Train Tracks

I looked over the edge. The trains rumbled by, below me. Red lights spelled their end.

‘Hey, fancy meeting you here.’ A boy approached me, folding away his umbrella.

‘Fancy meeting you here,’ I replied.

Rain fell around us, outside of the station’s overhangs. It poured and poured.

‘Damn this rain!’ the boy cursed, yelling it over the rapping of water on the tin roofs.

‘I know. How was school?’

‘Shit, as per usual.’ The halogen lights flicked on, lighting the seats. He took one next to me.

‘I thought education was fun.’

‘It was. Now it’s shit.’ The boy shook his hair, spraying wet everywhere.

I felt a cold creep onto me; as a train thundered under us. I observed the other people on the station apart from the boy. There was a woman chewing gum, a man reading a newspaper.

The boy stared out onto the tracks, nudging himself up to me on the rails that overlooked. ‘So, how was your day?’

‘You ask me?’

‘Of course I do, you’ve asked me already.’

‘It was okay.’ I looked out onto the tracks. The colour in the lights changed from green to red. It was a sombre scene. 

‘Know how these work?’

‘Yeah. The trains run when the light is green. They don’t when it’s red.’
I furrowed my brow at the boy’s naivety. 

‘I mean, really know how they work?’

He smiled. ‘Not really.’

‘I’ve always wondered…’ It was so…grey. This place, this creation, it was merely where nature stopped, and humanity continued. The place where the grass did not grow, trains ran them over. A labyrinth of metal rods and iron bars, there was just no life to the place.

My eye found no grass growing in the station that looked over the train tracks. No little insects scavenging for food. It felt so artificial.

So…cold.

‘Do you reckon we’re like a train?’

My thoughts stopped when I blinked. ‘What? Repeat the question?’

‘Do you reckon we’re like a train? Like, we go when things are green, and stop when things are red?’

I ruffled the boy’s damp hair for him this time. ‘No, we must go no matter what. And although it isn’t shown on the track controller; what about the yellow? “Not sure” parts that we must encounter in life? That’s where I believe we lie. We are never sure whether the lights are green, or red. Therefore we must run when the lights are yellow. It is the unknown that keeps us going. For if we knew everything, there’d be no point to anything.’

‘I guess you’re right.’ We stared in contemplation for a few minutes. Rain still fell all about us. The woman chewing gum went down the stairs off the station, drenching herself. She tripped.

‘Going to help her up?’ the boy asked.

‘The lights are yellow. It would be best not to do anything.’

The woman picked herself up and kept going.

We watched in silence. The lights turned green. A train rumbled past.

‘But…you said – ‘

‘I said that we should continue in the yellow of what we are doing. For life is a mere moment on a line. It bears no relation to anything. They are the “not sure”.’

As if in reply to what was said, something happened. The lights of the track fused, lighting sparks before going out.

To me, this was the lights going yellow. Fear gripped me as I watched, motionless, as train sounds reached our ears.

That rumble, that rumble of change. That yellow, rushing towards us. The track ahead was unknown.

I looked in shock. The trains rushed by, below me. Red lights spelled their end.

Fishing Lines

“What’s waiting at the end?” I asked.

“Only what you take with you.” The little boy replied.
I walked across the boat, slowly, feeling the sunlight on my shoulders. Burning into me. What’s at the end? What’s at the end? I felt it in me, the carnal want, that plagues all humanity, and it was waiting. It needed answers.

I shook the thoughts off my mind.

“You must learn,” the boy said, “to accept yourself for yourself.” He cast his stick out over the boat’s side. The line of string holding the hook, plopped in the water, the little worm on the hook squirmed and squeezed, trying to remove itself from its predicament.

“Shut up, you.” Was all I could say as I cast my rod out over the rails. “I meant what sort of fish are we going to catch today.”

“Oh. So you’re not flawless.”

“What?”

“Sorry, philosophically speaking, I meant.” The boy pulled a crooked smile, reminiscing over our past conversation, the one at the train station.

I shook my head in dismay at his impudence. That boy will have to learn to keep his big mouth shut sometime. Probably never at this rate.

Minutes past; they grew into one long, drawn out hour.

I lit up a cigarette.

“You shouldn’t smoke.” the boy said when I slouched in the fold-out chair, leaving the rod in its socket.

I waved a hand in his direction, to silence him. The sea seemed so quiet, so calm. What fish would turn up here? There’s no commotion. I bet all the fish are further out, with the big waves.

“I got something! I got something!” the boy yanked on his line feverishly, trying to bring the stick up.

“That fishing rod’s so small,” I told him, “you wouldn’t be able to catch squat.”

The sun caught the little string as it was pulled up, up into the air. A wisp of silver. Attached to the end was a huge Tuna-fish, its skin gleaming with the glint of a thousand summer suns. For a moment, it looked like a rainbow leaping out of the water and into the skies. The fish fell onto the boat with a dull thud, blood slowly trickling from where the hook had skewered the mouth.

“See? Got one!” the little boy cried with joy, running to where the big Tuna had fallen, putting his hands on the fish’s scales as it thrashed.

I couldn’t stop myself. “How the fuck did you catch that?”

The boy looked up, seeing right through my many guises, the masks I put on in society to get by. In that moment he saw through all that was personality, habit, and what I was raised to be. He saw ‘it’, in me, in humanity, and understood it.

He spoke only two words to me.

“Don’t ask.”

Crocodile Lies

There’s a smile on her face that Harry knew well. They’d been sitting on the bench now for a good hour, watching all the tourists walk by.

“There’s a lot of different crocodiles. Do you know how many there are?”

“Yeah. Not enough.”

“The family Crocodylidae have loads of subspecies, like Gharials and caimans, and Crocodylomorpha. And they all live together in this one zoo. Well, except Crocodylomorpha, that species is long gone.”

“I’m not so sure about the caimans and the gharials and all of them. I’d like only one specific kind of crocodile.”

“Which? Caiman or gharial?”

There was a pause as Quinn considered. She looked at the ground, frowning a little.

“Gharial?” Harry suggested.

“Oh yeah.  I could go with a gharial. Saltwater and mugger crocs are too dirty for my liking. Alligators just aren’t crocs in my eyes. I like a quiet, feminine-looking croc.”

“Did you want to go and see them?” Harry stood up and dusted himself off. Even now, the day looked to be coming to a conclusion. He was bored and Quinn looked exhausted. He wanted a change. He hoped Quinn would pick up on this too. “Well?” He asked, a little annoyed at how long Quinn always took to answer these sorts of questions.

“Maybe. I’m not sure.”

“I thought you were a fan of crocs.”

“I am, you know that.  I just want some time to think about it. We just had lunch.”

“That was two hours ago.”

So Harry sat down, and they waited. The tourists in front of them began to disperse; the loudspeakers droned the same tinny So Fresh! album, and the birds sung and squawked from the bird sanctuary a few fences over. They were sitting in front of the leopard cage; even the leopard had gotten tired of chewing on the lamb leg and fallen asleep.

“I think we should,” Harry told her, “it’ll be a new experience. We’re still studying them at university, and I know it’ll be good for both our work and our entertainment. We still don’t know many things about them.”

“I guess you’re right. It’s just a big step for me; we’ve been walking around all day.”

“You know what I’m getting at, don’t you?”

“Yeah. We’re discussing crocs.”

Harry sat back, defeated. “We are.”

“How about we go?”

“Okay. Let’s go.”

They stood up and walked into the thinning crowds. They still held hands, even though Harry was pressing too hard. Quinn didn’t notice, at first. Harry could tell she was slightly annoyed with him. Her lips became a thin, unchanging line and she sighed that drained sigh of hers that seemed only to express contempt instead of exhaustion. He didn’t choose to question her on it. It was too late in the day for pointless anger.

However, Quinn let it go as soon as she’d made it known, and, pressed on, that carefree smile back on her face. Harry knew he couldn’t resist. He found it too hard to stay angry with her, and instead, bought a plush crocodile in some twisted attempt at atonement for their failed conversation. A kid had stood in front of him at the check-out, tugging on his father’s sleeve with a Dolphin snapper toy.

Sitting in the car, Quinn put the key in the ignition as Harry bit at the Maxibon he’d gotten for himself. The Volkswagen (Quinn’s Dad’s) choked a little, knowing its end was near, before kicking into a driveable gear.

“Made a decision?” Harry asked, yawning. “This is kind of a big thing for me. And you too, I’m sure.”

“Croc? Oh…um, I’m not sure.” Quinn chewed her lip in that idly attractive way that Harry wasn’t sure he still loved.

“Can’t make up your mind?”

 “I don’t want to rush, Harry. We have plenty of time for all that.” She giggled a little. “Choosing your favourite croc can be hard sometimes.”

“How do you know?” Harry asked. “How do you know if you never make the decision?”

Quinn pulled a faux-serious face and turned to him as she backed the Volkswagen out of the car park. “Okay. I’ve decided. Gharial.”

“Just drive. I don’t care anymore.”

Willie Costello and the Spider

Willie Costello sat in his office, the cigar sticking out of his mouth. He was envisioning a dragon, and trying to make his smoke clothe the roof. Staring up at the various fungi on the ceiling, he completely missed his secretary, Kristy Bain, enter the room.

“We’ve got a situation, Mr. Costello.” She said, putting her clipboard on the office couch. “There’s a spider in the water cooler.”

Willie Costello composed himself, spreading his hands on the paper-laiden desk. “What are you saying?”

“It’s dead. I think it’s dead but I can’t be sure.”

There’s a look of panic that Willie Costello noticed now. He raised an eyebrow and the cigar flopped out, rolled off his bottom lip and hit the desk with a drooly splat. “Spider?” It was a Friday. He’d organised a stripper party at around six o’clock with prospective stockholders. There was a girl coming he fancied and he needed to restock his personal office fridge. No time for these sorts of dalliances in troubleshooting water coolers.

“He’s big, sir, real big. He’s lying on the surface, spread, dead I think. I can’t drink from the water cooler.”

Willie Costello shivered, his shoulder muscles tensing, almost sandwiching his neck in the spasm-like motion. “You can’t?” Sweat rolled out of his hair, matting it, giving a crawly feeling of cool to the sides of his face. A spider in the water cooler. He won’t have time to change shirts before the party.

“You have to, sir, I really need a drink.”

Willie Costello blinked back tears as he rose from his desk, nostrils flared. He stepped outside his office, Kristy Bain behind him, checking no one else was watching. The water cooler stood at the end of the hall, unassuming in its white porcelain, its giant head filled with colourless liquid and blending with the surroundings.

Before he knew it, Willie Costello was at the end of the hall, next to the gargantuan petrie dish. He peered into the depths. A spider sat near the top, spinning slowly, limply, slightly obscured with the bend of the plastic.

“Right there.” Kristy pointed at the obvious.

Willie Costello pulled back his sleeve, readying himself for the worst. His arm snaked over the bowl, fingers slowly unscrewing the lid.

“Do you need space?” Kristy asked.

“I’ll be fine.” The lid fell off, bouncing on the dusty floor. Willie moved in closer, putting himself next to the cooler facing the wall. In one fluid movement, he plunged lifted and plunged his arm into the cooler up to the armpit. He realised the misstep, as his arm didn’t have room to bend upwards to reach the spider.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the worst part of the sorry tale. The spider, sadly, wasn’t dead, but very much alive. It had been treading water for the past day, using the sides as places to latch onto, the ebbing strength being put to moving its body up against the plastic, letting its skin bask in air, before collapsing back to the waterline. But here was a way out. A foreign object, clearly ready to move back out of the water cooler at any moment.

The spider, using its last reserves of energy, leapt. The body squished against Willie Costello’s hairy armpit, nestling itself, using the sweat as a malleable glue. Willie Costello, being rather dim, missed this. He peered down to arm-level, and seeing nothing, began to pull his arm out.

The armpit moving, the chest meeting the arm with the plastic cooler closing in quickly, frightened the spider. It knew moments of life and death. It had seen its mother and father lose their lives to a dog, burrowing for a bone. His cousin, moving for a slice of cheese, being cleaved in two at the hands of The Courier-Mail. This was one so moment in history, and the spider wasn’t quite finished. There was skin. And the spider had fangs. For dear life, it bit into that sweaty, insipid skin, and bit hard.

Willie Costello at first shrieked, then did what could only be described as a hiccupy cry. His hand jerked upwards, his arm bringing the cooler head off its hinges with the force. The water splashed out across the floor, saturating Kristy Bain’s shoes. Willie Costello fell, cooler tub following, onto the carpet. The spider managed to escape, spreading its legs in the freefall as a makeshift parachute, getting clear of Willie’s speeding frame just in time.

Kristy dropped down in seconds, not to help Willie Costello, but to pick up the cooler, wrenching it out from his arm.

She left, leaving Willie Costello to blubber. The sound of a tap running. Then she was back, the tub filled and placed back on the cooler.

Willie wiped tears from his face, his right hand scratching at his armpit, trying to relieve the pain. “Are you going to drink from that? I think I got the spider.” He managed with the tone of an emasculated choir boy.

“No way. Your hand’s been there, sir, that’s just ew.”

Willie Costello did not stop crying until the prostitutes came, which for them wasn’t an issue, as that was usually how they found him.

Personal Manifesto — How Do I View My Creative Discipline?

Pulled an all-nighter to complete this for university. Twitter contributed the ABBA quote.

***

Since grade one, my creative writing has defined me. I remember watching one of my father’s taped movies from the night before, The War of the Worlds, and believing that the story were so thrilling, so gloriously action-packed and gory, that it should be written down in class the next day. I scribbled out the half-page plagiarised story, resembling the 1953 film in all but character names. As an added bonus, I felt compelled to scrawl in an abstracted version of the R18+ insignia, complete with a rambunctious written warning of the levels of sci-fi violence in the story.

Eventually, I moved on from shamelessly copying off movies I’d seen the night before. However, what still drives my writing is the want to entertain people. I’ve passed the one hundred and fifty short story mark, and all through school I had a system of writing a story and using an online messenger service to pass it on to my friends, who were always looking forward to reading my next story. I marketed myself as a storyteller before I even knew what marketing meant.

Now I am at the junction Stephen King referred to in On Writing, of whether I can finish a novel. I’ve attempted it four times and gave up on each try, although, I have a good feeling about this fifth trial and half the novel written to prove it.

I see myself as going on to work in the industry of publishing. I need something to keep me afloat financially while I finish my novels. While the author cannot sustain him or herself purely through writing alone (at least to begin with), a job is required. My degree affords me an entrance into the publishing industry. I have already worked in a publishing house for three months and know how the market is going.

The future of publishing is moving online and ebooks are the fastest-growing medium for reading. This means that I conduct my own distribution and have a more involved role in the publishing. My first novel, Stolen: Accounting Can Be a B*tch Sometimes, will be published and distributed on my blog and on the e-bookstore Jaffa Books for free. I will use my talents in both Facebook and Twitter to cultivate a reader base and build buzz around my novel.

While economically this will not benefit me in the short term, in the long term it will build an authorial portfolio that I can use to propel me into the wider public sphere, and a formal contract with a big-time publisher. Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw, a famous Brisbane game reviewer and novelist, began as a small-time freelance writer. It was when he uploaded a few jaded video reviews to Youtube that a serious gaming website, and the public, noticed. After writing weekly columns on the aforementioned gaming website, the publishing house Dark Horse contacted Mr. Croshaw for a novel deal. Being his lifelong dream, he accepted. This is one of many case studies (another being guest lecturer John Birmingham) where this style of a deep internet presence for an author has been successful.

The more ‘traditional’ distribution of publishing has been widened substantially with e-publishing. It gives authors like myself a chance to communicate directly with our audiences. On Twitter I decided to outsource ideas for the direction of my novel. I posted a tweet to see if anyone were interested in reading a draft, and already I had three replies from people eager for a copy. I sent off what I had written so far, and got responses within three days, one of which in the form of a long e-mail critiquing various aspects of both characterisation and scene structure. Perhaps this is the new way novels are edited – through crowdsourcing?

As a result of blogging and social networking, I have been asked to guest post on a science blog, pitch to a gaming website and given a movie reviewing job on the QUTE Magazine website.  This movie reviewing hobby has sustained me three years of continual writing and built up a user base independent of my fiction audience. Part of the reason I won an internship in a publishing company was so that I could be designated marketing manager, and bring the company more in line with digital strategies.

Many see my creative practice as failing due to this push for online publication, but I see it as a beginning. It cuts out the difficulty of getting noticed. If you have a product to contribute, you can share it online, and if it proves to be worthwhile, that product will be passed on, or at least read. Gone are the days of people idly passing a book, or a title being pushed back behind the ‘Top 10 Bestsellers’ section of a bookshop. Instead, there are Facebook feeds, Reddit threads and Twitter streams, which give everything an equal chance of being seen.

Things have not changed since school. I still share my stories with friends, except now instead of five readers, there’s over five hundred online who read them. My early years of rewriting Goldeneye, Star Wars Episode I, A Bug’s Life and The War of the Worlds as short stories have blossomed into long-form novels with unique themes, plot and characters.

People in the industry wonder if there is a darker side to Facebook, Twitter and the internet as a whole. Have we lost creativity in this crowdsourcing? Will these titles with minimal publisher involvement sell? Like the monstrous Martian Tripods of H.G. Wells’ novel, this digital age is mysterious and daunting. What sets us apart is the fact that it is not here to hurt our industry, only streamline it further. This is the biggest innovation since the printing press, and for once the old ways of the industry are the Martians, unable to handle the new atmosphere and dying out when inventions like the ebook take a stranglehold on their system. I say we enter that Martian Tripod. We upload our ebooks, update our Twitter accounts, and instead of viewing the online future of writing as an invasion, we welcome it as one of the great examples of human ingenuity.

As ABBA once sang, the winner takes it all. You have to be proactive to be published. You can’t win if you don’t try.