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
The Lovesong of the Flounder
June 2016
…or buying flounder in New Zealand out of season.
(with apologies to Prufrock)
Rhombosolea Plebeia – The Sand Flounder
Let us go there, you and I
Where the salt marshes are spread out ‘neath the sepia sky
Like a poem anaesthetised on a page. Continue reading
The second father
July 2010 – Here’s me supplanted, replaced, reduced. Reduced to this. Someone’s in my house. Look in the window and see. There’s Julia my wife and Bo and Bea the kids, curled up watching television—a perfect domestic tableau, a twenty-first century Van Eyck, (except Julia’s not deathly pregnant and I’m not some po-faced merchant limply holding her hand and it’s not autumn). Instead, I’m the overweight balding guy standing in the dark in the winter snow like a thief, like a perv, peering through the window at my little family and shivering… Continue reading
Up from the beach…
November 2010
On its final approach the plane turned across the island and Cathy saw the turquoise line of the water and then something dark, a cruising shape out there in the lagoon where the children splashed and then the run of palm trees and the ground coming up with the engines roaring.… Continue reading
In the Emerald Hotel
After nine months, one hundred and twenty-seven flights, one hundred and ten hotel rooms (fawn walls and twenty-four-hour corridors) and two hundred and sixty-five thousand frequent flyer miles, I’ve arrived on this high plateau called exhaustion. Nothing much grows here: a few leathery-leaved plants, xerophytes adapted to low moisture, low fertility and air freshener and there’s us, the travellers… Continue reading
Peter Frankis writes 