When my wife (then girlfriend) and I had been together for about two years and determined we were a permanent item, we bought our first dog together. Listy was a boxer and an uncommonly healthy one for most of her 12 years, but towards the end of her life she developed some sort of gastric cancer. Around this time, I noticed the flies (which are part of every Australian summer) had taken an unusually intense interest in her – and after she passed away, I looked back and thought: It was almost as if the flies knew she was sick before we did.
Many years later, Midnight Echo announced the theme for its 20th edition. I started rolling apocalyptic scenarios around in my head and recalled a factoid I’d read as a kid: if flies didn’t have such short lifespans and high mortality rates, the earth would be covered in them in a matter of weeks. My mind ticked from that image to the flies pestering Listy during her final summer and an instant later I had the central idea for ‘The Age of Flies’.
While it’s an apocalypse origin story, it also turned out to be subconscious rumination on the wholesale changes immigration and over-development have wrought on the quiet suburb I’ve called home for almost 20 years. It’s not the first time these anxieties have led to a story – my novelette Becoming also had its roots in the same sense of disquiet.
Kris Ashton 