Issue 3: wild west

Issue 3 brings the dark and deadly, the satirical and provocative. Tread with caution as you scroll through this ever-evolving Wild West.

We’re privileged to release these voices, both new and familiar, of writers from Aotearoa and elsewhere.

~~~

Featuring short stories from Tara Leckie, Sherryl Clark, Samara Patel, Eartha Davis, Laura Borrowdale, Anthony Baker and Gregory Bennett; and poetry from Charles Broughton, Zia Ravenscroft, Janie Shaw, Elliot M., Ronan Ira, Jedidiah Vinzon, Meander Farrow, Nicola Easthope and Jason Lingard.

Cover art by Madeline McGovern.

Page art by Kylie Woods.

• welcome to the wild west ~ Brooke, Madeline & Stephanie

  Kia ora koutou, 

  It is our great privilege to welcome you to our third issue: wild west! And wild it is indeed. We received an incredible quality of submissions, and applaud your commitment to throwing a myriad of different lassos around our theme, bending it out of shape and to your will.

  We now approach circular’s one-year anniversary. Thank you again to everyone who has supported us, and to those who have sent in submissions; we appreciate your vulnerability and trust in sharing these works!

  The particular Wild West that has been conjured in circular issue 3 is certainly no one place in particular, but rather a conglomeration of many. In our wild digital age, many of us are constantly feeling overwhelmed and overstimulated. There seems to be a constant pressure, a need even, to keep shifting and absorbing as quickly as our software updates. While reviewing for issue 3 we certainly felt this coming through – not only in the works we received from writers here in Aotearoa, but from submitters overseas, too. The many takes on the theme can only reinforce the incredible opportunity found in using genre as a springboard. It can help us to express our perception of our current world in new and intriguing ways. We hope that you enjoy the works we have selected as much as we do – see their empathy, fears, challenges, and also their beauty.

  So bring on the dark and deadly, the satirical and provocative. Issue 3 is full of contrast, texture and grit. We will now let these pieces speak for themselves, but remember this: tread with caution as you scroll through this ever-evolving Wild West.

• Here Comes the Wild West ~ Charles Broughton

  kiss kiss bang bang
  for the dead and dying
  for the fallen whēkau
  and lone kōkako flying
  up up and away
  as they echo nancy on the ground
  when she sings of that awful sound
  when her baby shot her down

  pew pew to the piopio 
  of islands north and south
  the haunting huia songs
  that were ripped from the mouth
  for beneath a killing moon
  it was the ass who saw the angel
  and to Balaam’s hubris swooned 
  to a tune that will always be painful

  for you may try to kiss kiss
  boo boos that can’t be taken back
  so collect the tumbleweeds of hihis
  and frame the lost avian stack
  by caging her close and tight
  if it makes you feel any better
  knowing it could have been a nest
  if you’d held your tongue and let her

  —

  Charles Broughton is a Masters Graduate of Victoria University of Wellington currently residing in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. His creative work explores religion, art, myth, and femininity. His work can be found at @nicholasrhodespoetry on Instagram.
  

• Rosa ~ Tara Leckie

  The chasm emerged first as a seam splitting the floor, barely wide enough to drop a coin through, transformed within a week to a maw that gaped. The sisters understood. They fed it in piety, praying as they did, throwing in their things that they had once made the mistake of thinking they could not do without, dried flowers, and their cups and knives and forks and bedclothes, the candlesticks and the etchings on the wall: all shoved in to that ever-hungry mouth. 

  Rosa left the convent when they threw her bed in, when she spent the night on a mattress on the bare washed-earth floor, coverless of even a blanket, and hearing below her the movement of the earth rupturing. The slow, definite shuddering of earth and rock. She could hear her sisters in the room next to hers too, digging the tiles out of the walls and scratching psalms into them. They were to feed to the chasm. Rosa traced the tiles in her own room with her fingertips and lingered over the chill of them, and decided she would not miss the convent of St Catherine.

  She looked about her room. Moonlight cast straight in with the cold night air. She had been instructed to take down her plain wood shutters that morning; the bareness of her room was illuminated in a clear hand. There was nothing. First she had thrown in her bed, and then her mattress, her blanket: now it was just the washed-earth floor and the habit she wore. It was so simple to leave. She had no things to gather anymore, not even her shoes. 

  (When she had left the old house in Lover’s Junction there had been so much to say goodbye to – the lace eyelet curtains and the piano that needed tuning, the worn rug at the top of the stairs, the poppies waving along the path. Her mother’s mouth pressed into a line so hard – Rosa understood it had been to keep back tears. To think that all had only been three months ago.)

  Was there anyone to miss? A week before she would have certainly thought so, but in the days that passed that feeling of connection had left. Outwardly her sisters appeared good. They were humble and in their words, at least, still praised and followed the Lord. But they acted in a unified obedience, an obedience that was led without words but seemed on instinct. This instinct was beyond Rosa – she saw it in the others but couldn’t find it herself. She didn’t think she wanted to.

  Rosa trod in her bare feet down the two flights of wooden stairs, tracing her hand along the earthen wall for balance. She had helped dismantle the handrail just that afternoon, taking the nails out with Sister Myrtle and Sister Sophia. They had all worked without speaking, and Rosa hated the unbuffered sound of cracking wood and careful, methodic, relentless destruction that echoed throughout the large building. With the other sisters she had neatly stacked the rail pieces and boards at the foot of the stairs. The nails in a pile of their own. Leaning amongst the rafters above, elderly Sister Marian had carefully retrieved the nest of the mourning doves that the convent had provided shelter to for so long, climbed down the support beams and walked with her typical grace to the edge of the chasm. While in continuous prayer she took the three speckled eggs to the edge of the open pit and let them fall. A chorus of pale blue droplets, one by one, into the dark. Before Sister Marian could throw the nest in after, there came a rustling sound, soft and loud, and three adult doves rushed out and flew in circles around the room. All the sisters stopped their work, grabbed at each other and whispered. Eyes bright and hands clasped: Our proof! It is a miracle.

  Rosa passed softly through the rest of the convent. She hoped to retrace the route of her induction in reverse, one last time: until, stepping through the north transept, she caught sight of the chasm. That evening it had been huge, overwhelming, a giant pit in the middle of the thoroughfare, floorboards rupturing upwards as if something had burst through. Now by night it spanned all the way to the walls, the wooden pillars nearby sloping sideways, the domed roof splintering inwards. Rosa saw that to make her way down the nave she would have to press her back against the walls and edge around the chasm. She shuddered, made the sign of the cross once and prayed, then turned on her heels to find her way to the side door. She found instead the gap where the door had been, taken off its hinges. Outside, the desert called.

  Rosa stepped out into the night without a backwards glance. There was nothing to gather on the way, no food that she knew of. She could still hear the scratching sounds from inside behind her, of some of the sisters working through the night, but focused instead on the desert’s own noises, the breeze tugging through scrub, the rhythmic shaking of seed heads. She rounded the building, taking care to focus on the path ahead of her, not to look at the low flickering light of candles in open windows, candles that would be laid directly on stone floors in a massing heap of their own wax. Not to see the shadows of women and their industry: instead she kept her eyes steadily on the convent gates and what lay beyond them. The iron bolt was drawn against them. When Rosa moved it back the weight and solidity in her hands was comforting. 

  She closed the gates behind her, keeping her eyes low, and walked quicker and quicker the trail to town. Not to Lover’s Junction, but the nearby watering hole, Quarrel. She quickly passed the first of the many cairns laid that indicated travellers were on the right road to the convent, with the roses growing out of them. The roses were alive, but barely, dead-heads nodding in the desert wind. She paused and pinched a half-wilted rose off, and using its thorns pinned it to her habit. Then turned and looked behind her. The convent was barely visible at a distance, a smudge in the blue-black of the night, vaguely sad and menacing. The night rustled out to Rosa. The strange noises of it were becoming more and more alive. She pressed on quickly. She felt suddenly like perhaps she had made a very rash decision. But she couldn’t stay, and she wouldn’t follow the sisters wherever they were heading.

  Rosa withdrew this from her mind for now, focused on her own breath and the things ahead of her. It was a two-hour ride to Quarrel, roughly five by foot. She would arrive perhaps with the sunrise. The sun would climb slowly over the buildings and bathe them, the stone and the earthen walls would be licked over, first lavender dusk, then etching bronze and orange. Then day would creep in and there would be the usual problems of living. She would go into the general store and cut her hands asking to do anything. If there was no work at the store she would walk barefoot across the street, press open the salon doors and the morning light would cut across the dust of the previous night, the dulled glass look in everyone’s faces. She would pick up a broom and help the bar staff sweep up broken glass and ask if they needed a dancer or somebody to pour drinks or nod and listen and be touched. They would ask her if she could keep her habit on and she would say, I’d rather anything but that, and they would ask her, Do you want food in your belly? They would lend her a dress for the day and she would put the habit on only in the evenings, and let her hair fall down straight, take off her loaned boots and put on her bare feet again. She would not need to speak if she didn’t want to. She would avoid drink and she would avoid cards and the other girls could call her whatever they wanted. She would keep her mind to herself, and the mistress would still keep her money and drive up her debts – the new clothes, the bedding, the hot water, even if she kept her fare as strict, stricter even, than when she was with the sisters. And when the gauchos came to town with their creased faces and unsorry eyes Rosa would steal out under the violence, with her worn-in boots she still owed money on, and jump a horse and ride her way to Hereafter, through the desert night again. She would leave with her habit folded on the iron bed, the sheets straightened neat and the corners tucked in.

  In the meantime, Rosa shivered and tucked her hands into her armpits to keep warm and  walked and listened. There were sounds calling from across the plains: the whisper of the grasses and the breeze and the brush and the sinking of earth and dirt and women, giving up the days of their lives to a hunger, working in fealty to something that lent them promises without words.

  —

  Tara is a short fiction writer living in Te Whanganui a Tara. She desperately wants somebody to take her fishing. You can find her at https://linktr.ee/taraleckie or on Instagram as @nonstopcricket.

• most of me is tiger lily/carpal mountain syndrome ~ Zia Ravenscroft

  please be kind enough to remind me
  that my body is a thing for living. a valley run dry
  last night, i took off my clothes in the dark
  alone with the orange spilling through and
  casting shadows on the blue. i felt bare and easily
  cherished, and slept knowing i would wake early:
  before the sun, even.

  i’m a tree with a knife stuck in it
  and the etching of a thousand initial hearts
  i pretend to know what i’m doing
  i make plans to lie under the moon tonight
  not quite full, gibbous
  summer nights always make me swollen at the throat
  like something needs to flee

  all these wasps i’ve thought about swallowing all
  the ice water i’ve been told to drink all
  pouring out from my mouth and
  up to the sky like a reverse rainfall
  aren’t we all in need of a good storm
  from time to time?
  turns out love is a gale
  (a force of nature)

  it seems it always ends here: desert road, summer woozy
  and hot. we’ve found ourselves in this oozing landscape painting
  where the horizon never ends and is also somehow lit up:
  kind of bonfire the way you can still feel the sun under your skin
  even in the dark. big moon, big uneasy, shaking red and west,
  all melty with sage, hay fever, pollen, gorse flowers
  dust on our hands. every canyon
  is a carved, lovesick thing

  —

  Zia Ravenscroft (he/they) is a writer, drag king, actor, and boytoy extraordinaire currently studying in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. He has previously been published in Starling, Overcom, and The Spinoff, among others. In 2023, they performed at the National Poetry Slam Finals. He is a member of the queer filmmaking collective The New New. They can be found on Instagram as @insolentsaint.

• HUNTING ~ Sherryl Clark

  They said they were there to hunt wild pigs, but she knew they were after deer. This far into the wilderness, who would check? She’d never seen a wildlife officer this far west, and besides, the Americans were ready to pay off anyone who appeared and started asking questions.

  The first night at the remote lodge, after cooking dinner, she escaped outside, leaving the men to drink red wine and whisky. She desperately needed space from their drunken boasting and the red-rimmed eyes that followed her everywhere. She shouldn’t have agreed to be cook again. Or come back to this valley. But Mark had begged her. He reckoned he’d go bankrupt – finally – unless this hunting tour went ahead. 

  Men with guns. Urge to kill. Fuck the rules.

  Far from the lodge, she found the cave again, gave the dog a whistle, and it followed her in. They curled up together on the floor, which seemed softer than her bed in the cabin. The darkness was bliss, the silence was bliss. It was like being enveloped in a thick blanket, protected and calm. The local myth said these caves were sacred, and entry was banned. Not for her.

  Sometime after midnight, she was roused from her sleep by shots, and then distant shouting. The dog sat up, rigid, whining. She held it back, knowing something was very wrong, but it wasn’t her job to go and check, or even do anything. That way lay risks she wasn’t willing to take. She and the dog lay awake for the rest of the night, waiting for the cave opening to lighten.

  Just after dawn, they crept back to the cabins. She half-expected to see bodies around the campfire, but everything was empty and silent. Too silent. Even the birds weren’t singing their chorus. 

  Mark was supposed to sleep in the main cabin with the rich guy who owned the helicopters, be at his beck and call. She knocked softly at first, then loudly. Should she start breakfast? But the silence… Then it was broken by a faint moan. She listened, followed it, opening doors. Nothing. The cabins were empty.

  Down to the stream then, which crashed over mossy boulders and fallen branches, all the way down the mountain. That’s where she found them all, throats ripped out, bodies piled up like tree slash. The dog told her. It shivered and trembled, a constant low whine in its throat as it backed away. She followed it, pausing only to sling her pack onto her back. She’d tell the police she’d camped up on the ridge to get a phone signal. The dog wouldn’t contradict her.

  —

  Sherryl Clark writes fiction and poetry, for both adults and young readers, and has recently rediscovered her love of flash fiction. Her favourite genre for her novels is crime, but her short fiction ventures into all sorts of places and times.

• The Beginning, The End, The Beginning ~ Janie Shaw

  I called it the year of the twins
  When spring licked the hoarfrosts in pink strokes
  and the farm gifted her 
  own folklore 
  

  That season bore Janus 
  and the late spring snow glimpsed a beginning 
  and an end 
  and a beginning 
  Like the ring my mother gave me under the pine needles in December 
  before the new year 

  Sheep scattered their bloody birth across tussocks 
  blood and clear cling-wrapped the earth 
  in a kiss of life and death 
  Beginning and end 

  They bore two and disowned one
  I asked dad why 
  love wasn’t enough 
  He said the wild had a way 
  

  On a Wednesday in the school lab
  the teacher drew a surprise from the ice 
  Janus
  Body of wool, frozen in a capsule 
  for the ogling eyes of the cohort 
  Girls gawping, drowned in faux horror
  secretly revelling in the story
  Boys asking to touch and pushing a punch 

  That spring the year of the twins 
  bore twenty-seven outcasts 
  I named them all 
  and remembered each
  Spent hours caressing shivering bundles 
  soothing their abandonment 
  but I wasn’t their mother 

  Dad bought Janus to show mum 
  in worry perhaps 
  The farm boy muttered bicephalic
  of curses
  blamed the weather 
  and the seed

  But I never thought Janus was an omen
  rather a signal of the beginning
  the last to come before the snow melt
  And the end of the year of the twins 

  —

  Janie Shaw is a folk musician (Just Janie), poet and artist, born and raised in the heart of Central Otago. She currently resides in Ōtautahi. She wrote and recorded her debut EP Muse and Musician in the Blue Mountains, NSW last winter and is currently working on a double single and full-length album. Janie studied a Postgraduate Diploma in Arts Therapy at Whitecliffe Collage and a Bachelor of Arts in Education, Psychology and Writing at the University of Otago. She works part-time in mental health and creative wellbeing at Ōtautahi Creative Spaces. Janie’s poetry and lyrical landscapes offer an intimately raw window into her experiences of the world around her, love and loss, the disillusion of rose-tinted memories, and what it means to write and perform her music.

• foreigner ~ Samara Patel

  My spaceship is docked on the outskirts of town, buried in a veritable graveyard of a few hundred others. But mine is the only one with the flag of Freedor painted on its side. Even my ship looks like it doesn’t belong in the Raindorian shipyard, with their green-painted hulls and shiny new taillights. I dragged an old can of green paint up to my ship when I first got here, hoping to assimilate ever so slightly to the culture of the planet I had flown to, where I hope to live for a few years before jetting off to the next one – or back home to Freedor. Although I hope I never have to go back to Freedor. There’s too much I have been running from to ever turn back.

  I take certain steps into the Watering Hole, the place everyone goes to get their hydrogen-rich water. Back home, Mother sent us out with buckets to find the fresh drink in whatever puddles we could, but I guess everything’s different here. I scan the room for a familiar face, adjusting the dark blue uniform that denotes me as a foreign ambassador. I didn’t bother to change after work, too intent to get here before it got too packed. Besides, almost everyone else here wears their work uniforms – differently coloured jumpsuits, decorated with medals depending on their pay. Their people look almost like mine, having descended from us many sun rotations past. Which means that I can blend in, at least until they notice my uniform. At least until I speak, and they hear my Freedorian accent in sharp contrast to the gentle Raindorian one. And then...

  “Our resident Freedorian has arrived!” Monty raises her hands, tapping my bangled wrist in a hello. She turns to the mate she was talking to, her words seeming to echo off the cave’s walls. I had barely walked through the mouth of the cave before she spotted me; didn’t have time to make my way towards the luminescent pool of water at the centre, wood bucket still swinging in my hand. It’s barely dark outside, the first glimmer of stars appearing but completely obscured by the cave’s high ceiling.

  I roll my eyes at her greeting but smile, tapping her wrist back. “A kinder welcome was never received. How are you, Monty? Who’s your friend?”

  She turns to the woman next to her, Monty’s long black braids swinging against her back. I self-consciously touch my own shaven head. Not a Freedorian practice, but a mark of the tribe of Desosa. Our people were scattered across the galaxy, and even more were in Raindor than my home. I notice that her friend’s head is shaven as well and grin in recognition. “Samany, Monty’s friend.”

  She grins back, gold paint traced along her neck. “Samany, Shella. Monty was just telling me about you. I’m Culdora.” She taps my wrist. “Lovely to be in your presence. Are you of the Desosa people?”

  “How ever could you tell?” I chuckle.

  “Ah, pisiermen acontre.”

  My brain stalls for a second before I realise she is speaking the Desosan language. “Sorry, ah, I don’t speak it.”

  A moment of awkward silence while she purses her pale blue lips. “Of course, tribe sister.”

  I rush to defend myself amidst her judgmental look. “There are few people of Desosa on my home planet. Much more here, anyway... many Desosans on Freedor know not the language, you see.”

  Culdora smiles tightly as Monty claps her hands together. “Of course, the Freedorians are uneducated on most matters, isn’t that right, Shella?” She laughs, and it’s my turn to smile politely while seething inside. I know that she comes from a place of jest, but it feels unfair. The sun goddess knows that I’ve no special love for Freedor – I left it, after all – but she’s insulting my home, nonetheless. “Yes, don’t all you Freedorians have scorched skin from your unrelenting sun, and drink from mud puddles instead of clear water?”

  She means it in jest, she means it in jest, she means it in jest. “Ah, better than having to walk ages to get to a watering hole. Which is silly since water here falls from the sky so often it soaks everything in its path.”

  Culdora shifts on her feet. “Freedor, though, that’s so interesting. I have always wanted to visit the golden desert of Arzone. Is it as beautiful as they say?”

  “More,” I respond, grateful for the interjection. “But scorching hot. Last I visited, I couldn’t shake the sand off my clothes for days!”

  We chat a bit more as we move up in the line. Being Freedorian makes me special, a creature of great interest, and Culdora asks me many questions about it. “Is it true that Desosans are segregated to one island?”

  I laugh. “No, no. We get a poor reputation from the net dramas. Desosans live everywhere, though we’re sparse.”

  “You must hate to be here on this damp planet.”

  “No, it’s much different than the environment I’m used to, but I think that’s... shining.” I try a piece of Raindorian slang on my pointed tongue.

  Monty interjects. “Shining? Goodness, I saw your brain working for a moment just trying to figure it out. Our slang does not suit you, friend.”

  I cannot decide if I’m glad she noticed or angered she knew it didn’t come naturally.

  We move up in line, and I collect my water for the week. I speak with Monty and Culdora a bit more, ignore and laugh off and comically berate them for their jabs against my culture. Because what else can I do? I chose to come work here – if the price to pay is simply my own hurt feelings, I can bear it, right?

  Though the next time Monty ‘corrects’ my dialect I fear I may punch her in the face.

  The walk back to my spaceship is tediously expansive, but the long purple grasses make it easier. The beauty in them is too great to be ignored. I might act the part of the patriot, but there is no equivalent to this on Freedor.

  I see another figure, tall and angular, wading his way through the grass next to me in a dark blue jumpsuit like mine. I whistle sharply in greeting. He turns his head to whistle back and starts to walk over. “You are a foreign ambassador, correct?”

  He smiles in affirmation. “Yes, how shining of you.”

  Shining? “You sound rather Raindorian, if you don’t mind me saying so. Where are you from?”

  He laughs, and it sounds lovely and genuine compared to Monty’s mocking tongue. “I’ve been here most my life, but I grew up on Freedor, from the deserts of Arzone.”

  I stopped walking in shock. “You are joking.”

  “I... I am not, no.”

  “No, I...” I try to find the right words, scrambling through all the shocked phrases on my tongue. “I am also from Freedor! I’ve not met another Freedorian, and all Raindorians seem to think we are... well...”

  “Savages?” he suggests.

  “Most like,” I chuckle. “Yet they are the ones who walk miles just for water.”

  “Isn’t that so!” He exclaims. “I miss the watered puddles of Freedor, so convenient. And our people so much kinder, environment warmer and far more beautiful, than anything I’ve seen here.”

  I want to cry, throat choked up with the simple, assured knowledge that this person understands me, just by coincidence of having been forged in the same place I was. He can understand me in a way no one here could, because how could someone know me if they didn’t know the joy of finding a large puddle of water first thing in the morning, or ever admiring the way the Freedorian sand floats in the air like glitter, or watching the five moons rotate and singing an old Desosan song with friends just outside a gloriously dusty house.

  This person knows me immediately, because he knows my home. And while I’m happy to be in an adventurous new place, even with all its odd customs, a little bit of home is so entirely welcome. While Freedor is not a place I want to see again, that doesn’t mean that I don’t miss it every day. Since my uniform identifies me so singularly as different, I can’t help but be constantly aware of how I am unlike my peers, how this new home is unlike my original one. And though my Desosan shaved head is the only aspect that identifies me as such, the only part of my culture I keep, it is nice to have a community wherever I travel.

  It’s like a piece of my soul was left when I fled my homeland, and this Freedorian, just by virtue of his birthplace, has returned a bit of it back to me.

  —

  Samara Patel is an undergraduate visual arts and film student. Endlessly curious and resourceful, she spends her free time yelling at the T.V. screen and listening to the rain. @samara.ayesha on Instagram.

• anail a ghabail ~ Eartha Davis

  “Before a life, air. 

  And after. 

  As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.”

  — Jane Hirshfield 

  My love is felted with dust. Her cheeks bulge like swollen apricots. She is stepping down from her horse, legs taught and quivering, palms the colour of charred earth. She stumbles to my side. 

  The desert, she says. The desert is alive. 

  I watch my love tremble. Her eyes thread themselves to the sand. I imagine her fear spilling out across the mountains, kissing their knotted faces. I imagine her in my arms.
  

  Hush, I say. Hush. 

  My love does not listen. She is at my side, clutching my wrist. Her eyes are fractured. 

  You are not listening, she says. The desert is alive. The desert is breathing. 
  

  * 
  

  Birds and their empire of feathers. They are brushing their wings against each other, a rustle of flight. Their beaks are bold and bright as chalices. Trill, they go. Kahoo. Little songs unveil themselves above the dunes. 

  My love is listening. Her ears are arched towards the sky. 

  I know you don’t believe me, she says. 

  Believe what? 

  That the desert is alive, she says. That the desert is breathing.

  Silence knits a gulf between us. I imagine it blowing our hearts away. 
  

  * 
  

  It is said that sun is the mother of madness. It is said that sun tugs on kindness until it tumbles, aches.
  

  You are not listening, my love says. You are not listening to the desert. 
  

  Her breath is a soft tide. It issues from her throat like river, like ocean. 

  The desert is a desert, I say. It is not alive. It is not breathing. 

  Dusk spills her yolk across the horizon. I realise, now, that night is a gift: a gift the sky must unwrap slowly. 

  * 
  

  I am sleeping in my love’s arms. I am sleeping against my love’s heart. 

  Hush, she says. Hush. 
  

  Crickets roar, clinging fiercely to their violins. A flock of scorpions dance by our feet. Everything is soaked in song— a firefly, a jackal. 
  

  Don’t you see, she says. The desert is alive. The desert is breathing. 
  

  I want to tell my love that I am listening. 
  

  I am listening to the desert’s aliveness. 
  

  I am listening to the desert’s breathing. 

  —

  Eartha placed second in the 2022 Woorilla Poetry Prize Youth Section, was nominated for Best of the Net in 2023, and was shortlisted for the 2024 Creative Writing New Zealand’s Short Story Prize. Her work is published or forthcoming in Wildness, Rabbit, Frozen Sea, Minarets, Modron, Baby Teeth Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, JMWW, LEON Literary Review, Arboreal Magazine, ELJ Editions, the Basilisk Tree, the Stirling Review, Boats Against the Current, Where the Meadows Reside, the Spellbinder Magazine, the engineidling, Discretionary Love, Sour Cherry Magazine, Revolute, & Eunoia Review, among others. She honours her Ngāpuhi ancestors and the Wiradjuri people, on whose land she lives, breathes, and writes.
  

• turning the light away from that fissile rock bottom ~ Elliot M.

  faith is a collective
  it starts with the clack of hooves on stones
  & ends with a fool’s first breath
  how delicate are we?
  & what are your favourite moments?
  dreams are in a grey area
  they ebb and flow
  distance is a thread—

  it’s a smoking wick
  it’s a cruel bite from a horse’s teeth
  it’s a message saying let them live
  —a moon phase of growth.
  i’m lighting a candle because i like your music
  i’m a mobile / stationary legend and i’m putting the heat on
  i’m telling myself i don’t like anyone who doesn’t like me
  & i’m asking myself why do we want a person so much?

  —

  Elliot M. (they/them) is a horse girl / cowboy living in Tāmaki Makaurau. Currently, they are employed as a community support worker. Elliot’s writing has appeared in Starling, Best New Zealand Poems, bad apple, Tarot, Takahē, Turbine and Sweet Mammalian. In 2023 they won the given words National Poetry day competition and were published in the Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook — revelations. Their poetry is often inspired by queer identity and an obsession with evolution and intricate webs of life.

• outlaw country ~ Ronan Ira

  you always like it best when we’re running from something
  three days out from civilisation,
  sugar-dusted with red earth
  landscape all yucca and sun-bleached cattle skulls like a cartoonist’s desert dream.
  and love is a bird nesting in my mouth as I watch you—
  you with your daddy’s pistols slung across your hips, heavy as a body
  you with those hands that can darn a shirt or skin a hare or kill a man.
  and i’ve got your wanted poster in my back pocket 
  even though it don’t do you justice.

  we ride until the sunset’s boundless, consuming the horizon
  holy fire all the way down
  this tent ain’t big enough for the two of us
  but you don’t seem to mind
  and i’m a bad gambler, so i’ll take the win and run.
  in the twilight you sit canyon-blue and shadowed
  pipe hanging from your lips like a dare as you question
  where to next, partner—
  as if you don’t know i’d follow you like a dog if you asked me to.
  as if you ain’t seen me spitting out blood and feathers.

  —

  Ronan Ira lives and works in Pōneke. He enjoys dilly-dallying, lounging, and just generally hanging out.

• a letter to the flower of the desert. ~ Jedidiah Vinzon

  i want to kiss the tumbleweed
  and tell it, i love you

  because our bodies are forgotten.
  only death remembers because death
  is the only necessity. to open is to detach
  from our neck and cry for water. there is
  no tear in the sand. our tongues are mothers
  in search of the child they have not birthed.
  when teeth become our legs we do not walk.
  we stand on the dunes as a flag on the moon.
  a proud testament on a blank canvas not even
  the ears of sand would listen to.

  i want to kiss the tumbleweed
  and tell it, i love you

  because our lips are irredeemable from the hands
  around our cheeks. the intercourse of heat and rot
  and calloused earth has birthed our eyes. we are
  the match without the spark. the candle in a tank.
  they say we have potential when they look at us.
  but look at us. we are as beautiful as the angels
  of death. our wings are golden in the sun. silver
  in the moon. we are glorified in our hollowness.
  the rain would not drown us. they cannot hide
  what we have hidden: our faces in the lines
  of our veins. inside out. insidious and incensed
  in the identity of our bodies.

  i kiss the tumbleweed
  until all that remains
  is our teeth.
  i tell you
  i love you

  and kiss you

  again.

  —

  Jedidiah Vinzon is studying physics at the University of Auckland. He enjoys writing music for chambers and choirs, and rewatching sitcoms in his spare time. His works can be read in Tarot, Symposia and circular, among others, with many more forthcoming. You can find him on Instagram @jayv.poetry.

• Ripe ~ Laura Borrowdale

  When the outsider came, she had even less than I. She came up the dusty hill path with eyes ringed red and children black with dirt. The largest of the children carried a long stick with water bottles, the kind from before, strung across it. The bottles blew lightly in the wind and knocked together with hollow noises as the children moved. 

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said, standing up straight from my task. I left my tomato beds on the lowest terrace of the village, and walked out to the path. I held the hoe in one hand, and stood with my chest thrust forward.

  ‘We need help,’ she said. ‘Not much. Just water, my children are thirsty.’ She stopped, and the children collected around her skirts, peering around at me. They pulled her clothing tight in their fear and I saw her womanly shape, the curve of her thigh and buttock and then they pressed against her all the more tightly, like maggots to a dead rabbit.

  ‘Just water?’ I scoffed.

  ‘Please,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t have any to spare,’ I said.

  ‘But you are growing tomatoes,’ she said, and she looked across my garden with those eyes, greedy and desperate.

  I’m no fool. I could see the red tomatoes hung like jewels from fleshy stems, the strawberries heavy in their shrouds of black netting. Under the ground, the orange and white tubers grew large, throwing green ferns up above.

  I’d worked hard for this. I had gathered the plastic scraps to collect dew and rain, and I gave my plants water even when I did not give it to myself; they needed to come first, or I would have had nothing to offer. Nothing to keep myself from being forced out of the village’s protection.   

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You must go back to where you came from.’

  ‘There is nothing there.’ The woman looked up at me. I could see her neck, the hollow of a collarbone, the dip before the rise of her breasts. ‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘I do not know how much longer we can walk.’

   ‘I cannot help you,’ I said.

  She picked up the smallest child who clutched at her back, his hands like claws. She turned away to walk back down the path. Then she looked back at me through narrowed eyes and made a sign with her hands.

  ‘Get out of here,’ I shouted. I watched until I could no longer see her on the path.

  That afternoon, soldiers came down from the higher levels of the village. I stopped my work and bent low at my gate to show them respect, so low the dust from the path stuck to the sweat on my brow.

  The group of men parted and the leader's son stepped forward. He wore the necklace of his father, its metal links bright and oiled.

  ‘We know what you did,’ he said.

  ‘Sir, I am sorry,’ I stammered, lifting my forehead from the ground, ‘but I could not let her take what is mine.’

  The leader’s son looked at me and his face was like polished stone, smooth and reflective, merely showing me myself.

  ‘We know,’ he said, and I saw that I had done the right thing. ‘But you cannot be all that keeps us from being overrun,’ he said. ‘I will leave men here to support you, and tomorrow we will build a wall around our hill to prevent this from happening again.’

  I bowed down low, so my forehead touched the earth. The leader’s son walked back up the hill.
  

  That night I slept with dreams of scuffling feet in the dust paths, of plastic sheeting ripping, of the outsider’s bottles, full, thudding together. I woke, hot and slick and panicky. I left my bed and walked outside to check my plants, but the soldiers at the gate turned me back. From inside the hut, I could hear them laugh quietly in the blackness, and I knew I was safe.

  The next day, men came to cut down the trees. They took the ones from around my house, the olive trees I had planted that had not yet fruited. The apple trees were too small to use, but they were too close to the new wall, so they were felled too. They cut the trunks and sharpened stakes to drive into the ground to build a wall to protect me better.
  

  The trees were so small once they had been stripped of their branches and leaves. I knew they were more valuable as part of the wall, but I grieved for the olive oil I might have traded for meat. 
  

  Each night I slept more soundly. The wall grew and grew. When the men left, my garden was gone, and I no longer had apples to store for winter, or fallen branches to burn, but I was protected by the wall. 

  I tried to build my stores. I hoarded water, the cans’ wire handles cutting red stripes into my fingers, and I trickled it carefully into the root balls of my plants. The water soaked into the soil, seeped down into the dark roots of the plants as though it was never there. And although they never grew, I was safe, because I had the wall, which now stretched around the entire village.

  When my stocks ran bare, I wiped my face, and began to walk up the hill to the leader’s house. The path does not run straight up, but rather around the hill. As I walked past my neighbour’s house, he stepped outside, his butcher’s apron and hands bloody. I could hear the animals bleating in the pens behind the house. Once, I had a chance to eat lamb he had prepared. It lingered, fatty and crusted in salt, in my mouth and my memory, even as I went back to my tomatoes. 

  ‘No outsiders here! Be gone!’ he said. He was angry, and he held his cutting knife in his right hand. His face was red.

  ‘It is me,’ I cried. ‘The tomato grower!’

  My neighbour looked at me. His face showed me what he thought as he looked at my dusty clothes, the red cut marks on my outstretched hands, the sunburn from working long hours.

  ‘So it is,’ and he put down his knife. ‘But you have no business leaving your garden.’

  ‘But I must see the leader,’ I said. ‘I gave my trees and my crop to build the wall, and now I have none.’

  ‘That is your problem, not the leader’s,’ said my neighbour. ‘What do you need?’

  ‘Thank you, brother,’ I said, and I bowed low on the road, so the dust anointed my forehead. ‘I have nothing left to eat, the men ate it all.’
  

  He laughed. ‘You do not think I am offering to feed you, do you? I need what I have for my family,’ he says. ‘But it is not the leader who you must see. You must go to the commander.’

  My stomach grumbled, and my neighbour turned away from me. I saw his wife in the doorway, a singular dark eye winking in the light, her blonde hair catching the sunlight. My neighbour followed my glance. He scowled.

  ‘Be gone with you,’ he shouted.

  I turned and began to walk — not up the hill, but around it, to the commander. I knew him by his necklace of bones, which rattled and clacked as he walked. Some had hung around his neck for so long they had become polished and smooth as ivory.

  I bowed in his doorway, pressing my body against the ground. He grunted to the man beside him, ‘See what he wants.’ The man tapped my shoulder and I crawled forward.

  ‘I am the tomato grower. I have no food left as the men ate it as they built the wall. I ask for your grace and kindness.’

  ‘We do not suffer beggars,’ he said to me, and although I knew that was not what I was, I stayed on my knees, looking at the ground. ‘We will set you to work. You can earn your food.’

  ‘Gladly, I work hard to grow the food to feed your army,’ I said.

  ‘That is not work. You dabble, pah. You sit back and watch plants grow. Work is my army. Work is keeping our people safe. Work is putting others before yourself.’
  

  I looked at the commander of men, bloated and lounging in his chair. ‘I will work,’ I said. 

  We worked, patrolling the poorly made wall, shoring up the parts that tumbled down, and watching for those who might try the gaps. I could no longer care for my garden, but I saw it as I passed it by. Slowly it died and the dried leaves of the tomato plants shattered in the sun. 

  We walked this way, around and around the village as the months slowly turned. As it grew colder, the food grew scarcer, until there was barely anything to feed us. In the evenings, we sat outside the wall around fires and talked about our lives before, inside the wall. 
  

  ‘I had a wife,’ one man said. ‘ But I could not find food for the children to eat. Now I am here.’
  

  ‘I had meat,’ another said. ‘I would cook it slowly and watch the juices drip down onto the plate below. I would mop them up with bread.’
  

  The men sat quietly at this. When the broth was ladled out for our supper, the two men argued over who got more. I kept my head down, raising my mug to my mouth quietly so that no one looked to me to offer mine up. I considered the butcher who lived beside me, his wife and his meat. I thought about their juices running into my mouth. I swallowed my broth. 
  

  The next morning, there was no breakfast. The patrol leaders stood in a line. They carried batons in their dark belts. They told us to prepare to march, but we were hungry and sullen. 
  

  One man stepped forward. 
  

  ‘You must feed us first,’ he shouted. 

  ‘What did you say?’ The first patrol leader hissed the last word like a snake.

  ‘I am hungry,’ the man said. ‘I have not been fed. There are things that must be done.’ He sat down in dust, cross-legged, planting his body into the earth. ‘I will not move unless we are treated fairly.’ 

  The patrol leader stepped out and around the man, standing behind him, his baton in one hand, gently thudding into the palm of the other. ‘What would you have us do?’ he said. 

  ‘We march for days,’ said the man on the ground. ‘We starve and never see our families, never see the things we are guarding.’ His voice began to lift in pitch, to get louder. ‘I do not believe there is a threat! I do not believe you treat us fairly! I do not beli—’
  

  The patrol leader’s baton came down hard on the back of his head. There was a thud, then a noise like a ripe tomato splattering on the baked earth. The man fell, jerked on the ground like a fish, then lay still. We could smell the wetness seeping through his pants, but we stood quietly, looking at the ground, looking at the officers. My eyes slid across to the man beside me. He glanced back at me, then towards the ground. He shook his head.

  ‘What was that?’ The patrol leader moved like a dog to fallen food. ‘Do you have something to say?’ He lifted the chin of the man beside me with his baton. ‘Do you disagree with me?’

  The other patrol leaders stood at the front, their faces impassive. The man beside me shook his head, his eyes lowered. 

  ‘I think you do,’ the patrol leader continued. ‘I think you are communicating dissent to those around you.’

  The man beside me shook his head, the baton still hard under his chin. Tears began to run down his cheeks. ‘It wasn’t me, patrol leader.’

  The patrol leader turned to me. ‘Was it him? Or was it you?’
  

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ I said. I could feel my muscles shake. 

  ‘It was him, or it was you. Which is it?’ the patrol leader said. ‘Here,’ and he held out his baton. ‘You must punish him, or be punished yourself.’

  The man beside me shook. I looked at him, and the piss ran down my legs into my shoes. 

  ‘You or him,’ the patrol leader said. I took the baton. I wondered, did he judge my fear in this moment? I closed my eyes and thought of my garden, my tomatoes. I brought the baton down, again and again and again. 

  Around me, the rest of the men roared. They surged forward, kicking and beating the man beside me as he lay on the ground. He was still and silent when the patrol leaders shouted stop, and stepped closer to force us back. 
  

  The patrol leader looked across the group, daring someone to raise their eyes. We stood with our heads bowed. He tapped me on the shoulder with his baton.  
  

  ‘You will take these men to the gate and string them up for the outsiders to see. They will know fear if they see a wall of bodies.’ 
  

  I dragged the first body to the wall. One shoe was pulled off in the dust but I didn’t stop to pick it up. His body was already beginning to smell, like sickness and sweetness. He was leaking, bloody froth from his ears and mouth.
  

  I hung the body where I had been told to. I looped the rope around his torso and under his armpits, a harness rather than a noose. When I had hauled him high, he swung, the one boot he had left knocking softly on the wall. 
  

  *
  

  We walk for days. We scavenge for food as we go, but there is never enough. There are always more bodies. They are always ours. 
  

  The corpses of our comrades hang on the wall; left to discolour, bloat, and be consumed by flies. The white wriggling bodies of maggots fall into the grass below. We eat what grows beneath our hanged comrades.

  When I sleep, my bones hard against the earth, I dream of tomatoes, fat with liquid, bursting in the cavity of my mouth. I can smell the sweet acid, feel the skin tight like a drum beneath my fingers. 
  

  When I wake, I look at the man to my left and he is still, so still he could be dead, his face gaunt, the skin pulling tight to the bones of his face. Soon, the bodies on the walls will be bones, and so will we. Will a wall of bones be enough to protect us from the outsiders? 
  

  Who will be left to enjoy our women, our meat? 

  —

  Laura Borrowdale is a writer, editor and teacher from Ōtautahi. Her first collection, Sex, with animals was published by Dead Bird Books in 2020. She is a founding editor of ngā pukapuka pekapeka, a small chapbook press in Ōtautahi
  

• Not Sane ~ Meander Farrow

  the day has creased in 
  Half, the fences lean in, bruising in the mud
  a folding
  who from
  for the street I find my life on
  

  to my south or rather
  the direction strange behind me
  big lungs live
  

  the drop away from day
  and nakedness to swoop like lips rolling back
  

  I am not sane if I name an aphid 
  an omen
  though I have seen what they do to leaves
  as acid and how they strain
  the breath when fed 

  
  in nature is an industry, a sonic pall, the
  blinking salt graves

  
  —

  Meander Farrow (they/them) has had homes across several islands, but none so loved as their one here, in Aotearoa. They endured an evangelical childhood, with an emphasis on testament, and were lucky to uncover poetry as the better version of that. Their writing occurs in the intervals of being screeched at by their diabetic alarms for yet another low blood sugar. This is their first published poem.

• Jericho – world without verbs ~ Anthony Baker

  Eyes on the distance. A horse, and a man on it. Trails of dust behind it. Jericho. Bent nose (usually like that). Bent arm (not usually like that).

  ‘Howdy.’

  ‘Howdy.’ 

  On his own horse with Jericho behind him. Down the dust road. In his eyes, the dust. Ten minutes on the road, twenty. Dead straight for miles. A t-junction. To the left: nothing. To the right: nothing. Forwards. Thirty degrees or more. The sun red in the sky. Grass all brown and dry. Water stop down by a creek, the feel of the cool water. Flask up to Jericho still on his horse. Then back up on his own horse again.

  At a village. Population: five. Can of beans from the store. Bandages for Jericho’s arm. A triangle sling. Through saloon doors back out to the street. Alcohol on graze. The bandages real tight around Jericho’s arm. Too tight. Again. Better now. 

  An old lady’s house. She in her chair on the porch. A good lookout on the street.

  She: ‘Howdy.’

  He: ‘Howdy.’

  He: ‘Howdy.’

  She in creased brown shirt, brown trousers. Grey hair like a bird’s nest.

  She: ‘Water?’

  Them: ‘Yup.’

  She: ‘Right. And for me a tea.’

  She up from chair, slowly. Creaky joints. For support: arms on armrests. Into house, bit by bit, slow-like. Feet one at a time, only just off the ground. Inside: dark, old furniture, bits of old books and magazines about. Radio in the corner. Paintings on the walls. One of a rocky outcrop in a mushroom shape with flat clouds and a big drop to a river.

  In the kitchen, two glasses from the cupboard. Under tap, until full with water. One for him, one for Jericho. Kettle on stovetop.

  ‘You guys just now in the paddock? You hard workers.’

  ‘Yes ma’am. We just now in the paddock.’

  The kettle, the whistle sound. 

  ‘Well you likely thirsty. The water for your thirst.’ 

  Teabag in cup of chipped china. Hot water from kettle, teabag in the water.

  ‘Your arm, Jericho. Dumb of you. How?’

  ‘Down from horse onto grass, Grandmother. Horse frightened by wind.’

  ‘Next time, the horse under your control. The wind not under your control.’

  ‘Yes, Grandmother. Next time.’

  They back through, slowly to porch. There only one chair: hers. A sip from china cup.

  ‘I ever, boys, the story about my own horse?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘She beautiful, black. But she rash. Reckless. And one day, with me on her, she so fast, I with fear of death. But with strong arms on horse, I still on her. She fast, my horse, through grass, through trees. Under branches in contact with my back. But no luck for her. I with strong arms still on her.’ 

  Later, the old woman asleep. Him and Jericho on their horses again. Down the straight dust road in the direction of the town. Jericho an arm’s length or two away.

  ‘Your grandmother OK?’

  ‘Yeah. She tough as nails.’

  ‘Requirement for life out here.’

  ‘Yeah, you not wrong.’ The smirk on Jericho’s face, a little crooked. ‘How long to the town?’

  ‘Sixty miles or more.’

  ‘That far? This damned arm. Not easy riding.’

  ‘A fault of your own causing.’ A trail of dust behind them. ‘Steady pace now – doctor before dark.’

  A long way into the town.

  —

  Anthony Baker (he/him) is from Ōtautahi Christchurch, and is now based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. He is a tramper and a musician – he plays the cello and writes pieces. Alongside this, he is a fan of the written word. He has an Honours degree in English Literature, and his Honours project looked at exuberance in Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly. He sometimes writes poetry and prose, when he has the time and motivation. Humour and intense experiences are two of the concerns he’s interested in – also how to convey place and atmosphere. His work has been published in bad apple.

• Digital missionary of the wild west ~ Nicola Easthope

  I am that wild white woman online—
  look out for me, I’m there on the volcanic plateau riding
  for you! I’ll be the first to like, love, embrace and rage emoji
  on your and all the famous literary people-I-follow-of-colour’s out-posts.

  Follow me! I’m always the first to effusively erupt on colonised, diasporic, hybridised,
  transcultural walls—rock art of the most digitally high and bi because it’s always so
  relevant to my work and you just don’t know it yet but!
  I am centrally relevant to your

  post-colonial post-racial post-human lives. You know, your poem is spiritually linked
  to my rim of fire novel-in-progress, really—your pain is even
  mine: white hot, flaming, out-of-reach and fleeing upwards
  into the piercing black viscous skies

  yet always as searchable and nettable. I am winding and grounding—your white hot
  nuclear-mothering saviour, your subterranean fatberg friend clogging the networks,
  kneeling in front of my sycophantic screen. See me doing important research
  for my burgeoning fictions. Yes! I am breaking new ground without need

  for a cultural advisor. I am learning and teaching you back to yourself. Hell,
  I am writing you back to life—converting your culture
  into mine in order to save it.

  Some people call me thinly racist but I think I am
  a gas-rich, lava-skin ally (look at me use the reo!) and I’ll know
  if you unfriend me because you’ll still be friends
  with my one or two other digitally ethnic friends
  and you know, it won’t be long before
  

  I’ll rise like a holy virtual missionary (book launch soon!)
  and request your friendly, attendant devotion again.
  But don’t worry—mind the magma—I won’t trouble you
  to meet up for a kōrero in real life.

  
  —

  Nicola Easthope (Pākehā, Tangata Tiriti) grew up in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and has lived on the Kāpiti Coast on the lands of Te Atiawa ki Whakarongotai for the past 22 years. She is a secondary school English and Psychology teacher and poet, with two full collections: leaving my arms free to fly around you (Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2011) and Working the tang (The Cuba Press, 2018). Nicola has been a guest poet at the Queensland, Tasmanian and Manawatū Poetry Festivals, and at LitCrawl in Pōneke. She is currently nearing the end of a Master of Creative Writing through Massey University, mostly written on the sofa with her darling Shih Tzu-Maltese Sid by her side.

• Lou, Who Stole from this Town ~ Gregory Bennett

  ‘That money wasn’t for you; it was for everyone!’ bellows Lou’s father while he paces backwards and forwards in the kitchen. He’s begun repeating himself because there are only so many ways one can yell at one’s daughter. 

  Lou sits at the kitchen table in front of him, staring straight down at the floral tablecloth, which appears blurred beneath her tears. The scariest thing in the world is when her father raises his voice. It doesn’t happen often and it’s usually directed at someone else – someone who forgot to shut the paddock gate, or someone who nearly backed into his ute outside the grocer. This afternoon, the full brunt of his yelling is directed at her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

  ‘Sorry ya got caught! Can ya replace the money?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Course not. Money’s tight enough as it is without this whole town thinking we’re thieves. That’s what they’ll think, ya know? They’ll think I’m not raisin’ ya right! That I even put ya up to it! I dread what your mother will think.’

  ‘I said I was sorry!’ wails Lou.

  ‘Sure, to me ya did. Not good enough.’ He grabs the red rotary phone from the nook and slams it down on the kitchen table in front of Lou with a clang. He steps over the cord and grabs the ’92 phonebook off the fridge. He waves it in Lou’s face. 

  ‘There must be a hundred-odd names in here and you are going to ring every single one and apologise for stealing. Got it?’

  ‘But…’ began Lou.

  ‘No buts! Here’s a pencil. I want to see every name ticked off by the time I get back from milking.’ He tosses the phonebook and a pencil down in front of her and storms out the front door.

  Lou jumps when the door slams. She wipes her eyes clear. She doesn’t feel like crying now that her father has gone out. She reaches for the phone and takes the receiver off the hook, placing it on the table – a steady dial tone rings out from it. She opens up the phonebook and flattens it to the first page. She checks the first number and starts dialling. On the final number, she lifts the receiver up to her ear with both hands and hears it ring.

  ‘Hello, Anderson residence,’ comes a welcoming woman’s voice down the line.

  ‘Hello my name is Lou and I stole from this town and I am very sorry,’ says Lou quickly.

  ‘You what? Who is thi—?’ 

  Lou cuts her off by placing the receiver back on the phone. She picks up her pencil and ticks off the first name.

  Lou spends the bulk of the afternoon dialling each number in the book and letting them know that she stole from the town and then marking them in pencil. It stops feeling like a punishment after about the thirtieth name and instead starts to feel like work. Boring work that needs to be done. She considers just ticking off the rest of the names and telling her father she did it all, but if she was to get caught out, there is a good chance he will do more yelling. 

  She’s getting towards the end of the book and starting to feel a sense of accomplishment as she dials the next number. A man answers, which has been unusual at this time of the day. 

  ‘Hello?’ he says with a croak. It sounds a bit like he just woke up.

  ‘Hello my name is Lou and I stole from this town and I—’

  ‘You and me both,’ says the man. He takes a heavy, deliberate breath that sounds like it’s rolling around in his throat.

  ‘What?’ says Lou, the most she has ever said to anyone on the phone this afternoon beyond her spiel.

  ‘How’d you get this number?’

  ‘Phonebook.’

  ‘And why’d you dial it?’

  ‘I took money from a fundraiser. Father’s making me apologise to everyone.’

  The man whistles down the phone. ‘Some punishment, kid. Tell you what – I happen to have a lot of money and not much use for it. Why don’t you come see me?’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘Does your phonebook have the addresses in it?’

  Lou looks down at the book. ‘Not for this number.’

  ‘No, I suppose it wouldn’t. You got a pencil?’

  Lou looks at the pencil in her hand.

  ***

  Lou squeezes the brake on the handlebar and her bicycle slides to a stop on the dirt road. She hops off it and stands next to it, while digging through the front pocket of her dress for the scrap of paper she wrote on. She studies the paper and then the letterbox. This is the place. She takes a moment to look around – green and brown fields as far as the eye can see. Not uncommon for this area, but she suddenly feels very alone. The house itself cannot be seen from the road, as there’s a long driveway that curves around to the left, and lots of trees bordering the property. Lou takes a deep breath and pushes her bicycle up the driveway.

  As she approaches the bend, she starts to see the house – it’s enormous, practically a mansion. She can hear a faint ‘ding-ding-ding’ growing louder as she approaches, and once she turns the bend she can see that it’s coming from a car parked out front with its driver side door wide open. She approaches the car and pushes the door shut so the sound stops. It’s very quiet now.

  Lou takes a few more steps towards the house. She can see the front door is also wide open, but it’s too dark to see what’s over the threshold. Lou is suddenly overcome with the sense that she should leave, even before she spots the bloody handprint against the white house paint by the door. She spins her bike around and throws her leg over it, places one foot on the pedal and tenses her leg, ready to push down.

  ‘Is that you, Lou?’ calls a man’s voice from somewhere behind her.

  Lou slowly turns around and looks back at the house. She scans the windows, looking for the source, but spots nothing.

  ‘Why don’t you come inside?’ croaks the voice. ‘I got a favour to ask.’

  ‘You come out here!’ yells Lou at the house.

  ‘Would that I could, Lou. But the money’s inside. You just have to come inside.’

  There’s something about hearing his voice that makes this whole house seem a little less creepy to Lou. At least she knows there is an adult inside, although she suddenly realises she doesn’t even know his name. She carefully places the bicycle down on the ground and walks towards the doorway. As she approaches the door, she gets a closer look at the handprint on the wall. It is wet and dripping. Fresh. Lou steps inside. She nearly slips. She looks down and sees more crimson blood beneath her shoe. The house is dark on the inside. The main hallway doesn’t seem to get any light.

  ‘Hello?’ calls Lou into the house.

  ‘I’m in here,’ calls the man.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Just follow my voice, Lou.’ 

  She walks towards it. 

  ‘That’s it, Lou. Down here. Keep coming…’

  The voice gets louder as she travels the hallway. He spots her, before she spots him.

  ‘Hello there.’

  Lou brings a hand to her mouth to scream, but nothing comes out. Lying in the kitchen with his back to a cabinet is a man no older than her father, covered in blood from the neck down.

  ‘You must be Lou.’ As he says this, a fresh stream of blood pours from a huge wound on his cheek.

  Lou simply nods, her hand still over her mouth, unable to look away.

  ‘Could you hang this up? The beeps are killing me.’

  Lou suddenly hears them too, and notices the telephone receiver hanging down next to him, the cord running all the way up to a phone on the wall. She slowly approaches, reaches down and hangs up the phone, before slinking back towards the hallway, never taking her eyes off the man.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Same as you,’ laughs the man. ‘Caught stealing from this town. Well, nearly caught. They got a few good hits in anyway. Especially on Bazza.’ 

  He motions to the other side of the kitchen and this time Lou does scream. There’s a man lying on the ground in a pool of blood with a lot of his insides on the outside and a cold, blue face.

  ‘Geez, I’d say you’ll wake up the neighbourhood, but you can’t scream loud enough to stir the guy who owns this place.’

  ‘Who?’ says Lou, unable to take her eyes off Bazza’s corpse.

  ‘Listen, about that favour…’

  ‘I’ll call a hospital.’

  ‘No, no, no. I’ve no desire to work my way through the phonebook, so to speak.’

  Lou looks over to him. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘There is a big bag of money in the car outside. More than your fundraiser, I’m sure. It’s all yours. You just need to hand me that.’ He motions to a pistol that sits very close to him on the ground, but just out of his reach.

  ‘You can’t get it?’

  ‘Answering the phone, hoping it would be someone else, took the last of my strength. Just give me the gun, and the money is yours.’ As he says this, something resembling a large chunk of flesh oozes out of the wound in his face.

  Lou leans forward and picks up the gun. It’s heavy. She hands it to the man.

  ‘Thank you, kindly.’

  He places the gun under his chin and pulls the trigger. There’s an explosion of sound and viscera and Lou’s ears ring and her vision is blurry and red and when she wipes away the blood from her eyes, she sees a sight even more horrific than Bazza’s poor, blue corpse.

  ***

  When her father comes back from work, Lou sits at the table again, unsure how she got home. Her face has specks all over it and there are some heavy, dark, red stains on her dress. The phone is in front of her, phonebook open on the last page, large stack of banknotes toppling over next to it. 

  Her father closes the door gently and speaks in his regular voice, washing his hands in the kitchen sink as he calls back to Lou. 

  ‘Sorry I was so hard on you. I just dread what people think of us. Do you know what dread is?’ He dries his hands on the kitchen towel and turns to face Lou.

  Lou nods.

  
  —

  Gregory Bennett is a writer and filmmaker from Wellington whose accent comes from Invercargill. They hold a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters and currently live in Castlemaine, Australia with their partner and bluray collection.

• Meghalaya (2022) ~ Jason Lingard

  Despite my Western
                          predisposition
  you ambush me
  with your cowboy style
                         and peaceful smile.

  Soft skin enveloping me
  like a sandstorm
                        that just won’t quit
  

  So   
  like Prometheus
  I try to arrange your
                          sand into the shape of a man
  but in my frail fervour you
                          slip through my fingers.

  
  An obscured calculus of power.
  

  I want you to shape me
  control me
  oh my Bengali cowboy   
                          isn’t it time?
  God knows I deserve it 
  (revenge for decades of oppression).
  

  But it takes seconds for me to realise
  you want me    to fuck you
  So I do
  (despite my white guilt).
  

  Yet
  in the reflection
                         of your equine eyes
  I see a spectacle of blood
                         on the horizon
  and you’re trying to figure out
  what direction the gunshots
                          are coming from.

                         Will we get attached?
                         Will we fall in love?

  Nevertheless
  with aortas entwined
  and hats in the sand
  I remove the red twine from your belly
  and use it to tie limb to     limb

  Bodies bound
  I drag you into the
                           Khasi Hills
  wild Eastern jungle bridges
  fashioned from ancient roots
  warning us
                           what centuries
                                         of entanglement can do.

  
  —

  Jason Lingard is a designer and writer from Pōneke Wellington. He is currently working on a collection of poetry, and also a non-fiction book about fashion and pop music. He has recently had work published with Tarot Journal, &Change, Rat World, and bad apple.

Kylie Woods is a graphic designer with a lifetime passion for painting. Since 2021, she has held a degree in Design Communication from Otago Polytechnic. Kylie’s design work varies from print and illustration to web design and more! She loves to up-cycle old skate-decks, repainting them with acrylic to give them new life. By incorporating creatures from her nightmares into her favourite parts of the material world, within her paintings Kylie hopes to face her fears. More of her work can be found at @wyliekoods.design on Instagram, or via her website: https://kyliewoods.myportfolio.com/.