“Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.”
~Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables and Reflections
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Black no Sugar – 9 Short Stories by A.W. Wilson My rating: 4 of 5 stars Black no Sugar is a collection of nine short stories by A.W. Wilson, a self-published author, containing some bleak, pithy, funny, and well-crafted prose. I have read it slowly, one or two stories at a time, because (as promised) each story is like a dose of hot and bitter brew. In fact, that is just how I prefer my coffee, and it was the title, along with the hilarious image of a much-overused Munch painting on a Starbucks take-away cup (I’d thought I’d never see a fresh re-frame of that, but life is full of surprises) that made me decide to give the stories a try. I…
We have some cactuses growing in pots on our back terrace. They are pretty and harmless, unless touched … or, so I’d thought. I had never really looked at them up close until recently. Robin took some photos of them out in the sunshine, thinking that I might enjoy them, and looking at the results made me realise two things: firstly, that I really like the aesthetics of cactuses, which I’d never thought much about until then; secondly, that we are harbouring an alien colony, which may or may not be planning to destroy us.
Nevertheless, they are tiny, so I think we don’t have to worry just yet. Having said that, anyone who ever read The Day of the Triffids understands that all it takes is a random catastrophe to strike humanity, permanently weakening our capacity for self-defense, in order for botanical horrors to take over our planet. And to think that people have been worrying about zombies all this time.
This one is pretty, I think …
Before my husband and I married, he lived here in Melbourne, and I lived in Houston. We talked on the phone daily, usually during his mornings and my evenings, but that would vary, and the time of day we spoke would inevitably influence what was taking place in our surrounding environments. The first conversation we ever had about possums, which are nocturnal animals that frolic in the Melbourne suburbs come twilight, went something like this:
Him: “There’s a possum in my garden and I am watching it as I talk to you.”
Me: “Ugh. You should shoo it away. They are revolting. I am an animal lover, for the most part, but I find it hard to love feral rats and possums, and possums just look like gigantic rats to me, anyway. Besides, can’t they carry rabies?”
Him: “We don’t have rabies in Australia. Anyway, I think they’re beautiful creatures. Your Opossums must be different from our Possums, I think.”
Me: “Oh. Well, that’s not fair. How come you haven’t got rabies? And, seriously, Australian possums are beautiful?”