by Sean Wallace
2. Megan Lan—Thursday 18th October, 1991
I used to see Mee almost every day at uni, wandering across campus in that purposeful kind of way, striding confidently across the quadrangle on one of her various extracurricular missions. She was heavily involved in student union stuff. After six months of watching her walk past, noticing the clothes that she wore, the people she was with and the way she hooked stray loops of hair behind her ears with her pinkie finger, I decided that it was time to meet the legendary Megan Lan face-to-face.
One afternoon I saw her putting up posters, attaching them with a giant roll of masking tape to the bollards that were scattered around campus. She had dropped a pile of the posters on the ground beside her, and just as she was tearing a strip of tape with her teeth a punk on a skateboard shot past and the jet stream from his board sent the unstuck posters flying. I took the opportunity and ran over to the bollard, frantically snatching at every poster I could get my hands on. With most of them recovered, I turned to Mee and smiled what I hoped was my most self-effacing-yet-fascinating smile as I handed them back to her. She smiled back as she took them from me and tucked a stray loop of hair behind one ear. I took a deep breath and to stop myself from staring I checked out the poster she’d just stuck up. It was advertising a public lecture by Professor Jane Damage on the interface between contemporary urban planning strategies and philosophical interpretations of the role of kaiju in long-term social development. Professor Damage was Mee’s honors supervisor, and she was helping out with promotion of the event to try and score some brownie points from the Prof. I offered to help Mee out with the rest of the posters, and she took me up on the offer, splitting the pile in two and arranging to meet me back at the Student Activities Office in an hour.
We had coffee that afternoon and arranged to meet at the lecture that Thursday, and then go out to get something to eat afterwards. Though it was great to be hanging out with Mee, I didn’t enjoy the lecture very much. Professor Damage’s theories were a little old-fashioned, which is something that often happens with tenured academics—they tend to carve out their niche at their institution and dig in, ignoring any developments in their field that post-date their appointment. The Prof. was just about to demonstrate one of her theories when the containment unit short-circuited and the three juvenile carnivopteryxes that had been held in short-term nanostasis broke out. Within ten minutes they were big enough to fill the auditorium, and ten minutes after that they had burst through the ceiling, growing bigger and bigger as they slashed at each other with their talons and screeched telepathic war cries, shooting golden death rays at every building taller than three stories. Mee and I were crushed up against the back wall of the auditorium in the rush to escape. When the second monster knocked over a support beam with its tail, I caught a chunk of masonry in the small of my back and a rafter came down on my right arm. Apart from some bruises and scratches, Mee was okay. Luckily, I’d fallen on top of her and most of the debris landed on me instead of her. She came to visit me in hospital a couple of times. A few weeks before I was released she started going out with a mutual friend from my botany tutorials. I hate to admit it, but they made a really cute couple.
3. Lucy Darnell—Friday 9th August, 1993
Lucy worked in the office where I was doing a three-day-a-week internship. She was always helpful when I wasn’t sure who I was supposed to deliver which forms to. Her kindness made her stand out from the rest of the arseholes in the company who mainly saw me as their personal courier-slash-mailroom-slave. Lucy wasn’t like that at all, maybe because she was a lot younger than most of her co-workers. She had got the job out of an internship she’d done there herself a couple of years earlier. I think she sympathized with me having to put up with all the crap I had to put up with from my superiors, which was pretty much everyone in the building, including Lucy. I would bitch to her about them when we would go to lunch at this sleazy café that served bad “modern Australian” food but made good coffee. We got close, like you do when you’re having lunch together almost every day, talking about your lives and ambitions and that sort of junk.
I don’t normally go out with people that I work with, but this was an internship, not a full-time job, and it was only a six-month position so I figured if it went really badly I would only have to hang in there a little while and then I’d never have to see her again. That was the worst-case scenario, though, and didn’t seem too likely because we got along really well and had a lot in common. One day I asked Lucy if she wanted to go out after work some time. She smiled a coy little smile and told me she had been wondering how long it would take before I asked. We organized to go out that Friday night—she’d ditch end-of-week drinks and I’d come by after classes and we’d wander down to Little Vietnam and pick a place that looked good.
I left classes early that Friday so I could go home and change. I caught the bus to the office only to find that the whole building had been pounded into rubble, along with everything else within a seven-block radius, during a fight between Robosaurus and some weird bee-headed creature nobody had ever seen before. I hung around and tried to talk to some of the emergency guys, but they were pretty busy so I headed back home and started calling hospitals. Lucy wasn’t in any of the hospitals that I called, and no one from the office knew where she was. She never came back to work at the relocated office, either. I couldn’t call her at home because we’d never swapped numbers—we always saw each other at work. Someone told me that the bee-monster thing had been using some kind of hypno-pollen to turn bystanders into an army of zombie bee-drones, so I figured that that was probably what had happened to Lucy.
A few years later I bumped into her at a garage sale. She was there with her husband—she was married by then, to a really nice guy who worked in landscape gardening. She said she’d followed the bee monster for a couple of months until the hypno-pollen had worn off and she had come to her senses in Ulan Bator. She’d had to stow away on a Cathay Pacific flight to Townsville, and then hitch-hike back down from there. We swapped email addresses, but I never heard from her and to be honest I never sent her anything myself.
4. Serina Coustas—Sunday 26th January, 1997
I had met Serina at a party of a friend of a friend, and we’d struck up a conversation that had lasted until 4:00 AM, when we’d exchanged numbers and caught separate taxis. We arranged to meet in the botanical gardens on Australia Day, which was coming up, to check out the open-air concert that was happening that day. Serina knew someone in the headlining band, and I was just keen to tag along. We brought picnic stuff, and when it started raining we moved in under the fig trees along with everyone else who hadn’t thought to bring an umbrella. The bands were pretty good. Serina’s friends’ band had named themselves after Doctor Malevolent, whose talk show was popular at the time among people who liked to think that their superior sense of irony made that kind of pop-culture trash actually worth watching.
Two songs into their set a scruffy, bearded, barefoot guy who had been wandering among the crowd came up to us and handed us an invitation to a march that was coming up to protest against the government’s recent military action against Krigga and other offshore daikaiju. I made some offhand comment about nobody caring about giant monsters and Serina got upset. She didn’t think that the government had been justified in their preemptive strikes, but I told her that I thought that they had done the right thing. Our conversation soon devolved into an argument, and from there it became a series of personal attacks, each of us caricaturing the other as warmongering nationalistic speciesists and naïve bleeding heart hippies, respectively. Serina got up in a huff, packed away the food she had brought and pulled her blanket out from under me before storming off into the easing-off rain, leaving me sitting by myself on the wet grass next to a soggy half-eaten baguette, with the rally invitation still crumpled into a ball in my left hand.
5. Tracy Evans—Friday 20th February, 2000
My housemate Tran set me up with Tracy. He was sick
to death of hearing me whinge about my recently unsuccessful love life. I met her at one of those “hidden” bars in the CBD that everybody knows the name of, stepping over the vomit puddles and syringes that littered the obscure back-alley laneway which led to the seemingly barricaded entrance. Tracy was sitting at a corner table by herself, sipping a gin and tonic. I introduced myself and she stood up to shake my hand. Our voices were only just audible over the DJ’s choice of up-to-the-minute noise. I excused myself for a moment and grabbed an overpriced beer from the bar before rejoining her. Conversation was slow-going, especially with the omnipresent beats, but she seemed nice enough.
We were both shy, and a little nonplussed about being out on a blind date, but we made an effort to entertain each other anyway. After a couple of drinks I suggested that we grab some dinner somewhere, and pretty soon we were in a cute little yakuza-run Japanese restaurant sharing bowls of agedashi tofu and nasu dengaku. I excused myself to go to the toilet and when I got back she was talking to the guy sitting at the table behind ours. Turned out he was an old friend of hers from high school who’d gone on to join the city’s damage-control unit. He was charming the pants off Tracy, bragging about his close encounters with Nerodon and King Zenah, showing off in high-resolution detail about rescuing grandmothers from the claws of Batroxigon and finding children still alive in the collapsed basements of buildings destroyed by Gaijantizu and her Twelve Twin Sisters.
I took my seat after being introduced and watched Tracy’s eyes sparkle and heard her make quiet thrilled noises at the back of her throat as Mister Damage Control went on and on about himself. After ten minutes I got up, paid the bill and left without either of them noticing me. On the way home the train was diverted to avoid a battle between the Neutrazilla Posse and Harmonadon. Everyone in the carriage rushed to the window to get a better look, but I pretended to be absorbed by the torn copy of MetNews on the seat beside me.
6. Lainie Goldberg—Thursday 8th October, 2002
It took weeks before Lainie would agree to go out with me. I’m not usually so persistent with women, but there was something about Lainie that made me decide to take each of her excuses at face value and keep trying to find a night of the week that she wasn’t already doing something. Hearing about the things she would be doing instead of going out with me just made her seem more interesting: theatre, dance recitals, Vipassaña retreats, looking after guest artists from the innumerable festivals that the city hosted, gigs with her band . . . I’d gone along to a couple of her shows, but Lainie had always been surrounded by a gaggle of cool-looking hangers-on and groupies at the end of the night and I’d caught the last tram home rather than bothering to try to catch her attention.
I’m not sure what it was that changed her mind. Maybe she genuinely was free that night. I was just happy to be finally on a date with Lainie Goldberg, drummer from Retort Stand and the friendliest bartender at the Stars and Garters Hotel. We were meeting at the steps under the clocks at Central Station, so I walked the few blocks to my local station and jumped a train into the city. We were approaching the major inter-city station when a voice came over the PA system. It was an incomprehensible jumble of vowels and consonants, like all railway announcements, but among the garble one word could be heard clearly: Zillasaurus. The train slowed to a halt and the emergency lighting came on. The buzz of nervous conversation filled the cabin as people tried to work out what was going on. A guy with a walkman radio tuned into a news channel and relayed the news to us all over the continual, indecipherable chatter coming from the PA. Apparently the so-called “defender of children across the world” was being mind-controlled by his old enemy Power Outage and forced to cut the city off from outside help by destroying all major transport centers.
It took an hour before the CyberSamurai arrived with their Z-Bot Restrainivore so that they could hold Zillasaurus down long enough to deprogram the mind-control device, and another three hours before external power was restored to the trains and the doors of the carriage could be opened. I caught a taxi to Central Station, unable to help rubbernecking at all the flattened buildings and stomped-on cars. The taxi driver gave me his own personal spin on the attack, a conspiracy theory that made John Pilger and Chris Carter seem like suburban right-wingers by comparison. I paid the fare and took the steps two at a time, but I hadn’t really expected Lainie to wait.
Her shifts at the pub changed soon afterwards and I didn’t see much of her after that. I sort of lost interest, to be honest. The prospect of hounding a girl at least five years younger than me into giving me another chance seemed less than appealing all of a sudden. The last time I saw her was about six months ago in a Retorts clip on Rage late one Saturday night. She looked good. But then she always looked good.
7. Nancy Kiyanfar—Monday 12th April, 2004
I hadn’t seen Nancy since uni. We had had a couple of the same history lectures, and had been part of the same study group. I’d always enjoyed her sense of humor and her insightful, intelligent way of looking at the world. At the time she had had a long-term boyfriend whose name was Jaived or Javed or something like that. I bumped into her in my local news agency a few years later. She’d split up with the boyfriend about a year after graduating and moved out of the city to work as an environmental consultant for rural councils. She was back in town, visiting cousins who coincidentally lived at the end of my street, and was thinking about moving back permanently. We arranged to have dinner that night. Being Monday, most restaurants were shut, so I invited her to my place and promised to cook her my special vegetarian carbonara. At seven-thirty she rang my doorbell and I opened the door to the sight of Nancy dressed in a gorgeous burgundy dress, which wordlessly confirmed my hopes that the late-teenaged flirting I fondly remembered had not been purely the product of nostalgic self-delusion.
Dinner was delicious and the conversation was comfortable and continuous. We filled each other in on what we’d been doing for the last five years, which of our classmates we’d stayed in touch with, and joked about how we were dealing with the terrifying prospect of entering our early thirties. I cleared the dishes away and poured us both another glass of wine. I was just about to get dessert ready when I noticed that she was looking a little pale. I asked her what was wrong and she waved her hand dismissively. Just a bit of a headache, she said, frowning. She pushed her chair back from the table and began massaging her temples. I offered to grab her some painkillers and went to the bathroom to dig out some ibuprofen. When I came back into the kitchen, Nancy wasn’t there. I could hear the sound of her voice coming from the back yard. I assumed that she was talking to someone on her mobile, but when I followed her outside I realized that she wasn’t alone.
Standing in front of Nancy, dwarfing the pair of fully grown ghost gums that grew on the back fenceline, was Cygnatora, all two hundred feet of her. She had curved her snake-like neck downwards so that her head was only five feet from the ground, and was looking straight at Nancy, her jagged-toothed beak only inches from Nancy’s face. As I stood there in the doorway, Cygnatora turned her massive head slightly and stared at me with her deep-red smoldering eyes. I froze. Nancy turned around and saw me standing there, then turned back to Cygnatora. The two of them kept talking for a while, the giant creature making weird subsonic groans that I could feel in the pit of my stomach as it spoke. Nancy came over to me and explained that she had had a psychic link with Cygnatora since she was a little girl, and that she was going to have to go off and help out with a battle that was taking place on the other side of the Moon. She apologized for not mentioning it earlier, thanked me for dinner and told me how nice it had been to see me again. She stepped onto the monster’s beak and climbed up to sit directly behind her head. She waved as Cygnatora spread her enormous wings and took off into the sky, leaving me with a flattened back shed, a pair of footprints in my back yard each the size of an above-ground swimming pool, and an entire black cherry cake with cream-cheese icing to eat by myself.
The Eyes of Ereb
us
Chris McMahon
The Dark is alive.
It hums with points of red and violet. Distant places of heat, sometimes teasing with the brilliance of their demise. It is filled with the silence of dumb mass; and strands of unknowable strangeness that twist out of sight within the coldness.
. . . Oooo, la, la, la, la . . .
There are senseless calls in the distance—the meaningless chatter of an empty universe.
I am lonely.
My lover has gone, worn down by my embrace, yet her memory remains in stone and flowering teeth of metal, vast cords of heavy basalt tied with my hard, desiccated flesh. Gifts of ice all but gone.
My eyes are vast and many, reflecting the tiny lights around me. So distant they are, yet I have seen them swell before, and as they do, my need grows apace.
I have taken many lovers, some wet, others as dry as dust, others frozen with an acid tongue, but all I take into me. None endure, nor remain to be part of me, to share this vastness.
I parted from my mother long æons past. The flesh between us ripped on jagged edges. I tried to call, but my voice is a small thing, and as yet I am young. Never again have I passed her in this desert sea.
The lovers fail to satisfy, although their taste is a welcome distraction. My mother will have taken many by now, perhaps she will not even remember me.
Sleep at least is an end to the longing. And dream . . . my beautiful dreams . . . if only I were old enough to call as I should, perhaps then I would have my lover. Sleep . . .
. . . travelin’ down that lonely road,
Oh, lordy mamma!
I don’t get no pork and beans.
Oh, honey.
I needs me a sugar-baby . . .
A call!
Faithfully the signals are filtered through the shifting, swarming nodes of my nervous system. Thoughts. Feelings.