It’s on a long concrete strip next to the highway, always stifling hot on the bitumen, surrounded like all mattress shops by other mattress shops. The showroom is small and high tech with a central machine kind of like an MRI inside of which you would lie later on, once the sales team have talked… Continue reading Memory Foam
Ah, mia figlia. The mountain rumbled on the night of the feast. Moored in the harbour was a growing civil fleet and a limping pirate crew who brought tension and small chaos and tomatoes and wooden wounds taken by British flak. Their schooners floundered with peppered hulls and as the ash climbed high and we… Continue reading Rigger Tony
Apartments are cheaper because they’re smaller and easier to pin down and because the deed has less space in which to hide as they bound about the prairies avoiding the hunt. It’s into these fields that the homes go when they’re released like healed animals back into the wilderness by the builders to become prey… Continue reading House Hunting
They made him from the beer they drained under the taps. Sloshing around, he was more ale than lager, the bar in a gentrified place, nestled in the shadow of a stadium and apartment blocks all around. They sat him in the back corner, unseeable from the road but there to find if you poked… Continue reading Barfly
The mice started it. It was their insistence on a few hours of mandatory charging at a time at a minimum rather than what they referred to as the piecemeal standard of a bit here, a bit there, some more over coffee or lunch and then the rest after hours and then all at once.… Continue reading Stationery
She’s pushing on like she’d planned, recording on her smartwatch, planning to rate it not hard but at the high end of medium. She’s sweating a little even in the early spring rainforest chill. It’s early. She’s pushing through the light filtered by the canopies that were closing in. The trees gnarling as she continued.… Continue reading Flight Time, pt. 3
They only bury their dead in winter. From spring to fall they keep them cold, refrigerated in their homes beneath the floorboards. They’re exhumed as the first of the snow starts to fall. The village takes the second day of snow off altogether and they head to the graveyards on the edge of the town… Continue reading Snow Angels
Read part one here. It’s always someone’s responsibility and today it’s his because he’s the oldest and he’s built this all up for everyone and he’s paying — well, indirectly — for them all to be here today but there’s no time to get hung up on anything that’s not what’s coming without warning. Every… Continue reading Flight Time, pt. 2
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
This is not fiction. I had a target in 2024 to write 1,000,000 words for the year. That's 2,740 words per day every day on average. It's a hard thing to do and it was the challenge for the year because it was hard. I did not hit the target. I came in, as per… Continue reading 101,203 Short
Zac van Manen 