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
It's not so complicated but there are a few simple rules to follow to make it easier on yourself and your household and the dishes too — because this is the way they like it. It’s uncommon knowledge that they negotiated fair and square in the postwar boom of the 1950s, when utilities in the… Continue reading How To Pack A Dishwasher
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
Years ago they began to hide treasure deep in your Feeds and For You pages. They’re there too on the last pages of your web searches, at the end of Reel, the last Story there is to see. Documentation for online discoveries of this kind are just as rare as documented discoveries of the real… Continue reading Pot of Scrolled
I never should have asked. It was the pink ones I was always curious about and my parents had nothing in my childhood in the way of answers. Not just for that but for a lot of things which I thought for a long time were the reason I fell off the rails. It wasn’t… Continue reading Mallow Vines
Next Sunday, June 2nd, thousands of runners will line up at the northern end of Margaret Street in Brisbane’s CBD. At 6am, the gun will fire and they’ll start the 2024 Brisbane Marathon. I won’t be among them. The plan was to be, of course. For 16 weeks I trained and through April I ran… Continue reading Non-Starter
NB: Hotfoot is a personal essay, not so much short fiction. It was my submission to the Calibre Essay Prize for 2024. It was unfortunately unsuccessful so here it is in the public eye this way instead. Still, enjoy. -- When you start running a lot everyone asks what you’re running from. They’re joking, by and large,… Continue reading Hotfoot
Zac van Manen 