear to read.

It is all so foreign, Yul. Not the foreign as once we spoke, the foreign that comes of places we could reach if we walked far and long, for two moons or more, not stopping until our feet became raw. That kind of foreign is still close. Yet this … this kind of foreign is one that is true, one that I cannot explain in so few words as here I have written. In time I will try, because how else will I let you know that I am here? How else will you believe me?

Will you ever believe me, Yul? Will you ever trust me again?

—.

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P.S.

Hello. Happy 2026.

New year, new writing.

And by “new writing” I simply mean new writing because there hasn’t been enough writing here and the intention is for that to change.

In unpacking boxes of books in our new home, I leafed through the joys of Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook, which truly is a wonder book, full of tips, exercises, interviews and ideas from and for all manner of writers. Something in there was an inspiration for this, something I've long wanted to read but never have. For the life of me I could not locate it, but I knew it was in there somewhere.

Well, you can’t see the long minutes I just spent searching, but I found it: Leena Krohn’s Tainaron: Mail from another city. Have you read it? It must have been lodged in a distant part of my mind, because reading about it just now I note that the story involves a city with insects that talk! So onto the TBR pile it goes.

It’s taken a long time1, but we have purchased a property in Melbourne. A 1930s Art Deco unit with high ceilings, a wine cellar, five bedrooms, two glorious bathrooms and a hedge maze2. Turns out, houses here are expensive. The median house price in Melbourne is, oh I don’t know (I’m certainly not going to tab out to find out), at least ten million dollars. I suspect it’s only going to get worse, so we had to strike while the iron was luke warm. (Note: it’ll probably get better now that we’ve purchased. Prices will plummet, a crash will come, buyers will rejoice, we’ll have made an awful decision, we should have waited, yada yada. Welcome to my brain.)

Anyway. we bought a house. And I read a book. Many books, I should add. OK not that many, but enough that I can look back at my Goodreads list for the year and feel some satisfaction that I’ve spent some of my free time doing something useful, reading some damn fine books (Bolaño, I love you; you’ll never read this because you’re dead, but I love you) and that my arbitrary and short reading target has been met.

There’s been some good books in there, some excellent books, but not the last book I read. That was Joe Hill’s King Sorrow. More like King, Sorry, because perhaps that’s what Joe is saying to his father.

Ouch. That’s harsh. Sorry, Joe. I just … it’s just I wanted this to be your IT, you know? The description made it seem like it was going to be your IT, that strange and epic piece of horror and adolescence, the 1000-pager that left such an impression on me that sometimes when the weather is bad I go stand in the pouring rain and make paper boats that float toward drains. I thought this was going to be your IT and that’s my mistake, and really it’s fine that it isn’t IT, but it’s just not good. It’s not good at all. What I’m trying to say is that King Sorrow is not a good book. It’s a rambling, 900-page hot mess of contrived ideas and with characters so thin that Georgie could have folded them into boats to float toward drains.

[I started this post a few weeks ago, days after closing out the final page of Joe’s quote-unquote masterpiece, but we’ve moved house since then and right now I couldn’t tell you a single thing about King Sorrow other than it has a dragon and metaphors and something something secret government trash. Yeah. I can’t remember anything about it. Take of that what you want.]

I’ve been listening to podcasts about The Book of the New Sun again. I can’t escape the influence of Wolfe’s writing and all it makes me want to do is to return to the books for another read, to reabsorb Severian’s tale. Obviously that’s not possible, because how then would I be making a dent in the functionally infinite number of other books there are still to read?

I’m going to get a tattoo.

This hasn’t happened yet, but I’m going to get a tattoo of a solenoid. I’ll engrave the solenoid into my skin, perhaps on my forearm, and at night whilst I’m asleep a current will flow through the length of my arm, something electrical or magnetic or that defies the known physical laws, a slight hum emanating from my skin and audible only to our cat who’ll come padding into the room and sit in the corner watching as my arm floats and eventually descends. And then I’ll wake up, never having known that my arm had been suspended, feeling only a slight tingle that will persist until midday.

I want to return here.

I want to return here and just not care about what I’m writing. I don’t mean not care, as in to pen careless things, but to simply not care about whether I’m trying to write for a reason or an audience, or to second guess myself. I just want to experience the freedom and joy that was how this all started. To nurture the creativity. To actually get to read posts from the wonderful others who are such wonderful writers.

In many ways, it’s been a pretty shitty year. A lot has happened. A lot hasn’t happened, but in the end I’m taking solace and excitement in this new chapter we’ve started in our new home, the break from work that is about to commence, and what 2026 will bring.

If you’re still with me, if you still receive these posts and open them and read, then thank you. You’re awesome. Let 2026 mark the return of regu-slake-arity.

Seasons greetings, and all that.

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It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything. To be completely honest, I’ve sunk deep beneath the earth, existing in a kind of quiescence, letting all manner of things pile up on top of me (work, mostly, which seems unrelenting this year) and I’ve found it near impossible to extract myself from this Murakamian well to seek the creativity found in the written word1. I want to claw my way back to the surface, though, and to do that I must start somewhere. Here, perhaps. There are flames hidden below the keys, I am sure. Stories await, if only I can find them.

Despite the dark mustiness of this well, I have managed to maintain my external reading2. Nothing this year has quite topped the majesty and brilliance of Bolaño’s 2666 (I still dream of The Part About Archimboldi), and so I have felt somewhat bereft of inspiration during my daily commutes from one side of the well to the other. I did go on to read Bolaño’s earlier work, The Savage Detectives, which opens with such fervour and propulsion that I knew it couldn’t be sustained for its 600-or-so pages. Sadly, it couldn’t. That’s not to say I didn’t love it (I did!) but it didn’t hit as hard as his later masterpiece.

Compelled enough to stay with Latin American literature, I read my first dose of Mariana Enriquez via her short story collection, Things We Lost in the Fire. Macabre and dark, weaving political, societal and cultural themes from Argentina’s haunted past, I’d recommend this for anyone interested in understated horror. Many of these stories end abruptly, though the unresolved tension and ambiguity this creates certainly worked. (There were two absolute standouts: Adela’s House, about a girl swallowed up by a—yes, you guessed it—house, and Spiderweb, my favourite because it holds a certain intangibility that even now I cannot grasp. A road trip. Ghost stories. A husband goes missing. The end.)

I turn my attention now to Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin, which has long been on my list. Josephine just read it and loved it and it ties in with what I really want to talk about here: something close to my heart, something I can tap into as a means of re-ignition, the small ember that prevents the well from becoming eternally dark, a place where I go to renew my energy, find solace and peace beneath the soil. I’m still talking about stories, of course, but not of the traditional paper-based form.

I’m talking about games.

A hundred or so years ago, when I was about ten and the hormones of adolescence were yet to emerge in my being, I spent a lot of time with my brother in a house in the middle of England. The house was on a main road, a great long road that in places was so straight there was no doubt the Romans had a hand in its building, the house having a short driveway secured by a gate that at night my father locked with a padlock so that no burglar could attempt to rob us of our goods. It was a precaution. Or a statement of his anxiety. Or perhaps it was both.

My brother, Sam (hello!), was and still is a year and a half older, and although we differed in some of our tastes, there was one thing that grounded us from an early age: a love of computer games. We were lucky enough to own an Amiga (thanks, mum and dad), then a desktop PC, a giant box that ran nothing but DOS, and then a better PC with Windows, and so on, until the late nineties when the doubling of transistors meant not just a CPU but also a graphics card, and this continued and flourished and that love has never died, and though we live half a world apart, that connection keeps us just a message away from a discussion or piece of news that invariably has its roots in a hobby that together we nurtured in our youth3.

I think there are many who see games only as a form of entertainment, or perhaps a useless waste of time—either through ignorance or a simple naïvety as to the wealth the medium offers. Personally, I stand firm in the yes-it’s-clichéd Games As Art camp, viewing them no differently than films, books and, well, art, and the power that such can bring. (The right games, I should add, because much like with films and books and canvases splotched with colour, there’s a lot of trash out there.)

I could talk about many games and what they mean to me, the period of life they hold significance to, why they work, their merits, et cetera, but I want to talk—briefly, because I’ve forgotten how easy it is to blather on for a thousand words or so—about just two: Hollow Knight, and its recent sequel, Silksong.

The original Hollow Knight released in 2017. It was made by Team Cherry, a team of three guys in Adelaide, Australia. They’d had a successful Kickstarter campaign, though it by no means smashed any records, nor did it meet all of its stretch goals that promised additional content. They persisted, though. They devoted themselves to their vision and made it happen. Upon initial release, it garnered good praise, but didn’t break huge records. That praise built, slowly at first, and then gained steady momentum until it blossomed into one of the most successful indie titles ever created, selling somewhere around 15 million copies.

But why is it so beloved? What is it about the game that has entranced so many?

Good question.

In the first game, you play as a small creature—the Knight—who descends into the ruined, insect-filled kingdom of Hallownest. And a descent it is. Through its many, many hours you explore myriad locales full of strange creatures, stories, and environments. You’re thrown in with almost no context. It’s up to you to try to understand the world, what happened, what’s happening, and what role you might play in its salvation or demise. I won’t say any more than that, because to do so not only amounts to spoilers, but also because trying to explain the experience of the game will do nothing to capture the actual experience of playing it, of immersing oneself in it, of emerging out of the other side.

Its sequel, Silksong, follows a different character, Hornet, who featured as an adversary in the first game. Here, she finds herself captured and brought into the equally bug-filled kingdom of Pharloom. Silksong was six or seven years in the making. It broke the internet when it released, such was the anticipation of fans. Could such a long wait live up to expectations and hype? Put simply: yes. Team Cherry have once again delivered just as rich, complex and thrilling an experience as the first game. I adore them both, in equal measure. They represent everything I love about the medium. Though digital works of art, these capture living worlds—broken and decaying ones, at that—inhabited with creatures whose words leave a lasting impact, with environments holding secrets to uncover and with a central character that offers skills to master. Much like with Enriquez’s Spiderweb, I find a certain intangibility in trying to express what I feel from the experience, though part of the appeal is certainly the art style, hand drawn by Ari Gibson. The clean lines, the palette choice, the expert use of parallax with the 2D perspective. It all just works. It immerses you4.

Central to this immersion, too, is the orchestral score penned by Christopher Larkin. I have listened to both soundtracks countless times, finding it the perfect music to work to, drifting through its often melancholy tones. Take the first game’s iconic track, City of Tears, a piece that arrives the moment you drop down into the eponymous city, breath-taking in its rain-drenched splendour, and doubly so when later you discover the source of the rain: droplets that descend from the vast Blue Lake that sits above the city’s cavernous confines. It is such a fine, fitting piece of music.

As I close out the final moments of my first playthrough of Silksong, and as I flail to write anything coherent on this page, I’m left with a strange feeling of loss. The years of waiting for a sequel to such a beloved game are now over. Its wonders and lands have been seen and experienced and I’ll never have that sense of first discovery again. I feel moved and touched, far more so than I ever am from a movie5; instead, this feeling is on par with that elicited by a long, slow-burn read. Team Cherry’s desire and penchant for environmental storytelling—for littering clues around the world that take patience and an inquisitive eye to uncover—are sensibilities that all developers—all writers, for that matter; even those who rely excessively upon em-dashes—should strive to achieve.

My solace is that I will continue to think on Hornet’s story and journey. I will join fans on Reddit and YouTube to discuss and listen to lore implications, the many connections between the first and second game, to think on what’s next for the small team from Adelaide who eschew traditional game development6 and whose only mission is “to build crazy, exciting worlds for you to explore and conquer.”

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to extract myself from this well once and for all.

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If only you knew the impact you’ve had.

Towards the end of my postgraduate, and for almost an entire year, I worked in a bar in the west side of the city. My government funding (three years of it, no less) was drying up, leaving me facing the bleak reality of the outside world, and so the bar, in all its minute glory, acted to supplement a stipend that would soon be no more. There was another reason, of course. There always is. One that makes little sense to put here into words.

It was a small bar, the kind that was open later than most, located at the edge of the city and on a busy main road, a spot that held little else except for a handful of restaurants: a pizzeria, a Mexican fast food joint affectionately (or offensively, I couldn't decide) called Taco, Señor?, and a small Thai place, arguable the nicest of the lot, with a courtyard out back that on summer nights became a pleasant enough place to eat. There was also a coffee shop. Not that I ever went there. Come evening, when I would make my way to my shift, the little café was already closed, with blinds down and a blue sign informing me it was no longer open and would remain so until the morning. In any case, the bar had its own espresso machine, mainly for espresso martinis, which by then were all the rage and everyone was drinking in great quantities. Myself included. The bar, as it happened, was called Shrew. An odd name for a bar, I thought. Not The Shrew, like some pub, one with a painting of a shrew on a sign outside the window and with taxidermied shrews to be found dotted around the shelves within; not Shrewd, a venue no doubt offering itself up as “A place for the discerning drinker” (the same words surely printed in a serif typeface at the top of the drinks menu), attracting customers that might fit such a description but also bringing in many who merely wanted to be seen drinking there, their lives nothing more than a checklist of venues to frequent and obsess over and to be observed within. No. It was simply Shrew, in the singular. I have no idea why it was called it that. Not that I ever asked the owners. Still, being quite fond of shrews, I found it amusing and somehow appropriate to land a job in a bar named after such an animal, an animal that isn’t, in fact, a rodent—the rodent being a common misconception for the shrew’s order, which is actually Eulipotyphla, the same order as hedgehogs and moles—not that I thought of myself as a rodent, or even a hedgehog, but perhaps as a mole, one who preferred his eyes to be buried away from the bright glare of reality.

As I was saying, the bar was small. And it was quiet. It never got rowdy, is what I’m trying to say (perhaps it truly was a place for the discerning drinker). That's not to say it didn't attract its own set of locals, each of whom visited at their own specific time during the evening, or only on certain days of the week, their varying schedules meaning that if someone new were to walk in—a tourist, say, who’d wandered outside the busier and fancier parts of the city, or perhaps someone from out of town staying at one of the cheaper hotels nearby—there was never any issue finding a table. Over time, I got to know these regulars with their quirks and idiosyncratic qualities, and to observe the comfort that routine can bring. There was Camilla, a professional film and theatre critic who worked for a national magazine, her columns appearing in the entertainment section and occasionally also in the weekend insert of one of the major newspapers. She would come to the bar to write a first draft of her review after seeing a film or show, the bar being on her way home. With her thoughts still fresh, the ambience of the bar, or so she told me, was within the acceptable range for her to think and write. I cannot work when it's noisy, nor when it's quiet, she said, without even the faintest hint of emotion or humour, as though everyone would feel the same and know what she meant. This bar, she went on, absolutely straight-faced, is within the ideal range. It didn't take me long to realise that when she spoke she emphasised certain words and phrases. Camilla, you speak in italics, I wanted to tell her, but never did, worrying that my meaning would be lost. Then there was Arturo, a man of Spanish descent, in his late sixties and with dark skin that reminded me of old leather, who would come for a single glass of red wine, a Shiraz or a Cabernet Merlot, the bar having a surprisingly decent wine list, and who would lament, briefly, only for the duration it took him to drink his wine, of how it was better in Europe, how the nights were warmer and the women more beautiful, that vegetables tasted more of the earth and that there were no finer lemons than those grown along the coast of Italy. This he would say to anyone who would listen, which mostly would be me and no one else, and then he would nod his thanks and leave, and I would smile, knowing that I would hear it all again come the following night.

But the one whom I remember most was Marína, who visited always on a Wednesday and Thursday evening, at around 9 p.m., give or take, and sometimes also on a Tuesday, although (as she would later tell me) this was entirely dependent on her shifts at the Women’s, or maybe it was the Children’s hospital, I forget which, her schedule as a nurse not always predictable, never allowing her to depart the bar late on a Thursday night and to confidently state I’ll see you Tuesday, the little bell attached to the door jingling as she left, knowing full well it could be Wednesday when she would be here next instead.

Marína was mid-twenty something. That’s what I thought, anyway. My eyes, eyes that back then (and even now, for that matter) had no justification to be reading a woman's age, but that did so anyway, putting her features at twenty six, perhaps seven, still a few years away from thirty, that age at which things change and a person begins to transition into the next stage of life, or that if they don't, which for some can be the case, remain fixed and can seem as though they never transitioned over the threshold at all. It was entirely possible, is what I’m trying to say, that Marína could have been thirty five but that she existed in a perpetual state a decade younger.

Marína had black hair, a deep black, like the light was being stolen when it touched her, kept cut short and with a fringe at the front that fell close to her eyes. In her left ear she always wore three silver rings, each identical in their circumference, and her arms looked like the kind that wanted to be covered in tattoos, but weren’t, not a single drop of ink to be found there or elsewhere, or at least so far as I could tell, it being entirely possible that the only places without tattoos were her arms and her face. There was something else, too: Marína always wore the same clothes.

I’m Marína, she told me, the first or second time she came in, likely having noted to herself that I was new. It has an accent on the i, although the accent doesn't change the way it sounds, I just put it there when I write my name, and mentally when I say it, I wasn’t named with it spelled that way or anything, I’m not from a country where you’d do that and you can't hear it, the í, but I want you to know it's there. I know it's weird to have to say that, but if I don't tell someone then it plays on my mind. And then she stopped talking, halting herself, and I explained to her that it was fine, I was happy to know the i in her name had an accent and that it was actually an í, even if it sounded the same, and that if I were ever to write her name I would make sure to include it that way in honour of her desire. Telling her this seemed to make her happy.

Anyway, as I was saying, Marína was a regular. She came in alone and left alone and would sit at the bar with a notebook and pen and order a tequila that she would down in one swallow, promptly ordering another that she would sip over the course of thirty minutes as though it were an entirely different drink. She spent this time (her sipping time, as I liked to think of it, which would be repeated with subsequent shots of tequila throughout the night until she’d gotten through the best part of half a bottle, though it never showed, she never seemed drunk, the only thing I could tell being that she started to shiver) scribbling in her notebook with her eyes closed. Actually closed, I mean. Squeezed shut whilst her hand and pen drifted over the surface of the page. Around the second or third time I saw her doing this, watching as the pen left one continuous mark on the paper, I went over, waiting for a moment when she paused and took a sip of tequila (still with her eyes closed, I should note), and I asked what she was doing. “If you don’t mind me asking,” I added.

“Spirit writing,” she said. The pen was poised over the paper, ready to continue.

I knew what spirit writing was, I'd just never seen anyone do it. I told her as much and she shrugged, her eyes still closed.

I elaborated: “But why are you doing it?”

She opened her eyes and placed the pen down. The trail the pen had left was indecipherable. Or at least it was to me.

“Why does anyone do it? I'm trying to communicate with the dead.” She looked at me and wrinkled her nose, and then said: “With my brother.”

And that was how I found out about Marína’s brother, how he’d passed away in a drink-driving accident, that it was her brother, forever 18, who'd been the one who was drinking and driving, how he’d swerved off the road into a lamppost, killing himself and also taking the life of his friend, a friend who was also 18 and who had been sat in the passenger seat without a seat belt on, his body ending up 20 metres down the road.

“It happened just outside,” Marína added, as though this were a minor detail she’d forgotten to mention.

“What? Right here?”

She nodded. “Over on the other side.”

I looked out through the bar’s window, to the streetlamp on the opposite side of the road. Several cars zipped by, their drivers oblivious to the conversation we were having inside.

“At that very spot?” I asked, the question entirely pointless.

“That’s why I do it here,” she said. She took another sip of tequila and winced. “Of course, it’s possible I should be sat right over there, right on the spot where he died, but this is close enough, don't you think?”

I admitted to not knowing the rules that governed the success of spirit writing. It was entirely possible that, yes, she should be sat on the other side of the road, that that would be the only way to communicate with the dead, especially her brother, the one whose life had been lost in that exact location. But at the same time, I could understand why she’d chosen the warmer insides of a bar in which to conduct her work.

“It was six years ago.”

So you would have been twenty, perhaps twenty one, I didn’t add, asking instead: “Have you ever made contact?”

“No, not yet.” She looked down at the paper. The lines of black ink were a mess. Marína turned the paper around a few times, inspecting it at different angles, as if a clue were to be found if only she looked at it the right way. But there was nothing. Nothing that she admitted to seeing, and I didn’t feel comfortable spending too long looking at it myself. Instead, I left her to it, and a few hours later she departed, a cold sadness in her eyes.

After that night we began to speak more and more, like there was something opening up between us, not a relationship but a friendship, something like that, or at least that’s how I felt, and with the passing of the weeks I began to sense that I was the only person she spoke to, that I might be the only one who knew she came to the bar two or sometimes three times a week, to drink tequila and attempt to contact her dead brother.

One night, a cold night in winter when the rain lashed the windows and the bar was devoid of all but the two of us, Marína told me (her breath leaving the occasional cloud of vapour as she spoke) that she didn’t even like tequila, that the only reason she drank it was because it was what her brother had been drinking the night he’d died. He’d consumed half a bottle (or so the coroner estimated, as Marína informed me) with his friend at a party—the same friend who’d been flung from the car and killed. The friend’s girlfriend (and this was according to Marína herself) had just had an abortion and that was why they were celebrating, a fact that struck me as utterly grim.

“It’ll get me closer to him, the tequila,” Marína said when she explained all this. “It’ll get me closer to him,” she repeated.

I don’t think I slept at all that night.

Some time after this, I told Marína how I, too, had known death, not in the same manner as her, saying that I couldn’t and wouldn’t talk about it but that I admired the way she spoke so freely about her brother, about what she did—what she was doing—even if I didn’t really believe in spirit writing or the dead and that it was likely a waste of her time (none of these things I said out loud). I don’t remember what else we spoke about, and maybe we didn’t speak about anything else at all, we were just another Arturo, someone who would enter a room, speak the same things, and then leave. And that, despite how it sounds, was OK.

Eventually, of course, I stopped working at the bar. With my postgraduate finished, I landed a job working for a company on the east side of the city, earning enough money—not a huge amount, but enough—that keeping the job in the bar made little sense. It was hard saying goodbye. We almost exchanged numbers, Marína and I, and perhaps we would have done had mobile phones been what they are today, but we didn’t, and on my last shift we hugged—her body shivering as we embraced—and I think we both cried, just for a moment, our friendship seeming to have reached that point when crying was a natural response.

In the months after, I would walk past the bar, even though it was far out of my way, not at all close, living as I did at that time on the other side of the city. I would walk past on a Tuesday or Wednesday evening, at an hour sometime after 9 p.m., slowing down to look in through the window. Marína was always there, wearing the same clothes and sat with her eyes closed, one hand resting on a pad of paper whilst the other held a pen that drifted slowly across the page, a shot of tequila never far out of reach. I almost went in. Twice I almost went in to take her hand and remove the pen and tell her that it's OK, that she didn't need to drink tequila anymore, that she could stop, he wasn’t going to make contact and that that was OK, it was OK to let go and free herself of her hurt. Christ, I nearly went in, my hand one time actually on the handle and ready to open the door and hear the bell jingle and for Marína to turn and see that it was me, to smile and stand and walk over and hug, just briefly, just for a moment, long enough for me to impart a gift of warmth, something that I could offer her even if there was nothing else I could say. I still think about it, I still think about the fact I didn't do that. I never went in, not once, and I've never dared go back, worrying she might still be there, older now of course, although perhaps still looking the same, perhaps still twenty six or seven, or whatever age below thirty that she remained within, and maybe that's it, maybe that's what I've been thinking about all these years and that’s bothered me and that I could never realise and shake free from my system until now: that it was Marína. It was Marína and not her brother. Marína was the one who'd died and she was trying to contact the living and not the dead, and in all those weeks and months that I worked there I wasn’t talking to a person but instead a ghost.

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See (sub)title. No preamble here. Just books.

Wizard and Glass

When I fled the UK at the end of the war at the end of my PhD, I gave away all of my books. Well, not all of them, but most of them, a stupid act of wanting to rid myself of who I was at that time. One of those books was Stephen King's Wizard and Glass, the fourth entry in King’s The Dark Tower series. There have only been a handful of times in my life that I have been drawn to a book purely by its title, and that was the case here, wanting to read it even before I got to it chronologically in the arc of the series. It's been several millennia now since I read this, but it sticks in my mind as one of King’s best. It's a tragic love story—a story within a story that acts as a pause halfway through the tale of Roland and his ka-tet journeying towards the eponymous Dark Tower, with Roland telling the story of his teenage years and the magical, mysterious, and truly awful happenings that entailed—and I don't ever want to read it again for fear the special edifice it holds upright within my heart might crumble.

Read it if you want to experience long days and pleasant nights1.

The Left Hand of Darkness

I was first introduced to the writing of Ursula Le Guin when I read the mind-bending The Lathe of Heaven, but it wasn’t until I read The Left Hand of Darkness (at 30,000 ft, no less, flying halfway across the world and discussing the plot and context of the book with an interested flight attendant) that I began to truly appreciate the slow precision of Ursula’s gift. This is science fiction doing what the genre should: pushing boundaries, asking questions, making temperature feel palpable on the page.

Read it if you like unending snowscapes, winter, plane journeys, philosophical discussions of gender.

Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell has written a lot of books and some are better than others and I was almost going to pick The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet but in the end I’m settling for the pinnacle that is Cloud Atlas, not only for its structure—a fine example of literature being inventive and uncompromising—but perhaps more so for the mega flex of Mitchell at the keyboard, or typewriter, or whatever he uses to write, bringing such varied style and voice to each of the connected timelines and characters that crest and then fall in this book of wonder.

Read it if you experience a warm feeling inside when you hear the name Sixsmith.

The Book of the New Sun

I Wolfed down this multi-book series and it remains The Book That I Have Annotated The Most With A Pencil. Seve(rian)ral essays of scrawl are etched as marginalia across my copies of The Book of the New Sun. It is literary science fiction/fantasy at its finest. Wolfe was a master craftsman, of both world and prose, and it doesn't get much better than this.

Read it if you find the account of your own life unreliable.

1Q84

It’s incredible, I know, but there was once a time in my life when I hadn't read any Haruki Murakami. Any! I was an unrecognisable soul. I probably had hair. 1Q84 wasn't my first Murakami. No, no. To read this first might have been dangerous. But it is my favourite. Every morning in the shower, I run through my ranking of books by Haruki Murakami and, without fail, just as the hot water is running out, I settle upon this one at the top. It's written in the third person, from the perspective of two protagonists, Tengo and Aomame, and despite this going against the thing I adore most about Murakami (his first person singular), this one still wins out. Oh, I've not told you about the plot, but do you need to care about the plot when Murakami is behind the wheel and using italics for special emphasis? (OK but actually the plot is excellent.)

Read it if you like ears, the moon, and very, very slender needles.

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Moby Dick

Solenoid

If you're anything of a regular reader of SLAKE (perhaps more regular than my posting this year…2) then you'll have heard me speak on numerous occasions about Mircea Cărtărescu’s monstrous novel Solenoid. The best book ever written. Ever. Sadly, I destroyed my copy. After reading each page, I carefully cut the page out and fashioned the paper into a miniature, origami solenoid. 672 of these adorn my desk, above which my monitor floats.

Read it if you wished you’d studied anatomy at university and could name each and every cranial bone. (Also if you’re fascinated by dentist chairs.)

2666

The second best book ever written. 2666 is a sprawling vortex. A labyrinth. It's five books in one. Five novels that span the story of obsessive literary critics, a philosophy professor and his daughter, a journalist, a spree of gruesome killings, and an elusive author around whom the whole book spins in orbit. Sadly, Bolaño died before he deemed it finished, though by his notes it was essentially done, needing only minor corrections. The offering of 2666 preserves Bolaño’s intent of a single volume—the correct choice, if I dare say so—rather than five separate novels, and its 900 pages of circular, interwoven, complex and brutal plot are what literature should be: utterly daring.

Read it if you own five pencils, a map of the US-Mexico border, and a piece of string long enough to be placed in Ariadne’s palm3.

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The Hair Carpet Weavers

Do you have those dreams where everything is slowly zooming out? The kind that feel like you're being subjected to the total perspective vortex in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Andreas Eschbach’s The Hair Carpet Weavers is like that, only instead of a torture device its about carpets. Carpets made of hair. Yes. I closed this book feeling astonished at the transition the story had undertaken, the perspectives I’d experienced, the blending of obedience, tradition, futility, and even hints of hope. I still think about it regularly, which can only mean this book changed my life.

Read it if you like walking barefoot on carpets whilst simultaneously having no idea where a story (your feet) is (are) going.

The Shards (and by extension, American Psycho)

OK so cheating. Two books. Same author. Bret-with-one-T Easton-Ellis’ latest novel (the latest in a long time), The Shards, came at a moment when I needed it most. Which is to say the summer of ‘23, sun blazing through the balcony window, the Australian Open on TV, and me with my eyeballs glued to the look-I-get-it-it’s-likely-not-a-real-depiction-of-80s-LA-rich-kids-but-man-do-I-love-it story that I wish was a movie already. American Psycho is a movie already. Why isn't The Shards a movie already? (Incidentally, I read American Psycho whilst on safari in Africa, age 21, wondering which was the more graphic: a felled giraffe’s ribcage being slowly devoured from the inside by three lion cubs, or retiring to a tent hut at night to read about Patrick Bateman using a rat to … to … anyway, there’s a whole chapter on Phil Collins.)

Read it if you have to return some videotapes.

Hyperion

Yes, yes, literary science fiction’s must-read. For good reason. Book two fumbles the catch just a little, though more so in structure than in prose and story, but that's OK because the first book, the actual Hyperion, is godly. I was addicted to this book. I read it in a horizontal position, lying naked on the floor of my apartment, trying to do lines of each sentence up my nose.

10/10 would do it again.

Read it if you secretly tell everyone you’ve read The Canterbury Tales when in fact you haven’t and in any case you can’t even spell Chaucher Chauser Chaucer.

Lolita

Stephen King possibly famously quipped that the road to hell is paved with adverbs. My introduction to Nabokov taught me that the road to a good novel is paved with f*cking excellent prose that makes blinding use of adjectives when adjectives aren't expected. There’s something special in the unexpected of Nabokov’s writing, his mastery of language, his means to destabilise the reader.

Read it if you want to, err, hmm, hrghh … just read it.

So, dear reader, what (book) changed your life?

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But this story isn't about flowers or the misremembered scent of jasmine, it isn't about how it was a hot dry summer and that in the morning I could stand on a balcony facing north, drenched in sunlight in a suburb of a city in which I still live—not the same suburb as now, not at all, but one close by and that upon occasion I will happen to wander, my footsteps taking me past a road with a café that once upon a time was something else—watching as individual bone-white clouds brushed their way across the sky.

It's not about that.

It's about you.

Because you'll never read this.

*

Back then we were already no longer friends. Or, to put it another way, we had a friendship that was trailing into the abyss, a dark place that must sometimes form between friends and that does so under certain circumstances. That's how I've come to understand it: such friendships dissolve under certain circumstances. You wouldn't say it or write it that way; you wouldn't think to note that that is what happened to us, or that it could happen to anyone, anyone at all, those who walk the streets with their footsteps offset and no longer in sync, the couples found at night in restaurants visited beneath the waning moon. Your mind would never notice such things—not about us or anyone else—because your eyes were those capable of looking only inward, like there were mirrors you had placed over your eyelids that from the outside made it seem you had normal eyes, yet for you they were a mirror and nothing else. But you won't read this and you won't know and so it doesn't matter in what terms I express this fact; I can say it this way, or that, or any such way, the truth being that by then our friendship had dissolved and had approached the black abyss and there is no simpler way to express it than that.

For six months we had lived together, an amount of time felt far longer inside than observed under the scrutiny of any watch. During that time I would awake at dawn and leave before you knew I had left, taking the small number of steps that I always would, steps that could only be taken alone, for to walk them together would offer nothing, not to me or to you, the cadence of our steps no longer being correct. There were many birds in the trees. I remember that now. The birds would come in such great numbers, filling the branches as though each tree were a separate city, a kind of city of birds, their voices so loud that the traffic of the road was nothing compared to their endless calls. The days back then were blurry, filled with so little when I compare them to now, a daily repetition that seems almost laughable, minuscule, like an ant tirelessly eating away at a leaf without realising the very tree it walks across has many such leaves, each thick and green and different in its own way.

Would it fit? I remember you asking one morning whilst I was still there, and I looked at you, perplexed, struck by what you had asked, and I think at that moment I placed the bowl of cereal I held in my hand down on the kitchen table, the cereal only half eaten, the bowl not emptied and washed and left to dry, actions I would normally take before I left, the movement and process like closing off a sentence before beginning the next, the cereal remaining half eaten, the spoon protruding from the bowl like a metallic tail, all as you laughed at what I did, asking again, your tone too serious, whether I thought it would fit, whether it could fit, whether it was calculable that such would or could or should, and whether I had an opinion, like an opinion of this could be held between two who had slipped into the abyss, and I walked out, not saying a word, not answering what you asked, and even after I left you tried to call me, possibly to apologise, which I knew you would never do, not in earnest, it wouldn't be an apology, it would be baffled surprise at my actions, or you would speak as though it had never happened, that I was never even there, and perhaps you did call and perhaps I answered and then hung up, because all I can remember is the searing sun in the sky and the rare appearance of a cloud.

I don't know whether you would ask any different now. I don't know whether you have changed. It's possible you would say the same. It's possible that you would. But I don't know you anymore.

And I don't care, of course.

That's why I'm writing this.

Because you'll never read it.

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“Do I look like I have anywhere to go?” I lie, and in a move so alien I startle myself, I walk two steps toward him, loop my arm through his and set us moving, to blend into the crowd that seethes past.

Approximately two stackturns1 ago, I wrote and posted a small piece of Science Fiction. The piece was part of a larger series of fragments, all told from the perspective of a protagonist named Jisa who inhabits a broken world, navigating her way through a series of events and interactions that stretch far further—and higher—than she could ever realise.

The story and its characters have lived with me for a long time now. The intention was to tell parts of the story—temporally and spatially—from three perspectives: Jisa’s story, largely from within her ruined city of Siridan; Tess’ story, from within the (questionably) more Utopian city of Vi; and the no-it’s-not-his-real-name Cloud’s story, who moves between the two cities with a freedom not afforded to many. In doing this, and as a writer with little experience, I also wanted to explore narrative devices and shifts in style. It was to be a tragic love story. A lament. A slow-burn character study. A suspenseful mystery.

It was to remain incomplete.

Turns out that commencing what was—and remains—my first serious, large project began to feel insurmountable. It’s likely why I turned to writing single, one-post pieces, or only stretching myself out to Finnish a seven-post piece in the form of The Sernox2.

I published these fragments (some of them, at least) from Jisa deliberately out of order, partly as that was the order I was writing, refining and editing, and partly (precisely?) because the story wasn’t finished. I was filling out details in both directions. Not an ideal way to proceed. But hey, what do I know? I’m just a scientist pretending to be a writer.

The truth is, though, I’ve never stopped thinking about this story—Precipice, to give it the title that’s always lived in my head. graciously mentioned it when discussing his recently published novel, Lamb. There’s something about exploring a story through snapshots that I find attractive. I love that about Lamb. Troy really nailed it. It's a wonderful story. I hope you get to read it, if you haven't already.

Since listening to that discussion with Troy, I’ve been thinking about this story of Precipice a lot. I don’t know when, if, or how this will ever be complete. I want to finish it, of course, but the mountain is high, and sometimes the words feel like boulders. But I invite you, dear reader, to dip briefly into Jisa’s world, if you’d like to. No context. Just slip in and taste the rain.

If you read this when it was first posted, thank you. I invite you back, complete with new edits. I’m sure Jisa’s grateful.

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“Jisa!” a man calls, grabbing my arm. I whirl and try to twist free, but then stop. In front of me stands Zinn’s friend, the one he calls Cloud.

“Cloud,” I manage, finding my words and dropping my guard. “Trying to mug me?” I shake free of his grip, sidestepping a torrent of water that spurts from a gutter above.

“Sorry,” he says. “I wasn’t sure where you lived.”

“So you just walk the streets expecting me to cross your path?” I look at him. He’s soaking. Shivering, possibly.

“Something like that.” He shrugs, then smiles, a smile coy and wry and like so many of those flashed last night, a secret exchange when the three of us met. The same smile that kindled a fire still burning within.

For a long moment we remain like this. People from the evening rush jostle past, their movement a flash of washed-out colour as they transit beneath the endless glow of the city.

“Strange,” I manage finally. “Why not just ask Zinn? He could find his way to me blind drunk. Has done many times.”

Cloud shrugs again. “I…” he begins.

I see something in his eyes. Nervousness? I wonder. I could mock him for it—to do so would come so easily—but something makes me bite my tongue and just raise my eyebrows.

“I didn’t want to ask him,” he continues. “I, ah, how can I put this? I didn’t want him to know I would see you. If I saw you, that is.” Cloud runs a hand through his wet hair, bounces a little from foot to foot. “I was beginning to think standing here a stupid idea, but Zinn told me one time that you lived in Dridok, so I just picked a busy intersection and, well …” he motions towards me, then pockets his hands back into his coat.

“Right,” I say, sarcasm lacing my tongue. “You know”—I poke him in the chest with a finger, making him stumble—“I could think that fucking weird. Some guy I just met, stalking me, lying in wait.” I burn his eyes, but smile a thin smile.

“Harsh,” he says, regaining his footing. “True enough, perhaps.” He smiles too, lips curving upwards, leading me once again to those eyes, the deep green, the pupils a black abyss of … of … I snap free from my thoughts, slap myself mentally. I’m about to tease him, an attempt at regaining myself, when some commuter bumps into me, knocking me into the water that still streams from above.

“Watch where you’re going, you shaft-dweller!” I yell after him, cursing as water slicks over my hair, inside my jacket and down my back. The man doesn’t turn around, he just keeps walking back to his home, or bar, or wherever the fuck he’s going in the evening crush.

“You’re soaked. Here,” Cloud says, moving towards me, unfastening his thick coat.

“Don’t!” I snap. “Don’t,” I repeat, warmer. “It’s fine. I'm used to it. And you’re cold enough already, I’d say.”

“You sure?” he asks, already re-buttoning the top notch so that it fits snugly back under his chin. “Let’s at least get inside, then.”

I think, then speak. “I can’t, I’m already late, I have to run Cloud, I’m sorry.” I feign a movement to leave—because I can’t help it, because I want this charade to play out a moment longer—but all the while I stare at his eyes and watch his face. That look of dismay, the slight frown and flicker of his lips; these tells are all I need to confirm everything passed between us last night as Zinn sat right next to us, unknowing.

“Oh,” he says, glancing to the side, uncertain.

“I’m fucking with you, stupid. Do I look like I have anywhere to go?” I lie, and in a move so alien I startle myself, I walk two steps toward him, loop my arm through his and set us moving, to blend into the crowd that seethes past. “Come,” I say, and we merge, become carried in their sway, passengers of routine. Cloud says nothing. I just feel his warmth, the already comfortable silence outstripped by the hustle of a thousand people chatting, of vendors peddling their wares, of street merchants hollering that their stalls offer the finest escape from the oppressive damp and cold.

We cross Ondorro Street and cut right onto Undorro Lane, silent in our path but with a steady heat growing inside the pit of my stomach. The laneway is a flurry of people, the busiest of the myriad alleyways so characteristic of the district. This is Dridok, after all, the grovel hole of Siridan, the district that tries to rescue itself through its penchant for vendor food and night markets, for bustling bars and seedy dens, for secrets and tunnels. Relics of an era gone by; an era that people would rather forget. Being so close—precariously so—to the edge of the Causeway, the vast once-river long drained of its water (long before my own life), has left Dridok tainted with all manner of wrongdoings that have inked their way into the city. The eras of smuggling, of wars, the fallout of digging too deep and for too long, the causes and consequences of The Ruin—these are things present throughout all of the city, but more so here perhaps. If only you look. There are networks of tunnels that connect dens like warrens, scars that moved all manner of contraband—drugs, of course, and weapons … but people, too. Some of those tunnels cut right out into nothing, an archaic entrance or a foolhardy exit that once would have sat far underwater. There is irony in the sustained rains being unable to ever quench that great riverbed. The bedrock just laps it up, sucks it down, funnels it away through the shafts we bored.

We keep moving, hugging the edge of the laneway, pushing our way through people who stop to snack or to warm their hands on electric braziers, passing those entering recessed kiosks that offer hot zirosh and freshly-baked dough-breads.

“You know this area?” I ask, breaking the silence. I look sideways to this man I am linked with, his stubble laced with water.

“Not really,” he says. “I grew up on the other side.” Cloud flicks his head towards the towering buildings on our right, to where the Causeway lies hidden behind.

I nod. There is little social divide between the districts that flank the cavernous once-river—little reason for Cloud to guard his words as he speaks—though that was not always the case.

“Then you know not where we are going,” I say, looking ahead, stepping around puddles as my mind steps around words. The crowd is thinning as we approach the intersection with Tanner St, the threshold that divides Dridok from the looming presence of Moiety. Most of those still commuting—the ones that haven’t nestled themselves in for a drink someplace, down into some seedy hovel for seedier deeds—are people descending underground, off to ferry themselves to wherever they started the day. The shuttle entrance is ahead to our right, but that’s not where I wish our path to go.

“I know not,” he says. “If I’m honest, I was hoping you’d suggest somewhere.” He glances at the watch on his wrist. “At least for now.”

I wrinkle my forehead. “I know a place,” I say. “Quiet. Dark.” My throat clenches as I say the last.

Cloud looks at me. I see words in his eyes just as a crowd spills from a nearby eatery, the open door a brief bark of noise. The smell of food wafts upon us, fried fish and poached fruits, the incense of mulling wine; but then it is gone, claimed by the air and rain. The crowd stumbles past, already intoxicated even though it is not yet evening. The group moves out of our way. I press onwards, Cloud’s arm still linked through mine, and as I do he pulls me in, tightening our link. The warmth in my stomach leaps a notch, dropping that little bit lower.

“How long were you waiting?” I ask. We move as one, our pace now steady, our feet synced in steps.

Cloud laughs. “A while,” he admits. “A little while.”

I smile to myself, pushing back a strand of hair caught between my eyes. “You flatter a girl,” I say.

Cloud laughs again. “Sure,” he says. “I’ll take flattery over you being weirded out.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I still think it’s fucking weird.” I nudge him sideways and he, in turn, nudges me back.

We round the corner onto Tanner and then cross the road, the ground traffic lighter here. Overhead cables, relics that have never been removed, sit tangled between poles that flank a once thriving road. Once on the other side, I guide us into a small alleyway cut into one of the buildings. This is Moiety now, an altogether different place. Here the buildings are giant blocks, a mixture of strange architecture built into the existing rockmass. Buildings here weren’t so much erected as engraved, carved, faceted.

“Where were you headed, anyway? Before I saw you, I mean,” Cloud asks as we move through the alley, escaping the rain at last. The way ahead is arched and overhead the passage is lined with dusk-red tiles, some broken and exposing the underlying rock that in places drips with water.

As we move farther down the vaulted alley, the cloying sickly-sweet scent of rootdrop becomes evident, the smouldering narcotic emanating from vents that pepper the walls. A couple ahead—another couple, for that is how my brain already wants to think—pass us in the opposite direction, engaged in intimate discussion.

“Just out,” I half-lie, scrunching my nose. I am no great lover of rootdrop, but the decision to come to a darkened bar where I know the residue sits burning seemed automatic as my mind raced through options. We will talk. We have to talk, I know. At first comes talk.

“Just out?” he asks as I steer us inside and down a short flight of steps.

The Undertow is a cavernous expanse, a grotto carved into rock leaving small recessed seating along each wall. The centre of the room contains a dimly lit bar, a soft yellow glow catching on each bottle, jar and glass. A few couples occupy the nooks along one edge, but as I expected—as I hoped, I find myself realising—most are empty. Even at its peak, this is a place of intimacy and privacy. Two things I have never desired more.

“Something like that,” I say, mirroring his own words. Already these few breaths of rootdrop make me want to talk, to say more. “Come on,” I say. “What will you have? Beer, zirosh, pure arianth?” The words pour from me and I clench my jaw. These first few minutes are always the worst. Once my brain adjusts, numbs itself, talk will be fluid, exhilarating, controlled.

“You pick,” Cloud says, pursing lips together, a smugness writ there as no more words come out. This affects you more than me, that looks says.

I nod to the barman, a man named Juke, clamping my own mouth shut.

“Sure, Jisa,” he says back, looking first to me, then to Cloud. He lowers the glass he had been polishing and logs our presence onto a tab.

I move to place my finger on the scanner, but Cloud stops me. His hand is wrapped around mine, I realise. “Think I’m going to let you pay?” he says, registering his own payment. We linger like this for a moment; for too long, I wonder, or not long enough?

“Take a seat,” Juke says, tilting his head toward the rear of the bar, to where the empty corner sits in near darkness.

Cloud nods, then moves from the bar, his hand tugging on mine. “Let’s go,” he says, without looking back.

“OK,” I shiver. “OK,” I repeat and move to follow.

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We were waiting at the station, slumped against the wall as people boarded a train on the opposite platform. You were in a pair of white tennis shoes and a loose grey t-shirt, the t-shirt tucked in at one side of your jeans and the rest of it billowing free, like a sail. It was a cute look, I had to give it to you.

“What?” I asked, realising my brain hadn't processed what you'd said. I was distracted by a pigeon scavenging for crumbs.

“When you're walking behind someone and they clench their fists, it means they're deep in thought. Haven't you ever seen that?”

I shook my head. “No, never.”

You raised your hand to shield your eyes. By now the sun had crept above the city's skyline, the rays scattering across the platform. You’d forgotten your sunglasses. You always forgot your sunglasses.

“Start looking,” you went on, pulling a weird face that soon relaxed into a smile. “Walk behind someone and soon enough you’ll see it. They’ll start clenching their fists.”

“Right,” I said, still distracted by the pigeon. It didn't seem to be having any luck finding crumbs. Try another platform, I willed, but it didn't seem to receive my signal, instead continuing to wander its repeating path, pecking fruitlessly at the ground. “I guess I’ll start looking.”

A couple made their way onto the opposite platform to wait for their train. They were laughing. Nearby, a woman was drinking a coffee. Possibly it was a hot chocolate. I had no way of knowing for sure.

“They’re deep in thought, I’m certain,” you said, your voice so low it almost required subtitles.

I lowered my sunglasses and turned to you, copying your squint. “Are we still talking about this?”

You shrugged. “It’s just something I’ve noticed.”

I pushed my sunglasses back up the bridge of my nose. The sun dimmed.

The pigeon flew away, landing on another platform. Perhaps it had heard me after all.

Our train arrived. The doors opened and we pushed off from the wall and made for the carriage. I walked ahead of you, clenching my fists.

Hello. Something short here. I felt inspired by ’s recent and excellent short fictional portraits, along with ’s continuous ability to write so precisely within 100 words1. And, well, this is what fell out.

Semester has just finished. I am—as my students are so fond of saying—“cooked”, but I'm enjoying letting some ideas finally marinate.

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I was standing beneath moonlight, silver rays that streamed down from a thousand moons or more.

“Impossible,” I managed, my words just vapour, particles that joined the dewy air and sank to where flowers bloomed across a carpet of grass too lush to be anything but a dream. “What moons are these?” I asked, staring at the procession of orbs that littered the sky.

Astri rested her hand on my shoulder, speaking in whisper. “Your own moon. Others. I do not know them all.”

For a long while we said nothing, Astri perhaps waiting for some signal that I would give, though I gave her none, looking instead at the sky that was somehow a sky, a night sky of a thousand worlds, one set deep underground and far below the plaza of the small Spanish town.

“You're still kneeling,” she said. I could hear the smile in her words. She was right—I hadn’t moved since the door had swung open, the only movement my body had made was to slump to the floor, overcome by the cavernous room and its crystalline light.

“Here,” she said, taking my arm and lifting me gently until I could stand. Then, looping her arm through mine, she guided me forward to where a stream ran along the ground, its low gurgle now finding its way to my ear.

“What others can they be?” I asked, my eyes still caught by the moons arrayed in the ceiling’s curving dome.

“I do not know them all,” she repeated. “Only that they are here, filling each hole in turn as they make their journey. A journey endless and repeating.”

I tried to speak, to ask something that may have had some value, but found no words. In their place were only questions, and so I said nothing, and because I didn’t speak we continued, stepping over flowers that were more vibrant than those I had seen lining the restaurant in the square, more vibrant even than those lining the cellar-like room we had passed through moments before. Ahead, the ground sloped to a depression—a nadir in the vale of the hidden sky—where in the centre there was a tree, vast and green and incomparable in its own right, its great roots like arms that stretched out to touch the blades and leaves and flowers that blossomed in every direction. The stream ran around the base of the tree, bathing the enormous trunk as though it were a tree that could only grow when half-submerged and illuminated by silver light. In the water floated flowers of the deepest indigo, their petals bearing a brilliant iridescence, and as I looked up I saw that the flowers came from the tree, the buds of its branches now swelling into bloom with unnatural speed, so swift that soon the entire tree was shimmered in purple.

Astri knelt at the edge of the stream and motioned for me to do the same. She took my hand in hers, intertwining our fingers and moving the collective creature that was our hand so that it was immersed in the cool water. Her voice began to fill my mind, though her lips never moved.

I see stories in all that is living, in the way the light hits the leaves and the air ushers in change. I see you. I see the you that spreads from your being, the roots that you have and those you are still yet to grow. I feel the blood of your heart, each pulse that it takes as it finds its way forth, carrying all that it carries and wants and gives. I see the places where it pools in loss, the moments that swirl through regret. I feel the ones you have yet to know and those that you will yet meet. I feel the shimmer of hope in the contraction of your eye and the twilight that hides behind each lid. I see all of the stories we walk beside, the ones buried and those that drift free, those that you catch and melt on your tongue, unaware of the change they impart. I see you, and what you haven't yet become. I see you, and what you already are.

When her voice faded, the crisp, cold of the water pulled me back, the singular, submerged object that was our hand refracting in the light.

“Who are you?” I asked.

Astri lifted our hand out of the water, placing it against her chest. As her skin warmed each finger, our hand dissolved to once again become two and my palm began to feel the beat of her heart. “You know already that answer,” she said. Then, reaching down she took two flowers from the ground—their petals the deepest purple, ones that had fallen from the canopy of the tree. “It is a gift from this place. To remember what you have seen. To remember what you have yet to see.”

“What are you?” I tried to ask, but couldn’t, and when I tried again we were already moving away from the tree, the moons still tracing their journey overhead as our steps carried us back to the door where beyond awaited the staircase that led to all that was above. As we stepped across the threshold I heard the door click shut. I didn’t turn, because to turn and to look was, I realised, to remove the door from my mind. We started up the steps and some eternity later we reemerged into the kitchen of her restaurant, her Jardín de Luna, although I knew then that that was just a name, not the true moon garden, for that I had now seen, and as we stepped out into the square I saw the sun was rising in the east and already there were people milling through the plaza, those drawn to this place without realising why, and as Astri held my hand in hers she raised it and kissed my palm. And then, without saying anything more, she turned and left, to become absorbed by the architecture of the winding streets and leaving me with a feeling so rich that it fills me still.

When I looked down, I saw enclosed in my hand—held gently like I was cradling a fragile bird—the two purple flowers.

*

When I returned home I was changed in indelible ways. I thought of Astri—a botanist, though not the usual type, she never having elaborated on what she meant by those words—and what had happened, the glow of memory from that small Spanish town able to be summoned in an instant. Even now, even with all the years that have passed and in remembering this story as here it is told, I smile as my mind so readily returns to that place. The purple flowers never wilted, their indigo hue remaining as vibrant and clear as the day of their gift. I have kept only one of the flowers. It lives on my desk, resting on a page that is blank. Sometimes I will move the flower and see it has left a mark, leeching something purple and brilliant onto the page. Other times, there is nothing, and at this I will smile, knowing that it won’t always be so. And on warm nights, when I place my ear close to each petal, I can hear hear her voice, as though the very fibres of the flower hold onto her words. Perhaps therein is the truth, that somewhere she resides in me still, a root or leaf or blade, something that is there beyond memory alone.

To my boss at the time, I gave the other flower. I sandwiched it between the pages of a book on Spanish cuisine. “Your cigar,” I said, for him a cigar being any kind of gift, placing the book on his desk and pushing it toward him. At the front of the book was my letter of resignation, a letter written from a certain terrace in the plaza of the small Spanish town, written in the days after I had sunk beneath the earth and witnessed the tree that grew under the guidance of a thousand moons, a letter written from a chair in the Jardín de Luna as the sun rose and then set and the warm wind blew across my skin, my life never having been more aligned with the beating of my heart.

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And thus concludes The Botanist (prior parts here: 1, 2, 3) , a piece I have written over too many short, fragmented sessions. As with all words and worlds, I leave it up to you to find the meaning that speaks most true, though I will add here a short footnote to this piece: Several years ago, Josephine and I went to Bali to enjoy a short break in the foothills of Ubud. Whilst there, we had the pleasure of doing yoga in the most stunning and idyllic of locations, as the sun rose and the trees basked in its beautiful light. One of the sessions was led by a Yogi named Astri. I am not a religious person, but I understand what it is to feel connected in a spiritual way. Be it to nature, the Earth, the experience of consciousness, or perhaps something more. Astri was like a concentrated form of that experience. She emanated—she radiated—some inexplicable connection with all that surrounded her. I cannot help but think she was the product of a thousand moons. She’ll never read this, of course, but I dedicate this to her and the overwhelming presence of her presence.

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“You are ready,” she said, not as a question but a statement as firm as the ground.

“Yes,” I said, standing, and as she turned I found I could do nothing but follow, entering into the restaurant and though the kitchen to where, despite the hour, I expected to find her daughter, the one who cooked tirelessly each night, yet I saw only plates, washed and stacked in piles of a glistening white, and the only sound was that of the tall refrigerator, humming and gurgling whilst beside it a chest freezer lay squat and silent as though too embarrassed of the noise its sibling made.

Fom the kitchen, we slid away through a slim door, Astri’s hand at my back, pressing to guide me forward. We descended a flight of steps so vast in number that when the steps seemed they could go on no longer, I realised I had no recollection of the distance we had travelled, the outside world—that place where moments ago I had been sat beneath an enormous, rotating sky—seeming so suddenly vague that I felt it may not have existed at all. Eventually, after some unknown amount of time, for time lost all meaning as we moved deeper underground, we emerged into what at first I took to be a wine cellar, the high walls adorned with huge, ancient racks, their metal frames dull and grey and laced with the fine threadwork of spiders. There were no bottles in the racks; instead, they overflowed with leaves and flowers, the same kinds that spilt from the tables of the Moon Garden, Astri’s restaurant up there in the outside world, a place in whose existence I no longer held any confidence. The leaves seemed to glow, imparting a shade of green that made me think only of the word cyclamen, and I would have remained there, transfixed by the glow of the leaves, had not Astri’s fingers—soft and threaded with a trio of silver rings—guided my hand to the brass handle of a door set into the wall. The metal was cool, and as my hand clasped the handle I felt a thrum, as if an electric current were running between the alloy of the brass and the membrane of my skin. She released her hand, and for a moment I did nothing, merely attuning to the thrum and awaiting something, some moment, not knowing how but sensing that to turn the handle too soon would reveal nothing, only a wall behind the door, a false portal bricked over that would lead nowhere, but even as these thoughts emerged and departed of their own accord, I felt the thrum stop, and without hesitation I turned the handle and the door opened and the air rushed into the room and my breath was whisked from my lungs. I sank to my knees, too staggered to comprehend what I saw.

“This is the true moon garden”, I heard Astri say, from somewhere far behind. “My Jardín de Luna.”

To be continued…

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Thank you for reading. I know it’s been a while. I’ve been distracted and caught up in work these last few weeks. But I’m back, and there’s a fresh excitement within me at getting to write and pull at the threads of this little tale. This is Part 3 (links to Part 1 and Part 2). Probably one more part. Probably.

Thanks for being here and taking a moment to read. If you’re a writer here on Substack then thank you for your patience in the time it’s taking me to get to your posts. I look forward to reading them.

N—.

I was going to title this post '“What I think about when I think about ‘What I talk about when I talk about running’”, which is a stupid, ridiculous title and amusing (or not) only to those who, like myself, have read every printed ounce of Haruki Murakami and spend their time contemplating just what it is about an author writing about running that makes for a compelling read. Then I realised that what I wanted to say wouldn’t have much or anything to do with Murakami’s book on running, which in itself isn’t all that much about running and instead is about writing, and baseball, and it turns out I don’t know anything about baseball, and I’m not overly fond of running, but I have visited Japan and I do think a lot about writing, so perhaps the premise remains and so the title became what it is, not that I’m going to be touching upon it all that much, which, I realise, doesn’t make for an overly compelling start…

I should also note that I was going to start this post with an apology, but a wise person once said “Never start with an apology,” and so I didn’t, but if you’re curious then the apology was going to be about how the next entry from The Botanist—my something-serial about, well, a botanist (though not the usual type1)—is still being written and isn't yet ready, and so if you’d asked then I would have said to please excuse the delay, it’s being written, it’s just I’ve been distracted by all manner of things. Mostly work.

Mostly work. I’m halfway through semester now, a point in time that I always dream of earlier in the year, not because I dislike the semester—far from it, in fact; the students are what keep me alive—but because the workload reaches its peak always around this time and I know that once I have broached this point there is a glimmer of relief on the horizon. A distant, cold, southern-hemisphere-in-June horizon, but a horizon nonetheless.

All this is to say that I have come home in the evenings with little in the way of creative zest for writing, and nor have I awoken wanting to put pen to page, feeling often so deflated that I couldn’t even find desire to read2. This is, I realise, partly because I have been drained by spending a good couple of weeks writing a new case study for biomed students. I put in a not insignificant amount of effort, throwing in a short third-person narrative scene and trying to flex skills that I have hopefully learnt here from writing fiction, along with a fake autopsy report, notes and documents and snippets of facts, making it all look at least passably realistic and doing all this to give it some authenticity and make the students have to work to unpuzzle the scenario. They’d then use that information to complete a series of questions and analyses related to the case and its broader implications, it being the kind of thing that I myself would enjoy working through, that being my metric for how I should pitch the activities I facilitate in class. So I was somewhat deflated when all of that was shot down and it was compressed into a bland, flat, uninspired Google Doc because “it’ll be easier for the students.” Sigh. Oh well. It’s not my own unit, so I don’t have the final say. The upside is it’s made me think about creating a twisting and winding scenario for the unit I do coordinate—the one I have full control over—full of students I’ve now come to think of as my family, taking some pedagogical learnings and writing a large piece as an exercise in revision ahead of their final exam.

So I’ve been thinking about that, but I’ve also been thinking about something else: a conversation between and his wife Annaka that introduces a chapter of Annaka’s new audio documentary, Lights On. I find links in posts awkward, because I want to remain within the page when I’m reading, but I’m going to link out below, because this is a must listen. I love Sam Harris. I’ll say that openly. His approach to meditation, via his Waking Up app, probably saved me back in 2021 and forever changed the way I perceive the world, and his thoughts and conversations via his podcast Making Sense resonate deeply. Here, his conversation with Annaka feels like you’re listening in on an intimate dinnertime chat—albeit a deeply philosophical one, but perhaps such is regular in their household—and the moments when you hear their relationship bubble to the surface—and especially when Annaka laughs—are just beautiful. But it’s the content that is so compelling. The episode contains a free chapter of Lights On and it’s enough to make me go grab the whole thing. It’s all about consciousness, what consciousness is, whether it’s a fundamental property of the universe, and various other things that are equally reality-shattering. I’m fascinated by consciousness, as are others I’ve spoken to here or whose words have hinted upon this topic3.

The episode of Sam and Annaka is here and contains links out to Annaka’s full audio documentary.

*

I’ve written more than I’d expected, a hopeful sign that perhaps this little trough of writing block has passed, so I’ll finish with one final thing.

I was reading on the train to work this morning, and then on the bus, and when the bus finally pulled into the loop that enters the university campus, we passed a car being driven by a man who, in his seeming confusion of signage, had found himself within the loop and was casually letting a passenger out of his car, a woman whom my mind assumed to be his wife, for their exchange seemed that of husband and wife, and possibly it was a good exchange, an end-of-week farewell, a see you tonight darling, don’t be late, we’ll serenade the weekend with our love, that type of an exchange, and the man was so occupied with this goodbye that, coupled with his unawareness that cars shouldn’t ever be within the loop, he didn’t see the bus sidle alongside and the bus driver honked and shouted and spouted a tirade that continued until the man, flustered, started the car and left and the bus took its final turn and pulled up alongside the curb and all the passengers—the students and occasional academic, those who, like myself, prefer the opportunity for public transport over sitting behind the wheel in traffic—disembarked, and as I was stepping down from the bus my eyes landed back on the page where I had been reading and I just stopped, unable to move, because I was in awe of the words that I was reading, and it left me with a profound sense of something, some strange awareness of what it is to connect to an author through words that are crafted with power, and I thought perhaps that even the words were conscious, because that is where my mind has been all week.

Which is all hyperbole to say this is the best passage I’ve read all week, all month, possibly all year, which is in itself hyperbole, and it comes from an author whose prose makes me want to write, and I don’t know if there’s anything more important to me than that right now.

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Of the numerous restaurants and bars lining the plaza, there was one in particular that I would visit, a small restaurant with only a handful of tables inside and out and run by an owner who employed only one other: a teenage girl I later learned was her daughter and who emerged periodically from the kitchen to serve food as wondrous as the warm night air. The restaurant’s terrace offered nothing of note except for the plants that spilt from its eaves and gushed wildly from each of the tables, no two arrangements alike and set about in pots without any sense of order or scheme, the flowers appealing in ways hard to describe, flowers I had simply never seen before, having shapes and hues that spoke of connections natural and symbiotic and not the pretentious pairings of a florist. Above these, above the terrace’s flowers and eaves, there was a sign painted in soft silver by an elegant hand that read Jardín de Luna, or Moon Garden as my rudimentary grasp of Spanish managed to translate. A pretty name, one as pretty as the proprietor, who may have been the real reason I was so drawn to its doors. Like the flowers clustered upon each of the tables, there was something about her, something I couldn’t immediately define. She was beautiful, but her beauty was transcended, and it was only by the third or fourth visit that I realised by what: she was spiritual, emitting something that invited you, stilled you, made you want to sit and find acceptance in the mere act of sitting alone, and more often than not I would be content to do just that, to be in her vicinity at one of the tables and surrounded by the many flowers of such types I could not explain, waiting for the sun to dip behind the buildings and for the stars to emerge, or watching as the clouds drew their hidden shapes across the darkening sky.

“Astri,” she said, telling me her name on that third or fourth visit, an evening where once again I found myself drawn to the plaza. I was sat at one of the tables in her Garden of the Moon, for some reason that order of the words being more preferable to my mind than the strict translation, evoking something mysterious and special, and I wondered whether in Spanish Jardín de Luna evoked the same, the English destroying any hope of its true romance. “A pretty name,” I returned, smiling, my words automatic—her name seemed the perfect match for her face and hazel eyes, the same eyes that her daughter wore. It was the first time we’d spoken, our interactions having before been nothing but glances, my eyes following hers as she moved about each table, her hands touching the flowers where she would pause a moment as though in conversation, as though speaking with each coloured petal, to then move to another table or patron or back inside to the bar or kitchen, moments later emerging with a tray of drinks or a plate of tapas.

“I’m a botanist,” she said, “but not the usual type.” She spoke as though we were mid conversation and there was a logic to the announcement of these words, words that were coy and hinting at something else, not sexual but a sense of the spiritual, and as she moved from my table her hand grazed my arm and our skin touched and in that second I heard her—not out loud, for I was looking at her and I could see her mouth and how it didn’t move—but in my head, her voice there and present and as if she was whispering straight into my ears.

Come with me, that voice said. Come with me tonight.

To be continued… (here)

Thanks for reading. This is a continuation of Part I of The Botanist. If you enjoyed this, I’d love it if you could take a moment to click the Like button, drop by for a comment, or share the post (or all three). Such actions are the irrigations that keep the botanist’s flowers in bloom.

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I fell in love, of course. My body—grounded at once to the steps and paths of the picturesque streets—knew what it had found. There was an immediacy to it, a sensation that left me dizzy and stumbling, something I had felt only once before, far off in some other, unknown part of the world. Walking those Spanish streets, I found I wanted to embed myself in the rock and become one who lived within the white-fronted buildings, to water the flowers that overflowed from the narrow balconies and to sit in the plaza not as a tourist but as someone who was there, someone who belonged. I was overwhelmed by these feelings, flushed and somehow confused, and each morning, as the sky draped its azure blanket over that small Spanish town, I could feel everything stop—the world outside may not have existed at all.

I was lucky to be there, I realised. Such a trip was one of the few benefits of my work. My boss at the time had a fear of flying, and, what with me being junior, along with the fact that for whatever reason he seemed to have a soft spot for supporting my career, he would always ask me to go on such trips in his stead. Would you like to visit such-and-such? he would ask, and I’d respond with a yes, saying I’d be happy to, that of course I would go, asking him whether he was sure he didn’t want to visit, that it sounded like a pleasant trip and that he should go, and he would decline, making up some excuse or other, when in reality I knew that for him the idea of having to send his body halfway across the world inside a metal cylinder was, quite frankly, too terrifying to bear. Bring me back a cigar, he'd say, just as I was getting up to leave his office, a cigar for him meaning any kind of gift, something he could put on his shelf or tuck away in a drawer to look at every once in a while. He'd barely raise his eyes from his computer during this exchange, pausing only to look at me when he said the word cigar, his mind perhaps conjuring up ideas of what it would be that I would bring home as a gift, an object that would in all likelihood never turn out to be an actual cigar.

*

I had bad habits back then, in the time before my visit to the small Spanish town. I smoked and would often consult the start of each evening with two fingers of whiskey, or possibly a beer, or often both, and on Fridays, and sometimes also Thursdays, if the weather was nice or if it was gloomy, a certain malaise having descended upon my being, I would allow myself to indulge in the less salubrious activities that could be found in certain parts of the city in which I then lived. I had no conscious awareness of what I was doing, giving in to the ease of indecision and unwanting of anything beyond the transient desire of flesh, the concept of commitment as alien and terrifying as the freedom I thought I had but was too naïve to know did not even exist. Only later, in the bleeding heat of that Spanish town, would this change, but before then, before my visit to the town in mainland Spain, a town almost devoid of name and far from the sea, I was careless and carefree, I had no ties, and so to travel at almost no notice—at the drop of a hat, as is the phrase—was easy and I went where I was told, taking on the role that my boss would otherwise have assumed had he not been so terrified of the trivialities of travelling by air.

It was only natural, then, and by then automatic, that when my boss asked Would you like to visit S—? It's a small town in Spain, not tilting his head up from his computer during our exchange—not until the mention of a cigar, for him a cigar meaning any kind of gift—that I responded telling him of course, I’d be happy to go, allowing myself the routine of asking whether he was sure he didn’t want to visit the town himself, and then listening to his excuse—a thin veil of an excuse—of why he couldn’t go and that I should be the one to travel, that it’s good for me, him having a soft spot, for whatever reason, for supporting my career. And so it was that some time ago, I forget how long exactly, I made my way to that small town in Spain, the reason being for work, at least—as the phrase goes—on paper, but as it turned out for something more, something I did not realise until I was there, not knowing that it was a predestination, one that my body, through some inevitability or abstraction of fate, fell into, like a star whose density has built up so much that it reaches a point where it collapses in upon itself.

It was there that I was overcome by something. It was there that I experienced something I can barely explain.

It was there in that town that I met her—the botanist.

To be continued… (here)

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If you made it this far then “hello”. Thanks for reading. This piece emerged from nowhere this week and I’m running with it as fast as I can, not letting it go. It feels weighty in my mind, like it wants to run across many pages, so I’m going to enjoy that feeling and see how far the roots extend. I hope you’ll come with me.

Semester is here. My life is over.

OK, so exaggeration. It’s not entirely over. The students are lovely; it’s like meeting a new and giant family of 400. I get to hang out with them each week, learn their names, work out their personalities and realise just how different they are from a cohort a year ago.

It’s fun, I’m grateful, I love the opportunity to connect and to facilitate their learning … but boy is it draining.

Each time I step into a workshop or lab, there’s a mask I’m wearing. At least, I think it’s a mask. The chameleon I house inside my body fluxes its chromatophores and I change into the skin that I need to wear. To put it another way, there’s a Nathan that walks into the room that isn’t the Nathan who walks home that night, the one who collapses onto the sofa, socially and emotionally spent.

This process of changing clothes, however it works, leaves me unsure of who is the real me. Perhaps I am all of these creatures. Perhaps I am none.

Why am I saying all this?

I don’t know really. I’m just making excuses. Buying time. Attempting to write something because writing has been a precious commodity I have barely enjoyed these last weeks and was the reason my last post was so late.

So, to steer myself back on track, I’ve taken a trip into the archives of SLAKE and pulled up a very old piece. Something short. One that I’m happy to say still makes me smile. I hope you enjoy. If you do, you know what to do. Sincerest thanks, and all that.

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///

I do my best editing on the toilet.

That’s what my editor told me. Via text message. From a toilet.

We never speak on the phone, not anymore. Once he’d discovered the detrimental economy of text communication, he decided it wasn’t necessary.

Why the toilet? I wrote, unsure if I wanted to know the answer.

Because it’s quiet. No one interrupts you. There’s a certain peace to be had on a toilet.

His words continued, like we were having an actual conversation on the phone. When I thought we were done, I'd be alerted to yet another text.

It needs to be a good toilet.

A good toilet? I tapped out somewhat reluctantly, eyeing the last wisps of steam rising from my undrunk coffee.

The three dots informed a long reply was inbound.

Yes. Many factors. Natural lighting, clean (of course). White or blue tiles is ideal. Heated flooring an added bonus, though a shaft of sunlight through a skylight acceptable. Not cold, but also not hot. No air freshener, just natural air. Cosy, but not cramped and not too spacious. Do you know what I mean? There’s got to be a sense of place when you’re sat there.

I told him I’d never thought of toilets in such detail.

You should. It’ll change your life.

Change my life? I looked up. Had I been too unconcerned about toilets? In, out, done with. My usual routine. How many toilets had I passed through without any knowledge or consideration of form, layout, design? All of them, was the answer. My brain began to think of toilet architects and I couldn’t help but picture a scene of these men and women nodding and strolling from toilet to toilet within a gallery of toilets, uttering small approvals. Unable to stop myself, I imagined my editor at the centre. For some reason, he was cradling a large glass of Chardonnay.

I shook my head, aware that several minutes had past.

Do you have a favourite toilet? I ventured, unsure of why I was letting this go on.

Oh yes, many. I keep a log book.

A log book? More images and questions formed in my mind: Was the book touching his naked thigh as he scrawled away, or was it held in the air like some trophy? When visiting a public lavatory, would he wait for an empty cubicle to sit and jot within, or would he be content to rest on the sink as others washed and watched?

I decided I didn't want to ask, resolving to end the conversation. I moved away, but my phone soon vibrated. Sighing, I found myself drawn back.

The small Moleskine ones are the best, he continued, oblivious to my expression. Compact enough to remain in your pocket at all times.

At all times? This was becoming too much. My mind turned to those rare visits when, during the early stages of my literary career, we met in person. Had there really been a little notebook squished inside his pocket? At sixty, he must have accrued many such notebooks.

Then my mind recalled a visit he once made here. Somewhere within that notepad, would there be an entry from my own house?

Do you log every toilet you visit? I was typing, hating my fingers. I looked to my coffee and touched the cup. Lukewarm and ruined, I poured the contents into the sink.

His reply came an instant after I hit send.

Every one, he wrote.

But you also edit on the toilet? I asked, trying to steer the conversation back to where we had started—a piece I owed that was overdue for an online publication.

Most things. Smaller stories I’ll work on at my desk; longer pieces require a good toilet.

More questions emerged at his paradoxical response, but I had to stop this.

Look, I wrote, I have to go. I’m still shy of the word count and I can’t write with distractions.

At that, I turned off my phone. Whatever else he had to say could wait. I boiled the kettle and set about brewing another coffee.

Then I sat, staring once again at the empty page.

***

N—,

See changes. I’ve removed quotation marks. A bit livelier that way, don’t you think?

Call me.

—your editor.

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He's looking at the man in the lab coat, one Lloyd Samson, hands in his pockets and fingers fumbling with something. He's a fidgeter, Burke’s come to realise. Hands always busy. Burke's got little time for Samson, has far more time for Marie. Marie with her navy suit and pressed white shirt. Marie with her small and perfectly round peaks hidden under her shirt that taunt him when she stands up straight. Marie with her goddamned beautiful hair.

Samson’s hands have emerged from his pockets and are now playing with the cuffs of his labcoat, popping and unpopping the metal studs that do up the sleeves. He looks to Burke, stops what he's doing.

“It's not in the correct condition for dissection,” he says.

Lloyd’s lips are wet and thick and Burke thinks of a story he read as a teenager, some weird tale about fish people who inhabited a coastal town. He can't remember the name of the story, can't even remember the author, but he sure as shit remembers those fish people with their thick, wet lips. Lloyd Samson would fit right in, yessir he would.

Burke suppresses a wince, knows he's gotten distracted.

“What do you mean?” Burke says, finding his words.

“What I mean,” says Samson, fiddling still with the pop-studs on his cuffs, “is exactly that. The body,” and here he points toward the corpse, as though Burke has no knowledge of what they’re actually talking about, “is not in the correct condition for dissection.”

Burke rolls his eyes, turns to Marie. “Translate for this idiot, please.”

Marie steps around the table and tugs on Burke’s coat, pulling him to one side. She speaks in a whisper, as though afraid Samson might hear. Burke wishes she'd pull him a little closer. Just a little. If he were closer he could smell her hair. Maybe touch it.

“What Lloyd means is that the body can't be cut.” She glances back briefly to the corpse atop the autopsy table, covered in a white sheet. “The skin seems too tough.”

“Then get a sharper blade,” Burke hisses.

Marie sighs, the kind of noise Burke imagines she makes each night when waking up alone. “The scalpels are sharp,” she says. “They'd cut through leather.”

Burke ignores her words and moves to the table, picking up the scalpel from the little kidney-shaped tray. He holds the scalpel in one hand and with the other lifts the sheet, exposing the corpse’s feet. They are a dull grey, like food that has decomposed and become covered in mould. He pushes the blade into the skin. Or he tries to, at least. The scalpel does nothing, the skin resisting his attempts. He may as well be using a sock as a screwdriver. Annoyed, he places the scalpel next to the foot, that slab of meat with its weird grey tinge. The blade makes a metallic clank on the autopsy table.

“Satisfied?”

It’s Marie who speaks. Burke turns around and sees her with her arms across her chest, hiding her pert little breasts. Her eyes are wide, expectant, waiting for him to speak.

He ignores her question, asks his own: “Well?”

Marie drops her arms. “Well what?”

“Well what does it fucking mean? A body that can't be cut open!” He can feel the temper rising inside and does nothing to suppress it. Let it come, he thinks. Let it come.

Samson, who all this time has been leaning against the wall and wearing an expression Burke labels as indifferent, starts to open his mouth, but Burke cuts him off.

“No, not you. I don’t want your words. I want hers.” He stabs a finger in the air at Marie.

Marie fumbles. Her mouth moves as if she's about to say something. Nothing comes out. It’s as though she can’t remember what she's meant to—

“CUT!” the director shouts.

Burke—real name James McColl—sighs, closes his eyes for a brief moment, then spins on his heels to glare at Devin who’s sitting with his head in his hands behind the monitor. You’re not Fincher, he wants to say. We don’t need to do this so many times, you two-bit wannabe. But he holds his tongue. Burke wouldn’t, he knows, but for a few moments he releases himself from that character.

“Was it too close? Did I pull you too close?”

“What?” James asks. It’s Sarah, timid in a way that’s so different from her character of Marie that it's jarring. His brain catches up with what she meant. “No. No, it’s fine,” he says. “The distance is fine.”

Suddenly there’s a powder brush in his face, the makeup artist standing between him and Sarah. As he waits for whatever shine and sweat to be removed from his forehead, he looks over at the corpse. He doesn’t even know the guy’s name, he’s just some extra they’ve rolled in—literally, he notes, amusing himself—for what feels now like a hundred takes. Poor guy. He’s stirring under his sheet, repositioning himself. James can see the hump of his chest rise and fall and wonders at how much the guy has to hold his breath during each take.

“So are we going again?” James shouts, the powder brush now gone, and with it the makeup artist. Devin ignores him. He’s discussing something with someone from the production team. There’s too many of them, James thinks. Far too many. They’re like flies, crowding over a pile of shit.

“Whatever,” he mouths in silence, then looks around. Sarah’s back at her mark, dispelling her timidity and reassuming the confident skin of Marie. He chews his lip then puts his hands in his coat pockets, wishing there was a cigarette to be found. Christ he’d love a cigarette. He glances to the clock. 11 a.m. Not even close to lunch.

“Are we going again?” he tries once more. “Anyone? No?”

They all ignore him, continue their buzzing activity from behind the camera. He walks back over to his own mark, if only for something to do.

Eventually—an amount of time James cannot measure under the bright lights, the sort of non-time that he thinks is like in a casino, except here there's nothing to win—the first AD tells them to be in position. There's a flurry of activity and soon enough silence descends on the room, punctuated only by the clapper and the sound of Devin's voice:

“And ACTION!”

*

The camera focuses on Wilson Burke. His back is to the door. The focus shifts to Lloyd Samson, standing there with his hands in his white labcoat pocket. He’s fiddling with something, but the camera can’t see what.

“It's not in the correct condition for dissection.”

The focus pulls to Burke.

“What do you mean?”

Now back to Samson.

“What I mean is exactly that. The body,” and the camera sees Samson point to the corpse next to him, “is not in the correct conditions for dissection.”

Back to Burke, who turns his head slightly.

“Translate for this idiot, please.”

The camera pans, focuses on Marie’s face and her navy blue suit. She takes a step toward Burke, the camera maintaining its precise focus. She grabs the sleeve of Burke’s coat and pulls him toward her. Their heads come close together.

“The body,” she says, glancing at the corpse that remains out of focus, “can't be cut. The skin seems too tough.”

“Then get a sharper blade,” Burke hisses and breaks free from her grasp, the camera following him as he moves to grab the prop scalpel.

“LINE! Wait for the fucking line, James! Jesus.”

The camera sees James McColl whirl on his heels. The cheeks of his face are flushed red, his brow furrowed, and he—

—the camera stops recording.

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Something different (and late!) this week, inspired by the lengths actors go to to embody their characters and think about their backstory and emotions that run silent to their lines. I see Josephine do this with scripts all the times, scribbling character notes and feelings in the margins. There's a lot of creativity and skill in that.

A thin film of cellophane is wrapped tightly around the box, the plastic folded over at the corners into neat little triangles. The folds resemble small and transparent napkins. A machine did it, of course, but it's so neat that it makes you wonder how it’s even possible.

The box is one of many slotted into the shelf. You don't know why you have so many. You know exactly why you have so many.

You slide the box out, inspect the edges. It has everything you desire: shape, contents, an attractive back design. This could be the one you want. But it isn't. You cannot say why. So you slide it back and extract another, placing it on your palm where it has the same slim shape, the same cellophane-wrapped form, the same gentle weight that wants to drag your hand to the floor. Except … it’s lighter than you expect—lighter than you’re used to. Not this one, you realise. You slide it back, extract another. The pattern on the back is pleasant, but not distracting. It has a symmetry and tessellation that would have made a certain Dutch graphic artist happy. The weight of this one is correct. You know this by instinct. You know the precise contents within. If even one of the many flat rectangular pieces housed inside was removed, you would know. That is the extent of your intimacy with the box and its contents.

You smile. This one. This one tonight.

Feeling the sense of relief that this act of choice brings, you dig the nail of your thumb into the plastic film—at the point where one of the small, transparent napkins is folded over at the corners—and peel it back. The plastic comes away with a satisfying rip, releasing the box from its cellophane confines. It makes a sound your mind has learned to associate with a kind of ritualistic pleasure. You discard the plastic onto the table. Later, you’ll move it to the bin, but for now your attention is on the box.

Next comes the seal. You’re never quite sure whether you should attack it with your thumbnail or seek a blade. You opt for the nail, same as you always do. A blade would need to be sourced and the kitchen is at least a room away. It takes several attempts, but your nail gets through the seal and you smooth the broken edges around the crescent tab, making sure no residue of glue remains. It would be disastrous if so. The wondrous rectangles inside will, eventually, become blemished and warped, but their initial exposure must be kept pristine.

You open the lid, popping it out from its crescent enclosure and folding it back on its scored hinge. There's no aroma, no release like the scent of a new book, but it has the same sensation to your mind. It elicits a brief and beautiful burst of pleasure you have come to desire. It's why you do it. It's not at all why you do it.

You part the little paper flaps on either side of the opening—the ones that would otherwise prevent a smooth extraction—and tilt the deck at an angle. The cards come gliding out, gliding as though their freedom has finally arrived. You are their saviour. You have accepted them just as they have accepted you. They slide out and onto your palm, the place where they are destined to belong. They are slippery, like little flat fish, yet somehow they retain their whole. You spread them, inspect them, adjust to how they feel, confirming for yourself that they are right. That this is the right deck. You split the packet, abut the ends and push them together with perfect pressure to let them weave in their glorious way, the one-after-another-after-another whisper until the whole deck is interlaced and then bowed and allowed to cascade, the noise now a snake’s hiss.

You smile again. This one tonight.

You return the cards to the case. Enclosed within their sacred box, you slide them into your pocket. Later, they will be used. Later, they will be extracted and fanned. They will be palmed, shifted, spread. They will be shuffled—falsely and with a casual hand that belies the thousands and thousands of hours repeating the action. They will be turned, doubled, tripled; they will be memorised, miscalled, jogged and stealed and tossed.

They will be all this, just as they have always been.

To you, they will be all this.

It is why you do it. It is precisely why you do it.

But for now, the comfort and security of their shape against your thigh is a gift you carry out into the night.

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A short afterword. It’s not my norm to write in the second person1. I feel a little tense…

Anyway. You may know that I have a deep love and affection with cards and close-up magic, having spent numerous years in my twenties working as a magician. It is one of my first loves. Though we have had our quarrels over the years, we have never truly fallen out. To my left as I write, there is a shelf containing many unique, rare, and varied decks of cards. Some are expensive. Stupidly so2. Others are commonplace. In the bedroom cupboard are bricks of several more, the classic Bicycles in red and blue, sealed and wrapped and waiting to be used.

If you’d like to read more of this passion, I wrote some more words about it in my early days here. It’s a piece that remains one of my favourite slices of word-output because it was written directly from the heart. You can read that by clicking here.

For some time I didn’t move. I was fixated on the noose. It swayed back and forth, twisting in the air by the invisible hand of the wind. It had a freedom to it, a melodious sway that sung of movement unconstrained, its hoop untroubled by any head around which it was destined to be cinched. Back and forth, back and forth it continued to twist and sway and all I could do was stare—stare and stare until it started to grow, the noose getting larger, the platform and its posts and crossbeam increasing in size, swelling, filling more and more of my vision until I could make out each fibre of the deathly rope, the sausage-like thickness of the hemp, the splinters and nails that projected from the wood.

I’d walked right up to it.

My feet, carrying me of their own accord, had brought me to the gallows unaware.

I took another step, crunching the floor of fallen leaves. I reached out my hand, wanting to touch and feel the grain of the wood, perhaps to step up onto the platform, the flat board with its trapdoor, the place where feet—trembling and wet with urine—would stand, awaiting the moment when the floor was no longer there and the eternal abyss beckoned with its swift descent. The temptation was too much. I was starting to move, reaching forward, somehow wanting to know what it would feel like to—

“Many have I hanged.”

A man’s voice came from somewhere close. The quiet pain of his words froze me in place.

“Many have I hanged”, the voice said. “Many have I hanged. Heavy is the heart that has hanged.”

I turned my head toward the sound. Hunched behind the far side of the platform was a man. He was enrobed in a woollen garb the colour of dirt, a hood pulled up over his head that showed within it nothing but the grim black of night.

“Many have I hanged. Heavy is the heart that has hanged.” Wind blew in from the east, ruffling the man's hood, setting the noose further in its erratic swing. “Many have I hanged. Heavy is the heart that has hanged.”

Sweat erupted along my spine, under my arms, across the nape of my neck where it ran, steady as a river in spring, to join the flood that made itself known on my back. Entire degrees were stripped from the world. I stood paralysed and cold next to the wooden gibbet, hearing repeated and repeated without end the words of a ghost. It was a ghost, I realised. Never before had I witnessed such (and never since have I seen the same) but on that night, right beside the platform that never truly was there, I was certain I was looking at a ghost—the hunched and hooded form of a hangman—one who wept a cruel and accursed sound, a sound that I cannot remove from my mind, even now, all these decades later, as though lamenting the souls he had struck from this earth.

“Many have I hanged. Heavy is the heart that has hanged.”

He went on and on, relentless, the tremor in his voice a wraith to the spiral cochlea of my ear. In my paralytic state, I didn’t know what to do, though I became certain of something: he had no knowledge that I was there. How could he? Whatever time or space he occupied, it was not the same as mine. We were dislocated, temporally estranged, casualties of fate or chronologically entwined; a thousand other terms could describe how two beings so disparate in time could co-inhabit a singular moment. It was some error of the universe, some glitch or rift or broken seam. These words are all I can proffer as explanation.

I wanted to scream, to run, but it was as though my feet were glued to the soil. My mind defaulted, imagining that somehow the hangman’s hands slid and elongated away from from his body, racing across the ground like snakes to wrap themselves around my legs, holding me in place to suffer forever in his endless repetition. Many have I hanged. Heavy is the heart that has hanged.

His head turned in my direction and the hood fell back, revealing the tormented lines of his face.

I screamed.

I passed out.

*

When I awoke, I was lying on the path beside the bushes. The heat of the sun bled from the ground, though I had no recollection of it having been warm the day before. It was early enough that no one had come up the hill, though if they had they would have found me there, sprawled on the floor as if drunk. They would have laughed at the corpse of my body.

My hand was swollen. It was covered in bites, a hundred tiny red spots, the trail of ants having claimed my skin, testing it with their mandibular jaws. I watched them, incapable of doing anything else, fascinated for them at the world they had discovered in such short few hours; repulsed by the swollen size of my flesh. Perhaps, I wondered, the ants thought the giant slain. Or perhaps they thought nothing at all.

Eventually, I got up, dragging my body upright. It was at that moment that I recalled what I had seen and my head shot toward the bushes and trees. There was nothing there. I knew there would be nothing there. There were only the trees in all their verdant greens and to the right the many buildings that made up the campus atop the hill, the one that looked down on the expanse and mystery below. Dawn had almost arrived, the sun still a coward behind the rise but probing the sky with its infinite rays. I stumbled down the hill, back to my dorm. I showered, got dressed. I ate breakfast with those who happened to be in the building’s kitchen. There was nothing abnormal to be found in that morning. The routine continued. I walked back up the hill to class, my eyes drawn to that place within the trees. There was nothing. The only trace of what I had seen that night was the moniker that the hill itself wore. One that remains to this day.

*

Of course, that’s how I remember it. It never happened again. For some days I tried to piece together what I had seen, trying to link the feelings spoken by the girl whose surname was a medieval tune, of the hangman whose voice repeated over and over, and of my heart, locked and incapable of beating its own blood, the organ in my chest I had extracted and offered on my palm to find it containing nothing but sunken valves. I couldn't piece it together. I still can't.

There is something else I must note, before these words I write expire. I had a friend back then, one who went to the same university. His name was The Hat. It was a strange name, one given to him by my grandfather, a man stoic and war-torn and who couldn’t understand that a cap or hat or any kind of covering for the head could be worn indoors and done so with the same freedom as a shirt. Have you seen The Hat? he would ask, and I would tell him that yes, I have, I see him often, and he would say nothing, simply nodding as though satisfied and perhaps playing witness in his mind to the conversation I might have had, the one that his brain—a brain far older and knowing than mine, having seen and outlived the cruelties of war—computed and projected towards his own inner eye. Yes, I have seen The Hat, I would repeat, and he would nod again and we would talk of something else, most likely the war.

Some months later, or perhaps it was weeks, The Hat and the girl whose name was an old English folksong—a melody that still plays out across the page as my hands form these words, undying in their pursuit for the truth—were together. This simple knowledge made me smile. Their pairing seemed correct, and with it, gradually, the confusion in my blood filtered away, lost and diluted not by time but by the glomeruli, the nephrons, the tracks of vessels that flow endlessly within.

I was, for the first time in my life, relieved.

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Thank you for reading. This was the concluding part of Gibbet, which I began last week here. As with a lot of things, I wrote this semi-consciously, its meaning buried and blurred. Extract from it whatever means the most to you. Leave the rest for the hangman.