T3SHORTS

GREEN The lichen clinging to Dominion Road's footpath has a colour that I cannot name. It is pale anaemic blood splatter, little patches of not-quite life that are not-quite green, the almost-colour of an almost-plant. KFC glows red on one corner, golden arches glare at me from another, and I…

MAGIC Part of night’s magic is how it preserves possibilities day annihilates. Those floodlights, barren blare delimiting the asphalt of State Highway One from the formless darkness beyond, might be the sentinels of a robocratic regime. Those bright points shaping a hill from shadow might be the watchfires of a…

Microfiction 3D printing only became ubiquitous once the machines could print using any materials – plastics, plants, stem cells, dreams.   Bushfires started earlier each year. Soon every month saw fire restrictions, as we tried to make sure there was something left to burn.   That robots would take our…

Winner and runners-up in the #WHERETONOW Writing Contest Judged by Paula Morris * Volcano Karen Holdom - Winner I am black diamond. Born in a firestorm with a shriek that made the ocean draw back in awe then throw itself at my feet, trying to haul itself onto me, into…

The Street Where I Live Perched high on a spine of West Coast bush, the smell of wet manuka and asphalt retrieves childhood summers from their past. Beyond the crowning branches of a grand kauri rolls a wide macrocarpa-framed valley where dark native forest must once have lined the snaking…

On the Street A cafe blackboard’s daily ‘nugget of wisdom’ promotes money, happiness, and crying comfortably in Porsches. A white Corolla slows at the lights. Electrical tape clutches waterlogged cardboard spelling a license number in sharpie, its liquefying letters birthing strange unidentifiable creatures. It convulses into Cromwell Street. Cardboard entrails…

On Titirangi Road my grandfather’s dog was squashed dead. My grandfather hiked dry-eyed up the drive, and scraped her off the concrete. He said that he knew this would happen. Cars hurl angry along the street’s arc, and thin footpaths cower by the roadside, often vanishing, alternating sides, forcing pedestrians…

K Road is tinselled with grey wiring. Like hair, it splits off, tacked to the paint-stiff facades that are strung along the Karangahape Ridge like braces at the mouth of the CBD. It was Te Ara o Karangahape, a trail, then a street; dust paved over, then all at once,…