(Drawing by Franz Kafka)
The Barn
Memory works in mysterious ways. Often, the images and fragments that resurface from our subconscious are unsolicited. There are some memories that seem, inexplicably, fundamental to what we are. So what do we do with them when we have them? Where do we put them? These fragments belong in a symbolic place, one that stands for both the experiences we can and those we can’t remember. It doesn’t need a name but, if it were to have one, it might as well be The Barn.
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Dreams Are Free (Until Further Notice)
“In this world,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, “nothing is certain but death and taxes”. That was in 1789 and there have been a lot of deaths and tax returns since then. What if, in an uncertain future, the Revenue became literally ‘Internal’ and, through the wonders of cortex implants, began demanding a tax based on what citizens were dreaming?
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Everything Is Not Enough
Sometimes we walk through the world so full of our own troubles that we do not even see the miracles of Nature around us. Not even when they include mangrove swamps and snapping shrimps.
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Hokianga Cause and Effect
The sand dunes at Hokianga were among my first and strongest impressions of New Zealand. They have made a couple of cameo appearances in my stories, but this is the first time they have taken a starring role.
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Kind of Blue
When Miles Davis went into the studio to record ‘Kind of Blue’ on 2 March 1959 he had only a theory from which the five pieces developed. Why not approach a short story in a similar way, I wondered. It wouldn’t be easy; it wasn’t for Miles, and he was a genius. So what chance did I stand? Instead of starting with a preordained line of action, I tried to get most of it down during one sitting by attempting to capture the spirit of discovery with no unnatural or interrupted strokes. In the end, it took longer to write than it did to listen to or even to record ‘Kind of Blue’.
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Lunching At Reuben’s
Back in the 1970s I was a record company runner. I’d also be sent out to buy my choleric boss lunch. I liked to think that the smooth running of the company hinged on this task because otherwise, if his salt beef wasn’t hot when I returned with the paper bags of mustard-soaked sandwiches from Reuben’s, the afternoon air would be blue with expletives and resonant with the slamming of doors.
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The Manly
This short-short was inspired by a vintage advertisement for a product which, as far as I know, is sadly no longer available.
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Rangikapiti Pa
On the spur of the moment the European decided to head north in search of adventure. He hired a hatchback for 29 dollars a day, all inclusive, and at 18:15 on Saturday he found it on top of an ancient Maori fortification, Rangikapiti Pa, just north of Mangonui on New Zealand’s North Island. Another short-short.
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Shem-el-Nessim
The Mu’ezzin of the Sultan al-Zahir Barquq mosque in the City of the Dead was calling for morning prayers when in one last rattling exhalation the Englishman opposite me expired. As his head fell forward, jangling our coffee cups and startling the clientele, his skin appeared almost translucent in the dust-dappled light. “Shem-el-Nessim!” were his final words. An old-fashioned tale in the English tradition, set in 1920s’ Cairo.
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www.sadbastard.co.nz
A short-short first published in the 2005 Random House NZ Home anthology. (And no, I have not registered that internet domain yet.)
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A Glacier-Blue Trabant
Even Timo can see this is a moment that will change everything, and he is only eleven. A short-short set in 1989 Germany.
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Transformation
The Franz Kafka masterpiece known as Metamorphosis in English isn’t about a cockroach. Gregor Samsa’s transformation (Verwandlung without the masculine article was its original title) was from man into “Ungeziefer”, which can be translated only to “vermin”. The generic term “vermin” didn’t work in translating Metamorphosis into English, so most people think of Kafka’s story as “the one about the man who turns into a cockroach”. I wondered what would happen if I wrote a short story that turned Metamorphosis on its bug-headed head.
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“Yes, darling.”
Not so much new as rediscovered, this short story first appeared in print in issue 2 of RQC (Really Quite Cosmic) magazine in the UK, in winter 1995. I had forgotten I’d written it until I recently found a copy of the magazine. This is one of the stories I wrote with help from Ansible Information’s AIQ PC Text Randomizer software, using its randomly generated words as a kicking-off point. It’s not the sort of story I’d otherwise have written but, dare I say it, there is a kind of Talking Heads quality to it, which I like; my apologies, of course, to Alan Bennett.
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Poems
Let’s drive
The graves have turned to powdered wind
Life is sweet
Moscow clad in snow, 1908
The language of birds
The playroom of lost toys
