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James Firkins

James Firkins

Australian web designer & developer. I write, draw, and make games. I like quiet things.

Australia •
79 posts •
fantasy

dust folk (3)

The cathedral is an anvil dropped from a great height on the shoulders of the city. Houses and market stalls crowd away from it and heavy blackout blankets blind its openings. Many people

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
1 min read
sf

captain orpicea and the visitor

When Orpicea had been in the mining business, the jargon for gas-harvesters like these was ‘canaries’, drowning as they did in their mother jovian’s atmosphere, and the general feeling was that they

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
2 min read
poetry

refuse

Red robe a pyramid of blood / the prophet-priestess said:

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
1 min read
sf

white dwarf resonant

We would drill deep to reach the marrow. Feldt helped me lay down the battery and align the bore. Seseq directed us, the coral's deep structures clear to her through some mechanism of

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
1 min read
art

skelinton

sklengton

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
1 min read
poetry

bitter winter

Just beyond the taiga, / between it, actually, / and the still frost flats

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
1 min read
sf

underpass

They found her body in the wrong country’s river. The officers grimaced at the stench as they fished her out, eelgrass wrapped around her like the water wanted to keep her.The

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
2 min read
sf

galactic coral bloomed

We set down upon the coral where it was brightest. Only Seseq did not turn away as the bay doors yawned open. Even through my suit's filtered visor the poison light leaked through.

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
1 min read
poetry

space resignation

Formal resignation of an asteroid miner.

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
1 min read
fantasy

dust folk (2)

Sound had died in that time, Marlowe explained, and the desert folk had dug deep. The nomads rewrote their traditions or they disappeared. Things had made roost in the desert. You heard them

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
2 min read
art

classical feets

Last year I enrolled in a classical realism art course when, while idly researching how far I'd have to travel if I wanted to study at an atelier, I made the incredible discovery

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
1 min read
fantasy

lunatic moon

Where the moon's threads touched the forest canopy the leaves were manic although the air was still. Tapic's shoulder scraped on the shuddering branches as she climbed. A long keen dagger swung at

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
1 min read
short fiction

where the snow dies (1.5/2)

Above there was only the unmoving clouds, preserved mid-maelstrom. She was close enough now to see the eye of that frozen storm, which the corpse of the elder tree strained to reach with

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
1 min read
short fiction

where the snow dies (1/2)

Some mad wizard wanders, they said, up in the old north, in the creaking airless wastes where the owls went. A hunched, arthritic witch (a barkeep drawled), a smirking magician prince (said the

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
5 min read
fantasy

dust folk

The desert cities shut their gates when the red clouds rolled in over the dunes. Mountainous billows of sand scaled their walls, used their streets as veins, and buckled the roofs of the

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
2 min read
short fiction

in transition

There's the slippage, that gets some folks off. You get this real, uh, disassociative sensation. When the boat splits. In transition. 'It's the grey stuff,' Pam's voice crackled. This was years back.

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
2 min read

sightings by various authors

[...] Aboard a train in southernmost Norway, as a for-instance, I sat in the dining car watching the Arctic countryside lurch by. Mottled clouds made the sky a well-aged carpet. Little perfect houses peppered

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
4 min read

förlåt

What at last arrives, hours late, is not a train at all: it is the shit of a train, a droopy sad-faced crayon drawing of a train with stink lines trailing from every

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
1 min read

the late engine

Okay well hopefully that's the most unredeemably obnoxious thing I'll ever write. It did a number on my momentum—I don't know how many days I missed but it felt like a lot.

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
1 min read
sf

the hate engine (8)

An experiment was carried out: having stolen the Andromeda machine, we carried it into the time traveller’s cell and informed him he was to enable the systematic obliteration of his home time

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
7 min read
sf

the hate engine (7)

As we made our return journey to Jupiter, we came to terms with the idea that perhaps he’d been telling the truth. That the destruction of the psychic projector had sent our

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
1 min read
sf

the hate engine (6)

His ship cracked apart like an icicle without even breaching our hull. It was pathetic. Then he tried to walk through our ship's walls like they had the first time, but whatever mechanism

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
3 min read
sf

the hate engine (5)

We waited for hours, but the future envoy didn’t speak again. While Yup was shipped planetside we squinted through our telescopes at Jupiter, or the space where she should have been, but

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
1 min read
sf

the hate engine (4)

From the staging station Earth was an absence. Its clouds ate what city lights were left and starlight barely touched it; it was a black hole, a wall of nothing. We felt too

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
4 min read
sf

the hate engine (3)

We’d lived on the dark side of the Earth since before I was born. Darkness didn't worry us. The Venusian cloud cover would even keep the surface toasty for a while. Eventually,

  • James Firkins
    James Firkins
1 min read
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