The sword went through the armour as if it were just silk. His knees buckled as it severed his spinal column and exited out his back, hilt hard up against his chest. He hung there, held from collapsing to the earth by the sword that had been driven through him as if he were paper. As his sight began to waver, he forced his gaze to follow up the arm of his slayer. His eyes widened as he found himself staring at nothing more than a mere slip of a girl clad in vermillion armour. Not armour, a crimson tunic perhaps. No, not a tunic, just blood, a cloak of blood dripping like honey. She put her bare foot, toenails painted with splatters of blood, against his breastplate and slid him off her sword. The last thing he saw as the reaper’s scythe bore down on him were her eyes looking at him, into him, through him. Burning into his soul, flaying it from his body. With his last thought, he prayed for the Devil to take him to the depths of hell. He now knew there was somewhere that even Beelzebub feared to tread.[...]
So, these are the leftovers then. This is the husk. This is what’s left at the end. The detritus – saved, perhaps, but forever altered. Imperfect. The wreckage. The final result of incursion, affliction, disintegration.[...]
Down the laneway she followed her whimsy. It was nothing more than that that led her there. An idle thought, a daydream, her whimsy. She pirouetted past coffee grasping tourists attempting to find their way out of the labyrinth of alleys and lanes and dead ends. She sashayed around drunken lovers lost in each other so deep that the world had faded to background noise and blurred watercolours and all that there was was each other. She twirled around the purveyors and creators of gratis public artworks, gliding around their heady fumaroles. She skirted the bouncers and procurers and maîtres d’ attempting to coax her in for a dance, a dalliance, a dinner; perhaps one, perhaps all three. She sidestepped past it all, down the laneway, away from the world, into the fading light, the growing eternal sunset fuelled by exit lights. Down the laneway, whimsy leading, around the corner, away from this world, and onto the doorstep of the next.[...]
Despite – perhaps because of – the rumour and intrigue that continues to swirl around her brief but highly eventful dalliance as a primary teacher, Anthea has managed to carve for herself a place in the upper echelons of society resulting in her recent appointment as High Priestess of the Chai Society.[...]
“And you are?”, the security guy behind the reception desk asked me.[...]
You are the man sitting outside the cafe across the way. You are there often, and your rusty coloured dog, a shepherd or working dog of some kind, sits by you at the end of a lead.[...]
After many years of a stressful career in the legal profession, I decided to make a tree change and move to country Victoria. Needing a challenge in life, I bought a rundown cottage on the main street of Hollow Bend, an old gold mining town some thirty klm’s west of Ballarat.[...]
He moved down the narrow hallway through the debris of moving day: boxes upon boxes stacked, bottom to top and shoulder to shoulder the length of the passage. They congregated outside doorways like drunken uncles at a wedding. A posse of boxes stood leering at the bride from the entrance to the master bedroom, another set were reminiscing about buck’s nights gone by outside the study, and a smaller, more collapsed group wistfully mulled over lonely bachelorhood outside the bathroom.[...]
This video is about an abandoned old cottage in an outer eastern suburb of Melbourne.[...]