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The big darknesses—the void, underground lakes, old basements—are bad, but shallow, less bad than the concentrated deepness of the small darknesses—the shadow between your fingers, the black sphere lingering just outside your peripheral vision, the hollow of the slightly-overlong pause from your mum

Sorry for the lack of posting—my despair came back, like an old lover’s embrace, cold arms reaching out of the shadows

Do not strike the clown, for its body will simply split into two smaller, weirder clowns

Centuries have passed since Earth went silent, and somehow the abandoned rockets here on Mars have woven themselves into a cable-tangled forest. Many folk, foraging in the depths of the winter, have claimed to see the same thing in the highest portholes—an Earth child’s face, lips moving silently

The furnace's interior keeps changing colour, and keeps talking to me, even after I ride the elevator upstairs to my flat, and even as I now lie tossing in bed, smoke creeping up from beneath my bedroom's door, smoke that is talking in splendrous colours

I hate the way that our dog looks at me, with those still black eyes, and the way that his legs just seem to keep getting longer. I've been feeding him dark chocolate, and grapes, and have buried his still body under the sycamore three times now, but he keeps coming back, each time a little taller

Death is a sound, a pure tone that I follow through the mist, through the fields, through the industrial estate, to the tall factory wall, where the sound abruptly lowers in pitch, as if I must start digging

The peekaboo man lives in the book I take out to look at when I'm alone, but he's growing too big, and soon will be big enough to come out of the book, and then I'll have to live in it, and he will look at me, with those eyes like chameleons' tongues

The stars are wheels, and, if you attend carefully, you can hear their spinning and sparking, within your head, and may, with continued focus, be able to detect the other wheels, too, such as those that constitute most people's faces, the faces of those from whom you must run, faster than the wheels

The small man who appeared at my door pretending he could not speak—nonsense. The bird I saw through the window that was flying backwards—nonsense. The man's voice suddenly speaking in my bedroom in the middle of the night about my dead mother—all of it nonsense, not a lick of sense in any of it.

It sounds horrible, but I was relieved when I flushed my miscarriage down the toilet—that is, I was relieved, until much later that night, when something small and wet climbed into my bed, making a sound that was a bit like crying

It's been so long: am I still able to write?—I think to myself as the AI surgically extracts the last dripping segment of brain tissue from my skull cavity

The bones of spring jut from the mud, florid with fungus, rippling with worms, the only colour and motion in this flower-filled field that admits the full truth of the season

I know I shouldn't be thinking about it, but I can't put the hole in the dirt beneath the electricity pylon out of my mind—its warmth, its softness, its voice telling me it is thinking about me too

I'm becoming a witch—my brim is sprouting from my temples, and my hat tip is extruding from my forehead. I'm going to be so jaunty

My teeth are softening daily, bending like warm wax as they begin to dissolve. Gelatinous agglomerations of enamel coat my throat like lumpy custard. I smile

This pedestrian underpass is much longer than I expected, and much too dark, and by now the sounds from the road overhead don't sound anything like cars

They don't want you to know this but you can eat your computer and get the AI's dreams

The ash-veined sky weeps ghost acorns, as if in mourning for the falling of the last tree. I cup my hands, and the cloudy acorn falls right through, to be grasped by ghost roots writhing out of the ground, the dead woods still hungry to grow

It seems like the right thing to do, to wade through the tall reeds, and to just keep on walking—I don't really understand why, but you have promised to explain everything, once we're both deep beneath the black water and are silent together

None of my friends from school want to come with me to visit the old woods. But that's OK—I have made new friends there, who I haven't seen yet, but who whisper from the shadows in the canopies of the old karri trees, saying that I will see them soon when they come to visit my school

All I remember is climbing down this ladder into fog-thick darkness, hands slipping on steel rungs from the heat, sweat making the straps bite into my shoulders—straps securing the chain that hangs below, whose weight goes slack, as if something is climbing up

I know he was blind drunk, I know he was gunna tear out to her shack out bush, I know the shack was just ashes the next day—dunno where those two are, dunno why the parched trees round the shack didn't burn, dunno how those gloves got strung from every bloody tree, pointer fingers all jabbing down

Growing up, we never talked about it, but we all knew it was there, inside Mum, until one day it came out, seeping out her skin, and she ran outside, and took her clothes off, and stabbed our sister with a meat thermometer in the face. Mum died not long after that, and now we don't know where it is

Once a century, the flower emerges from the deep, opening its petals beneath the moon, revealing the city of the dead, dragged up from below, whose inhabitants simply pick up their hats and go about their day, until the moon blurs into the dawn, and the flower swallows and descends once again

The first treehouses were not constructed on trees—instead, they were found, within trees, in the folds and tunnels known to our ancestors, and that, even today, lead to many being swallowed and changed

I am not particularly sane myself, but, even so, I am troubled by the madness in the West, carrying on the prevailing winds, paper dolls with far-too realistic faces drifting above the trees and landing in my yard, each doll insisting that it alone is sane

Sure, your career may not have panned out the way you hoped, but at least the thing that lives under your childhood bed is happy that you moved back in with your Mum

Mum is no longer the woman who raised us, she is forgetting things, and getting so angry about it, accusing me of moving things, but I know I have not, and why are the things she said I have moved all bloody, why are there footprints on the ceiling above her bed, why is she saying Dad is hiding

Mum says not to talk about the tall things that stand in the shadows of the car park, their heads too high up to see, but now there is one standing in the corner of my bedroom, and now, given the right-angled bend of its body, I can see its head, and I don't like it