Today's story—'Babble Fish'

3800 words. Written mostly in the Sydney City Library Reading Room, in the Customs House at Circular Quay. Recommended as a writing place when your head will go off pop if you sit at your own desk another day.

I could feel the fireworks coming, rolling towards me as the eye rolled away. A storm of them, in bleachy colours, the greens and blues the brightest. Fountains and birdcages, lattice-spirals and wedding-cakes and leaf-jewelleries of light spumed and jetted and melted and reformed and grew, and grew, and took over until there was only enough Big Dark to show off all this brightness, only enough Big Empty to allow you to feel the fullness.

‘I have to get off this floor!’ I determined. I scrabbled shaking up the ladder, watching my feet, my hands, making sure they remembered to grip. The gravmats lost their power on me and I felt myself lifting, all of me being drawn up the tube, my wet hair lifting, my balls light in their sacks, my cheeks, all my cheeks, afloat. I uncoded the dome hatch and floated through, and it was all there around me, brilliant peach and gold, turquoise and emerald emissions of space-jizz, spurting, spreading, sparkling, never ending.

Oh my, poor Chas! What I've put this poor young space-courier through today.