PISCINE
Essay. Published in The Big Issue, May-June 2026.
The first sinkhole was only the size of a toilet seat. It hardly made the local news. Still, there was something eerie about it, asserting itself in the middle of a Geelong street. It was an error in the image; a thing that did not belong. This was the start of the hauntings; the sinkholes that inexplicably began to erupt around me. It was 2021. My friend was dying. Things felt upended, somehow; strange. I was still vibrating from the months of lockdowns, nervous about leaving the house. I started writing a novel, about an older woman and a young girl trying to navigate a disaster together. What disaster? Well, I thought, there’s one right on my doorstep.
The next one came the day my grandmother died. I was at an artist residency on Mount Hotham. The site was full of weird omens, mysterious augurs. Snakes in my path when I ran. Rabbits dashing past in the dusk, eyes wide and fearful. I floated in the world above the treeline, phone in hand, getting updates from my aunt. Hospice, hand holds, death rattles. I’d left my car down the mountain, had taken the group bus up the single road from the town below. I told the residency staff I’d likely need to leave to get to the funeral. There was nodding, understanding. Then someone checked a news site. ‘There’s a sinkhole in the road. We can’t get down.’ Our faces all lit by our phone screens, we stared at the cavity in the bitumen. More photos came overnight: the sinkhole was bigger. The size of a car, now. We’d driven right over it in the bus up the mountain, wheels whistling over the crust of the road with its rotten emptiness beneath. A text message came. My grandma was dead.
My anxiety has always been forward-facing. I’m not a ruminator on the past. What frightens me is the terror of the unknown event; the disaster I have not foreseen, that I cannot prepare for. I’m constantly terrified of the bottom falling out of the world, of tumbling, helpless, into disorder, into panic. This is what it has always felt like to me, when things suddenly go wrong. Like the ground itself has given way. This was what I wrote into: sudden horror. Change that happens too quickly for rationality. The way that shocks cascade — like climate change, like the floods, droughts, urban expansion that cause sinkholes at an ever-increasing rate globally. But too, like the impact of grief upon grief, the exhaustion of one devastation after another, of the great unknown becoming too great. I wrote my characters frozen on the spot, knowing that wherever they stepped could be the next place to collapse, to leave nothing but a yawning maw with dark water sloshing in the depths.
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Full piece in The Big Issue, May-June 2026.