#40 UNTRUE

Catching Impossible Things

It was then that she looked at me, her face fresh and unburdened by the last two decades—illuminated by the light, the soft coins of the poplars falling around us—and asked if I had ever caught a falling leaf. I told her I hadn’t ever tried and she seemed surprised, said that she had always wanted to but never could.

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I Am Not Lu Xun’s Descendant

 I do not write in service of nation, family, or progress. I do not believe in lineage, revolution, or the moral hygiene of literature. What I believe in is fracture. The crack between a sentence and its translation. The glitch between a story and its structure. The betrayal between a word and the thing it tries to mean. I was not born into a canon—I arrived as an interruption. I write not to belong, but to expose belonging itself as a myth.

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Comic by Stick Mob

Image is a blue-toned sketched image of Spencer Hill Atnellkertyarliweke, Alice Springs. The image is separated into two sections on the page horizontally: the top half of the image depicting above ground and the lower half depicting underground. A text panel in the top left of the page reads, ‘In Central Australia, every hill holds a story’. A text panel in the middle of the page reads, ‘This is Spencer Hill Atnellkertyarliweke’. A tree stands in the foreground of the top half of the picture, with sprawling Australian bushland behind it. On the left-hand side is a post with markings on it. Two figures walk across the land with a long red serpent’s tail weaving between them and through the grass. The tail is a solid red. A white dog stands at an opening in the ground that leads to the serpent in the foreground of the bottom half of the image. The serpent’s body is red and textured with scales, wrapping around the left-hand side of the picture, with its head on the right. It appears to be slithering through the underworld as it engulfs a somewhat indistinct scene of people gathered around someone holding a stick that is on fire. The earth around the serpent has markings in white, including images of skulls and bones and wavy lines. Markings above the people gathered together resemble the markings on the post in the top image. There is a feeling of the land holding memory.

Comic of The Suburban Review #40: UNTRUE by Stick Mob Studio. Image is a blue-toned sketched image of Spencer Hill Atnellkertyarliweke, Alice Springs. The image is separated into two sections on the page horizontally: the top half of the image depicting above ground and the lower half depicting underground.

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