I know you remember this. I woke up on the raft. I’d been sick. I’d been sick for weeks. Everything before was a delirious nightmare. The murders. The container. You. It was all merged into one with her singing lullabies over the top. Her spoon-feeding me. Her weeping at night and stroking my face and telling me everything was going to be alright. I felt better. I felt clearer. For the first time I felt I could control my body, my mind. The fog was lifted. And I realized I was starving. My stomach thrummed with pain. I realized I …
Caterpillar Man @ Shelter of Daylight!
One of my stories, Caterpillar Man, has found its way into print. I don’t really know how this happened. I don’t recall the magazine editor checking in with me about the story, though I do recall them asking me how I wanted to be paid. Hey cool, I thought, and who are you? Back from my UK holiday I found my contributor’s copy waiting in the post-box- my story is the last in it. The magazine is a biannual anthology, I think I submitted the story to a sister publication about a year ago. You can buy it here. Or …
The Pearl love hotel, overgrown with brambles
The Pearl Love Hotel Haikyo in Tochigi is a wreck in camouflage, deeply nested underneath a blanket of scraggy brown vines. Rooms lie in embers, grown through with ferns; once-bohemian beds, chaise longues and chandeliers lie scrapped, dropped, and despoiled with the nests of birds, spiders, and the homeless. The grand two-story executive suite still maintains some of its sordid gravitas, its sultry red round-bedded apex room as faux-regal as ever, now overlooking a graveyard of spent passion inveigled by nature’s rapacious tendrils.
The Fix reviews Freemantle Mons
The Fix– Online literature review site The Fix recently ran a review of Something Wicked- the first print magazine one of my stories has appeared in. The reviewer said this about the story: ‘In Freemantle Mons The Leviathan Smile by Michael John Grist, an old clock stops, and the people for whom it is a fixture are surprised to discover that the sun fails to rise and time fails to move forward without it. In the best tale of this issue, Freemantle Mons must discover why the sun refuses to rise and what it means not just for the city, …
The dead boar of Yamanaka lake
The Yamanakako Spa Resort Hotel in Yamanashi prefecture very nearly didn’t make the cut to appear on this site, as I came close to just walking on by. It was only an hour or so from dusk, and I’d already spent hours exploring and shooting the main Resort Hotel I’d come out for. From the outside it was an unremarkable complex, a simple red brick structure set off from the road on a slight hill. The first building in the complex was bland on the inside, but the second had more to offer; a spacious main function space spread with beautifully crinkled red …
Leanna Drew the Moon
Leanna knew she was a special little girl, because the moon spoke to her. She knew that it shouldn’t, and that she shouldn’t listen, but none of that stopped it from happening. She drew pictures at school of her talking to a big moon face, and the moon saying things like “try eating those soap suds, Leanna,” or “that dog wants a bite of plasticine, go on,” and in the pictures she would go ahead and do it. The moon, after all, was her friend. But it wasn’t always so nice. She was 5 when it told her to kill …
Gunkanjima Opens
Gunkanjima opens to the public! The famed ‘Battleship Island’, properly Hashima island- formerly a haikyo Holy Grail, has now been opened to tourists to ‘explore’ along a specially built walkway. The cost of the trip is 4,000yen, including the ferry ride out to the dilapidated island. Tourists have up to one hour (weather permitting) to wander the walkway before they have to re-board the ferry and leave. This is great in some ways- the island will be preserved, vandals will be stopped from gaining access as security will be doubtless beefed up. But for the same reason, any proper exploration …
Mt. Fuji’s mysterious underground vault
The underground vault haikyo in the shadow of Mt. Fuji is one of the strangest abandoned structures I’ve yet explored. A double-doored double-walled walk-in safe with triple combination locks buried in a man-made mound in an unpopulated and obscure part of the Japanese countryside. Now its thick and weighty doors hang open and loose, and there’s nothing in the vault but for 5 odd logo/symbols on the wall, and no other clue as to its purpose but for the dedication in kanji on top of the dome- ‘in memory of our ancestors’. Imposing entry hall to the vault. I stumbled …
Storm Watcher
The storm-post was made of crumbling old red brick. Ragged weeds grew up its chipped and tattered sides, through its paving stones and round the observation platform binoculars on its roof. The grindstone railings that once prevented tourists from falling over the edge had collapsed inwards in a landslide a long time ago. Its windows were all broken or cracked. At night the long low mountain winds rushed cold down its halls draped with autumnal leaves, crinkling in the dry air. Stockrooms filled with ancient paraphernalia all had a low white carpet of snow. Once it had been a place …
Ruins of Gulliver’s Kingdom, Japan
Gulliver once rested in the shadow of Mt.Fuji, bound and nailed to the ground by the hair. His giant body was the main attraction of the now defunct and dismembered Gulliver’s Kingdom Theme Park in the shadow of Mt. Fuji, built in 1997, closed in 2001 due to defaulting bank loans, and demolished around 2007. Perhaps a contributing factor to its ultimate failure was the proximity of Kamikuishiki- a small village that was the main base for the cult Aum Shinrikyo at the time of their deadly 1995 Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. Tourists on a day-trip with …