The entire wood seems to be shifting and swaying to music I can now hear. I can feel the spiders crawling over our skin, lightly, like little dancers. I yearn to stand and let them come to me, take from me what they need, move on to find the last of the humans, to invite them to join us. But I cannot. I will not. For I am still one of those humans. Instead, I run up to Sammi, among the swaying trees and throw my arms around her. I begin to cry.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I say.
She croons at me, a lilting, arborous, quarter-toned trill. She invites me to join them, these new creatures, not human, not tree, but sentient things halfway in between. Some part of me reaches out to her, but I know now that she is not there. There is no Sammi Bernhoff. There is only this new and alien thing that exists beyond humanity, the evidence of a new logic emerging. She left me a long time ago. With that, I let her go as well, and the final part of me breaks off.
And so I stagger back towards the empty library, which looms above me, the lost image of my dreams. When I am inside, I stand for a moment, surveying its vast reaches that once were filled with people: laughing children and studious teenagers; policemen and detectives; loners and groups. I know, now, where I belong.
When I plant myself in the remains of the water feature, I hear Elroy chirping away happily. My toes plunge into the damp earth, pushing their way into the ground. The cool dirt embraces my roots, pressing in on me, giving me the stability I have long yearned for. Nearby spiders scuttle and jump towards me, grasp my bark, climb into my branches. Others I send out through the library, for they are part of us—our hands and eyes. The spiders take our thoughts with them; we are one organism. Through the spiders, we can see. A few days later, my roots entwine with Elroy’s.
***
Things change. The sand belts engulf the last of humanity’s suburbs, burying the skeletons of those who have died, unearthing them again a little later, scattering the bones across the ruins of the houses. The whole city resembles nothing so much as a great collapsing cemetery. Our spiders flock over the land in waves, creating a new civilisation wherever they go. While we—I—watch on from my place in the library.
Strange creatures venture across the land, scrabbling land-crabs capable of building primitive tools. A flock of crystalline butterflies, their wings brilliant blues and oranges, flutter one day around the library. They won’t let the spiders embrace them, for they, like the final humans, want to keep their identities.
When two of those humans finally arrive at the library, we watch on calmly, knowing that no matter how much they struggle, evolution has passed them by.
The blue-overalled woman looks warily around the library. ‘We’ll have to clear the place of spiders. Unless we want to go back to the towers.’
The man nods and picks up the axe, which lies there on the ground next to me. ‘Look at this.’ He touches the blade. ‘Ah, it’s sharp.’
We call to the spiders, who come scuttling and leaping. The woman points a nozzle attached to what looks like a fire extinguisher. A spray bursts over the spiders, who slip, slide, and curl up like clenched fists. A spike of fear drives through my trunk. Who are these humans?
‘Let’s seal off that window,’ the woman says.
The man gets to it, and pretty soon he’s boarded up the opening. When he returns, he says, ‘Fire?’
The woman passes the axe back to him. He looks up at Elroy and me. ‘Which one do you think?’
She glances between us. ‘The larger one.’
He steps beside Elroy, who lets out a wail like that of a steam engine. ‘I hate the way they scream like that.’ The axe hovers, plunges into Elroy’s trunk.
Pain shoots through me. Elroy’s roots grasp tightly onto mine.
‘This axe really is sharp.’ The man’s face takes on a hard edge and he swings again. They’re cruel, these humans. Pitiless. For a thousand years they cut and burnt and razed and dug. A thousand years of tyranny.
Elroy cries and wails as the axe strikes again and again. His branches sway; his trunk shakes. We call more spiders, but again the woman sprays them, and they scrabble and turn over and die. The remaining ones slink into corners and hide themselves between the covers of books, leaving us to face these humans alone. Elroy finally crashes to the ground beside me, his roots still clasping mine in a death embrace. His body-trunk shudders a final time on the ground before he is extinguished. Out on the hill, we cry together, for a part of us has been obliterated.
‘We can cut the other one down later,’ the man says.
The woman looks at me, ‘Don’t you think we should leave one of them? Keep the place a bit pretty?’
The man shrugs. ‘Let’s go and have a look around.’
They are gone then, and we are left with our grief. I recall now, what it was like to be human: that restless energy, that drive to survive, to struggle. They have short lives, and this makes them savage and desperate, while we live the long slow rhythms of arboreal time. If we are the slow shifting sands, they are the flood, rushing suddenly on, submerging all beneath them. Like drummers out of time, these two rhythms do not form a counterpoint, but clash in awful discord. As night falls around the library, I hear a radio start up, playing recordings of two shock jocks. ‘You’re listening to Brightman and the Ferrett. So to round up, we’re saying that they’re just not a part of our society, are they? They just don’t fit. And on that note, let’s get back to our favourite television show, where the votes are just in.’
Acknowledgements
Needless to say, this book would not have been possible without the heroic efforts of a team of committed and enthusiastic professionals.
Our partners in making the book a reality:
The Australia Council for the Arts
Queensland University of Technology
Pressbooks
The Espresso Book Machine by On Demand Books
The Queensland Writers Centre
Thanks go also to the State Library of Queensland for allowing us to bunker down in their space well past closing time.
Our quite literally tireless volunteers who kept tweets humming and food coming:
Kyle Zenchyson
Mandi Orr
Joseph Robinson
Chloe Townson
Emma Chataway
Lee McGowan
Donna Hancox
Perry Woodward
Kate Eltham
Meg Vann
Aimee Lindorff
Our editing team:
Jack Venning
Sarah Kanake
Laura Elvery
Chris Przewloka
Andrea Baldwin
Emma Doolan
Matt Shepard
Kelsey Bricknell
Sasha Mackay
And a huge thanks to our now legendary lead editor, Keith Stevenson. We sincerely hope we didn’t damage him in this process.
And finally, thanks to everyone who tweeted, commented, or simply watched the book unfold online.
About the Authors
Nick Earls is the author of twelve novels and two collections of short stories. His books have won awards and appeared on bestseller lists in Australia and the UK. Two of his novels have been adapted into feature films and five into plays.
Steven Amsterdam was born in New York and has worked as a map editor, producer’s assistant, and a pastry chef. Since 2003, he has lived in Melbourne, where he works as a writer and palliative care nurse. His debut novel, Things We Didn’t See Coming, won The Age Book of the Year and was longlisted for The Guardian First Book Award. His second book, What the Family Needed, was published last November and has been called ‘Wonderful’ by the Sydney Morning Herald and ‘Exhilarating’ by The Australian.
Krissy Kneen is a bookseller and writer. She has written and directed documentaries for SBS and ABC TV. Her short fiction has been published in The Lifted Brow, Kill Your Darlings, The Griffith Review and The Big Issue. She is the author of a short collection of erotica, Swallow the Sound,
a memoir Affection (Text 2009) and a collection of interlinked erotic novellas, Triptych (2011).
P.M. Newton‘s first novel, The Old School, was released in 2010 and described as ‘an arresting debut: astonishingly accomplished and as authentic as a .38 bullet wound’ by Andrew Rule. The Old School won the Sisters in Crime Readers’ Choice Award and the Asher Literary Award. In 2011 published two short stories, one in the Sc-Fi edition of Seizure magazine, the other in the Review of Australian Fiction, and is working on the sequel to The Old School.
Christopher Currie is a 30 year-old writer from Brisbane. His first book, The Ottoman Motel was published in 2011 by Text Publishing. He also maintains the barely-tolerated literary blog Furious Horses.
Rjurik Davidson is the author of The Library of Forgotten Books. His first novel, Unwrapped Sky will be released by Tor books in 2013. His script The Uncertainty Principle (co-written with Ben Chessell) is currently under development by Lailaps films. He is the winner of a number of awards and is an Associate Editor of Overland magazine.
Angela Slatter is the author Sourdough & Other Stories (Tartarus Press, UK) and The Girl with No Hands & Other Tales (Ticonderoga Publications), which won the Aurealis Award for Best Collection in 2011. Her work has appeared Dreaming Again, Strange Tales II & III, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Steampunk Reloaded, A Book of Horrors, Mammoth Book of New Horror #22, and Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2011 & 2012.
Geoff Lemon is a journalist, editor, writer, and performer. His political satire and social commentary appear in outlets like The Drum (ABC) and The Punch (News Ltd). He’s also a sportswriter for The Roar, with weekly radio segments on ABC Sydney and RRR Melbourne. He is currently co-editor of Going Down Swinging. His creative work is published in the likes of Best Australian Stories, Heat, Griffith Review, and PAN Magazine. His book Sunblind was published by Picaro Press in 2008.
Simon Groth‘s fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Meanjin, Overland, and Island, among others and his novels have been shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and the Text Prize. He is co-editor of Off The Record: 25 Years of Music Street Press (UQP, 2010). Simon is the manager of if:book Australia and the lead writer for the 24-Hour Book.
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