Reading a biography of Elon Musk a few years back, I kept thinking about my school mate, Greg. He passed away 8 years ago. I wish Greg had been an Elon Musk. He studied engineering and computing so that he could design and build a military space fleet, but didn’t quite get there in this […]
INTERNATIONAL BURNS DAY I thought that it must have been International Burns Day with the victims on parade, their different scars on display. Marks I had not seen before. Hair up, showing pigmentless flesh below the ear. Flashmark along the arm. Puckered skin running down the rear of a shoulder. Are these the marks that […]
When he heard the cracking before the lights had even been doused — a noise he would later realize was the sound of small facial bones breaking — when he looked up and saw the man’s face turning into someone else’s, the boy stopped paying attention to the stuffed horse he had been pulling hair […]
If only the boy could talk. He had a tongue in his head: Joe had checked. What horrors had silenced it? The usual, probably. Not that I am counting or anything, but my 20th published story, Mid-life Crisis, is now live and available for your free reading pleasure at Chrome Baby magazine. When do we first […]
Coming soon, The final hypotheses of Professor G. [UPDATE: available now, click on the link.) Professor G has had walk on roles in some of my previous stories: My Life as a Lizard, The Boulevardier, and Mr Cranky. He discovers that even in the tiny universe of his own story, he is not the most […]
“You will be free; you will die and be reborn. I will guide you to what you want, and to what is fit and proper for you. Tell me what it is.” “You don’t want me to kill the others …”. The Intercessor inclined his head in a nod. “It is for each of them […]
Very sorry to read of Peter Corris‘s death today. It has been a while since I read any of Cliff Hardy’s adventures, but I read a lot of Corris in the past. Unlike me, he was not Sydney born, but in his Hardy detective stories, he exposed many sides of Sydney to me that I […]
Four years since MH17 was shot out of the sky, four years since our telephone rang in the early hours … Here is what I wrote then.
I had a dream, and it was bloody awful. I blame my younger daughters. They were discussing stress dreams, so then I went off and had one. I was in India, catching a bunch of trains, and every time I was on a platform I saw someone die. People just leaping into trains. I won’t […]
Fucken hungry. He could murder a cold one too, a dozen, but he knows he could drink a sea and it wouldn’t fill him with what he needs. He’s just taking a breather. No one could deny he’s been digging away down here in the dark. Working hard. Its only when he looks up that […]
Nobody is looking 