Hyacinth by Will Cox is out now
Hyacinth asks Richard about the people in the house. Has he seen them too?
When she, Richard, and Sheridan first moved into this house, decades previously, Hyacinth had the notion that there was an old couple still living there. She never saw them, but she felt them, in the air, behind her, around corners. There was never a feeling of solitude. There was always somebody else there. Eventually, the old people left. Or perhaps Hyacinth just became accustomed to filtering them out, like the low hiss of a detuned radio.
Now, she is worried they’ve returned. She feels echoes around her, feels breath. Feels the somethingness of a presence in the room.
Will Cox is a Tasmanian-born, Naarm-based writer of fiction and non-fiction.
Hyacinth is available at independent bookstores and online here.
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Gif by Paul Cumming.
You first come across MAPKNA when you’re torrenting an old film you can’t find anywhere else. A Polish horror film called Nieznajomi, though you never get to watch it, because when you open the torrent folder there’s another file in there that gets your attention: there’s Nieznajomi.1978.KL.480p.DVDRip.x265.HEVC.FLAC-QWEENANT.mkv, which you expect, and the usual subtitle files and an info.txt but there’s also another file, MAPKNA.s04e03.mkv. You open it and skip through the video. It’s an episode of a show. A sitcom? It looks like it was made in the eighties. Something about the hair, the sound of the synthesisers, and the grain of the low-grade videotape. You forget Nieznajomi and watch this instead.