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When desire arrives properly, it does not knock.It enters like bad weather through whatever weakness the house has kept secret: a window latch, a parted mouth, the small fatal gap between what one means to do and what one has already begun.You stand there with that look people wear just before they become expensive to themselves.The room knows. The lamp has gone gold with complicity. The chair in the corner has the stillness of a witness who will never speak, not from virtue, but from taste.Your dress on the floor is no longer clothing. It is evidence. My shirt beside it looks less removed than sentenced.Everything white in the room has become obscene: the sheets, the wall, the moon at the window like a rich man paying to watch.This is what language cannot admit in daylight: some nights are not tender. Some nights are chosen ruin, a private collapse entered willingly, with clear eyes and the full intelligence of the blood.Come here.Not sweetly.I want the version of you that steps across the line as if it were only chalk: the hand that does not tremble, the mouth that understands power, the silence that already knows the verdict.Let the dark take sides.Let your fingers learn the cost of my restraint. Let my name in your mouth sound like something stolen. Let the clock go on with its small mechanical morals while we commit the old intelligent crimes.Desire is never clean. Only honest.And I, knowing all this, would still come closer.Because there are moments when the body, tired of diplomacy, declares its own government, and the mouth says yes with such authority the rest of the soul has no choice but to sign.Afterwards, the room will resume its manners. The lamp will pretend it saw nothing. The chair will return to being furniture. The moon will withdraw its filthy blessing.But for those few black minutes, with your hand at my throat and your silence refusing all appeal, the whole world will confess what it wanted all along. <h3>F.S.F</h3>

Chosen Ruin

Four responses to one photograph1. Scene Evidence NoteSupplementary Interior Observation File Ref: SD-14/26Object observed: one internal lever handle fixed to a painted timber door in an elevated Brisbane house of older construction, modified in stages during the early years of this century. Metal finish consistent with brushed brass or brass-plated alloy. Surface dulled by oxidation, repainting dust, and repeated hand contact.Handle remains functional. Minor lateral movement at neck. Latch engages with resistance. No clear evidence of forced entry. Paint buildup around plate edge indicates repeated repainting with hardware left in place. This suggests the usual domestic method: renew the surface, preserve the instruction.Localised brightening is visible at the underside of the lever and around the thumb-pressure zone. Use appears to have been concentrated from the hallway side. Lower section of the door retains faint residual marking beneath later cleaning. Witnesses referred to paint. One referred to blood. Neither was granted the dignity of follow-up.In wet weather the timber likely swelled, increasing resistance in the latch. This is common in older Brisbane houses. Doors drag. Windows stick. People call it character because the alternative is maintenance, or honesty.Descriptions of the room beyond varied: “storage”, “sleepout”, “back room”, “the room we left shut”. No stable account was established.Object photographed in situ and not removed.Additional note: small domestic fixtures often carry more authority than larger objects nearby. Their scale should not be mistaken for innocence. 2. Hardware AssessmentDomestic Fixture Assessment Component: Internal Lever Handle Location: Eastern hallway door, Brisbane residenceThis handle is a replacement item of no special merit. It is the sort of thing bought during a bad season when money is thin, tempers are short, and somebody wants at least one problem to look solved.Its value lies in accuracy.The grip points are polished. The untouched metal is not. The object therefore preserves a record of contact without having asked to. It shows where hands went, from which side entry was usual, and where pressure was repeatedly applied.Paint history remains visible around the backplate and screws. Cream over white. White over whatever came before. The standard household fiction that a fresh coat constitutes change. The hardware tells a different story. Surfaces were updated. Access remained under old management.The lower panel retains traces of an incident involving splashed paint and, by one account, blood. This assessment does not determine which. It notes only that both were cleaned incompletely, which is common enough. People tend to stop cleaning once the stain becomes discussable.Functionally, the handle performs a simple conversion. Intention becomes entry. Hesitation becomes delay. Force becomes noise.Recommendation: retain in place. Clean only to stabilise. Do not over-polish. Replacement would improve operation while destroying the most useful thing about the object, namely that it has recorded more than the household intended.It should remain.Not because it is beautiful.Because it is evidence. 3. Witness StatementStatement of E. H.I make this statement voluntarily and with no expectation that writing improves a family. At best it limits the number of lies available.The handle shown in the photograph was on the back-room door for as long as I can reliably remember.&nbsp; The house was a typical Brisbane timber place. In summer, sound travelled badly and too far. A raised voice did not stay in its assigned room.&nbsp; I reject the suggestion that the room beyond the handle was neutral storage. Harmless terms are often used where harm has become routine.&nbsp; The handle worked. That does not mean access was open. A door can function and still remain closed in every serious sense.&nbsp; After Dad became unwell, the conditions around that room changed. No rule was spoken directly. None was needed. Tone of voice, position in the hallway, whether someone paused before touching the lever: these were enough.&nbsp; I recall one occasion involving paint, shouting, impact against the door, and later a dark stain on the lower panel that was discussed first as paint and then not discussed at all. My mother yelled. My father went quiet. The distinction, at the time, was mostly acoustic.&nbsp; Afterwards she cried in the kitchen with restraint that suggested practice. He stood in the hallway sweating through his shirt in the heat, furious at whatever had failed to obey him, which may have included the house.&nbsp; The cat remained on the corner sofa throughout. White, compact, watchful. It had the look of something that had already seen enough of us.&nbsp; I touched the handle less often than the others. Not because I was afraid. Because I understood the object had ceased to be a fixture. It had become a term of entry.&nbsp; I confirm this statement is true to the best of my knowledge.Signed, E. H. 4. Unsent MemorandumI did not fear the room. Fear is too grand for most domestic arrangements.I avoided the handle.That was where the intelligence of the house sat. Not in speeches, not in blows, not even in the yelling, though there was plenty of that. It sat in the small brass lever on a painted door in a Brisbane house kept alive by deferred repairs, wet seasons, cheap fixes, and the general belief that whatever had not yet killed you could be left another month.There was no visible lock. That mattered. A lock would have been honest. This handle offered something worse: access in principle, refusal in practice. You could touch it whenever you liked. The system depended on you teaching yourself not to.That is how the house governed. By making obedience feel like judgment.The handle taught the lesson precisely. A little drag in the wet. Easier movement in August. Warm by late afternoon. Sometimes warmer than it should have been, which was how I knew someone had already been through. Houses teach these measurements when language stops being serviceable.I remember the day the paint hit the door. White first. Then the darker matter through it. Then the argument over naming, as if the correct noun might reduce the cleaning bill. There was yelling in the hallway, the kind that empties words of meaning and leaves only rank. Sweat on collars. A hand striking timber. The handle turning, catching, turning again.Then the silence after. That was always the worst part. Not peace. Administrative silence. The kind that tells everyone their statements should now be revised.The cat stayed on the corner sofa through all of it, a white ball of fluff watching with the cold attention animals reserve for weather, vermin, and human disgrace.Later, as expected, the house was translated into acceptable language. Stress. Illness. Renovation mess. Family difficulties. Terms broad enough to spread over everything and thin enough to cure nothing.The handle was more exact.It marked the central fact of the place: who could enter, who waited, who shouted, who bled, and who put a hand on the lever only to take it back, having understood that the door was not closed by timber but by what the house had already taught. <h3>F.S.F.</h3>

Terms of Entry

I. On Records1 Whiskers test the light like surveyors mapping fault in the local question.2 Question at breakfast: who promoted this small beast to middle management.3 Management, briefly: stare until a larger thing starts keeping records.4 Records become myth. Myth, once properly indexed, hardens to evidence.5 Evidence tends to arrive in fur of the most reasonable grade.6 Fur is excellent public relations for sharp interior cat.7 Cat explains the chair better than furniture does. Chairs explain power.8 Power goes soft when upholstered and directed at the warmest sun.9 Sun, like fish, was once worshipped by practical minds. Fish still gets the prayers.10 Prayers drift toward Egypt, where decent help once sometimes outranked gods.II. On Night11 Gods, by comparison, seem vague at three in the morn. Cats are more direct.12 Directness is this: become a branch of weather once night begins work.13 Night enlarges eyes till the ceiling picks up some offshore signal.14 Signal from beyond reason says only this much: continue being now.15 Now is a red dot crossing policy-shaped rugs at public expense.16 Expense is nothing beside the cost of chasing doctrine into purring.17 Purring may be prayer, fraud, dentistry, engine-work, or a small machine.18 Machines with whiskers test the tensile strength of sleep using one good pen.19 Pen rolls under fridge. This confirms, to cat at least, the laser theory.20 Theory concludes truth prefers remaining just ahead of the paw.III. On Tyranny21 Paw on the rib cage before dawn can knead a man down to biscuit.22 Biscuit is the term hostages use when softened into furniture.23 Furniture drifts toward positions best described as strategic comfort.24 Comfort is the name tyranny gives itself when columns need filling.25 Columns omitted the central fact that tyranny can purr.26 Purr once convinced us domination dressed in fur was affection.27 Affection expires at five, then files the morning under judgement.28 Judgement is simple: the bowl is low, the world is wrong, proceed as servants.29 Servants call it love. The half-chewed gecko on tile arrives as gift.30 Gift implies motive. Cats prefer the cleaner term, which is choice.IV. On Contract31 Choice in this kingdom means appetite that has dressed itself as groceries.32 Groceries suggest a future. Cats call the same arrangement tomorrow.33 Tomorrow waits by the curtain, one eye open, auditing windows.34 Windows turn theatre. Everything beyond the glass has become birds.35 Birds perform each dawn as though gravity were still merely a rumour.36 Rumour becomes law the moment whiskers turn to expensive antennae.37 Antennae receive instructions between one blink and accidental sleep.38 Sleep is not repose. It is customs control on the road between worlds.39 Worlds reduce with ease to the measured dimensions of a cardboard box.40 Boxes have answered more questions than philosophy ever settled.V. On Purpose41 Settlement fails once a cat has formally declared readiness.42 Readiness is all invasion ever needed besides entitlement.43 Entitlement walks through closed doors with the calm of a small kingdom.44 Kingdom means hallway, radiator, keyboard, face, and whatever squeaks.45 Squeaks define borders. Borders are how anxious species keep score.46 Species are merely folders a bored clerk once filed under arrangement.47 Arrangement, unsigned, reads: you provide warmth, rent, groceries. We provide purpose.48 Purpose sounds grand until a document you need becomes a lap.49 Lap is where policy turns intimate and most appeals fail quietly.50 Quietly, memory keeps each insult, every late supper, each closed door.VI. On Time51 Doors, to a cat, prove time is a conspiracy against supper.52 Supper delayed breeds theology, complaint, and the lever called meow.53 Meow is the tool used to alter architecture surrounding doors.54 Doors are a fiction best experienced from both sides of freedom.55 Freedom, after lunch, takes the practical form of a heater-side cushion.56 Cushions become thrones once occupied beyond what law finds reasonable.57 Reasonableness ends where practical theology begins with prayer.58 Prayer receives this gift: a tail in the face, then a great deal of silence.59 Silence is the room in which self-importance must rehearse contempt.60 Contempt, done well, looks less like anger than manners in a better suit.VII. On Hunger61 Suits are for humans. Cats prefer the older style called polished murder.62 Polished murder walks through kitchens with economic hunger in tow.63 Hunger has budgets. Budgets are fictions believed chiefly by cats.64 Cats, to be clear, hold the minutes of every slight behind the bright eyes.65 Cats, to be clear, mourn nothing. This is their one gift and their single wound.66 Wound hidden in fur still turns at once toward the sound of a saucer moved.67 Moved by nothing seen, the house rearranges when authority meows.68 Instruction: the door. Not that door. The door that leads to wanting. That door.69 That door, once opened, becomes the central problem in domestic freedom.70 Freedom usually chooses the chair you need most, then ripens to cushion.VIII. On Theology71 Cushion becomes throne after six uninterrupted minutes of cat.72 Cat density warps the local geometry of theology.73 Theology asks whether God invented cats or merely lost prayer.74 Prayer, if answered, is a small thing entering and enlarging silence.75 Silence, once enlarged, leaves human self-importance looking like contempt.76 Contempt crosses tiles with the well-brushed elegance of murder at work.77 Work, for hunger, means recalculating the day around the empty bowl.78 Bowl economics produces small coups, loud songs, and patient chaos.79 Chaos sheds lightly across the clean black jumper of ambition.80 Ambition annoys the universe, which envies simpler projects.IX. On Empire81 Projects collapse once dignity starts taking notes in the corridor.82 Corridors at three become long administrative forms of midnight.83 Midnight improves floors. They remember every step except the sofa.84 Sofa is empire, padded against the failure called civilisation.85 Hairball arrives at the exact coordinates dignity fled.86 Fled down the hallway, dignity leaves behind only paperwork and dust.87 Dust is democratic. It settles on saints, screens, plans, and patient witness.88 Witness the cat watch our finances, breakups, grief as useful weather.89 Weather can be sat upon, ignored, or knocked from a narrow shelf.90 Shelf proves that height is only gravity waiting for paperwork.X. On Minutes91 Paperwork attracts cats the way despair attracts philosophy.92 Philosophy walks the hall at three asking for snacks and absolution.93 Absolution comes as rarely as competence in the void.94 Void with whiskers gains character, authority, and breakfast rights.95 Breakfast arrives like tax, weather, and consequence. Delay it and learn.96 Learning is mostly watching reason trail behind consequence and fur.97 Fur enters the dark with more certainty than any formal reason.98 Reason still insists it drafted the minutes, though whiskers chaired the meeting.99 Meeting adjourns when matter, bored beyond endurance, behaves like living.100 Living gets entered in the final hand of the Minutes of the Cat.<h2>F.S.F.</h2>

Minutes of the Cat

There was a café I haunted at the wrong hour for breakfast. The bacon chewed like old leather, the toast came damp as bad news, the coffee was burnt past apology. The table wobbled like a conscience. None of it mattered. She was there. Apron tied low. Pencil behind one ear. The kind of face that made a man forgive crockery, plumbing, God, empire. She’d say, “Big breakfast? Large black?” same as yesterday, and still it struck me like a hymn in a ruined church. You’d say there were better cafés. There were. Hotter bacon, cleaner cups, coffee made by someone who cared, which I found I couldn’t forgive. I never asked her name. Didn’t want reality coming in with its muddy boots to ruin a perfect arrangement. This was a romance built on ritual: she says hello, she brings the plate, she tells me what I spent, I leave owing more than the bill. The food stayed bad. The table never found religion. Still I came back. Because sometimes a life is held together by a waitress in a tired café saying, “There you go, darl,” like it costs her nothing.<h3> F.S.F.</h3>

Waitress

<h3>The Forge</h3>The first rule was simple: fit in or die. Not die in the Shakespeare sense. Die in the corridor. Die in the pause after your name. Die under the stare of older boys who had mistaken puberty for rank and wore authority like a rash.I arrived small. That is where these stories begin. Small blazer, small trunk, small voice, name stitched into shirts by hands not mine, the smell of home folded into everything for about three days, until the dormitory got to it with sweat, floor polish, wet towels and the democracy of other people’s socks.The place was the eighties, which meant bad carpet, brown furniture, a television that glowed like a state religion, and adults who looked as if they had been issued by a department no one much trusted.The boarding house master drank. Not with flair. Just enough to make discipline come in and out of focus. The matron believed in Panadol the way monks believed in relics. Broken leg, fever, concussion, plague, she would study you with bureaucratic pity and slide two tablets across the counter as though pain were largely a matter of attitude.Then there was Willamina. Cook, quartermaster, stern keeper of the Sunday night catastrophe. She could produce a meal that made hunger question its vocation. Mash rose from her kitchen with the adhesive properties of light industry. Boys threw it at the dining hall ceiling and a week later it still hung there like a weather system refusing to move on. The meat had a tired look. The gravy carried old grievances. You ate because youth can digest almost anything, including policy.Morning began with porridge, which arrived not as food but as a sentence. Grey, steaming, inevitable. You swallowed it under portraits of men who had probably called hardship character while someone else buttered their toast.Then the sprint to the showers. That was its own theology. Move early or be baptised in cold water sharp enough to make a tenor of you. A hundred boys learning velocity, towel over shoulder, soap in hand, running not towards cleanliness so much as away from the Antarctic.The seniors had rites for our improvement. Hold encyclopaedias in the corridor until your arms shook with knowledge. Scrub the black marks off the gym floor until your knees understood obedience. Write out pages from the dictionary as if English itself were the instrument of reform. Gargle soap. Gargle shampoo. Say thank you. Tradition, they called it. The nation has always loved a cruel thing once it has been repeated.You learned quickly. That is the boast and the wound. You learned when laughter was camouflage. You learned to keep your face from volunteering. You learned that the room was a weather map and weakness travelled fast. You learned that a nickname could be a crown, a knife, or both by lunch.No one kept his Christian name for long. A stumble, a haircut, one bad afternoon, and the school rebaptised you for years.There was the tyranny of the telephone. One line, too many boys, a queue of homesickness dressed as patience. You waited with coins in your palm while the house listened sideways. No privacy. No mercy. Just your mother’s voice arriving thin through static, and twenty boys behind you hearing every word, still reaching back.Study happened somewhere in theory. In memory there are books, yes, but more often bells, bruises, the smell of liniment, the racket before lights-out, the scrape of chairs, the low parliament of boys negotiating status with insults, fists, borrowed cigarettes and improbable lies. Education was in there somewhere, but the school was better at making reflexes.Sport ruled. There was always some oval, some whistle, some larger boy bearing down with evangelical purpose. You learned to tackle or to simulate it well. You learned to rise quickly because visible pain drew commentary. You learned that loyalty among boys rarely arrived in language fit for greeting cards. It came as a shove into line, a hand on the back, a punch thrown on your behalf, a silence kept.Sneaking out after lights-out with shoes in hand and hearts carrying on, over a fence, down a path, towards the beach or a party or simply away. Smoking behind walls that knew our names. Drinking whatever could be found, which in those years was often warm, terrible, and accepted without philosophical complaint.The beach was another country. Sand in the cuffs, rank washed out to salt, boys again for an hour, before the bell took us back.And then Countdown with Molly Meldrum, songs happening to other people, modernity in the wrong room.Years passed with that steady pressure. No single grand event. Just repetition, which is the old craftsman. Porridge. Coffee. Too much coffee. Cold showers missed by seconds. Mash on the ceiling. Panadol for everything short of decapitation. Nicknames shouted across the quadrangle. Gym floors. Dictionaries. Encyclopaedias. Smoke. Salt. Sport. A master half-cut and a house half-raised by boys.And the small one changed. Not all at once. That would have been theatrical. He changed by inches. Learned the pecking order of any room. Learned to joke before being judged. Learned to carry hunger, noise, boredom, pain. Learned that belonging was costly and paid up anyway. Learned that adults were mostly guessing. Learned that tribe could be tenderness in work boots, or cruelty with your arm around a shoulder. Learned to keep moving.By the final year the blazer fit. The voice had dropped into place. The phone no longer owned him. He could drink bad coffee black, spot false authority at twenty paces, take the cold water without opera, read danger, read bluff, read sorrow in the set of another boy’s mouth and leave it alone unless invited. He had methods now. That is what the place gave. Not wisdom. Methods.So call it what it was. Not heaven. Not hell. A forge. A long hot room of rules and accidents, older boys and stale gravy, porridge and punishment, salt air and small mercies, where a child went in labelled and tender and came out tempered in the image available.No verdict. No lesson pinned like a ribbon. Only this: the steel remembers the fire, even after it has learned to look like a knife.<h3>F.S.F.</h3>

The Forge

The God of Small Teeth The bowl is empty.He is there before the kettle, white on the lino, waiting by the chipped blue dish.I am half-awake, bare-legged, looking past him to the phone lit on the bench, the mug by the sink, the unopened day.He sits. One paw tucked. Tail around his feet. A blink slow and judicial.I leave him there a second past mercy.Then the nip at the calf: neat, bloodless, percise.I turn. He is already at the cupboard.So I take down the bag and let the dry food fall. It hits the bowl like gravel on enamel.He lowers his head. The kettle starts up. The fridge keeps humming. Light gathers at the window over the sink.On my leg two pale marks fade with the light.Tomorrow he will be there again, white on the lino, waiting by the dish.F.S.F

Writing, Poems and Rants

Chosen Ruin

Terms of Entry

Minutes of the Cat

Waitress

The Forge

The God of Small Teeth