PULP: ISSUE 28 2026

USU Creative Awards 2026

Calling all student artists, writers, filmmakers, and musiciansGet involved with USydʼs largest creative prize to showcase your work at Verge Gallery, and be in to win up to $2000!

Submit by 15 June at verge-gallery.net

Senior Editor’s Note

Portia, Rosanna, and I met at the PULP Editor workshop in February of 2025. Bunched like sardines on one of the PULP couches, we were put in a group exercise together purely by chance. !at evening I learned that Portia’s mum sometimes makes her scallion pancakes for breakfast and that Rosanna used to be an engineer. I hadn’t even made up my mind about whether I wanted to apply to be an editor or not. Our next meeting was when PULP3 threw their Issue 19 launch party at Manning. Dressed in all black, we found each other in a sea of party goers eager to be interviewed by Bipasha and Joan and included on the PULPstagram in a vox pop. Jess and Sophie joined the team at the launch party. And a er a few trials and errors, we found our nal puzzle piece: Jayden. Jayden blew my mind in a rst year literature class when he wrote a poem as a critical response instead of writing an essay like the rest of us did. We had to have him on our team.

When we received the news that we had been chosen as the new PULP team, we headed to Cabramatta to celebrate. Our insides warmed by pho and bun cha, we chattered excitedly about our dreams of producing our own print media and rebuilding the website. Full of soup, kue, and pickles, we photographed fresh longans in the palms of our hands on the train ride back to Central to advertise pitches opening for our rst issue.

It’s di cult to re ect eloquently on our time as PULP4. However, I am extremely proud of the work we have created. I cannot express the depth of my love and gratitude to Portia, Rosanna, Jess, Jayden, and Sophie. I have learned so much from you all. A huge thank you to the iconic Kate Saap, our PULP coordinator who has supported us all year. From grappling with InDesign, organising our printing, playing pool with us, and reminding us of our deadlines. We love you!!!

!ank you to Tesha Malott, Anthia Balis, Anneka Scholtz, and the rest of the incredible Verge Gallery team. We love being part of USU Arts & Culture with you, and ensuring that the arts stays lively.

And to our wonderful contributors: PULP only exists because of your creative, mind-boggling, hilarious, and intelligent minds, and all of your hard work. It has been so rewarding working alongside you, running through ideas together, and meticulously re ning your pieces.

Working in student media is a privilege. In a time of political uncertainty, censorship, and a lack of support within the arts, I am extremely grateful to have had the freedom, funding, and time to have created seven magazines alongside Portia, Rosanna, Jess, Jayden, and Sophie.

In the words of RuPaul, PULP4 will now sashay away. And to PULP5, good luck and DON’T fuck it up. Xxx

Sasha x

Editorial

All right, memories, guys, memories. I have none. I remember when we !rst came into the o ce, we were like, It's so messy. I just want to tidy it up. [laughs] We It was back there. It was back there. Yeah. So we've made our mark. I was about to say, it did move since we got here. We moved it. Yeah. Not for the better, though. have used the pool table. Yeah, and I will... True, we really didn't use the pool table enough. Yes, this couch wasn't really used when it was there. No, I did have slanted as fuck. I have played many a game of pool on this pool table. I've played a few games of pool here. I think I’ve played like two. I've had, like, strangely, we didn't play. We should have a movie night before we don't have this. You know what I think we should do? I think we should have a sleepover here. Just one you, Sophie. Sleep over here. anks guys. I'll sleep over here. Like, I think we could do, like, we could have wine, we could have whatever alcohol you guys drink. worst, but, like, gonna have to decide when this is happening, like, soon. at's why we have a senior editor. Yeah. TO help us with the organisation of the sleepover. In the holidays. Might just be easier. A er once... Yeah Yeah, I am. Before you come, before you go, or either when you come back. Okay. When are you going? [laughs] When would it be? Also, I realised Ellie's having her party on that day. Okay, then I'm just not gonna have a party this year. What? What? What? You're because it's actually my birthday is on the last day of our PULP tenure. Oh, perfect. Oh, party. Should we have mimosas at 10 AM? Oh, yeah, yeah. We should at, like, 4 PM and go there. And then when it gets dark at 5, we can... Yeah. Well, whoever wants to come or is available. Let me check my calendar, sorry. Can more. Well surely I hit Ryan up and... Joint birthday. We just have a joint party... And then we go to the Courty once it gets dark. Oh, perfect. And oh, probably Yeah, a er the rave, we come back here, absolutely fucked. I need to change the date. No, no, I mentioned you, pushes you on that day, but I need like... I need calendar to 2 days before that. Have we started recording? Yeah. Okay. Wait, this is all very relevant. We're recording a voice note? Shall we add out inability think we should just transcribe this whole conversation, not edit it at all. And !ll the entire page with nonsense. Yeah, low-key, that would actually be kind of colour of text. And so, like... Whoever's transcribing this... sorry. Yes. Yes. We transcribe, no editing. Fuck, yeah. No, no di%erent colours, just guess who said sheets when we leave notes and then we're like, brackets, JW. Yeah. Yeah. True. at's so cute. SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET [Awkward pause]. Yeah, maybe we can't say that. is part in the transcription will just be redacted. Yeah. Yeah, like that. Well... Are It did. at… we aired our personal grievances. [Laughs] Oh, cool. Oh, no, I feel like we didn't air our personal grievances. at is true. And then our personal You want a tour? Shut up, Portia. We're ready to strangle each other. Yeah. I don't think we need to include that. Let's never mention that again. I just think if know if I can even do that. Yeah. And we have one yet to be released. What if 28 is my favourite? I'm lowkey feeling like 28 is my favourite. Favourite SECRET

In our attempts to write our last ever editorial, we opened up voice memos, plonked ourselves on the beanbags, and got to chatting. !is background is the transcript of that incredibly productive conversation. Please read at your discretion.

A er much discussion of the complementary colours we should wear in our interview, and all the possible questions we could be asked, we stood outside the door with sweaty hands in nervous silence. We had, for God knows what reason, printed a celebratory-application cake with our mock magazine cover (also Jess’s face) on it and we vaguely thought that maybe we would bring this out during our interview to showcase our planning skills. en we had a crisis about whether this was narcissistic so we didn’t bring it out. e cake sat mysteriously and unidenti!ed on the table for the entire interview.

WINDOW ROOM/MEETING ROOM/PRODUCTIVE ROOM (entry)

We once remarked that we didn’t know why the last team stayed here !nalising issues until 2am. At midnight that night, eating doordashed Guzman in our meeting room and adding comments like “change em dash to semicolon” on the Figma, we realised we had made a grave mistake in speaking too soon. e name ‘Productive Room’ emerged as it became the preferred space for those seeking sensory deprivation, considering how (o en) too loud the Lounge Room speakers played music involving lyrics.

is was also the room where:

• Jess sat on a thumbtack

• e ceiling would collapse

• e scene of the GREAT HELVETICA MASTHEAD DEBATE (yes we debated our masthead for an entire month)

LOUNGE ROOM

Everyone in publishing seems solely occupied with remixing the alphabet into “GSM, DSM, DSP, RGB,

CMYK”. We knew we were in the right place when Alaina from Seed visited and we each grinned gleefully at the prospect of caressing various textures of paper stock (laid out on the pool table, of course). is moment a rmed our team’s wankerish disposition.

SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET. Okay. To each shut up. Okay. Not as part of the fucking actual thing. Be released. Well, like, release a SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET. And then your shoes broke. I was !xing my shoes while I was doing it. SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET. It's true. Okay, favourite issue? I think white one. Really? Woahh woah. Really? Oh, no. Really? 25. 25, I think. 25, beautiful, pretty surprisingly, surprisingly good. Not like, but just like, like, it went really smoothly. It did. You know? Apart from the cover. But yeah. But even like... But even ended up being !ne. It was great, like, with... it disappeared from the stands. It did, it's nowhere to be found, that issue. Like, 26? Mm-hmm, yeah. ere's one that was really, like, it, like, when it, when we got it, I was like, oh, this is so nice. Very nice. Yeah. It is really nice. Okay, and, like, working overseas was surprisingly FaceTime. Portia was in Bali. We've done 2 covers overseas. I was in Switzerland. Yeah. We have done two covers overseas. Wow. Look at us go. I do really like vourite. It's a good decide it is photos. Oh, wait, editors photos for 28? Yeah. Did we even do those? Oh, yeah, we did. ere you go. Like, last week, Jess. You're nothing beats the amount of excitement I had for our 1st one. Yeah, seeing it physical, holding it for the !rst time. Right, right. Like, that was so cool. I know. columns, but I honestly think it's held up pretty well. Like design-wise. 22? Yeah, that's my least favourite. Really? Let me bring it out. I wanna look at it. I know learnt to love it more. I think I love it, like, I love my !ve-year-old self. Yeah, exactly. We were just babies. But like, that's gorgeous. No, that's ugly, isn't it? See? the margins, just look at it. Yeah. From really far back without your glasses on. Why is the fuck that big? Like through. at was a mistake. issue. Yeah. Pretty. And then also, like, this was such a. Oh my god that was one of the !rst pieces I edited. Who's was this again? SECRET. SECRET. Yeah, guys. Such a butt fuck. Which is good. Except for the fact that the font is just far too big. It's way too big. I like the size. at's nice. SECRET didn’t get done dirty, though. ankfully, no for, like, having no college. Like, yeah. Yeah, but I didn't have any concept of like the fact that some text would, like the closer it was to the spine. Like, it's way at it that closely and you just ick through, it, I feel like, I know, this is like the ugliest thing I've ever seen in my life. Contributors and editors. [laughs] It's it's that up and I wasn't. But also just, like, look at, like, I'd be like, hmm, but it's okay. e comparison between these two, like. Oh, yeah. How beautiful is that? In Someone made a badge. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, this is incredible. With the dust jacket... Every time I look at it. It’s also the colour and transparency of the pages. have, like, 30 at home. Do you? Yeah, because I took that thing to SECRET, but then they wouldn't let me give it to them. So now I just have a box. Well, can I little bit further than... Yeah, I want to take 27 to Dead Wax again as well. Okay, memories. A memory I have of the media room is SECRET SECRET SECRET. green Hands bag. And we need to check that the green Hands bag is empty. Disappears, you know? Is anything in it? Well, that's what I was gonna ask. ask you. A memory I have of that room... Yes, theres de!nitely stu% in here. What room is that? Yay. e texta room. Oh, that Oh, shit. Oh, that was the low sensory room. were, like, red. My favourite memory of this room is anytime anyone is working in here, and somehow everybody... ends up. I think maybe the smallest possible about them. Sorry. Wait, go. Holy shit. Well, get rolling, girl.Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, Friday or something. When people are free. When are you free What about Saturday, or is that just too crazy to even suggest? I'm working on Saturday. Oh, and it's ANZAC day. I think I'm going canyoning maybe if you want the shop, in George Street, next to Yochi. ey've done a bunch. I am kind of keen. It depends. Well, I don't know if I want to go out. on Friday nights. If I do, Oh, have we? Are you working on Friday? I don't think so. Saturday. Not Friday. Not Friday? No. Well, locally, I kind of want to go to a place. She has to have on guys. What else? No, no, no, no. come on. No, we've got this. We've got this. Come on. Okay. Do you want me to go, like? Another memorable moment… Yes. the keys to the fucking room. Oh, yeah. We're so organised. ere's always something going. All the WelcomeFests. But the fun? ey are fun. ey always work who they through their work. But then, like, how, like, and how they respond to my edits. Yeah, yeah. I think my favourite memories will always be from the this moment, like, at the end of the night, where we all get together, and we, like, take a photo or something, and we all just, like... [squeal]. And we look at our And I’m like I love these guys. Yay. Yeah. Yeah. Do you guys, like, how I’m sitting right now? I love it. I think, yeah, munch parties that I've thought were gonna launch. I remember we all got there super early and we were all feeling a bit at at the Gladdy. Oh, my God, that makes sense. And a bit like... And then the bake was pretty great. Friday was amazing. And the Gladdy with the big sale. It was awesome. And Issue 26. e photo booth was great. Photo Booth was great. other launch parties? Well, 22 just for the record, when I emerged here from that, the low sensory room, you said I had emerged from Plato's cave. Yes, you had ic equipment that doesn't work, I think there's another shout out. Don't worry, like, oh, yeah, Kate's an absolute chiller... Wait, what do we have to do? Yeah, how okay? Yeah. RIP that texture scanner. Oh, I know. was just thinking about that. Kate's not a mind reader. Bro, the fucking SD card applied. Having an SD card, was like, no, no, no. Oh. Very nice. You know what else we haven't talked about? Welcome Fest. Well, which one? Well, both. So enthusiastic. e 2nd one was got the 2nd one. No, no, but that was the key in a way. Like, we were more just with, like, comfortable within ourselves. Yeah. Please, like, chip in the pin straight years, we, like, just were getting all random, tote bags and stu%, were taking them and binning like, straight a er, and you'd be like, no, Splendour Gel. When hard that we made a cake with your fucking face on it? Well, no, let it be known that in the in the layout. De!nitely. Let it be known, though, that Rosy also made remember? And then there was that whole like last minute debate of like, oh, wait, bring the cake out so weird. Is that fucking weird? Remember that. I think our–. It had the cover. And waiting for the callback as well. Waiting for the... waiting to go into the interview room as well. at was crazy. ey're all standing bring up that we, like, thought it was too narcissistic to be. I feel like that's funny. It is. Oh my god. So just that was perfect. e last minute submission, because yeah. Why did it go yellow? Because I didn't know how to correct the colour space. Because the colour space of the !lm... I didn't think I've ever heard of the of our tenure has broken up with their partner throughout our entire tenure. My class starts at 4:30 and I must leave. Okay, love you. Love you, too. Bye. Anyway, just like, I think a highlight was a er the !rst launch party and we all came here and depleted a large portion of food. Oh, yeah, that was good. And a er the 2nd

For our !rst ever issue (Issue 22), we opted for the Rolls Royce of the paper world: Splendor Gel. Since then we’ve splurged on dustcovers and embossing, and fought about the optimal GSM of stock. A special thank you to Kate and Tesha for making our wildest paper fantasies come true.

e lounge room is where we sat on beanbags. And where we did important work tasks like mapping out Rosanna’s entire horoscope. We watched 2000s music videos (for inspiration) and ordered a bucketload of KFC a er a launch party. ere tended to be a strong relationship between laying on the grey couch and the rapid speed at which vox pops were completed.

Since there are no windows and we had no indication of time besides our iPhones, we fabricated an ambient atmosphere once the tasteless overstimulating ceiling lights were turned o% and warm lamps were turned on, arranged thoughtfully in sacred corners of the o ce oorplan.

PRINTER ROOM

Somehow we always ended up in the printer room. It would start with one person sidling away to be more productive. Another person would join them in the teeny tiny room !lled with pens and badge makers and paper. en, a'icted with FOMO, we’d all want to be in on the conversation, cramming ourselves into the little space. Due to the scarce availability of chairs, this led to some sitting on the exposed concrete oor, just to feel included.

In the printer room, we edited less vox pops than we should have, getting to know our much loved PULP crowd a little better as they shared the places they would heist or whether they would smash or pass Nick Wilde from Zootopia.

We haven't tidied it. We've made it worse. We've made it worse. We did change the layout. A little bit. is couch has not moved since being moved here. It's true. though. Like now the pool table's just unuseable. No, it's not. What? We can-, it's not. Oh, I kind of get you. But that's not our fault. Like, but prior to that, we could have a nap on it once, but... So a pool table, lack of lack of use of pool table. Surprising lack of use of pool table. Although it's shit. Hmm? It is a shit table... It's like strangely, like a lot of people just here on a Wednesday night. A er !lm soc. Oh true. Nice. Yeah. I've played pool…with people. Yeah, it's fun. Nice. I feel like, as a team, one night before... Really? I think we should go away. I think... Yeah, I think we should go to like an Airbnb or something. Yeah, yeah. No, I'll have a sleepover with drink. Fuck, yeah. I'll roll a j. Oh, yeah. We could, like, watch a fun movie and stu%. OK, yeah. Yeah, fun takeaway. Yeah. I agree. Well, pretty much, not to be the sleepover. Um, I think in June we should also go away. A er everyone's done. Yeah, yeah. And we can write our honours. I think like end of June, end of June. Yeah. going? 21st of June. e 20th. No. Shit. Good. Oh, 2 p.m.? Well, we go before that. I was thinking of having a birthday party, then, but I guess I'll just cancel that idea. You're so sad. No. Another problem is... Maybe just have another birthday party, you can have a party. One more. No, I was thinking that on my actual birthday have a bottomless. And also, we, I think I'm just gonna invite, like, all my friends to, like, Camperdown Park. Nice. In the a ernoon. Like, we can just leave here Can you come? And well, it's actually May, so... Oh, fuck, sorry. So you have no excuse? at actually is Ryan's birthday, so I'll have to decide which of you I love probably not. because my honours will be doing like 5 days. I was like, if there's like a good rave on then. Oh, and then we come back and sleep over at the park. [laughs] need to change the date too. that day too because we're in the same class, right? No, I think it's my other class. Oh, no, it's not. Okay, I'm changing the date in my to ever have an on task conversation? at's a great point. Yeah. Okay, what are some actually fond memories? Maybe I should just think about like um... key of cool. In putting that part that you just said. Yes, that was so cool. Meta, meta, meta, meta. Yeah that's a good idea. Oh, each of what we say can be a di%erent what. Guess who? Say your name a er every sentence. Yeah, like, like a walkie-talkie. Sophie, over. We can talk about, like in our pitch, like in our Excel spread-

We also:

Are you talking about the pitch meeting? No. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, the pitch meeting from hell. 27? Yeah. at was a lot of fun. at really tested our relationships. personal grievances came out… in other ways, yeah. I didn't catch... I'm so like– I was sitting there like, you were having the time of your life. You guys, you want a tour? if I was reading that, I'd be like, oh. Okay, well, what about so, okay, why don't we just go around and say our favourite issue? Oh, okay. Which is tough. I don't SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET a 2 hour voice note, but it's all redacted. Okay, I see what else. Oh, no. is is too far. Yeah, okay. sorry. SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET

• Decided to include the Dan and Phil meme in Issue 24

• Witnessed Jayden release himself from the darkened printer room with bloodshot eyes a er many tiresome hours of staring at a maximum brightness monitor

• Sasha mentioned that Jayden’s state resembled an emergence from Plato’s Cave

STUDIO ROOM

Contributor photos were an endless source of entertainment, each of us acting like we were meeting a guest celebrity on the reality tv show of our o ce. It was always a joy to meet the awesome contributors we’d had the privilege of working with. “I wonder what they’ll look like,” “I knew she’d wear Blundstone boots.”

ank you to the contributors for patiently waiting while the camera was locked in the storage room with no keys, we were missing an SD card, we had no charge, and had inexplicable meltdowns.

LANEWAY CAFE

Roses are red, Violets are blue. Laneway Cafe, We love you.

OUTSIDE VERGE/LAUNCH PARTIES

Most of our favourite PULP memories were made at our launch parties. To introduce ourselves, we o%ered psychic readings from e Argyle Oracle in line with Issue 22’s concept of ‘dreams’. We were very proud to raise money for Olive Kids through our bake sale alongside Honi Soit at the Issue 24 launch, whilst dancing the night away in the courtyard of the Gladdy. e House of Genet drag kings at our Issue 27 launch were also a performance highlight. We loved meeting you all, and celebrating our contributors’ hard work. It is always a special moment to reveal our contributors’ works to them, in print, held in their hands.

A special thanks to the Verge Gallery team who has hosted a few of our launch parties and who we had tonnes of fun vibing at WelcomeFest with in February.

LAVATORY

In the (public) bathroom we would all do our makeup and skincare regimens for PULP launches under the repressive overhead white lighting that made us all look chopped. Everything in the bathroom is A(sop, courtesy of Jayden and Sasha (current and former employees). e use of our supplied, regular, bright pink bathroom soap was simply inconceivable.

e hidden bathroom remained a secret, an Easter egg, only for those with stage fright and germaphobia. However, there was no A(sop available, constituting a trade o% upon use.

THANK YOU

A sincere thank you to Kate Saap, Tesha Malott, Verge Gallery, OUR CONTRIBUTORS!, our DJs, performers, readers, and everyone who attended events to be part of our PULP community. We are so proud to have introduced PULP to many new faces, and to have facilitated a publication for aspiring writers and artists to exhibit their talents.

To PULP 5, congratulations on achieving your welldeserved editor roles. We can’t wait to see the evolution of PULP.

SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET Oh, which was really good. Like, what is, um... SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET SECRET pretty special. 25 is a real special. Very, very special. Very special. Uh... I also love 26. 20–? Yeah. 26 was wonderful. And I'm on the cover. So even better. 26 was like even like... No, that was the di%erent one. at was for... But, like, even cover, I feel like, was okay. You know what I mean? e cover was !ne. We !gured it out. box there. In one of the stands. Oh, near Manning, if anyone needs any. I might take some. At the sushi shop, nice. Oh, yeah. But that's pretty much it. Yeah, but surprisingly easy. Yeah. Awh true we should include something about us having worked on it from overseas. Yes. Talk about our Zoom call. Oh, our FaceTime. On like 28 as well. I mean, like I'm really excited to see. Yeah, that... I wonder, like, a year on, which my favourite will be. Yeah. I think contributor photos, 28 is my faYou're not known for your short term memories. I should. I think any of us are. Best, ugh. I think the most exciting, I mean, all of them are really exciting, but I think know. We take that for granted now. Like, I think the 1st one, 22 will always hold, like, a very special place in my heart. And I know that you hate that it doesn't have know we all, like, held hands a er our 1st pitch meeting and we're like, we agree that this is a good pitch. I actually don't remember that. I think over time, I've like Like, what the fuck is that? But that's terrible. do you mean? Why did I do that? is was good. If you go, this was fucking good. anks, guys. But then it's like Yeah. is is great. If you look closely... Like, love this. Love the sheep. Wish there were columns. And then there are columns in this page. Oh, oh, ewww. Like... is is like a lot. is just would have been so much nicer with columns. Like... is page, this no notes. at was great. Jayden's, he didn't get done dirty. Yeah. you still didn't get done dirty. ank God. SECRET didn't get done dirty. It was apparently. Just didn't get done, though. Did you get done dirty? at one I had way too close to the spine. Like the text goes away. e margin problem again. Yes. Didn't know what margins were. But if you just took that and you don't look nice that we're able to look back and be like, that's that's embarrassing. Because it's like, okay. We've improved. Cute bedsheets. anks. I don't know, if I picked In comparison to like... [laughs] What the fuck is that? You know, like, whereas this is like, wow. Well, again, it's like a toddler of us. Oh, she's ripped? Someone... pages. Yeah, yeah. at was such a good shout. Bible paper. Bible paper, paper. Bible baby. Bye bye. Yeah, I need to stock up on these ones actually. Same as well. I just have some of yours then? anks. Okay, are the memorable moments... I think we should ask to drop some of 27 at, like, Vic on the Park or somewhere, SECRET. Oh, my God… Depleted within like the !rst 2 months. Literally, that was so beautiful. It was a tough time. e green hands bag. Oh, my God. Shout out the you. Go check. I don't think there is. Special surprise. Well, actually there could well be. is is why we need to... Sorry. Maybe... Do you want to shut the door on? room. Low sensory room. My favourite memory is when Jayden came out of that room a er being in there for, like, in the dark for like 2 hours and it was, his eyes possible room, which is really... I think it is the smallest trip. We should mention more about our contributors. So much good, guys. I think we should say something next week? Oh, I hate being adults. I know. Remember when you just did nothing a er school every day? Yeah. at was kind of vibe. Um, I mean, like... Yeah. want to come. Oh, in those wetsuits? Yeah. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Maybe. Well, what... I'm looking at it yet, but... I don't know. Where'd you !nd an IGET? Um, then there's no... Yeah. ank you. But... that's really nostalgic. It's a nostalgia avour. Let's make a day. We just have. How are we doing this Sunday? Ever. Yeah. on Friday night. Oh my god. Can you turn o% the recording? I think we should leave the phone behind. I taken notes on the relevant bits, which there's not much, Yes. Can I just say one? Yeah, yeah. And every time we do contributor photos, there's a fucking camera malfunction or we can't !nd the SD card. Or we don't have work out. Done. It's how I learn, like, contributor photos is how I learn, like, who you are. Because I've got no idea. en I meet you, I'm like, oh. See, how I learn launch parties, though, especially when it's, like, oh, we've spent the whole night, like, apart, and we're all talking to our own separate people, and then there's issue, and we look at all the people that are there because of us, at the party we organised, and we're like, hell yeah. at's my favourite memories. Yeah. Agreed. gonna go really well have not gone so well. And then ones that I was like not feeling great about have been like the best thing ever. Absolutely. Yeah. Like, the issue 24 bake sale went so fucking well. And then everyone was dancing and like it was just so good. I think 24 and 27 have been our best launch parties by far. Yeah, Friday e Drag Kings, so fucking good. Yeah that was really good. Yeah. Excellent choice. Yeah, thank you. My leave for class alarm is going o%. Ignore it. Um, what had emerged from Plato's cave. at was so good. Um... I love the endless amount of Aesop. Yes. Yeah, yeah. e tradition is passed on... Yeah. All of the electronhow to use that camera. Why? Well, we can vlog. Nothing else. ere's like so many things, but then like we... Everything we got is shit we didn't want. Yeah, like, card, then, like, having to go get an SD card like that. e whole beginning part of this. Oh my god, yeah, that so stupid. And then I was just using my SD card and was wonderful. Second one was great. We didn't have to do much. [laughs] Oh, we probably did, but I didn't do much. I can't, this was because I cared less. Yeah. straight a er I'd be like, oh, my baby that I spent 300 hours in the 1st welcome fest. We were just handing it out to no one. Wait, just handing it out, like, so many 1st When the paper people came. I feel like the very beginning with everything as well, the interview, making the, the, the cake, the fact that we knew we fucking ate made that cake to demonstrate that she could organise events. Oh really? Yes, I remember that. She was going to bring it up. Oh my god. And then we were like, think I had cold feet about that. No, I think it would have been it was for the best. Glad we had it ourselves. And here's a cake we made. What's the cake? Oh, it had standing outside like in Manning. And we were all just like, go around and introduce ourselves to the room, just never... Yeah, yeah. at's so funny. Oh, my God. Let's because the video kept going yellow. Oh, yeah, in my room. Yes, at like 11 p.m. Why is it yellow? And you're like, I just upload it. You just have to submit it, sorry. Oh, video. at's why yours always looked oversaturated. Also, this is kind of a random one to bring up, but like, no one who was like with their partner at the start Anyway, the point is, no one broke up during our tenure. Yes. Yeah, yeah. at's beautiful. Yep. Happy. Good luck for tomorrow. e best moments, thank you, were 2nd launch party, when we ordered KFC, and we ordered... Fuck. We can do it again. Well, no, yeah. Okay, so guys. Last launch party. Yeah. I think verge is kind

All the love in the world from, Jess, Jayden, Portia, and Sophie xxx

Lost Diary

Roxy Lees

To the woman who sat in the window yesterday using a knife and fork to eat her Portuguese tart, you are meant to pick it up. Also, we would like to get your diary back to you. You left behind a navy notebook which I read. Our entire team at the bakery were entertained, it’s hilarious. Inside the cover is written: If found please return to Christina. However, this name is written without any way to contact you, Christina. In efforts to find you we have decided to publish excerpts of your writing in PULP. Could the relevant Christina please return to collect their notebook…

Christina, who bought a pastry last week, has not yet claimed her journal. Human nature dictates an attachment to our own creations, whatever their quality. We suspect this local woman does want her diary back, but may be embarrassed. Being the owner of a local business, I am naturally solution-orientated. Therefore, I have organised a small print run of the lost journal—full copies will be available at our bakery counter from next week. The writer is welcome to buy a copy, as any customer is, and has the opportunity to remain entirely anonymous. My team and I are delighted to continue serving the local community like we

Between pounding red lights and slick, sweaty bodies, I !nd respite. A space wherein the darkness I can move unnoticed and unpoised. Going out “to be gay”, as Jeremy Atherton Lin would say, is my ritual of rejuvenation, and without it I am pent.

Night cultures fostered my understanding of queerness, expanding how I express gay identity through movement. e queer techno community of 160k, formerly Poing (RIP), Mono, and Time is the New Space—clubs from my usual home back in Rotterdam— wrapped me in a more radical expression of self through the body. Queer identity here is fostered through more than sex, but something spatially and sonically relational. A time, place, and sound that enables expression in opposition to heteronormative standards. e liminality of night cultures is where we can detach ourselves from the everyday, indulging in the darkness as a space of freedom to aberrate from (in my case) CIS male convention, without fear of judgment or persecution. Movements through dance in a queer club are released from heteronormative guidelines; techno environments where unrestricted bodily expression cultivates a moment of respite from the otherwise poised presentation of the everyday self.

"You don’t have to talk, you just know. You want to dance for hours and hours and make the feeling last…You can share something without talking about it, and you can communicate on di"erent levels."

Christina Goulding, “ e Marketplace Management of Illicit Pleasure” (2008)

Coined by Manuela Piccolo, ‘night culture’ as a reframing of nightlife is a term intended to normalise clubbing and raving activities as forms of cultural expression similar to perceptions of a Victorian-era ball. Such activities are now approached more cautiously, associated with danger, thanks to what some call ‘centralised’ clubs. Zones unde!ned by a particular culture or community that invite not a diverse but an enforced normative and heterosexual/patriarchal context to clubbing. It is these same connotations that I think confuse many when they hear my relation to night culture as a space of self-care. When I tell people here in Sydney that I enjoy clubbing, alone or even sober, there is a sort of ghastly reaction. “Whoa, could never be me” sort of sentiments. Admittedly, solo/sober outings are not completely common, even back in the Netherlands, but the larger aversion to clubbing as a casual form of going out intrigued me, speci!cally

among younger queer people, with clubbing and techno holding such a historic relevance in the queer community.

Instead, the Sydney youth night culture gravitates towards Newtown, popular with queer 20-somethings and teens. Similarly, these bar-centric spaces cultivate a community of thriving queerness under the in uence of live music, drag, and alcohol-induced convo. Clubs, on the other hand, are perceived as more of a one-o% excursion, an occasional foray. In Australia, rising costs of alcohol and associated increases in drug use, early closing of public transit, and internet-driven expectations of clubbing are in part to blame for this reliance on bars as young queer hubs instead of clubs, but so too is the environment of these spaces.

Sydney during the 1960s/70s sexual revolutions saw Oxford Street transformed into the gay centre of the city, with the inaugural 1978 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras cementing this. Further still, the city is, in my perspective, a globally renowned LGBTQIA destination thanks to its famous pride events, beach lifestyle, and known ‘Gaybourhoods’. A holiday or home for both international and Australian gay men.

Gay men’s position within patriarchal and capitalist embraces, however, has granted us representation and power within such mainstream integration in the city. O entimes, our privilege gives us more allowances and a perception of normalcy as compared to other LGBTQIA communities. Sydney’s centrality on gay men as examples of progressivism and pride can be seen to have divided the community between what some call being culturally Gay versus culturally Queer, with gay men neglecting the radical histories of queerness as they are embraced into larger society under the auspice of the corporatised masculinity.

Such is exempli!ed in the gay clubs, populated predominantly by richer, mid-20s to middle-aged white men cruising for a make-out or illicit intimacy. As crude a description as this may be, my !rst stop in what I thought was queer techno night culture (as opposed to the also very fun pop-centric clubs like Universal or Stonewall) was at Flash. O%ering three oors of clubbing, two dedicated to techno/dance music, I was thrilled. e air inside drips with perspiration, heavily scented by overheated bodies. e muggy din shrouding illuminations of shirtless torsos outnumber those clad in clothes, and at every turn on the dance oor, another couple or

throuple kissing, hands clasped at the hip or around the neck. It was exhilaratingly gay. Spurred on by the beats, I too enjoyed my night, occasionally indulging in the sexual propositioning of the club kiss as well.

As fun a space as it may be for some gay men, myself included, the audience and rumoured lack of AC—to promote said shirtlessness (so I’ve been told by a resident DJ)—imitates a male !tness advert mixed with a club. A space with few deviations from the idealised masculine form and presentation. Almost plastic in its manufactured replication of heteronormative patriarchal gender expectations.

is can in part be related to a post-AIDS body ideal, which stigmatises and distances itself from gay bodies of “fragility”, reminders of the visible sickness caused by the epidemic. In response, muscular !tness and extreme wellness cultures became new standards. Physiques built from the sculpting of the body away from a stigmatised gay and into these built clone-like forms. In Sydney speci!cally, where I’ve found visual cultural capital is gained not so much by style (as I am used to), but rather, the display of the body, this is further prevalent. e beaches, !tness lifestyles, outdoorsy vibes, and hot weather in general perpetuate the exhibition of the body as a vessel of societal aesthetic appeal, perhaps more so than other places. Even Palms, an Oxford Street club popular with the gay Bears, I found to be similarly focused on exhibiting a shirtless homogenised physique as the normative bodily expression. Centred around such ideals, clubs become spaces of fraternisation and peacocking of these sexually standard/ stimulative bodies, and less about the expression of identity.

Combined, the impact of AIDS and Sydney’s body-centric culture has created a club atmosphere of what I call ‘Kissing Kens’. Environments of (hyper)masculine manufactured bodily exhibition and intimate motivations in a space that has otherwise historically been a space of queer movement and release. Such di%erentiation between gay and queer spaces is further promoted by the patriarchal prevalence of our position, one that lets us be queer but not so alternative to be pushed to the periphery. Whilst these gay clubs cultivate a tight-knit community, they seem to have taken ownership of Sydney’s techno landscapes that elsewhere have been used by a larger queer community to !nd release from heteronormativity and social expectations. Now these night cultures are enforced through a new homosexual

body exhibition standard. e aversion by other young queers to clubbing as a form of release is thus unsurprising, as the dark spaces and trancelike liminality of the dance oor hold a di%erent intention in Sydney. One bound less to what Glencross describes as follows:

“Reverberations of industry presented in a techno track […] provoked deep revaluations of the nature of repetitive labour, of hedonism as a healing power in a post-industrial society [...] O"ering an expression and a reconciliation of our ideas, the dance!oor—at its best—remains a site of re!exive praxis and transformation.”

Admittedly, these environments are not new. Douglas Crimp’s Disss-co (A Fragment) (1975–76) explores the popularity of NYC gay clubs like Flamingo, whose exclusivity and secrecy were staples in gay rituals. Gay Bar Why We Went Out (2021), by the aforementioned Jeremy Atherton Lin, similarly divulges some gay clubs and their proliferation of gay standards and cruising environments (not to say cruising and propositioning kisses are bad, just that they have become central in the techno music scene as opposed to dance/expression). It is in this text that he references this idea of going out “to be gay”, where, in a space relinquished from straight expectations, you may act unabashedly queer.

Whilst I struggle “to be gay”, or express queerness, in my respective manner amongst the ‘kissing ken’ crowds of Sydney’s gay techno scene, such spaces do and have always worked for a certain subset of gay men. Sydney’s Newtown night culture may just be the space for alternative queer praxis and transformation that I am merely not accustomed to. Perhaps then it is not my place to divulge or recommend a solution. Rather, my hope is that this investigation can incite re ection on the environments these clubs invite/exclude. Examining how gay men uphold patriarchal standards and assimilation into heteronormativity over queer cultures and expression, and calling to action perhaps others to reconnect with night culture as alternate opportunities to release. Divulge in the darkness and its freedoms as a chance to dance and to move in ways beyond that of kissing kens.

Charlie Bate-Sproston Kens

Maybe then gay clubs can hold an olive branch, an invitation, to the rest of Sydney’s queer communities to enjoy the praxis and transformation of the techno dance oor.

the scarcely known and neatly snowed in Jessica Crawley

to whose insolence in mine should i tether dreaming, what are the things upon the wall to see me as i am, and won’t be

the light harbours close beneath the far as something ever could be from a person. each motion made opens up to unforeseen reflections the skin more naked than the organ, marked in turns they know and turning, god forbid me to be known. i do not wish for motional revelation no, i do not wish to be revealed. i do not wish to echo nor to stutter out the picturesque oh, inaction utters. to be or do, to do, more so to conceive you, to begin

an enlightenment you would not haste, nor would you fight, to shiver into opens to the scopes one seeks in earnest at great distance, beholds no markers only bears, the barely drawn out pleas, such strife beholden eclipsing from within the here alone, the close to grounded ever far, oh the scarcely known and neatly snowed in.

MJ OVERMAN:

The Knowing Artifice of Friedrich Nietzsche and MJ Lenderman

Vance McDonald

Friedrich Nietzsche’s !e Birth of Tragedy (1872) bears an o -forgotten, all important subtitle: ‘from the Spirit of Music.’ is full title is slightly mystifying. Both phrases mean nothing on their own, and the way he uses them within the book is o en abstract.

To give a brief, contextual TL;DR, the book is Nietzsche (a Wagner tragic) justifying the role of art and music as a metaphysical exercise to a dubiously real, intellectually unenlightened audience who do not see aesthetic matters as of ‘serious’ philosophical concern. In his dedication to Richard Wagner, he states the following:

“Perhaps serious people will !nd it distasteful to see an aesthetic problem taken so seriously, if they see art as nothing more than an entertaining irrelevance… Let these serious people know that I am convinced that art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life …”

e book therea er appraises this loaded claim. In it, Nietzsche argues that the supreme goal of the world and existence is primarily an aesthetic exercise, and that music—especially ‘Tragic’ music which blends the sophistication of the arts with the chaos of daily life—has a unique ability to endow mundane life with greater meaning.

As exciting as Nietzsche’s ideas are to the music Tragic in me, I confess that I have no love for Wagner. His unique brand of substance without style pomposity is detestable enough on its own, but it takes on a special air of repugnance in light of the composer’s well-known a liation with German proto-fascism and his a erlife in the mythos of the Nazi Party. us, Wagner is somehow both evil and boring, the worst combination. us, my own understanding of !e Birth of Tragedy is drawn almost entirely from my own tastes and distastes, which are especially exclusive of Wagner. I have gone ‘Beyond Wagner and Nietzsche’ to try and locate an artist who best represents the mundane Tragedies of modern life.

On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), a book written a er Wagner and Nietzsche’s infamous falling out over gooning/antisemitism/ depends-who-you-ask, talks at length about how the masses used their limited means to invert morality, bene!ting themselves and demeaning the aristocratic classes.

In line with this view, I ask now that we consider a concurrent Genealogy of Music™. With few exceptions, the great Tragedians at the centre of Nietzsche’s aesthetic world were the cultural elite of Germany and Austria, each with a hilariously German name (Bach, Mozart, Handel, Schubert). Today, our Tragedians are multiethnic with names like “Rodrigo”, unheard of in Nietzsche’s time. No longer is Western classical music so culturally salient. It retains its cultural capital, but is kept largely separate from the popular consciousness. We source our tragedy elsewhere, and are each entitled to our own brand of personal meaning. Popular music, the music of the masses, is the truest everyday Tragedy, and its aesthetic qualities are not only valued, but vital to the construction of meaning in everyday activity.

Today, the most successful artists are increasingly those whose image and music are used as a tool to veil vulnerability. I must now commit a slight PULP misnomer and write brie y about Charli XCX’s ‘Brat’ (2024), as its tasteful indulgence of pop idol simulacra to veil the lyrical sincerity of the performer perfectly typi!es this musico-lyrical dissonance. Nietzsche, too, recognises the resonant power of this dissonance, emphasising its Tragedian quality. He states that, in music with lyrics, the lyrics are likewise bestowed with a greater meaning contextually in accordance with the song, and that any associated dissonance does not detract from the aesthetic quality of the song but generates additional nuance.

Even in the indie sphere— ostensibly opposite to mainstream pop music—it is the smirking and sly who are gaining popular interest. Everything is expressed with a wink and a nudge, and the inbuilt sense that the true story of the song is neither what is sung or played, but somewhat greater. Elliott Smith and Radiohead are vestigial holdovers of an era coloured by straightforward sincerity-core which popular artists are now rarely willing to indulge. Even in the seemingly bleak songwriting of artists like Phoebe Bridgers, we see a semi-constant wittiness which grounds the songwriter’s existential angst in something more approachable. e modern person sees the overtly introspective as a dishonest, unrelatable projection, and the contradictory as a more genuine re ection of the irony of everyday life, where the disconnect between the projected and the real has created a conceptual playground where we attempt to control how others perceive us.

Many artists have been forced into obsolescence by the advent of the irony pill, while others have resisted and become its antidote. Still more have tried to take the pill and died from the side e%ects. Few have been able to successfully synthesise the aching sincerity endemic to their prior work with this new mode of expression, and of those few, only one has perfected the synthesis. It is He who best carries the torch of the Nietzschean Tragedians by selecting the most appropriate aesthetic qualities to compliment modern sensibilities, and by highlighting the role of projected emotion in shaping what we perceive to be “real”.

I am, of course, talking about MJ Lenderman. No artist better exempli!es this gradual shi in tendency toward modern Tragedy. e mood of Lenderman’s early work is almost gratingly morose. ough the Songs: Ohia-esque Alternative Country of his self-titled LP frequently shows remarkable songwriting wit for a want to hold back is clearly not present. ere’s certainly something admirable about this level of vulnerability, but the record in its totality comes across as more of a wallow than anything transcendentally incisive about human emotion. It wasn’t until 2021’s ‘Knockin’ EP that Lenderman would truly come into his own as a songwriter. Herein, the artist shows a remarkable ability to knowingly invoke certain tropes and clichés as a means of making his personal melodrama more approachable. Still, the EP shows a certain lack of polish. While some !t from the lo-! production and outsider aesthetic (namely, ‘TV Dinners’), it is clear that others would necessitate a more appropriate musical aesthetic.

In this sense, ‘Boat Songs’ is a huge stride forward. ough released only a year later, it is on this album that one !nally feels as though they’re listening to a fully developed songwriter—one who has a complete grasp on how their lyrics and music in part can synthesise to create a more meaningful whole. Both this album and 2024’s ‘Manning Fireworks’ show a sophisticated interface with a long tradition of country music Tragedians who have used their songs to similar e%ect. Rather than the early comparisons to the likes of Neil Young and Jason Molina, these later LPs show traces of John Prine, Blaze Foley, David Berman, Roger Miller, amongst other ironic songsmiths

who frequently weaponised humour and inconsistency to mask their own sincerity. Lenderman seems to understand, better than most of his contemporaries, that the cheesy, overly earnest sentiments of country music have always been used in conjunction with humour to subtly expose the inherent longing to laugh at our own misfortune. It is as though the proclivity to make light of Tragedy is a tacit recognition that the Tragic, on its own, is only a signi!er of what we already know to be Tragic, and that to shi the way it is perceived through musical choices changes the emotional centre of the song. In Lenderman’s recent work, we see a highly developed awareness of how the compositional tropes of country music are thus fundamental in exposing the Tragedian dissonances of modern songwriting.

Even Lenderman’s music itself seems to be inherently conscious of the disconnect between the projected and the real. ough the song ‘TLC Cage Match’ (2022) is super!cially about the performance art of professional wrestling, it uses this frame to highlight Lenderman’s proclivity toward the arti!cial and the unreal:

“It’s hard to see you fall like that, though I know how much of it’s an act.”

ese lines can be read as analogous to the relationship between the music and the audience, and equally, the projected and the real. e music, the acted ‘fall’, intends to express a desired emotion, and the audience is conscious of the fact that the song is only a projection, or a%ectation of the true emotion. Yet the emotion resonates nonetheless; that it is only an act is irrelevant to how the music achieves its desired e%ect. us, the medium of song does not necessitate thorough authenticity, and is actually elevated by a subtle awareness of its own arti!ce. e more the artist is aware that a song is designed to inspire a certain emotion, the more this can be explicitly addressed within the piece. Other songs by Lenderman (‘Wristwatch,’ ‘Joker Lips,’ ‘Hangover Game’) show a similar interest in how people use extrinsic modes of expression to construct an aesthetic world which best expresses an intended emotion.

In Lenderman, unlike Wagner, is the inherent admission of falsity; rather than a pompous declaration of self-importance, we see a persistent self-awareness of the narrator’s own emotions, and how these emotions have been constructed in service of an intended e%ect. In this sense, Lenderman is certainly the truer Tragedian: he acknowledges the primarily aesthetic nature of the world, and his role in constructing it. In the songs of MJ Lenderman, we !nd that music is no longer limited by the arti!ce of the real, but has been elevated by the knowing invocation of the false; that which projects and which intends to a%ect.

District On Isabella Mitchell

My melodrama hides from the brutality that the notion of the end of the world brings. At the same moment I use my linen spray and do my skincare routine, the world, for most, seems to be ending.

I !nd myself constantly drawn back to a pubescent favourite, the !ctional world of Suzanne Collins’ 2009 novel, !e Hunger Games; her dystopian creation holding up a mirror to our modern world. I played the !lm adaptations on repeat as I arranged dialectic images of aesthetic destruction, drawn to the premise of !e Hunger Games, where districts endure starvation and slavery to provide resources for the wealthy Capitol.

is series re ects a fear of facing global issues. e luxuries of my world here in Sydney depend on the work of someone else’s hands, and then I make collages, from a shallow pool of helpless empathy. For the privileged, the plight of the world through our phone screens can be deliciously, addictively, dramatic.

As the people of the Global South face, !rsthand, the destruction of climate change and pro!teering corporations, I walk safely through my city which sells me happiness packaged in verdant matcha lattes and a pilates princess title. My District One brain can’t comprehend the 28 countries whose natural resources were extracted to manufacture my phone.

The seven hours in between Hugh Coffey

At some point, maybe twenty minutes a er he’d begun refreshing Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Gmail in a continuous cycle—with an ongoing, a"ectless, humourless realisation that his day ‘was over’— he noticed with confusion, having thought it was AM, that it was 4:46PM.

—Tao Lin, Taipei

“Have you seriously been on the couch all day,” is the !rst thing I hear my mum say at 5:30pm on her way home from work.

Leaning over the armrest, I reply, “It’s summer, mum. Of course I am. I’m watching the cricket.”

e answer is acknowledged but doesn’t seem satisfactory. Some quali!cation is needed. “It’s the Ashes,” I inform her, but she has already disappeared to her bedroom.

I 10:35am

From where I’m sitting, summer starts with the slow clap from the stands. At !rst, the punters match the rhythm of the bowler’s step. By that tenth pace it’s an audible mess of varying speeds and volumes, releasing a collective exhale when the ball is pitched into the turf.

e !rst ball is bowled.

On the couch I am nervous and excited, beginning the !ve-day shi in front of the TV. I am worried that we could lose and even more worried that the game will only get to day three. If summer love is real, it’s a breezy evening at the beach, downing cold beers and cutting open burrata in open-toe shoes, drinking Aperol Spritz and sharing small plates. Summer heartbreak, on the other hand, is an early batting collapse. You can never look at love the same way a er you experience an opening partnership that lasts two overs.

Seated with my homemade iced latte, I think of that old saying about batting !rst. It is one of the great lessons my dad has taught me, “When you win the toss, bat. If you are in doubt, think about it, then bat. If you have very big doubts, consult a colleague, then bat.” Maybe it’s a sign of my new-gen sensibilities, but I don’t really mind if we bowl !rst. is is largely because of Mitchell Starc’s !rst over le arm yorkers, that have swung the hope that the bails y o% the stumps into an inevitability.

At the conclusion of the over I scheme my breaks for the day. Downtime in cricket is high—the three second bursts of action are broken up by 30 second pauses between balls, followed by a minute break at the over mark and then a !ve-minute drinks break halfway between the twenty-to-forty-minute session breaks. And so, next to me is a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads (2021), a book I’ve owned for a couple years and have !nally decided that this summer I will have enough pockets of time to read.

Test cricket, I suppose, is like the big book, the 500 pager, the multi-generational dysfunctional family story told from !ve di%erent points of view, the three-part saga with religion and history folded in, the IFKYK brick of a thing, the book you read to stun your non-literary bro at the pub. And, Crossroads is this type of book.

II 11:00am

In the drinks break, I always visit the FoxCricket and 7Cricket Instagram pages, rewatching the same dismissals with di%erent voices. Two of my favourite images of the summer come to mind. e !rst is that clip of Stuart Broad closing his eyes a er witnessing the same mistake from an English batter. ere’s a darkness to his silence and tilt back of the head.

e other image is a Kerry O’Kee%e innuendo turned hysterical laughter. O’Kee%e is 76 and regularly rolls out one-liners in his

commentary that are so absurd and witty, sometimes dark and crude, but always polished with a delivery that could heal the nation. You know a great quip is coming in the urgency of his voice, a laugh imprisoned at the back of the throat, spewed out like the stomach remnants of a night drinking cheap piss. In both, are reactions so intense and theatrical, uctuating at the extremes in response to the repetitive contests of bat and ball.

As play resumes, I check the comments to a compilation of a Travis Head blitz attack—the one that ended the !rst test match on the evening of day two—and I notice some guy has written that test cricket is romantic. ere aren’t many things you will hear grown men call romantic.

III

1:00pm

e game is at a stage of consolidation, with the English partnership starting to settle in. We’ve moved from the honeymoon phase of the !rst session and entered an awkward boundary setting exercise for the teams, with lots of blocks and rejections mixed in with a few moments of “ irtation” and “nibbles” at the ball.

A er another play and miss, I am beginning to think that cricket is a sport of disguise. Personal ambitions for a big score are neatly packaged as a component of team success. e game functions through solitary acts that attach themselves to the collective. In some ways, it is like the literary world, where reading and writing are private acts that are understood and connected to a social community.

e batter is told to wait for the ball in their zone and resist the impulse for extravagance. e bowler has a secret plan in action, theorising the perfect combination of line and length. Ball by ball, over by over, session by session, day by day, test by test. Maybe part of the romance is temptation.

Ultimately, as if it is some unwritten law in the universe, patience will always triumph. e waiting game, the slow tease, the chase, the burn. Catching eye contact, brushing past their shoulder, nervously !ddling in the crease. Gaining courage, running through the risk, making your move. When it happens, it will happen. And when it happens, it will be glorious.

It’s not a very attractive kind of patience, is it?

For as much as we could talk about the beauty of a cover drive, we could think of the war-like game of attrition that is unfolding before us. Players are trapped in the heat, weighed down by heavy pads and the heavy expectations of upholding a mythology of national character.

Although a di%erent level of pressure, my favourite character from Crossroads, Perry, is tormented by the notion of being ‘good’. Perry, a tween with a genius level IQ, “liquidates his assets” (guilt-

trips his mate into buying his weed) to buy his younger brother a camera for Christmas. In this moment Franzen describes a pausing of time:

Snow had started falling from the Illinois sky, white crystallizations of water as pure as he felt, himself, for having parted with the asset. His thoughts had slowed to a happy medium, no slower than that, not yet. He stood for a moment on the sidewalk, amid the melting snow akes, and wished the world could just stand still.

e scene represents the movement of time in the novel, where the !rst 300 pages follow a single day from di%erent perspectives. In slowing the pacing of the novel, Franzen unravels the years of history for each character that led to their speci!c actions. Digression and pause draw attention to the happenings in between, loading each tiny decision with a gravity, the micro only understood in the macro, a signi!cance that lives longer than the seconds it took to…

SMACK!

e ball has just been launched into the crowd, bobbled in the hands of eager teens, while one, I notice, has pulled out his phone for the moment. Another man, two rows behind, is sitting comfortably, clutching his mobile like it is a beer resting on his thigh. Looking down, I’m in the exact same pose.

IV 2:30pm

By the middle session, where a partnership has formed and the fast bowlers have rotated out of the attack, I’m on my phone every three balls. It’s a doomscrolling sport. With all the talk of test cricket dying, surely the antidote is somewhere in the algorithm. I think we should just admit it. A dot ball is a good ball, and a good ball is rewarded with one reel. Maybe slow over rates aren’t even a problem at all. (I am not bored from cricket though, how dare you think that!)

I notice that one of the slip !elders has moved towards the boundary, reminding me of a commentary segment from a couple years ago, where they were talking about how the slip cordon stays focussed. It was probably Mark Taylor or Mark Waugh, and one mentioned something about switching o% while the ball is dead, before regaining your position, crouched, like one of those line umpires at tennis, with your palms brie y resting on your knees to be ready for when the bowler reaches their mark. e ickering of attention.

ere is this moment in Clarice Lispector’s !e Passion According to G.H. (1964) where the narrator, a woman who upon crushing a cockroach enters a state of spiritual ux, contemplates the in!nite space between one and two. She writes:

A note exists between two notes of music, between two facts exists a fact, between two grains of sand no matter how close together there exists an interval of space, a sense

that exists between senses—in the interstices of primordial matter is the line of mystery and !re that is the breathing of the world, and the continual breathing of the world is what we hear and call silence.

Indeed, a space exists between each ball, where the mystery and !re of pills past and future reside. e anticipation of cricket is like no other sport. In football or rugby, the play is continuous; there is no silence.

In the silences of cricket, the scoreboard is still, there is no change in the material total of either team. Like that small moment of rest and anticipation when you turn the page. You have a burning feeling inside. ere is some sort of fuel that is driving the passion, restricting you to one chair all day. I can’t speak of what happens during those small breaks that add up to a lifetime. What happens between ball one and ball two will remain a secret for you and for me. All I can say is that I am sure it is spectacular.

V 4:30pm

e Baz-ball is boring me. I wish I was watching Steve Smith bat right now. e addition of new wrist swings a er the ball has zipped through has added more are to the existing routine of mannerisms before each ball. Walks back towards the crease, taps le pad, taps right pad, taps the box, comforts the thigh pad, one knock of the bat in between the feet, a bend of the knees, gaze at the bowler, look back down, two knocks behind the right foot, a second gaze, one tap, ready.

I am discovering my own version of this in spectatorship. e ball has been bowled, le outside the ! h stump line for no run, and I am triggered into a routine. My le hand taps my pocket, feels for the phone and places it in in the le palm, le index !nger presses the power button, le thumb rests on the volume button, right index !nger scrolls up, eyebrows raise to focus the facial recognition, a moment passes as the home screen appears, the index !nger searches somewhere to pressure. An instinctual habit, connecting the hand to the mind.

is anticipatory tendency of mine, however, has detached itself from the possibility of hidden machinations. Unlike the novel, in which moments might seem insigni!cant, and cricket, where a ball might result in nothing, the algorithm does not reward patient solitude. Without gaps in between scrolls, you have no chance to build faith or hope that something amazing could happen next. ere is no mystery or !re or possibility.

VI

5:30pm

e day goes by towards dinner. Over four hundred balls have been bowled. Two and a half sessions of cricket. It’s like watching the price of an ETF rise and fall over the course of a trading day. Deep down, I know that I am not supposed to sell for at least

another seven years. Yet I compulsively check, watching the 0.03% changes in value. In that basket of more than two hundred companies, so much has happened in the course of a day and all you can see are those imperceptible uctuations, synthesising the mood of a market into a spiking line graph, each point a tentative step towards the peak. As I zoom out of the price graph— magnifying the window of time from day to week, week to month, month to years, years to all time—I feel like one of those random days on a market trendline. Where everything and nothing has happened.

Towards the backend of Tao Lin’s Taipei, the main character, a 20-something Taiwanese American writer living in New York, is driving through a street with electronic billboards: Paul stared at the lighted signs, some of which were animated and repeating like GIF !les, attached to almost every building to face oncoming tra c—from two-square rectangles like tiny wings to long stripes like impressive

Scrabble words but with each square a word, maybe too much information to convey to drivers—and sleepily thought of how technology was no longer the source of wonderment and possibility it had been.

Lin’s 2013 version of a 20-something year old, interested in and vaguely optimistic for a creative career, is nauseatingly described spending their day on a MacBook patrolling Twitter and Facebook and Gmail. In the summer of 2025–26, that person has further customised, streamlined, and optimised a multi-dimensional wall of content into its most e cient and claustrophobic form.

Cricket is a game that rolls on 30 second intervals. erefore, it is no wonder what has consumed my life in those brackets in between. ere is something romantic in that attraction, I suppose.

e last ball carries through to the keeper. e umpire calls stumps, li ing the bails away.

Where is My Muse

Rosie Ryan

PART ONE

‘ACT III’

“What brings you here?”

“Couldn’t tell you.”

“Why don’t you try?”

“But where would I begin?”

“How about with that ribbon on your boot?”

I look down. Brown leather binds my feet, eyelets drawn taught with string. readed through one is a strip of red satin, its loose ends unravelling, dragging on the oor below.

“Just for decoration.” My eyes it, unable to meet his cocked stare.

“You don’t think a decoration like that might make you a target?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Alright.” He turns his head to the back of his chair, his elongated torso and spindly limbs following the crook of his neck as he springs himself over the side of the armchair.

“I’ll let up for now. Give you a break.” Big white palms facing me, !ngers outstretched, motioned in a facade of defeat.

“You’ll let me make you a drink though, won’t you?” His head is tilted slightly on its axis again, and I have a great urge to reach out, grab him by the skin of his hollowed cheeks, and set it straight.

He wheels around a bar cart, standing just front-le of my chair, so that I can watch his silhouetted frame as he busies himself with bottles in hues of mottled green and deep orange. A slight clinking rings out from two short, fat glasses that rub together, cradled in his large le palm. I am handed my prop old fashioned, and the sheets of light above make the rubber ice

ough I know none of it is real, I swear I can smell the perfume of fresh orange zest, almost taste the buzz of whiskey on my tongue. I clink my glass with his, both of us looking slyly out to the sea of shadow blanketed faces that bob below, before the curtains draw to a close.

In the darkened velvet dreamworld that is backstage, I watch makeup artists and set designers scurry back and forth, checking their wristwatches as the intermission tapers out and the time bomb of the !nal act peeks through the curtains. e rest of the cast mingles excitedly, the thrill of the closing night washes across their painted faces in excessive emotion. I hang back, preferring my usual spot amidst the prop boxes, where the innards of the theatre lie exposed. Lengthy wooden beams run along the ceiling, thick yards of rope are draped through pulleys like webs. I hear a chorus of tapping and scu ng along the worn oorboards, and I know that somewhere James has risen from his director’s chair, and is circling the cast like some sort of sheepdog, eyes bulging, clipboard raised above his head. He must always perform some ridiculous, desperate dance in an attempt to marshal everyone into place. I rise from my spot amidst the darkness, dusting my skirt and stepping a pointed heel towards the light.

I stand in line to re-enter the stage, !dgeting behind that large frame, my eyes drawn to the little red thread that hangs from the back pocket of his denim jeans. e loose thread comes from a ribbon that is a twin ush of crimson to the one at my feet. We’ve built a world around its weaves and we s, and when he pulls it from his pocket, it will send the viewers spinning in their seats. We’ve practiced it endlessly, the perfectly calculated ick of the wrist to unravel it, the correct arrangement of overhead lights to make it shimmer just so. It is the play’s tipping point, the big reveal, our characters no longer enemies, but allies all along. e meaning of the thread will extend from the world of our play to the audience, pulling them forward in their seats, leaving their mouths agape. For a moment, everything will still, like a hitched breath. But it never lasts, and as the audience breathes out, they’ll slap their knees and shovel one last !stful of popcorn into their yawning mouths, leaving burnt kernels scattered down stairs, running their greasy hands over the carpeted chairs as they head to battle for a taxi back to their ordinary lives.

I watch his hands move to his pocket. Long nimble !ngers reach in and writhe, faster, frantic. ey stretch from one corner to the other, feeling only raw seams and fraying denim. A giddiness overtakes me as the light warbles over his face, expression twisted, capturing his panic, true and raw. I say nothing, do nothing, as the poise of the production unravels, like a chugging train grinding to a clunky halt. Hands behind my back, I twist the red ribbon through my !ngers, hoping no critic notices my sti ed smile.

The Sun Fades Beyond the Skyline

I scramble to push papers out from under me, making room for the plate that descends from above. I’m determined to stretch the eating process out as long as possible, enjoying the time where there’s a reason to put the futile scribbling in my notebook aside.

e deadline Simon gave me has been and gone; the talent he sees in me stays lodged, unmoving in my chest. Like clockwork I drag myself to the cafe each morning, to sit amongst all the others in town with nowhere else to be, attempting to write. But my e%orts cannot force phrases to materialise. For now I have passively accepted my role as simply dealing with the words of others. Small editing jobs for students and freelance writers earn me what little income I need to pay for my cardboard box apartment

Each walk grows duller as I come to expect the scent of each bakery, the display of each window, no longer dazzled by the new. Nonetheless I step one foot in front of the other, stopping when I reach the one place that still makes my heart leap. My heated breath fogs the glass before me, and I marvel at the mess beyond. Lamps made of rattan and fringe, silk curtain drapes and !ne-grained wooden dressers cluster together. I dizzy myself imagining the lost lives of each item: so green folding screens from Japan, ornate tiles from Marrakech, gilded gold frames from Paris. From each hangs a brown paper tag. Unassuming, yet I’ve turned over enough to know my place behind the glass.

e gentleman manning the till is scrawling in a notebook, likely tracking the journeys of the incoming and departing items from one wealthy American household to the next. I allow myself to step inside, and when the creak of the glass paneled door yields from him not even a glance, I begin to work my way through the store. From my pocket I pull the pen that refuses to pen plays, and begin to make scrawlings of my own. With each price tag I deface, my pulse quickens, blood pumping to my !ngertips in desperation to make the tale of each item more enticing than the last. I do not stop until a good chunk of the store has been livened with tales of origin, the imagined pasts of the antiques realised on their little paper tags. I see the shop owner’s eyes it upwards from below his darkened brow, and I turn on my heel, recommencing the humdrum click of my boots down the grit road.

Not an hour has passed when the jacket catches my eye. Marie the shopkeeper stands to the side as I admire the !t, its short crop and uted cu% sleeves slick around my body.

“I like the ribbon on your boots.”

“ ank you,” I nod, my mouth forming a stilted smile. I glance at the boots I’ve placed on the change-room stool, “Just for decoration, really.”

“I can see you’ve an eye for such things.” She catches my eye in the mirror, her gaze itting over the second-hand ensemble I’ve settled on. I’d chosen a structured black skirt that just grazed my bony knees, and from the sale section a pair of just-oversized men’s penny loafers. Like a snake shedding its skin I wish to slip free from my gaudy fringed shawls, the colours of which have grown faded under the relentless Los Angeles sun. Now I am engulfed in the palette of Chicago’s smoke stained sky, understated and tasteful. I give myself a !nal once-over, before clasping my hands together and turning my head towards Marie, exing my shoulders and poising my chin in my decision-making pose.

“ ey’re perfect. How much for the lot?”

“Fi y dollars.” She adds, “Forty-!ve if you leave the boots with me”.

I glance at the stool, the pointed lace numbers scu%ed with San Francisco gravel, the soles worn from marching across each stage in the old theatre district. Each one stripped of their original laces, rethreaded with ribbon, twin in their crimsonush.

I pull my gaze back to Marie, yet the muscles in my neck feel so strained I feel their !bres may tear and snap as I force my head to face her.

“Done.”

ough the price she’s asking is decisively unreasonable, I pull the forty-!ve dollars’ worth of crumpled paper from my wallet. Anything that’s been passed through the clammy hands of Hollywood, I am glad to part with.

e shop-front bell tingles above my head as I step out into the cool Chicago breeze.

Back in my cardboard-box, I take pleasure in changing out of my day clothes and carelessly throwing them across the room. I sit curled on the pull out sofa, the tic, tic of the wall clock seemingly slowing as my eyes bore into the glass of the apartment’s sole window. I wait for the day to draw its last breath.

But as the sun fades beyond the skyline, a gnawing pain hums steadily under my ribcage, and now I’m rising to take the apartment keys from the co%ee table and clutching them to my chest, shimmying on the day’s new purchases and clunking down the echoing stairwell.

e evening air is cold and biting, and my usual pace is slowed by the too-big penny loafers scratching at my heels. I reach the familiar shopfront, and stop sharp, pulling a pin from my hair. I let the strands fan over my face, shielding my pro!le as I stoop over in concentration until I hear the click of the old lock. I welcome myself in, careful not to open the door wide enough to hear the tinkle of the bell above. In the corner, a trail of crimson marks the spot where I le my shoes. e gnawing at my chest eases once I am !nished slipping on the leather, and pulling the ribbon tight around the arches of my feet. In their spot I place the loafers, and a note scrawled on a brown paper tag.

“I’m sorry Marie, please do forgive me.

I’ve found I can’t walk in these silly loafers, nor rest without my boots.

It’s rude of me to barge into your store as such, but please feel free to call the cops. I am not busy tomorrow and would like some excitement.

Yours truly, a dreadfully regretful customer.”

Historical Hinge

Rachel Gibson

Sick of modern dating? Feeling ! though you were “born in the wrong generation”? Perhaps the love of your li waiting r you in a di rent time period!

Cultivate your partner’s ideal Hinge pro le and y up your points!

1

Together, we could…

A: Sneak out for a late night drive

B: Stalk our opps on LinkedIn

C: Write each other love letters <3

D: Catch !ights and feelings ✈

4

2 3

My typical Sunday…

A: Getting a meal with friends and hitting the gym

B: Going for a walk and picnic through Victoria Park

C: Drinks at the Courty and playing cards and pool

D: Hitting the big three: Bunnings, Flower Power, BCF

5

I get myself out of a funk by…

A: Benching double your body weight ;)

B: Birdcage Wednesday, Ivy Thursday, Sidebar Friday �

C: Spending way too much at Glebe markets

D: Putting down that damn phone and touching grass

My most controversial opinion is…

A: Every couple should experience long distance

B: Open relationships aren’t as crazy as everyone makes them out to be

C: Despite the hate, beer tastes wayyy better than spirits

D: I could lowkey be convinced that the Earth is !at 

6

The hallmark of a good relationship is…

A: Climbing through your window like a 2000s romcom

B: Getting along with the in-laws

C: Taking care of the other when they’re sick

D: If you can beat me in an arm wrestle

My biggest red flag…

A: Can be a little possessive �

B: Finance major…

C: Proud user of Head & Shoulders 3-in-1 �

D: My decked-out mancave

The Results!

Answered mostly A:

Answered mostly B:

ANCIENT SPARTA,3rdcentury BCE

If you’re looking for an adventurous, sporty individual with a love for their community, you’re in the right place. The Spartans come with a tradition of kidnapping you on your wedding night—perfect for spontaneous thrillseekers. Downsides? Intense boot camp from age 7 and constantly being away at war means you’re perhaps not getting the most involved, emotionally-connected partner.

Answered mostly C:

MEDIEVALITALY, 14th century

For fans of friends-to-lovers tropes, Romeo and Juliet, or a simple small-town romance, then perhaps you should turn to middle-class medieval Italy. Don’t be icked out by the peasant life, though! Towns bustling with community gossip, travelling minstrels and great deals at the local tavern await. Unlike the elites, the lower classes had some level of love matches when marriage was concerned, so good news: you may actually have a say in who you’re marrying! Just keep the hand sanitizer close for that pesky plague.

REGENCY ENGLAND, 19thcentury

Wanting someone suitable to bring home to the parents? Look no further than the ultimate huzz of Regency-period England (this one’s for the Bridgerton fans). Whilst this suitor may be excessively formal and most likely cheat behind your back, at least there’s nothing improper about the size of their bank account! Educated, respectable, and tears up the (ballroom) dance !oor… as long as you’re alright with your inlaws having the nal say.

Answered mostly D:

circa. 9000 BCE

NEOLITHIC MESOPOTAMIA,

Deep breath in, deep breath out. Meditation lovers, DIY crafty fanatics, and those with a saved Tiktok folder all about hiking the Dolomites, assemble! Previously nomads and therefore travellovers, Neolithic forerunners are picking up a brand new technology called farming, meaning your future spouse is an innovator in their career. This is someone who will ght (literally) for you with their bare hands; I see you, Team Jacob. Just make sure you are rea y comfortable with a minimalist aesthetic…

It was almost familiar.

I stood in the kitchen again, above the spotless countertop. e furniture had been moved slightly out of place, the stools not quite tucked in, the table angled a few centimetres too far from the wall. It was almost dreamlike, slightly misaligned. Everything was where it belonged, yet nothing sat naturally in itself.

How Did We Get Here

e kitchen looked the same as it always had. My mother’s art deco mantle, deep amber wood, framed the back wall with a kind of quiet authority. It had always seemed too grand for the room, as though it belonged to another house, a more coherent family.

e wrought iron and glass outdoor table and chairs were pushed into the corner near the windows, as if someone had once dragged them inside during a storm and never thought to return them to their rightful place. Or perhaps they had always been meant to live there, awkward and ornamental, pretending to be useful.

e pantry door remained slightly warped at the hinges. Even beneath its most recent coat of white paint, I could still make out the faint shadows of old blemishes pressing through. Hairline fractures. Tarnish at the edges. e past had a way of refusing concealment. I wondered if it had always been like this: damage breathing beneath something fresher, cleaner, more deliberate. I wondered how o en I had mistaken renovation for repair.

It felt poetic in a way I didn’t trust.

I used to sit on this stool and let my legs dangle, never quite tall enough for my feet to reach the wooden oors below. I remember the strain of stretching them down, curling my toes in the hopes that they’d brush the oorboards, as if reaching them might be enough. It felt important then, to make contact with the world below me, to simulate arrival before I had actually grown into it. Now my feet are !rmly planted but I still feel suspended. Some part of me has remained perched there, unresolved, trying to reach what should already be mine.

once loved: they do not remain intact, but neither do they decay naturally. ey preserve themselves badly, like something sealed in plastic. ey become stage sets for a version of you that no longer exist.

at was when I saw her.

Not all at once. Just movement at !rst: fabric cutting through light. en the outline of a girl spinning over and over again on the rough sandstone tiles outside. She had been captivated by the weeds forcing themselves up between the cracks. Her skirt li ed around her in uneven layers, mismatched fabrics stitched together with thick pink raw-hemmed seams. I had one like it. Almost like it. My Nonna made it for me, a former seamstress with patient, capable hands. I was the !rst grandchild and the eldest granddaughter. ere are privileges in this position; love arrives in surplus but so do expectations. You are dressed more carefully. Watched more closely. Told, in subtle ways that you are both heir and experiment.

I couldn’t quite recognise her, but enough about her was close to me that it unsettled me. e angle of her shoulders. e stubborn set of her jaw when she concentrated on not slipping and grazing her knees on the ground. e way her pleasure seemed to possess her completely. She laughed at something I couldn’t hear.

I wanted to grab her. Hold her.

e sun shimmered through the window above the sink like always. Too bright in the mornings. It used to hurt my eyes when I stumbled in half-awake, searching for cereal, milk, honey, the cartoon excess of childhood appetite. Now the light feels !ltered, as though cast through something synthetic. A !lm laid carefully across the surface of memory. A dreamscape congealed in plasticine. at is the trouble with returning to places you

Shake her until something changed.

But that is not what I did.

Growing pains eat you alive. ey do not announce themselves as violence. ey arrive disguised as ambition, as discipline, as maturity, as the necessary pruning that adulthood demands of girlhood. First you learn to correct yourself. en to edit. en to anticipate correction before anyone else can o%er it. Soon enough, the work is internal. You become both the knife and the thing being pared down.

I imagined throwing her into the pool. e shock of cold water swallowing her small body whole. I imagined pressing my hand to the back of her neck, not forcefully enough to bruise, just enough to interrupt the spinning, the humming. It was less about killing than stillness. About relief. About forcing quiet onto the part of me that had once felt too much and too publicly.

But she was a strong swimmer. I remember that. She would have surfaced, coughing, furious, hair slicked to her face, but alive. She would have endured it. Children endure what they shouldn’t. ey make homes inside atmospheres that would atten an adult. ey develop rituals. ey misrecognise vigilance as personality. ey learn how to become impressive, charming, precocious, useful. e thought irritated me: that even in fantasy I could not get rid of her. She would survive my worst intentions and continue on, glittering and unbearable.

e gate on the side of the house slammed.

I froze.

No one entered. No footsteps followed. Just the echo of wood striking metal reverberated through the front entry and lodged itself somewhere behind my ribs. ese sounds stay with you, the ones that arrive without explanation. e acoustics of dread. A slammed gate. A cupboard door shut too hard. Keys on a bench. Silence a er raised voices. ey teach your body caution before language arrives to explain it.

She didn’t react. She kept spinning as if she had never learned to inch.

at was the !rst thing I envied. Not happiness. Not innocence. Something simpler and more humiliating: her lack of anticipation. Her refusal to brace.

Who are you? I wanted to ask. Where did you come from? Why are you taunting me like this, so intact, so unedited?

But I knew who she was. She was my younger self, she was a palimpsest. Every story read under the covers with a torch. Every song belted too loudly in the car. Every small humiliation swallowed whole. Every fantasy rehearsed in the mirror. Every warning misunderstood as love. Every moment I felt something before I learned how to convert feeling into language and language into performance. She was all the selves I have since tried to write over, badly.

at is the problem with becoming a person who writes. You think revision is redemption. You mistake articulation for mastery. You believe that if you can describe a wound elegantly, then perhaps it no longer controls what you do. But language is not antiseptic. It does not clean. It only rearranges. Sometimes it just gives the rot a cleaner border.

I have spent years trying to become legible to myself. I wanted a version of me that made sense in retrospect. I wanted to be the sort of woman who could narrate her life without embarrassment, who could locate the origin of each fear and archive each grief correctly. But the self is not an archive. It is a junk drawer. A house with locked doors and bad plumbing. ings leak, things warp; things you thought were lost reappear in the wrong season.

e girl stopped spinning and looked toward the pantry door.

For a moment, just a moment, I thought she could see me re ected in the spotless glass. Our faces nearly overlapped. Mine sharper, more tired than I had expected. Hers open, almost de!ant. ere was no accusation in her expression. Worse, there was curiosity. As if she was the one trying to work me out.

How did we get here?

People usually mean: what happened? What went wrong? At what point did innocence sour into self-consciousness, appetite into shame? But that was not what I meant. I knew, broadly, what happened. Time happened, desire happened, family happened, language happened. You enter the world porous.

I could list every reason I wanted her gone. e so ness. e volatility. e sentimentality. e way she loved too quickly. e way she believed attention was the same thing as safety. e way she entered rooms without !rst calculating her proportions, knocking her hip against a table, reaching for space that wasn’t hers. e way she cried from the body rather than the face. e way joy possessed her, loud and uncontained, laughing at something no one else noticed. e way shame did too, ushing red and going silent all at once. I could frame her erasure as evolution. I could call it discipline, discernment, adulthood. I could say I outgrew her. But she is not something I can press into silence. She lives in the architecture of this place. In the amber wood of the mantle. In the tarnish beneath the paint. In the too-bright morning light above the sink. In the habit of listening for doors. In the re ex to perform composure. In the ridiculous, embarrassing fact that beauty still undoes me. In every room where I become eight years old again without warning.

She is buried here. And she is home.

I used to think adulthood would involve some ceremonial severance, some clean departure from the selves that embarrassed me. I thought maturity meant becoming less permeable, less excessive, less attached to fantasy. I thought one day I would return to this house and !nd nothing of myself le here but anecdotes. Instead I found evidence. Not of innocence, exactly, but of continuity. e child survives inside the woman not as purity but as residue. She remains in taste, in terror, in gesture. She remains in the impossible e%ort to distinguish vulnerability from stupidity. She remains every time I mistake self-erasure for self-improvement.

e sun continued to shimmer over the sink. e glass in my hand had warmed.

Outside, the girl resumed her spinning. Her skirt ared around her. She looked absurd. She looked holy. She looked like someone I had spent years trying to apologise for.

I didn’t move toward her. I didn’t call out.

I stood very still and watched her turn, and turn, and turn, as if she might spin herself through time, as if she might become unrecognisable through motion alone. But she remained exactly what she was: loud with being, graceless, visible, alive.

And she never once looked afraid.

TUBE MEN

Tube men are a rare sighting, they aren’t seen walking through the streets. Wherever they are, a person in shorts and a top hat isn’t far behind.

On Esoterislop

Lucy Horton

KANTARA

Ananya Thirumalai

e drums do not begin so much as they take hold of you, slow and insistent. reading through the body while !re gathers at the edges of the forest and a man trembles, stills, then becomes something else entirely. In the Bhoota Kola sequence that frames Kantara, there is no clean line between performer and deity and no safe distance between the audience and the ritual, because the camera does not stand apart but moves with it, breathes with it, and presses close enough that you are pulled into its presence.

It is this closeness that makes Kantara so di cult to situate within the familiar stories of Indian cinema, where religion is o en rendered as something aestheticised and made legible for a broad audience. Here, what emerges is something far less willing to be smoothed over, a form of worship that is rooted in land and resists being translated into the institutional forms of Hinduism that dominate the mainstream. In this sense, the !lm is not merely about faith but about the persistence of ways of knowing that have long been pushed to the margins, including Adivasi and caste-marked practices, and forms of spirituality that remain inseparable from the land itself. Its success, alongside Kantara Chapter 1, signals a shi in Indian cinema toward stories that are willing to engage with the political and cultural weight of belief.

What Kantara does with land is refuse its reduction into property within state-backed systems of ownership and capitalist logics of possession, instead insisting on it as a site of authority that exceeds both. e forest is not simply where the story unfolds but where power is located and contested. Where the terms of belonging are determined not by legal ownership but by a relationship that is spiritual, historical, and deeply embedded in Animism, which understands land as something inhabited and negotiated with, that holds agency and cannot be cleanly separated from the people who live within it. is becomes most visible in the con ict between the state and the community. Bureaucratic claims to land appear hollow when set against a system of belief in which the daiva is the ultimate authority. What is being challenged is the very framework through which modern governance attempts to de!ne and regulate land.

is recon!guration of power is inseparable from the !lm’s use of body, because possession in Kantara operates as a transformation that collapses distance between human and divine, making the body the site through which authority is both expressed and enacted. In doing so, the !lm resists the detached spectatorship that o en characterises cinematic encounters with religion by forcing the viewer into an experience that is sensory, immediate, and di cult to contain within a purely visual framework.

e ritual does not allow for observation from a distance because it implicates the viewer in its intensity, and in this way the !lm aligns itself with a form of embodied spectatorship where meaning is produced through what is felt, so that the act of watching becomes entangled with the act of witnessing something that exceeds representation.

At the same time, the !lm’s engagement with caste operates through this tension between visibility and erasure, because while it does not always name caste explicitly, it situates its narrative within practices and hierarchies that are historically marked by caste distinctions. In doing so, it disrupts the dominant cinematic portrayal of Hinduism as a uni!ed and sanitised system by foregrounding forms of worship that are o en associated with lower-caste and Adivasi communities, and that have been marginalised or appropriated within broader religious narratives.

What emerges is a subtle but pointed critique of the way institutional Hinduism has sought to absorb these practices in order to maintain a more uniform and upper-caste image of religion. As a result, Kantara becomes a space in which these tensions are made visible even when they are not directly articulated, and where the persistence of local ritual stands is opposition to the hierarchies that have historically sought to contain it.

Kantara Chapter 1 introduces a di%erent kind of ambition by attempting to extend this world backward into history and outward into myth. In doing so, it raises a tension between what is lived and what is narrated. e act of giving origin stories to practices that are experienced as ongoing and embodied risks, transforms them into something more !xed and more easily legible within a cinematic framework that privileges coherence and scale. Where the !rst !lm allows the daiva to remain partially unknowable and therefore powerful, the prequel’s impulse to historicise and mythologise may render that same force more abstract, shi ing it from something that is encountered in the present to something that is explained through the past.

is shi also brings into focus the question of spectacle, because as the narrative expands, the rituals that once felt intimate and locally grounded are placed within a broader visual and narrative scale that aligns more closely with epic storytelling. While this expansion has the potential to deepen the cultural and historical context of the traditions being represented, it also risks repositioning them as objects of consumption for a wider audience that may not share the same relationship to the land or the practices themselves. In this sense, the prequel sits within a larger tension between authenticity and commodi!cation. e very success of Kantara creates the conditions for its own transformation into something more marketable and more universally accessible. e question that lingers is whether forms of Animist-rooted spirituality can retain their speci!city and their political weight when translated into a cinematic language that increasingly demands scale and spectacle.

e success of Kantara cannot be understood in isolation from the broader transformation taking place within Indian cinema, where regional industries are no longer operating at the margins but are increasingly shaping the centre, where the !lm reportedly grossed over )409 crore. Alongside the fact that regional !lms now account for roughly 60% of the box o ce while Hindi cinema has dropped closer to 40%, this signals a shi in cultural authority that re ects changing audience desires, rather than a temporary disruption. What these numbers also reveal is a growing fatigue with a parallel stream of Hindi cinema that has, in recent years, aligned itself more visibly with the ideological contours of the current political moment. In this zone, !lms function less as spaces of ambiguity and more as vehicles for a kind of stateadjacent nationalism that simpli!es history and identity into easily consumable narratives, o en reinforcing majoritarian visions of culture that sit comfortably within the broader media ecosystem surrounding Modi’s governance.

Within this landscape, regional cinema begins to take on a di%erent kind of signi!cance, because it o%ers a form of storytelling that resists both homogenisation and overt ideological scripting, allowing for representations of land, caste, and spirituality that are not always easily folded into a singular national narrative. is shi can be understood as a movement toward recognition, where audiences are responding to !lms that allow them to see their own worlds re ected back without mediation or dilution, whether that is through dialect and landscape or through the presence of caste histories and land-based spiritual practices that have long been excluded from mainstream representation. In this sense, regional !lms such as Kantara do more than provide an alternative to Bollywood. ey unsettle the conditions under which cultural meaning is produced by refusing to align themselves fully with either market-driven universality or the increasingly visible pull of propaganda-oriented storytelling, and instead remain grounded in the speci!city and political texture of the communities they emerge from.

e force of Kantara does not lie in nostalgia or in a simple return to tradition but in the way it insists that these practices have never disappeared and were never meant to be contained within the categories that mainstream cinema and institutional religion have tried to impose on them. What the !lm reveals is a continuing presence that exists in the relationship between land, body, and belief. e ritual does not belong to history and it does not resolve into myth, because it continues to unfold in the present.

In this sense, the broader shi within Indian cinema is not simply about diversi!cation or the rise of regional industries but about a reorientation toward forms of storytelling that are willing to remain situated within the complexities of local worlds, where identity is not abstract and where spirituality cannot be separated from the land that sustains it. What Kantara o%ers is a form of reclamation that resists being translated into something more palatable. In doing so it suggests that cinema can become a space where ways of knowing that have long been marginalised are not only made visible but are allowed to retain their depth and their power.

Unspoken Agreement

(with Someone Buried)

Carmen McPherson

It is dangerous, to choke out their dreams in dirty water.

Dangerous— when I disdain the e gy of he, my Nannu who wept when I got in and Nanna, prayed ornately with supplicating hands, under Madonna

in some garage in Liverpool, for a beautiful garden in the lucky country, ideally with a pot plant on a windowsill, and for the privilege of an ancillary room to call the o ce of, a paralegal. I water the plant.

It, and I, have come (to an unspoken agreement).

I pour the cup of water, half full, into the dead plant into what once (was) Hopeful

Leaves will unfurl a uent tongue, will curl again is is probably about the plant but de!nitely not.

Nannu used to call me, To spell for Christmas cards, a good omen. I would pick up again.

So I pick up a pen, and an A davit is foreign, yet a poem slips into misstatement. A plant is home grown.

Idle time, truth mishandles, when I free pour into the cup murky water.

Second generation, I am but for an immigrant dreamer quid pro quo, with Ave Maria my privileged presentiment

as I quell over poems. It, and I, have come (to an unspoken agreement) the sower will distill the water.

But my hands are ink-stained, Nannu’s earth stained.

I hope he now whispers prayers because under the mulch, Nanna has, since forgotten the language of which they’d command my name, So I erect/arrest myself upon some podium, before a Brescia loungeroom of ghosts with

the curly hair I straighten, the animated expression I tighten in the name of professionalism, to water the plant.

The Beatifcation of Sir Donald Bradman

Jack Davis

Beatissime Pater, Ordinarii Terra Australis humillime a Sanctitate Vestra petit ut Venerabilem Servum Dei Donald Bradman, numero Beatorum adscribere benignissime digneris.

e only religious pilgrimage I have ever made was to Bowral. In a December downpour, I drove in silence down the Old Hume Highway, watching the felt-topped hills of the Southern Highlands roll by on either side of my car. Coming into Bowral, I turned onto St. Jude Street and pulled into the gravel parking area of the Bradman Museum. It is hard to overstate the reverent air that gathers around the place. e museum sits adjacent to the oval which, since 1947, has carried Bradman’s name, and where, at age 12, Bradman played his !rst game of senior cricket for Bowral Cricket Club. e term ‘hallowed ground’ tends to be overused in sports writing, dragged out for promotional material seeking to contrive a sense of historicity to an early-season derby between two middling teams. However, as I walked beside a rain-sodden Bradman Oval, I felt that it was hallowed ground, in the truly religious sense. Bradman had padded up here; he had marked centre on that wicket; he had mid-o%, there, where a divot in the grass was collecting a pool of consecrated rainwater; he had been here, where I was now.

And did those feet in ancient time / Bat upon Bowral’s ovals green?

To address those for whom the sobriquet ‘ e Don’ bears little meaning: Sir Donald Bradman was Australia’s greatest cricketer, probably the world’s greatest cricketer, and, slightly more contentiously, the best cricketer that the sport will ever see. In a test career which spanned the years 1928 and 1948, he achieved the greatest ever test batting average of 99.94, a number which will likely never be beaten.

Cricket is unique amongst other sports in the way it is played, interpreted, and understood. It is distinguished from most popular sports in the way athleticism and sporting prowess seem to be secondary, mediated by an anachronistic set of what are, especially to the unfamiliar viewer, broadly silly conventions. In the traditional format of the game, the match pauses for lunch and for tea, and players spend the majority of their time either sitting in the pavilion or standing around in the !eld.

It is an absurdity in modern sport that a professional athlete might wear a woollen cable knit sweater vest as part of their uniform, yet cricket retains these genteel oddities.

ese anachronisms conjure the roots of modern cricket as a gentleman’s pastime. Popularised and codi!ed by the English leisure class, then exported to British colonies for the imperial purpose of moral edi!cation, cricket’s use as a morally instructive game gives rise to a very speci!c interpretive framework, which cricket demands of its players and spectators. is demand retains, in the practice and culture of the sport, an abstract moral character animated by an obscure spirit of cricket. Whereas in many other popular modern sports, competition is instantaneous and direct—for instance, the presence of both teams on the !eld in direct contact in rugby or in football—competition in cricket is mediated: only one team bats at a time, and only one team bowls at a time. As such, success in cricket, at least before the !nal result, is much more abstract and subjective, as anyone who has attempted to ask a grumpy father or uncle “who’s winning?” while the cricket is on may attest to. What constitutes goodness in cricket is only discernible through catechism, through the opaque machinations of inherited cricketing wisdom. You’ll never know who’s winning in the !rst innings. You can only trust in our cricketing clergy, having faith in Uncle Johnno when he says, “ is is a three-day deck,” or absolute belief in the crabby old bloke muttering into his Resch’s about how Marnus Labuschagne’s head falls out of line when he plays to a ball on a 5th-stump line.

As a latecomer to cricket, I felt out of my depth, mysti!ed by the byzantine intricacy of cricket knowledge, which seemed only to be accessible to those with an inherited knowledge of the sport. For those raised around cricket, who grew up watching the test summer every year, and learned the game from parents and siblings, understanding cricket is second nature; the signi!cations of cricket are immediately understood and interpreted.

ere is an essential mystery to the ebbs and ows of cricket, the liturgy of summer rituals, that gives rise to a need for a spiritual pastoralism. e cricketing public look to clergy and holy men to catechise the sport: the venerable Ricky Ponting, Fr. Allan Border, Prior Steven Waugh. To become a cricket fan, to understand the sport, demands of the convert that they look to the Church. e burgeoning believer is only able to rationalise, to understand and interpret, the theological complexity of cricket through a kind of Catholic pastoral education. Former Australian captains are held to speak with papal infallibility, giving homilies ex cathedra in the Fox Cricket studios during the lunch break. We can never really understand the Holy Spirit of cricket directly, rather, we mediate our understanding through ecclesiastical cricketing heroes; all squinted eyes and sidemouthed suggestions that “they need to bowl fuller.”

Writing for Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack on the occasion of Bradman’s retirement in 1948, Scottish cricketer and writer RC Robertson-Glasgow famously analogised the e%ect of the Don’s exit from the sport on English cricket: “So must ancient Italy have felt when she heard of the death of Hannibal.” How many sporting !gures live in such mythic company? e neologism ‘Bradmanesque’ is the highest adulation for an Australian sportsperson—the apogee of Australian sporting success is to, even barely, come close to emulating the perfection of the Don. ere are few other heroes in sport who enjoy the sacralised status of Bradman; his comparisons veer into the mythical. Bradman was described by South African fast bowler Sandy Bell as having a “sort of cynical grin, which rather reminds one of the Sphinx.” Cricket writer Gideon Haigh quotes Indian cricketer Vaisant Raiji, who describes the lasting, dei!c in uence of Bradman on a country which he never toured as a cricketer: “God is perfect. In the eyes of the Indians, Bradman is the perfect batsman. God is unseen. Indians have not seen Bradman play.”

Why does Don Bradman rise to this beati!c state?

e sancti!cation of Bradman is particularly unusual, especially in Australian sporting culture, where we are generally reluctant to elevate our sportspeople beyond their awed humanity.

e sporting Bradman—certainly distinct from Bradman the man—is exempt from this rule; he is beyond reproach, he is infallible, he is perfect and whole. Bradman is beyond human, because he is closer to God than we. It is near impossible for the cricket spectator, or the vast majority of those who have ever stood on the wicket with willow in hand, to even conceptualise how Don Bradman could have been so good. ere are no metrics we could apply to assess how well he saw the ball, how prudent his shot selection was, or the impregnability of his batting mindset. Because cricket can only be understood through mediation, through the intercession of a ecumenical cricketing culture that functions as a structure for belief, we can never understand the Don’s greatness directly. is is what makes Bradman unique amongst the annals of sporting heroes, and places him in more mythic company. We cannot know the essence of cricket, and we sanctify Bradman because he came closer than anyone to doing so, and in the process, became more than human.

“…to the $rst, the whiche is a knowyng might, God, !at is the maker of hem, is evermore incomprehensible; and to the secound, the whiche is the lovyng myght, in ilchone diversly He is al comprehensible at the fulle…

!e Cloud of Unknowing

Ontol ogy of the slippage (of sorts)

Let me elucidate: I know I shouldn’t be so comfortable sitting right up against strangers on the bus. City etiquette. Especially in this heat, then this snow, this dandru%-raining climate change. ings are bad, you know. ey’ve been saying this for a while now. Ash will gain momentary structure, of course, before settling on us as we begin coughing and spluttering all over each other, but I digress already! What I mean to say is that o en I can close my eyes and let the side of my body slip up against a stranger’s side. Only momentary. For a brief moment in that darkness, buscoloured darkness, I can !nd an eroticism in the texture of unknowable touch. I can’t exactly place my !nger on what it is. A scribble of an outline rather than any harsh lines, but it’s there, wavering, pulsating in the coat pocket of the human sat next to me. A model emerges.

She asks “...Have you been sleeping okay?”

“No,” I tell her. “I haven’t.”

I haven’t. I’ve been falling asleep reading documents on fashion metaphysics, a little hallucinatory from all the 528hz sounds and incense smoke I’ve been burning. I wake in a dream wherein a backless dress approaches me from the bar and asks if she can buy me a drink. I oblige.

Fig 1. Woman living in my white rose. Spent $10. Not sure how much rent she pays but she sure is living it up. Tomorrow they’re delivering an upholstered red velvet armchair for her to rest her feet on while she lounges in her upholstered blue velvet armchair. !ey really should mandate these kinds of things. P A S S I O N 4 F A S H U

She asks, “Are you thinking again about the symbolic dimensions of clothing beyond its material form or would you like a martini?” and I wake.

Cold sweat. Hot sweat. No sweat.

I make it to the grocery store in time to buy discounted roses which I pick the leaves and thorns o% of to place in a brass vase, to place on my desk and admire. ey are decaying (see Fig 1). I notice one of them is worse o% than the others, this ugly-duckling of a rose with an abscess in the side of its mouth, and the closer I look the closer I come to realise it’s not an abscess at all but a slippage of sorts, a strap fallen down the shoulder of the mannequin, a hole, a burrow, and in that burrow lives a woman, and in that woman lives a—

Second skin. A blatant mask, if you will, in order to create the never-naked body of you and me and everyone we can think of. A bridge between the physical form and the intangible roots of identity.*

I put the documents down last night. Heavy reading… in need of something lighter. Heidegger? Perfect. A little something like:

Being is not permanent or !xed but rather a dynamic and ever-moving event of presencing or appearing. e event event—in order to exist as an event and not any other form of circumstance requires a constant interplay with Absence.** For example, a hammer tends to only make sense in a network of mostly unseen relationships. We see then, the nails, the wood, the carpentry. e vast majority of this network is ‘absent’ from our immediate focus, yet it enables the object to be understood. Moreover, some objects are de!ned by their absence… by their lack of. Object de!ned by a cavity. e washing machine is hollow on the inside (see Fig 2). So is the urn. e function of these objects depends on their absence of, and it is within this absence that we !nd

something else entirely. I think once more about fashion metaphysics. I pull up the documents.

If fashion, in essence, becomes a way in which existence reveals itself, then it’s a kind of revelation that will still always involve concealment. To conceal the body, to bury it, to direct its absence into a tailored suit, reveals a sense of status, but it simultaneously consoles bodily irregularity and the labour behind production. Fashion as…

Ontology?

Yes. e removal of. ink about negative space as essential for creating the erotics of fashion metaphysics. How else would we adore the mid-dri ? e low-rise jean? e boob-tube? An erotica of absence… it’s all semiotics, it’s all sex, it’s all:

Fig 2. Cavity of the Washing Machine. Had to take my quilt to the laundromat a er last Saturday night; the extent of the thing wouldn’t $t in my own washing machine. I lugged it down there in a removalist bag and put it on a spin cycle. $18. Twenty-four minute wait and I discovered an organic grocer across the road playing Alanis Morrisett. !is is it, I thought, !is Is Where I Am Meant To Be. Amongst !e Persimmons. Woman behind the counter tried to sell me sea moss to $x my complexion. I bought a new toothbrush and chocolate-covered co"ee beans. “How do you eat those?” my housemate asks, “just like…swallow the co"ee bean?”

Sophie Bagster

In my dream Heidegger comes to me shirtless and sweating on horseback. I ask him where he learned to ride like that. His face is made of triangles and shapes I cannot draw. A man made of elbows. A sun sets in the distance. He says “...you know...it’s actually the absence of the thing, of the object, that makes it what it is. Your biological hollowness... the (w)hole of your sex is de!ned by the fact it is a cavity.”

He doesn’t know what I am. He’s not even looking at me.

“I’m not a feminist,” I say. “I am trying to write about clothes and metaphysics, you’re changing the subject—”

“I’ve never seen you post a political infographic on your Instagram story. Are you sure? You are pretty—”

Absent, I am pretty absent. I am categorised by my absenteeism on the surface of the digital planet. Is that right? Man On Screen is trying to sell me a !lter for my kitchen tap because it’s !lled with toxins we didn’t know existed in the 1970s. Man On Screen tells me it’s probably a good idea to start selling pictures of my feet. Man On Screen generates an image of Heidegger on a horse for me and tells me I’m doing a good job.

*From the corner of my room Oscar Wilde says “A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months!” Tut tut.

** ‘Absence’; the state of being away from a noun. See also; ‘abscess’ – a swollen part of bodily tissue containing an accumulation of pus; which, when drained, creates an absence. Remember? Yeah. Refer to Fig 1.

Bad Photos

Ting-Jen (TJ) Kuo

If the year is 2226, and technological imagination has realised itself, and my clone in cryosleep is waiting, eyes closed, for a project of my sel*ood to populate her soul, what would it contain?

e nurse asks me now: what is your self to you, from your birth to today? Can you feel the lineage of your physical being in space? You don’t look at all like you did as a baby and most of the cells you were born with have been replaced. Can you package your identity in your head to project out into the world?

In the slippery con!nes of the mind, memory is a house of mirrors. I think of my youth, and I think of old photos. Salvaged PNGs from the busted iPhoto app on our family’s ancient Macbook Pro Unibody, a few of which survive on my current laptop.

Most of these photos are objectively terrible. ere will be ten photos of the same hotel room with only three in focus. Anything moving will be a blur. A whole scene will be underexposed and oversaturated. An unnamed hotel room, obscured faces, my young parents, our old couch without stains yet, ten sel!es of my cousin’s babyface, amusement parks I would never go to now.

Each one comprises a cache of clues to the past. Start with the basics. Who is pressing the shutter? Where is that place? Why has the photo survived all these years, despite being easily deletable?

Taken when it was still possible to take bad photos, before automated focus or excessive curation, patience is required to learn the visual language of the past, to decode its grammar and use it to understand the present.

e irony of missing my childhood rests on my inability to recall much. An absence of artefacts from this time contributes to a sweet amnesia, lending to my romanticisation of a time that must have been quite tough on my mother.

I’m guessing my mum was the one who took most of the photos. Her lens dri s over things that might be important to remember: how fancy the hotel room looked on a trip to Hong Kong, a New Year’s couplet, a gathering of family friends, all a blur now save for the photos. Many are of me.

I see that even though my parents tell me I didn’t cry much as a child, I was a menace and a tomboy, eyes wide eyebrows raised mouth wide open !ngers outstretched like claws. I was very a%ectionate with my family, cuddling up to them all the time. ere was a fervour and hunger in my eyes that has diminished when I look into the mirror today.

I think I’d give my clone self these photos. I’d tell her: this is what it looked like to not yet know what was worth keeping. A syntax is created out of whatever the photographer could not bring herself to delete, without knowing why, waiting for someone to come looking.

She’d have to learn to read it herself. So did I.

Curse Universal

Arwen Beaumont-Lee

Alpha widowed and exiled from a dream. Siberian winter delirium, or maybe just mold poisoning. A beautiful old house rotting so fast you can watch the paint peel in real time. At least you’ll have something to do while your brain turns to mush.

You keep having dreams about a spider hiding under your bed. You scream and it disappears. You think it must have been a mild hallucination, the kind that bleeds out from half-sleep, so you choose to forget about it. Weeks later, you’re changing your sheets and you !nd it under your pillow, a huntsman like the one from your dream/ hallucination, though it mustn’t have been either because it’s really there, and how long has it been there without you knowing? It has to die because it represents too much, like a hidden camera in a hostel bathroom. You run downstairs and your housemate is in the kitchen eating toast. You apologise for screaming and run back upstairs with the Mortein. You start blasting the poor beautiful thing, but it won’t die. It keeps running around like it’s lost its head, darting away from the death stream. You hit it maybe ten times with a plastic broom, but it won’t stop moving, until one !nal whack and a brutal twist. e spider’s legs retract into this tragic shape resembling a baby mud crab or a de ated heart. You scrape its body into the dustbin and tie the bag up to su%ocate it, just in case it still isn’t dead.

You comfort yourself by looking at images. If you scroll fast enough, it’s possible to enter a state where your vision blurs around the screen and it feels like the object you’re looking at is the only thing that exists. You turn into the object on screen for a moment, then morph into the next thing. You’re a hot pink ip phone. Noodles like a pile of ribbons. Four tomato slices. A t-shirt falling o% one shoulder. A girl licking apple juice o% her ring !nger. Panfried dumplings. Dumplings in soup. Slim hands shu'ing tarot cards. A Blythe doll with one eye. A cow with a woman’s head and dragon wings. Refreshing bright citrus jalapeño salad. Models standing in front of a truck. Pilgrims journey at Kailash mountains. Brittany Murphy in legwarmers. Lucky rabbit feet. Sago lychee and rose water pudding. Mother Mary’s body made of crystals. Socks and Nike ip ops. You can be anything when you’re nowhere, but it all starts to mist together a er a while.

Your ultramarine iPhone 16 gets lost one night between the cracks in the sandstone at Marrinawi Cove. You try to get it out with sticks and a ashlight, but you’re crossfaded and you don’t really care. You’re daydreaming about your new life without a phone. is is how it’s supposed to be. Maybe you’ll get a brick, one that ips open like a shell. Except you can’t pay for anything or text your parents and you don’t own a watch so you can’t check the time. You’re limited to being exactly what and where you are right now and it blows to be le outside the mystical group with the rest shut inside.

Your best friend Ecstacy’s boyfriend Testosterone agrees to give you a li to the cove so you can look for your phone. You bring a wire coat hanger, looking deranged in athleisure. T brings a hockey stick that you can already tell won’t !t down the crack. You’re like junkies in activewear. You’re scratching up your knees and knuckles on the rocks, excavating. You can see it right there, but it won’t come up. e tide is coming in quick and each time a boat goes by it sends ripples of waves that submerge the phone completely underwater. You’re not even thinking of it as your phone anymore, it’s more like dust. A man comes over with his scru%y looking wet rat dog and just stands there with his hands on his hips. You notice a pair of girls in white string bikinis sitting nearby, vaping. ey’re watching you in a bored way when they’re not looking at the eshays !shing o% the rocks. And suddenly you remember its Invasion Day, hence the speedboats. T is bleeding somehow and you decide to call it. You’re secretly hoping he will get you an ice cream from the Mr Whippy van to make you feel better and he does, but it doesn’t really work. You ask T how Mr Whippy works, like do they all work for Mr Whippy or are they all Mr Whippy? He isn’t sure.

You’re hanging from the doorframe, lamenting the loss of your phone to your housemate, the toast enjoyer, who says it seemed to resist being saved. You drag your feet up the stairs to your room that smells like smoke. But Toast calls out, wait I just got a message, it says hi Toast, we found a phone with a missed call from you, do you know who it belongs to? You dial your own number, and they pick up and you’re like how the heeeeeck did you get it out of that crack? And the voice on the other end just says, chopstick method. Something about her tone tells you it was one of the girls watching you in white bikinis. She sounds like she truly doesn’t care and would rather be doing anything else than talk to you. Your reluctant angel. She sends a photo of a Woolies bag stu%ed in a bush. You and Toast get the metro to the cove, and you feel much lighter already, like maybe you’re not cursed. You !nd your phone without a single scratch on it. In its case, there’s a perfectly intact four-leaf clover right where you le it, which seems so miraculous that you can’t help interpreting it as a sign that the curse is li ing. Perhaps this was the action needed to swing you back in the direction of the light. e truth is there’s only one kind of curse, it’s universal. Out of the trenches and into the meadow, and back again.

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SASHA BLACKMAN PORTIA LOVE SOPHIE WISHART JAYDEN NGUYEN

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