Heather McQuillan

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Dead Plants In the Last Museum

It was the night the ocean reached exploratory fingers beyond the drowned village and into the valleys that we lost contact with the outside world. No radio. No internet. No phone. These things had been intermittent before, but now their silence was oily grey. It was a sombre night of cards in the Atrium of Botanics, surrounded by withered vines and terraria. The Venus flytraps had collapsed in on themselves from neglect. I cannot be
expected to care for all of them.

Salient, the girl with the tattoo of a seagull on her cheek, could not sit still. I guessed her to be the youngest, maybe 17 or 18 years old. One of the Omega generation. How must it be to be the last of your line? To grow up knowing that. Assigned a personal mental health worker to help you overcome the despair. Persuaded how much happier you’d be away from a gloom-filled family environment. Raised on positives and optimism and grit, and then to discover you weren’t really that special after all. She prowled around the exhibits and cried out every now and then, ‘Are they all dead?’

‘Shut up,’ growled Brendon. ‘You’re making me nervous.’

Salient was swift. Her nails gouged at Brendon’s cheeks, pulled down the edges of his eye so we saw the stallion’s fear yellow and red at the edges. The other kids pulled her aside, wrapped their arms and legs around her as she thrashed.

I went to the bunker and returned with a packet of chocolate buttons. Chocolate is not always the answer, but that night it was. Nobody asked me where it had come from, but I saw their glances. They know I am hiding something.

We had a race to see who could keep the chocolate button in their mouth the longest. The loser had to read us the botanical names of each dead plant.

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Milk Carton Churches


On a day when the sky split with lightning like old gods waking, the artist unfolded discarded oatmilk cartons, turned them inside out. She gathered abandoned pens and half-empty paint tubes, and things forgotten since full bellies became a myth.

She painted memories on the silvered cardboard: tilted homes with chimneys that curled smoke like question marks, birds in flight, trees plump with fruit, chubby children at play. When her hand trembled, the lines were crooked and honest.

The artist glued the cartons back into chapel forms and left them on doorsteps, on rusting cars, and beside the rubble graves where the air tasted of metal.

People collected them, treasured them. A child built a fortress wall around one with pebbles and twigs. A man tucked one into his coat pocket like scripture. As the storm sirens called a warning, a woman rocked a carton in her arms and laid it gently in a crib of weeds.

Her studio turned inside out as people gathered beneath tarpaulins to paint their own scenes — some with citrus skies, others with fields of green too vivid to be real. Their lines looped like lullabies, naive and bright. The perspective was never quite right, but no one said it was wrong. Whatever they couldn’t remember, they drew from dreams and stories: an ocean of fish, a sun that smiled, people holding hands all the way around.

They formed altars and lit candle stubs, not for prayer, they did not have the faith — or hope — for that, but for the joy of shadowplay across the tiny pictures.

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A Knot of Roots.


The archivist holds the old book in soft-gloved hands — its leather binding worn and cracked, its pages brittle, its ink faded. The cataloguing form demands classification: materials, origin, and condition. He observes.

The paper has the texture of flax fibre, the ink drawn from iron salts and oak, the binding from the hide of an animal. Its gilded edges are infused with ancient gold. The reek of smoke is more recent.

Time pauses, and under the glow of the LED lamp, he sees all things at once— a record of interwoven causes, of intent and labour, of thought. The book is all of these things and something more. The thing they sought to destroy.

He pens a note that all things are bound by lineage, ideas, too. Every artefact traces back to a first thought, a first breath, a first sneeze. The first match, lit.

He sees the flax that once swayed in swamps, drinking sunlight before becoming linen; the calf that once suckled before its skin became vellum; the ink fabricated from minerals formed in the earth over aeons. And human hands — artisans, scribes, readers — giving the raw materials meanings. Every fibre, every faded inscription, even the sooty fingerprints of its rescuer, form a tangle of relationships stretching deep across time. And him, here, now, a fragment of this unfolding story. Still, he has not read a single word. He sets down the book, rubs at his temple, finds his feet on the solid floor beneath which roots of history knot and twist. He understands why they are so afraid.

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Silence and Echoes


Is it paradoxical that silences fuel my words? My flash fiction collection, Where Oceans Meet, is filled with silenced voices, and my recent YA novel, Truth Needs No Colour, tells of a girl finding hers. My three stories in this issue of Rawhead are part of an experiment in writing a narrative in fragments, leaving intentional gaps so that those silences speak, too. Set in a possible future, the stories reassess how artefacts have been collected and curated, and how missing perspectives complicate what we think we know of the past. Sadly, we are now witnessing the systematic removal of recently validated histories from public record in the U.S., whilst here in Aotearoa, New Zealand, there is a political backlash to decolonisation and the mainstreaming of te reo Māori.

Flash fiction, with its constraints, compression of language, and the need to build what is not said into the writing, offers a compelling device through which to explore this theme of suppressed voices. One of my early influences was reading Lydia Davis’s shortest stories, which hinge on implication, thereby inviting the reader to be active in the storytelling. Foucault (whom Lydia Davis spent time translating) suggested that the reader’s role may be “to recognise that all material excluded in the process of narrative editing and selection installs itself hauntologically within the material”. I am fascinated by the idea that not only what the writer chooses to say carries meaning, but what they choose to cut out leaves an echo.

My brain runs in loops and I always write too much to start with, so I have learned to relish revision, checking my word choices and attempting to cut away the noise so whispers can be heard. Right now, my brain has looped back to the word hauntological and thinking about how past events (but also things that never happened but could have) linger in the present. This, in turn, reminded me of the Māori whakataukī, Ka mua, ka muri. Literally translated, this instructs us to walk backwards into the future, reminding us that to survive possible tomorrows, we mustn’t lose sight of history or the wisdom of ancestors.

Survival in the future requires both wisdom and hope, and that’s what these three stories essentially address. In “Milk Carton Churches,” with old gods waking, the rediscovery of art brings healing. In “A Knot of Roots,” the archivist discovers an essential truth without even reading the words of the burned book., And in “Dead Plants in the Last Museum,” community (and chocolate) fortify against despair. And today, as I write this, I found wisdom and hope on, of all places, Facebook.

“We make the future in the present, and don’t ever listen to anyone who tells you that it’s all been decided and we’re doomed, because they’re doomed to passivity but you’re not.” Rebecca Solnit.

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Banner Art:
from Landscape with Two Poplars, Vasily Kandinsky, 1912