“I think when it comes to it nobody really believes the human race deserves to be saved because we’re particularly deserving. Some people might think we deserve it because we’re particularly clever, but cleverness is the kind of thing that you only recognise or care about through cleverness. The universe doesn’t care about cleverness. The […]
The sun was setting far out on the horizon, sinking into dust. The pumpjacks were cast into stark silhouette, silent and still, like a herd of mechanical behemoth wild horses frozen in their gallop out across the frontier. It was fitting, thought Clara. “The horses that carried us stopped, so we climbed down to rest.” […]
They ran from Vile Lane to the East Arm. A small slice of city steeped in their sweat and blood. It had been a childhood game at first, but what started as play turned to pride, then to war. The Briar Patch Boys ran these streets now. They were these streets. To the South was […]
In practice, nothing will ever work one hundred percent of the time. Apart from some crazy idealists (who posit that since theory and practice are never the same and since in theory nothing ever works perfectly in practice, in practice it is possible to make something that works perfectly, and who almost never go on […]
“My mother was a rockstar. None of that commercial bullshit they have these days, either. Honest-to-goodness, fuck-the-man punk rock. Chances are you’ve heard her play. Maybe the more vinylly-obsessive of you would even recognise the name. But I’m not going to tell you her name. I only mention her by way of showing that I […]
As he walked down the street, houses loomed out of the gloaming on either side. They were now indistinct, now perfectly clear but somehow wrong, now indistinct again and passed away behind him. His footsteps took him faster than they should have and soon, without noticing, he was on another street; one that was not […]
The room was so dark that at first he wasn’t sure his eyes were open. He wandered down the hall and into the living room. The clock on the DVD player flashed a sickly green “88:88” mournfully, clearly as lost as he was. The front door was not locked. Outside the grass felt strange under […]
In the still air belowdecks, in the close and musty space that had been his cell for the past six months, he was the first to notice the smell of burning pitch. The fire started slow, and with a chill night wind howling down the river the sailors above making ready to dock had no […]
The house was nestled snugly at the base of the valley. There the trees crowd closely around the grounds, holding in the creeping fog and drifting wood smoke. In the pre-dawn light a pair of small brown eyes watched the house, unmoving, blinking from time to time, and they in turn were watched. Peter’s breath […]
It rained; an interminable kind of drizzle that walled the world in a sodden curtain, and roofed it in overcast grey. It was a melancholy sort of downpour – barely a distant cousin to a thunderstorm, dark and angry, that charges the air, and stands hair on its end; certainly no more than a distant […]