Marry me—let’s do it today
and tomorrow we’ll toast tequila
I’ll show you the fires of Manua Kea
and you can show me the dark side of the moon. Continue reading
Month: January 2017
untitled
Two old palings lean together. One wets a rolly
wrist all knobs and gristle Continue reading
The futurefone
We were in bed when the future called. Lara sat straight up. ‘Oh god,’ she said bunching the bedclothes up against her mouth. ‘Answer it,’ she breathed, her eyes wild and staring. ‘Answerit, answerit ANSWER IT.’ Then she forced a fist into her mouth biting down and next she was hitting out at me arms windmilling like a wild thing, ‘Answer it.’
Continue reading
The road not taken (38.0072° S, 177.2871° E)
Rather than the long road, the coast road,
the narrow goat road that follows
the bowls and bends of this sundered shore,
sea on your left or now on your right,
we turned inland, for we had far to go.
Is love still possible?
I found this story while browsing the archive this morning. It’s one of my early stories but it still made me smile. And the question remains…
June 2004 – Even though everything in the Universe was accelerating away from everything else and domestic life had become increasingly strange with widespread disintegration expected, Harry Plum, who was editing vowels, only really started to worry when the ‘a’ disappeared from the line he was working on. Continue reading
Funnier
‘I like the story, really I do—’
Ed wasn’t looking good. He was greyer, if that’s possible and he’d put on weight, and it wasn’t the pudge of some jolly fellow but the fat that one day soon is going to choke your aorta and leave you face down in your spaghetti marinara. Continue reading
Fuse country…
They sit in the car looking straight ahead. ‘I’d better go,’ she says. They stay. In the parking lot cars come and go. Some drivers reverse carefully between the lines others fang in careless.
‘There’s a pattern. If you watch long enough.’… Continue reading
To the lake again…
March 2005 – Janey was in the car and the car was in the lake again. She looked out at the cathedral columns of weed and the parallels of brown light and thought of nothing – no regrets, no concerns, no consideration. She was adrift beneath the surface of thinking and she had about two minutes of air – plenty of time. Plenty… Continue reading
How to pass the Turing test: a study guide…
First developed in 1950, the Turing test remains the premier means by which computer programs can exhibit intelligent behaviour that is indistinguishable from that of a human. How a program performs in a brief natural conversation is used to distinguish between the real humans and the synthetic… Continue reading
Peter Frankis writes 