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Ideas are kind of like stars. No, bear with me. 

Stars need time to form from the gas and dust of the interstellar medium. You have to leave that delicate substrate alone for it to undergo gravitational collapse. If something big happens nearby - a quasar, a supernova - the gas is blown away, scattered, and no star forms.

Like a stellar nursery, my brain matter sometimes needs to be left inert so that it can generate new ideas. I have to turn off the podcast or the music and starve my brain of stimulation . Then, I guess it has to generate something to amuse itself. And it works! A lot of my ideas come in those moments when I'm dead bored, when I'm out of podcasts on the way to uni and my brain is begging me to feed it something. If I do, no ideas form, just like a quasar quenching the interstellar medium. But if I leave that lump of grey matter to its own devices, it reluctantly churns out the occasional star.

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North Richmond Street

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North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when, after a daily seven-hour stretch of tedium, they finally let us loose. For the last hour us kids minded more the clock than the chalkboard. The yellow light of the sinking sun would warm our yawning faces, a signal to our brains to shut down; one old Mr Malone, droning on at the head of the class, was somehow insensate to.

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Cappuccino

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“Medium cappuccino.”
The grinder released a small pile of grounds into the handle. Dan tamped the pile smooth, then jammed the handle into its socket. As the coffee trickled through he steamed the milk, tiny bubbles rising to froth. He poured a stream into the cup with the coffee and affixed a lid.
“Medium cappuccino!”  

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The Quarry 11: Polygraph

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A new issue of The Quarry, with a fascinating concept! It's all flash fiction or non-fiction, but which is which? It's up to you to guess.

My piece is here:

Legs off an Ant

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Skink

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The lizard scrambled up the wall, toes seeking tiny ledges in the sandstone brick. At the top she basked briefly in warmth, bubbling up from the brick and beaming down from above. Her forked tongue flicked out. A pungent odor. Human. A shadow fell across her and she dove for cover in the greens beyond.

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Chains

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Here at the chains of the world, the bonds that hold existence intact, you see everything. Everything becomes clear. You see the stars growing and shrinking as they draw ever nearer to their eventual collapse. You see the gases moving between nurseries. You see the rocks hurtling through the void, and clinging to them in earnest, the races, with their wars, their treaties. You can see the hate, the love, the loss. You see, and you understand.

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