2024 writing competition winners:
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Geochemical Postcard by Jasmine O M Taylor
Coal is shovelled into the furnace, heating the water until the steam it produces generates enough pressure to push the pistons in the engine up and down. The pistons push the cranking rods to move the flywheel and the driving rod makes the wheels turn.
The coal is dusty and ancient. The shovel is made of steel. Steel and coal are kin. Born of and for fire. The sky above is filled with the breath of the earth, black particulate and piercing steam. The locomotive inhales heat and exhales power, its breath matching time to the scrape of the shovel into the coal bunker, the shattering sound of coal hitting coal, scrape, shatter, chugga, chugga, scrape, shatter. It becomes a dance for the stoker. He hears the hammering of horses inside the blast pipe
Someone three carriages down raises a tall glass of iced water to their face. The meniscus sways left to right left to right as it is tilted toward the lips. A brass curtain rod catches sun and the iced water glows amber.
Rocks of coal rest against each other in the belly of the firebox, no longer dusty and black they glow deep red and orange and white. Tiny suns radiating heat and light they haven’t felt for millions of years. They shrink as they burn. Gone, rising into the sky.
From a wooden-plank bench at the station a child stares down empty railway lines, fixated upon the vanishing point. Finally a puffy cotton mass appears to crest the closest hilltop, and the curved valley expels a steaming, smoking steel dragon. Fueled by fire and earth. Steam obscures the station; the child is in heaven.
A woman pulls large brown lenses over her eyes and looks into the falling glow, waving. Her hair, her skin, her handbag drenched in the warmest moments of afternoon sunshine. Her luggage has been placed on the platform, pointing her toward the pick-up spot.
A spark fires into a cloud of gas, igniting it and in the ensuing expansion drives a piston up a cylinder. Compressed air shunts through a valve and the camshaft turns and the crankshaft turns and and the wheels turn and the vehicle leaves the ancient breath of fauna behind.
Concrete and asphalt can only take so much; after decades the cracks and dips beg to be environments. A crown daisy pushes green into the edge of the gutter, where water seeps from a cracked PVC downpipe and over the tilted pavement. A town car passes and the shoot shudders in its tailwind. Above the shoot a green and brown stain spreads like the slowest steeping of tea. Tannins have settled into microscopic pockets upon the aged surface, bound to the crystalline structures, to serve as lowlights for the bright algal blooms of spring.
With blackened duck canvas coveralls removed to the waist, a filthy man sits before a stoneware plate at a slim rimu dining table. After grinding rough rock salt to fine sand over his fried eggs, he smiles as ancient minerals continue to serve him; he licks a white crystal from his index fingertip and thinks of the coal shovel. He is tattooed by the coal dust, the primitive grime of the industrial powerhouse sits stubbornly in every cuticle crease, each eyebrow follicle, the large pores at the sides of his nostrils. Black. As the fork raises to the mouth, two hepatic knuckles, calluses smoked like hocks, gleam in contrast. Where his moustache is not grey, it is yellowed. His sclera too. He is at home in clouds of smoke.
The woman from the pick-up spot is leading a dog toward a park. They contribute to the soundscape with the jingling of the leash’s brass hardware, stiff claws clacking on the footpath, soft scuffs of rubberised soles. One steps upon a twig. The other gets a leaf caught in their hair.
The stoker keeps fire in his eyes. And with every scrape and shatter, he smiles. The brutality of earth, the power sitting idly within. Energy released by the sun and held within plants and buried by time. Those eggs will be broken down by the enzymes and catalysts comprising his system. Energy released from the sun, to the grass, to the chicken, to its egg, to a stoker’s latissimus dorsi, to the shovel, to the furnace.
The dog chases a ball on a wide lawn as a solitary high-pressure sodium street light blinks on. The dog and the woman hear the whistle of a steam train leaving the station five miles over. It barks. She whistles for the dog to come; it’s time to go home.
Copyright © 2024 Jasmine O M Taylor
Jasmine O M Taylor [she/her] is a tangata Tiriti, pākehā, bisexual poet with a fixation upon mukbang and the sky. She lives in Ōtepoti with her true love and two black cats.
Second
It’s about time
I’m not sure it’s my best angle, Bunny.
It’s not about your best angle, Jase. It’s about …
Yeah yeah, I know, a statement. But I don’t see how this,
Jase lifts one red-roped hand.
Shit! That looks slack.
It looked easy from the films, Bunny thought. People did it back in the black and white days with no regular train schedules or iphones so it would be a piece of piss to make a TikTok, but Jase isn’t taking the whole thing seriously enough. Like, he has no concept of how hard it is to make grabbable, meaningful, media. He can just wave his white man shiny watch wearing wrist in the air and make things happen. Or seem like they’re happening. Which. Is it the same thing?
Bunny tightens the rope. Wraps it under the rail. That six-week shibari course in Melbourne gave her a healthy respect for knots. Takes Jase’s other arm and secures it in place, giving the steel strap of his Alpine Eagle 41 a casual flick and slipping it off his hand.
Time check?
Jase gets this look when he’s anxious and pretending not to be. A twinge in his eye.
Nine thirty two. We’ve got hours.
Not hours, Bun. Forty three minutes. Till departure.
Trotters Flat is vast and, well, flat. Trot on, is what she used to say to her pony. Trot on. That feeling of lift and surge. Looking up the track, Bunny can almost see the station in the distance, where the Kingston will start to Fly. There’s this video on the official tourist train Insta that Bunny had showed Jase to pitch this whole thing. Look. How slow it goes is that kids in not even running shoes can run along besides it. And look. The schedule. In black and red and white. But Jase said he wasn’t keen to be on the tracks much past departure time. At departure time. About ten minutes earlier would be a lot more peaceful actually Bun is what he said, and remind me again why we have to do this on a Sunday? But he agreed, he told her, because he was a good sport and because it was for her art.
Bunny had looked up Chopards after they’d first hooked up. After the glimmer in Jase’s eyes at the glimmer on his wrist, and the way he shook it loose so meaningfully as part of his undressing . She hates all that status bullshit. But also you it’s not like you can avoid it here now. Schist and dollar signs for brunch. Twenty seven fucking thousand dollars. And points for stopping buying Russian diamonds but still. Twenty seven fucking thousand dollars is. Is. Half a house deposit. A thousand Uber eats. Money for Palestine for fuck’s
Oww. Bit tight, Bun.
Sorry.
But what did that BetterHelp therapist say? Only apologise when you’re truly sorry. Looking down, the ropes are pretty damn nice. Jase’s torso a swathe of red-wrapped sweater, his beige chinoed legs sticking out over the edge. Art. The tracks seemed wider in the old movies. Or Jase is short? Bunny rewatched that sequence with Gloria Swanson writhing, chained, over and over, at the end of Teddy at the throttle. The dog in the engine room. A spoon of award winning blueberry yoghurt sorbet. The passengers all falling sideways. Delicious. Into each other. Into the seats. A spoon of how can it be sorbet if it’s yoghurt? The hero man on his way. So. Moreish. His bike wrecked to pieces. Soft, sweet, purple. Panic. Gloria lies flat, slips under the cowcatcher at the front of the approaching train, emerges, chains broken. Victorious. Transcendant. Makes herself so small and then emerges on fucking wings. Free. Which totally showed her abusive ex who was also her nemesis in the film. If you believe reddit. Which, Bunny does. Bunny wants that kind of unchained energy for herself. No. For everyone. The whole world.
Bunny? Babe? The whole world what?
Above them, tandem skydivers are drifting down from planes. A red chute, a yellow chute, a red chute, a red chute. Arcs. Wheeeeee. Bunny has never jumped or been pushed from a plane but she knows the more you pay, the higher you go, the longer you freefall before someone else pulls the cord.
Along at Kingston Station, people are taking photos in front of the Flyer. Engine and carriages have just been coupled. Black steam rising from the parrafinned coal fire, spitting pretty clouds of kill into the mountain air.
Bunny stands up, tucks the watch into her pocket. Chains would have been a better look, maybe, but you have to work with what you’ve got. A step back. A deep breath. Trot on.
Bunny? Bunny? What?
Copyright © 2024 liz breslin
liz breslin is a queer, tangata Tiriti writer, editor and performer based in Ōtepoti Dunedin. You can read about their work at www.lizbreslin.com
Third
Inner Space
I think they arrived in a storm, but I wasn’t paying attention back then. I’d been distancing myself from the news and social media, and I’d always stayed far away from the conspiracy theory circles where the stories originated.
The first reliable source I heard about them from was my friend, Annie, who was a photographer. Over hot lattes on a drizzly day, Annie told me she was starting to believe they were real. Four of her friends had seen them now, and her cousin claimed to have danced with one at a party. She told me that the going price for a photograph of one of them had reached five figures.
Curiosity piqued, I asked to see one of the photos. Annie told me that’s why they were so valuable. There were no photos of them. People had tried but failed. Their phones had died on full battery, or their camera lenses refused to open. One person swore that whenever they’d thought about taking a photo, their mind would switch over to another unrelated thought, like when someone has remote control over your computer.
Some people tried to describe them instead. The first reports labelled them as humanoid, but seemingly made of more stardust than we are. A teenage girl said the one she’d met reminded her of her father, who’d died years earlier. The most public sighting was the group of them shopping in the mall, and no one could agree about that encounter. Several adults said they were frightening, but children gravitated towards them, like a clown at a birthday party.
I met mine out one night at a bar. I was enjoying a cocktail in a cushioned booth before meeting friends for dinner, and there was a stack of newspapers on my table that I’d pushed to the side. When he approached, he asked if he could please borrow one of the papers. I said, “of course, go for it,” and so he retrieved the paper then took the table next to mine.
I knew what he was, of course. You can just tell. But I kept glancing at him to be sure, and he must have been glancing at me, too, because at one point, our eyes met.
“I don’t know why I ruin my day by reading these things,” he said, flattening the newspaper on the table and opening the space between us.
“I don’t anymore,” I admitted.
“It’s just people treating each other badly.”
“Yes. But sometimes, we treat each other well, too.”
“Now, those are the stories I’m interested in.”
I ended up being late for dinner that night. But when I met him for coffee two days later, I made sure I was on time.
From then on, time took on a different quality. It was as if it were a physical substance he could transmute, shrinking the moments we spent apart and stretching the ones we shared.
Those moments multiplied, and before I knew it, it had been four months since that night at the bar. Only then did he bring it up.
“You’ve never asked to take a photograph of me,” he said one evening in bed.
“Really?” I replied. “I assumed that I had, but my brain’s just not remembering it. They say that’s how it works.”
“They don’t understand how it works.” He said it almost sadly, as if he felt sorry for them, the ones that don’t understand.
Later, he brought it up again.
“You know, they’re offering something like $100,000 for a photo now. That kind of money could solve all your problems.”
“I don’t have any problems,” I replied.
I find the photograph one morning slipped under my pillow. It’s a Polaroid and it’s beautiful.
But it isn’t him. It’s colours and shapes on a two-dimensional card, and how could that possibly come anywhere near close to being him?
Because it doesn’t show you this. It doesn’t show you how he’s Christmas morning when you’re still young enough to believe in magic. He’s the perfect hole-in-the-wall restaurant you find tucked down an alleyway when you’re on holiday in a foreign country. He’s the customer that defends you against the other customer who’s demanding to speak to your manager.
He’s clothes with secret pockets. A sighting of a rare bird. A good news story. The obscure fact you happen to know that comes up in the pub quiz. Arms around you in the kitchen. An animal that chooses you.
I decide to throw the Polaroid in the fire, before remembering I haven’t had to light it in weeks because he keeps me warm now.
So, I rip it into fragments instead and let them fall around me, like pieces of stardust. Maybe there are even 100,000 of them, but I’m not counting.
Copyright © 2024 Kahli Scott
Born in Canada and raised in Australia, Kahli studied creative writing at Queensland University of Technology before spending time living in Vancouver, Brisbane and London working in various jobs in the creative industries. She has lived in Queenstown for six years and currently manages the local film office.
Highly commended
Alternate
Sam was down by the lake in Kingston the morning the craft surfaced and he sent a Snap of it to basically our whole year group. First it didn’t look like much, just the water fizzing in the middle of the bay, but then it shot up in this domed spout that grew and grew, until finally out popped the craft, this blimp-shaped thing with nonsense writing across it.
There was a solid-looking torrent of lake water holding it up and it bobbed about it in the wind. In the Snap, Sam was swearing heaps and backing away from the water, then all we could see were his shoes as he ran down the road. Within five minutes though, he had turned it into a TikTok with an Alien Weaponry soundtrack. The running part was gone and he had added some footage of the craft taken from the jetty, along with reaction shots of him covering his face with his hands, eyes wide. He told me it was the scariest thing he had ever seen, but he was grinning when he said it. Basically, he went viral because he missed the school bus. So lucky.
But that was just the start, because then the two Alternate Universers got out and swam to shore and started communicating with some honeymooners on the beach, who of course filmed the whole thing. Soon it felt like the whole world was looking at Queenstown. No one really cared about Sam after that.
It seemed farcical but they looked just like the little green men you see in cartoons. It had people wondering if there was something behind all those sightings from Roswell and stuff, if maybe they had just been AUs surfaced somehow in this timeline. They told the couple they had been on an expedition to find the bottom of the lake in their universe, which had taken days. When they finally reached it, there was a kind of plug hole down there and their craft was sucked into it. Before they knew what was happening, they surfaced out here. They didn’t know if they could go back.
Their names were these scrambled sounds that were unpronounceable in our universe, so everyone called them Blue and Green. Or B and G, depending on your Gen. Everywhere you went, there were journalists looking for a story and tourists looking for a selfie. Some people wanted them gone, but they were so likeable. I mean, they were locals, sort of. They knew the area. They even showed us where their house was, right in the middle of The Hills golf course. They told us everyone travelled under water by the lakes and rivers in their Wakatipu basin. Aircraft didn’t exist because of some issue with large flying animals and there was no such thing as roads.
“Mountains don’t change much, though. It’s almost the same as here but without so many buildings,” the blue-ish one told our local newspaper in their thrumming, high-pitched tone.
“We may be from a different universe but we’re just like you,” the green one added.
Of course, the tourism board got onto it super quick and offered them a whole line-up of freebies. They went on jet boats and the Earnslaw. They ate Fergburger and Patagonia ice creams. They seemed happy at first, but then one day they went back to their craft and they didn’t come out for days. The media finally started to drift away then.
It was Sam again, goddamit, who got the video of them leaving. Honestly I think that kid misses the bus on purpose. We were all at school so we didn’t even see his Snap until somebody snuck their phone out at lunch and showed us. B and G, our homies from another timeline, they had gapped. The torrent shut off and the craft disappeared under the water. Back down the plug hole I guess. The calm little bay in Kingston looked empty without it.
Some divers went out on the lake but no one could get deep enough. There was talk of a submarine being shipped to Queenstown so we could go down there and have a look-see but they couldn’t find anyone brave enough to take the trip.
Before long, we all went back to normal, almost like it never happened. Except for Sam. He changed after they left. He didn’t even seem to care anymore about the views he got on TikTok. He always said he wanted to be a chef but he quit Food Tech and started aceing classes like he never had before. And he developed this weird habit of staring out at the lake without blinking. I guess fame can do that to you. It was almost like he was a different person.
Copyright © 2024 Camille Khouri
Camille Khouri is a Queenstown–based writer and mother of two, working as a copywriter and freelance journalist. In the past, she has placed in several short story competitions, and is currently working on a YA novel.
Highly commended
Space Race
Rudolph hesitated before handing over the keys. You’ll never make it, he said. There’s snow on the Lindis. Vanessa, watching from the back of the office, nodded in agreement. The two clients, given the way they were dressed, were surprisingly serious. They had an old-fashioned paper map, which they held between them, asking Rudolph to show them the road to the observatory at Mount John. The green man said very little, surveying the scene, walking menacingly around the room, peering out the windows. The blue man asked all the questions. Where is your leader? How does the key operate? What side of the road do you drive on here on your planet?
They were carrying bags overflowing with shopping – sheepskins, rolled up posters, scented candles, women’s clothing, a massive greenstone tiki. Rudolph had no idea who the gifts were for. It seemed the men had no clothing of their own, just the tight-fitting fluorescent suits they were wearing and the ridiculous monstrous heads in matching colours. Rudolph assumed they were down for a stag do or a work party. He could smell no alcohol on their breath, didn’t know how to ask about other drugs.
Their paper work was in order, newly printed copies of up-to-date drivers’ licences, shiny credit cards that Vanessa put through smoothly with no need for further questions. Rudoph showed them the two cars available. They argued briefly over which vehicle to take, the blue one or the green one, then opted for the one with the most head room, and enough space in the back seat.
The office would be closing in less than an hour. The sun had set behind the hill, the street lights flickered on, a few stars shone faintly in the darkening sky between showers of snow. Rudolph reached inside the door, searching for his warm jacket, which he would need for his walk to the bus. He stopped to evaluate the two strange men. How far have you travelled? Rudolph enquired. The green man stared at him blankly. The blue man glanced upward, looked as if he was about to reply, shook his head. He asked Rudolph a few questions about himself, where he lived, how would he get home, were there any other humans at the house. No, said Rudolph, just a cat and a dog.
At first, the men appeared in no hurry to take their car, biding their time. Then suddenly the green figure slipped behind the counter and moved back towards the doorway dragging Vanessa beside him. She shuffled reluctantly forward, visibly trembling, the green man holding firmly onto her upper arm using his long thin fingers. The men nodded approvingly to each other. They bundled Rudolph and Vanessa into the back of the rental vehicle, the green man inserted the key as Rudolph had instructed, and shot out into the streets. Vanessa gripped the blue man by the shoulder, demanding to know what was happening. He pointed meaningfully towards the stars.
Rudolph spotted a policeman lining up to buy a burger, near the front of the queue. Rudolph and Vanessa gestured frantically. The policeman gave them a doubtful stare, then a friendly wave, as the car raced past. Very few other vehicles had ventured out onto the slippery road. Again following Rudolph’s advice, the driver kept left, too far to the left, perilously close to the line of parked cars. Rudolph had given no directions on what to do at roundabouts. The green man simply hurtled through, without reducing speed, requiring the other cars to stop and give way.
The two young humans, as they were, though they were no longer sure about the other two, whispered to each other. Vanessa found her phone. Phone home, Rudolph suggested. No, I’ll try 111, said Vanessa. The blue man spotted their movements, showed them he had a phone of his own, not a model they recognised. Vanessa’s phone didn’t work. How was that? A police patrol car pulled out to follow them, giving them some hope, but at the speed they were travelling couldn’t keep up, the flashing red and blue lights fading into the distance behind them.
The two men had the map spread out in front of them. They pointed to their intended destination, which they had marked with a big red cross, leaned forward across the dashboard and again looked up at the sky, ignoring what Rudolph had said earlier about the road. Rudolph and Vanessa screamed as they sped up to a stop sign, obscured by a drift of snow. Too late, the driver looked ahead, saw the intersection, swerved onto the main road, but didn’t slow down. A colossal freight truck, unable to stop, appeared out of the gloom, ploughed on towards them, its massive grill about to swallow them.
Copyright © 2024 Trevor Lloyd
Trevor Lloyd is a rural hospital doctor living near Bannockburn and studying English and Creative Writing at Massey University.
