- Start with your name: last first and then first last.
- Do you have a preferred name?
- Have you changed your name since your last return?
- Have you changed your name in the last five years?
- What did your name used to be? (Was it Amanda?)
humor
Happy now
Satan asks
— Well?
— I never thought much about it. Certainly, I never believed any of this was likely. But I guess it’s what you don’t know that trips you up. I’ve always thought of myself as…well… moral. Continue reading
The best man
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
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
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
Peter Frankis writes 