I wrote this while counting continued, before concession. It's better that way than with an updated edit. Enjoy. He’s the son of a Dutch tiler who’s no longer with us. He was made on the way over and he was, during the last Coalition government, the Chief Whip of the Australian Federal Parliament. “I don’t… Continue reading Preferential
If you're marathon training in Brisbane and you're looking for an almost exclusively hilly route to get your legs tender and ready for what's going to be a pancake flat Gold Coast Marathon, do I have a route for you! This simple hill route is easy to follow but boy oh boy will you start… Continue reading Up And Up And Up
No one knows, really, because it’s not the kind of thing you prepare for. Even if you’d’ve given it some thought it comes on faster in the moment in some ways and slower in others such that it breaks all the plans you might have made. Everything cuts out and there are breaking reports of… Continue reading Flight Time
He had to stop himself swearing because the kids were catching on. “How was I supposed to see that?” “You weren’t,” the crashed into driver said, “but maybe stay this side." The Volvo had bounced off the other car and they were both now shouldered on the side of the motorway. The crashed into driver… Continue reading Indicator
They never otherwise went that high but he was lost and then curious. He found himself at the soft end of an ambient warmth through the air of someone passing through not recently but lately and still up there, somewhere, maybe on the way up, maybe on the way down. He was hungry but that… Continue reading Rook
Bear with me. This is translated from provincial Norman, handwritten by farmers, into modern English. It’s not a tale like the Canadian Winnie. Instead this bear had fur as brown as its heart was black, furious and jealous and maniacal about its boundaries deep in the heart of Normandy near the northern French coast. The… Continue reading Camembear
Pizza is as good as old food can get. Attested there in the dying days of the first millennium AD, it’s lasted as long as fresh new ingredients can be found to layer on top of a flat bread with sauce, then topping, then cheese, roughly. Of course tastes change but never has it been… Continue reading A Pineapple Pizza Coup
On alternating Monday nights you take the green bin out with the red bin and the yellow recycling waits for the off-weeks. You remember this because you’re running down the other side of the hill and the rain that threatens to linger has softened the purple flowers to mush on the concrete so you slow… Continue reading Jacaranda
He’d dreamed a lot about his end as a grey crackling, loud and deliberate. Between them they were sure it was a fire. When the building’s fire alarms went off, preceded by makeshift orange and yellow visions of her own, it was a return to a life of sorts. A fate the colour of smoke.… Continue reading Newfangled
Their language is a strong one and there are few places now in which you hear it in the wild, their homes constrained to the darker dens on the emptying bottom floors of department stores in local malls’ rusting anchor tenancies. As their slow fade to relevance has been tweeted to death far faster than… Continue reading Web Strings
Zac van Manen 