The Horror

January, 2026

All events, even those on which account of their insignificance do not seem to follow the great laws of nature, are a result of it just as necessarily as the revolutions of the sun. 

I sleep in the day with the curtains drawn and taped to the wall. There’s a tiny sliver of light that escapes in the corner, a reminder of the rest of the world that’s nodding as they pass each other walking to the subway in shoes too small, not realising that they’re going to miss their train. 

They’re fucking on weekend nights with the Right Partner and trying to eat less sugar, but they never do.

They’re waiting in their section at the doctor’s to hear their name called and their fate delivered, but it’s been printed out and waiting in a stack of reports for weeks. 

Besides that streak of white, I live in only a few colours – the grey of the asphalt at night – only sometimes with a bluish sheen from the rain that makes me smile. And, the golden glow of street lights I don’t step under. I also like to rob a bright red raspberry coke slushie, sometimes. 

Otherwise, I am in near-black, where they can’t find me. Dark apartments and hidden signals are what’s left for people like us when there’s no section for us at the doctor’s and no one nods back on the subway. 

…

I was born into a room of blue, for the ocean. The walls were deep navy and sea creatures hung over my cot, my mum’s presence always in the gentle sway of the octopus and his tentacles above me. 

I was born with a name for shallow, tidal water; and I remember its origin and the story of my birthday more than any nursery rhyme. 

I don’t use that name now. When I hear it on the radio, it’s as though it addresses the boy that is being told to pick up his toys, brush his teeth. There is an alertness in me, but no warmth. There is no tide in me; I am resolute, I am known to myself without names. 

They told me I’d be strong; even rigid, difficult to read. But, kind and reflective, eventually. That’s what they told me, along with my favourite colours and numbers. 

I was born Cancer into a room of water signs – my Pisces dad in the corner squinting at me, my Scorpio mum and the monster of expectation all there waiting for me, already, pincers out. 

…

When I was about 7 or 8, my parents watched me paint all our signs on the wall in that room – a crude scorpion, crab and two fish chasing each other’s tails. I drew like most kids then, and still now. My parents pointed to them for years like I’d achieved some incredible feat with those shitty drawings and messy paint. They seemed to see it as a sign of my devotion; my pride in being a water sign with them; but they’d handed me the paints. My mum brought it up for years, like she wanted to remember some moment we had shared together. 

I used to drive to the newsagents with my dad. He’d take me to get a milkshake and then he’d buy the paper and some lottery tickets that he’d fold up and hide in the glovebox of his green Subaru. He sometimes bought scratchies that he’d scratch in the car and then made me walk them to the bin in the carpark before we left for home. 

Mum didn’t know about it, and Dad and I never spoke about it. So, one of those days I stole letter paper and a bunch of envelopes. I slipped them down my shirt and into my pants – my own secret. 

I laid them out on the floor at home and dreamt of everything I could say if I could say anything at all – even things I hadn’t told Jove. I couldn’t really write, but it seemed I could say anything on a piece of paper and it would make it something more important than a thought – more important than something said. 

I lost my favourite toy car in the sandpit and I dug so deep for it that I found old, little bones. I have one in a jar under my bed and I can feel it there when I go to sleep. 

Mum plays the radio on the weekend when she vacuums and the house becomes yellow and warm and I like to walk on my toes, jumping around corners. I wish we could feel like that all the time.

My Best Friend is actually kind of mean. Jove knows everything about me, but Dad says she’s Sagitarrius.

Sometimes in the bath I feel like the water is pulling me under and if I let it I’ll never come back up.

If they knew, my parents never mentioned it. I kept on stealing. It started with cash from their wallets once they’d gone to bed and, eventually, I was stealing pushbikes from other kids’ houses so I could go riding and see Jove. She lived around the corner but I never went to her house. We’d meet behind the shopping centre and take turns trying to bunny hop onto the footpath. Then we’d throw the bikes in the canal or leave them outside other kids’ houses. 

I always found small reasons to steal – to buy lollies at school, to give something to Jove. Being a cancer sign was never the reason. 

Horoscopism was just beginning to take over my family at this point, and it was hard to do anything without my parents – mostly my dad – justifying it with astrology. He was the outwardly pious one, while my mum was the campaigner. She would list everything she was achieving for everyone, looking past us like she was addressing a room full of people. Dad would stare at me then like he was trying to work out what I was thinking. 

Afterwards she’d say goodnight from my bedroom door as I lay in bed. She’d ask me what I hoped I’d dream of. I couldn’t see her face in the silhouette, but I knew she listened and smiled as I told her about how I wanted to dream I had hit a six at cricket, or doing wheelies with Jove. I couldn’t see her face in the silhouette, but she would stand and listen until I fell asleep. 

…

Determinism by the stars might be the oldest belief there is. 1,600 years before Christ they were writing big moon good for crops, crown moon – King good. 

It took the rise, and then fall, of monotheistic religions for it to make a comeback. It began in the 60s when this guy, (all heil) G.S Honda, became fixated on the idea that we’re shaped by pre-determined factors. ‘Big Bang’ had just been coined and he pitched that, just as each planet’s place in the solar system was determined by that single event, so then was how that planet would affect us through the date and time we were born. Ripples on the water, basically. His own ripples included some incest and white power.

It was the newspapers who made it what it is today. They’d taken blows from the radio and then as Vietnam ended, there were no wars and almost every house had a television. They were losing reach and control. 

The same papers that had trashed Honda and considered themselves adjudicators of reason were suddenly running front page stories on the movement of the planets and quoting the signs of anyone that was featured. They didn’t create astrology, but it was convenient for them to appropriate it.

I don’t know why it took off so fast, but almost everyone seemed to believe. It was easy, I guess? Like opposing whaling or saying you follow a football team you never watch. There wasn’t much to it, really – you called out the parts of your character that fit your sign. You opposed anything of chance, and you chose friends and partners with complementary signs. There was no church, no messiah and no scolding. In fact, you could blame a lot on it – virgos will be virgos! You don’t need to be forgiven if you weren’t ever wrong at all. 

Columnists soon became regarded as diviners. NASA leaned into it and their funding exploded. Whole TV channels were dedicated to live streams from space and talk shows began debating astrological interpretations. 

Like anything, once there was momentum, there was resistance. And when there was an other; an enemy – that’s when it really stuck. 

One of the first fractures was a fringe new age church in the country that was trying to stay relevant and began to claim that everything bad that ever happened was because of fire signs. 

It’s actually Capricorn, the earth sign, that has always been linked to the devil – but it was as simple as fire equals devil, and they had their enemy. 

The guy that shot up a school did it because he was a water sign raised by Aries parents. More planes fall out of the sky when Leo is rising, most shark attacks happen in the third decan of Sagittarius.

It also didn’t help that Stalin, Bonaparte and Hitler were all fire signs. 

It was frightening how easily people turned on a whole quarter of the population, even when it was their neighbours, friends and family. 

Jove was a fire sign, and my Dad told me, even though they didn’t agree with it, I had to stop spending so much time with ‘The Saggitarrius’, or people would talk about us. Mum never said anything. 

The other group were the Cusps. Tired of being told what they were, they’d tried to find their place in the system. They were born at the beginning or end of their signs and wanted to be recognised as something new, again. Some went further and said they identified as other signs, despite their birth. 

The purist astrologists argued that you can’t just make up star signs – missing the irony of that entirely; given they were all made up. You couldn’t change your birth, either – which was at least factual – but why did it need to define you for the rest of your life?

The Fires and Cusps became the frontline for the resistance against Horoscopism. 

…

Together my parents had started like most – an expecting couple who were curious about the child they would raise. No one survives childhood, they say. But, better if it’s the planet’s fault and not yours. 

My mum used to host clothes swaps at our house when I was a kid. She signed every petition she ever walked past, and was on the committee for the local footy club before I was old enough to play, or wanted to. She’s an organiser, drawn to community. She goes deep, and she fell – dived – all the way into Horoscopism. 

At home it began with themed books and toys, my name; but I wasn’t even in school before they had me holding a clipboard to gather signatures on political matters that affected – or should consider – astrology. I think she was in it for the trajectory of it, more than anything. She formed a local committee for her star sign, and then others for mine and my dad’s. She found other groups and pushed to create a federation and, when she was leader of that, she started speaking to the government directly. 

Soon my mum and her group were shaping the books we read in school, and towns were pulling up old swingsets and putting in huge telescopes. It became a dick measuring contest to see who could have the biggest telescope. 

Her first big win came when they introduced Astrology as a subject in schools. They passed it through as a pilot on the basis of free speech – but within a few years it was in every school, and the textbook was dedicated to her alongside G.S. Honda. 

At school, we were the perfect disciples for the faith – we had nowhere else to be, and no choice in it. It seemed like everyone just assumed the rest believed and so didn’t say anything. Except Jove. They were teaching us about the planets and their movements in science class when she passed me a drawing of Saturn with a huge cock wrapped around it, in place of the ring. 

‘How do they know so much about me?’ I wrote back. 

We never had to say much to understand each other. 

…

By the time I was 14, Mum was on the tele daily as some pseudo-bishop for the whole thing. The government sought her opinion and she was flown to conventions all over the world to speak on how astrology should be practiced in school, government, community.

She loved having my Dad photographed with her like some sort of astrology super couple. Worst of all, she referenced me constantly as her water sign poster child. 

She had to know, by now, that I wasn’t a believer. My parents never acknowledged it, they just moved me into a school for water sign kids. I don’t know if she thought she’d actually change me, or she was just ignoring it? By this point I was already meeting up with Jove in secret, anyway, who had been sent to a school for fire kids. 

Mum became more and more severe on TV to attract attention and followers. At one point she said that those that didn’t live in line with their planet should be medically diagnosed for mental illness. That night she asked me to help her cook dinner and she whistled while I cut carrots. It was as though speaking to the mass and the individual were not the same thing, in her mind. 

She didn’t think that she hated anyone. She acted from some sense of tradition – although it was only decades old. She heard and then amplified what others around her believed, as if it was more important to appear evangelical – or the most evangelical – than to determine her own belief.

…

Things escalated quickly. Doulas were becoming influencers and coaching people on avoiding conception that would result in a fire or cusp sign birth. It took a populist government in some shit country to outlaw marriage for fire signs and then things really kicked off. 

A fringe politician here quickly started campaigning that everyone record their sign – one of the core 12, only – on their license. It was to ridicule the Cusps and out the Fires.

He was all over the news, constantly pointing at the camera. It seemed like every bit of hate that caught on overseas justified a smaller step here. 

It was my 16th birthday when the Cusps bombed a small telescope out in the country. It was insignificant other than being the background that the 6 o’clock news used for their daily astrology updates. They were on the news most nights for some stunt they’d pulled, but this was beyond anything they’d done before. 

I was unwrapping another gift I didn’t want, while the news came on the radio. It came to me then that my birthday was a fact, a statistic. It was, only, a marking that I was still alive, yay! Why was it more important than who I was, myself? It seemed so determined, yet only the date itself was unmoveable. It was mine, not theirs.

That evening someone bombed a church and killed a dozen people. It wasn’t like the Cusps, but they got the blame and some of their hideouts were raided. I remember my mum’s face in the blue light of the TV, mouthing words like she was practicing a speech. I caught her smiling. 

That year I dropped out of school and Mum barely noticed. Dad eyed me suspiciously. He rarely shared what he thought on anything, but appeared to still be a believer. He said the right things, he read out our signs to us in the mornings from his favourite diviner. He went on trips when Mum did, but seemingly not together. I found his lotto tickets stuffed everywhere, more obvious than in the past. 

I fell in with some others that felt like me – that lived against their sign. They called each other Chosen Stars, but I didn’t feel a part of anything, yet – I felt alone without Jove. One guy let me move into his Dad’s mechanic workshop. I was living freerange, I laughed to myself.

I would come in after 6pm to a pile of empty beers as the mechanics were leaving, and I’d spend the nights there burrowed up in the corner like some sort of junkyard dog. 

At times it all felt ridiculous. I could just call myself a Cancer. I could pretend I liked swimming and home and all these other pointless stereotypes that didn’t deserve a war. I could empathise with the Cusps and the Fires and everyone else that had fractured off, and let them be. It didn’t actually concern me. Other times, when I was driving some guy’s hundred grand Mercedes from the mechanics around the city at 2am, I’d remember – is there anything worth fighting for more than the right to be yourself? When we ourselves were the battleground, surely our fight was deeper than those we fought?

When I was flying through the empty city at night with the road and those blue roads wet with rain, I always thought of Jove. 

I hadn’t seen her since I finished school. I rang her parents every now and again, but they’d lost contact with her. 

I spoke to her in my head about the world we were living in and I knew what she’d say. 

…

I saw Jove again as she was being punched in the face by a riot squad policeman. I’d found a poster in the street about an underground group that was turning up to oppose astrology rallies. There were a few dozen of us that met at the subway and marched to a rally outside City Hall with red bandanas tied around our faces and we joined up with some others already there.

The group we were protesting were trying to pressure the city to stop teaching anything about fire signs in public schools. They had a speaker up on the hall steps rattling off all of the historic fire sign figures we should be forgetting about. 

We’d flanked them, working our way into the crowd against the building, so we could try to cut in on their TV coverage. The rally crowd were screaming at us until the police pushed through and built a line between the groups. That had been the plan, and now the cameras were fixed on us as the police held us back.

There were six of us at the front, I was on the corner. On the other, against the wall, was a girl with a sign that read this is a sign that you’re a wanker. Someone was reaching through the policemen to pull at me, trying to make me crash into the cops, but I couldn’t stop looking at her. Her eyes were deep black, with a shine of blue.

She was full of life, loving the moment. She looked beautiful. 

I was still staring across the group at her when she pulled down the bandana from her face and smiled at me like she’d known I was there, all along. Jove. 

The smile killed me and I needed to be closer to her, to know everything about her and yet it felt like I always had. We were looking at each when someone nudged her from behind and she shouldered into the policeman in front of her. He was crouched down like he was waiting for something and he sprung up into a punch under jaw almost immediately; a fast, gloved uppercut with his right followed by a left to the guy next to her as she fell backwards, the red bandana flailing up in the air like a flame. 

I woke up on the ground behind City Hall next to some of the others, my shirt most of the way over my head where they’d dragged us, and my jaw aching. I rolled people over looking for her, but I already knew Jove was gone. 

…

I had no way of finding the group, or Jove. I couldn’t stop thinking about the violence of it, the way the police had been waiting to fight. Why was it so important to them that we be something we didn’t want to be? If there were no names, no stars, if we weren’t wearing bandanas – then we would just be, and would they hate me then? If you stripped away their own system there was nothing to hate. Without star signs, there was no fire sign. 

I didn’t want to hate back, but I couldn’t feel much else as I pictured Jove’s eyes and then her face being punched, over and over. 

There was a wide pedestrian overpass down by the main station that led from the platforms into downtown. It was packed in the mornings as everyone poured off trains and walked to work, but it was completely dead by night when there was nothing there for anyone. 

I’d found some old paint from the storeroom at the mechanics that they’d painted the back fence with – a deep green and a white that was turning yellow.

I wore an old set of overalls that the mechanics had used to wipe the bench. It was covered in cigarette burns and stunk of grease and dried beer, but you could still make out their logo on the back – Ugly’s Motors. 

It took me until the sun started to come up and the morning cyclists started to stop and watch me paint. I wasn’t a natural, but once I started, I didn’t stop. I had no sketch. The perspectives were all wrong, lines were wonky; and I only had green and white, and what I could mix with them. 

But, you couldn’t mistake it – two Pisces fish in a 69, sucking the cock of the other. If I was talented, I’d have painted scorpions for my mum – but the fish would do.

I stood below it and tried to see myself in that little boy in that room that slept beneath those paintings – the boy that stole paper and envelopes, that felt like he was being drawn into the bathwater and wouldn’t come back up. I looked at him like I was walking in that room with him, I could see myself in the confusion, but there was no hate in that boy – he didn’t know it, he barely knew star signs and all the things that could cause hate. 

I felt hate in every part of me. Like a drug, I wanted to drink it up, but knew it was already eating me. 

…

A hand came around my cheek and threw my head into the dumpster across the road from the mechanics where I’d hidden all my stuff the night before. My ears rang, I felt like my teeth were being torn out of my face. They put a bag over my head and threw me in the van as I was getting up. 

I woke up in an armchair in a filthy dark attic with a load of people laying around like they had nowhere else to be. It couldn’t have been the police – it had to be the Cusps. 

It was the space above the vacuum store, I found out later. 

I tried to get up and someone held me by the shoulders from behind and slowly lowered me back down. 

‘Where’s Jove?’ I called. 

A guy with a goatee and a monobrow sat down on a stool opposite me and smiled with his hands open like he was trying to calm me.

‘I’m sorry for the hit, man. We don’t usually do that, I promise. We thought it could have been a trap,’ he said. ‘You know, your mum, and everything’ he added.

‘Where’s Jove?’ I said again. He sat back and started rubbing his goatee, clenched his teeth. He looked sad. 

‘I’m really sorry for the hit. I’m actually a Buddhist. But, look, we need to chat about why you’re here.’

‘I’m here to find Jove. I know she’s with your group.’ 

He sighed and looked over the chair I was in, his hands on the sides of the stool like he wanted to leave.

He settled back down and started again. ‘There’s a lot of groups,’ he said. 

‘But, yeh, we know her. She does her own thing. The group you were with, they’re just a bunch that get together to protest. They’re not that organised, we don’t really know what they want…’ his voice trailed off. 

‘We need to chat about something, though.’ He leant in. ‘We need your help.’ 

He wanted to say more, but sat back and waited for me. I screamed that he wanted to find Jove. He ignored me and kept on. 

‘We want your help to change things. Your painting was sick. It’s been on the news, you know? They’ve already painted over it, but it was massive.’ He waited for me to say something, but my head was killing me, and I could tell Jove wasn’t there.

‘We sorted out the mechanics, so you know. Someone here knew the place from the logo, so we were there super fast. And your mate, the mechanic – he said he’d tell them he threw out loads of those pants in the trash every year. He said you’d already cleaned up all your stuff. It was pretty clever, but you would have been fucked if the police found you first,’ he laughed and then caught himself.

I’d figured that the police wouldn’t have held me for long, and the Cusps would have found me anyway – so I wasn’t that concerned, but I didn’t say anything. 

I sat back, exhausted. ‘Where’s Jove?’ I tried one more time. 

Someone sighed from behind me. ‘That Sagitarrius? She’s not here, but we can help you find her,’ said my Dad, leaning on the chair and looking over at me. He put his cold hands on my shoulders.

‘But, you help us, first.’ 

…

‘Bayou!’ Mum said as she was about to walk onto the small stage set up outside parliament. ‘I’ve been trying to call you, I can never reach you now, darling,’ she said. ‘Wait, what are you doing here?’

‘He said you were expecting him?’ said the attendant that had let me into the production tent next to the stage. She ignored me now and stood between us to put dark makeup under her eyes. Mum handed her a piece of paper folded up into a tight little square. 

‘I thought this was just a memorial? This is really what they want me to say?’ she said to the attendant, who shrugged and walked away. 

‘I just wanted to see you do your thing,’ I said and hated hearing the lie. She took my hands and held my eyes for a moment until I looked around for the AV desk. It was where Dad said it would be. 

‘It’s a big day here, we’re about to announce a huge win,’ she said, smiling at me. ‘But I need to tell you something.’

‘I should let you get up there, actually. Can I watch from back here?’ I asked and pointed to the small screen at the AV desk.

‘Sure darling, it’s all set up so just, you know… Small crew today,’ she said, meaning don’t touch anything. ‘But we have to talk now. It has to be now.’

The attendant was with a group of people, pointing back at me. In my pocket I was holding onto the harddrive they’d given me, my hands sweating. Dad had said only I could do this so he could stay on the inside, but I felt sick with it now. I didn’t care what he wanted, I just wanted to find Jove.

‘We’ll chat later, Mum,’ I said and squeezed her hand again and started towards the AV desk.

‘It’s that friend of yours, Jove,’ she said, calling her by her name. 

‘Jove? What? What about her?’

‘I don’t know how to say it, darling.’

‘Tell me, where’s Jove?’

‘I’m sorry Bayou, but she’s dead. They told me this morning.’

‘No, no, she can’t be, that’s bullshit! She’s alive. They said she’d be here! How? How do you know?’

‘The police report says she attacked an officer on the way to the station. She somehow got his taser in the car and they had to restrain her. It happened after a rally, two days ago. I’m sorry darling, I know you loved her.’

‘You don’t know anything about me,’ I cut back, but in that moment I recognised the look I’d never seen when she stood in the doorway of my bedroom, her face shadowed. Maybe it was measured in the movements of the planets and what the newspaper told her I would be – but somewhere in there she still saw some part of me. She stood there with her hands on my shoulders, my arms shaking by my side. I stared into her eyes, stoking the hate in me and unsure which part of it she deserved. 

She walked me to the desk and pulled the stool out for me. She pointed to the monitor and was going to say something, but just kissed me on the top of my head and walked onstage. 

I took the harddrive out, covered in sweat and wet clumps of pocket lint. 

I fumbled around the laptop until I got it loaded and dragged it into the projector program, like the guy above the vacuum store showed me. 

My mum stepped up onto the screen, her face flat and her cheeks flushed, her eyes sunken. 

‘The sun is in Libra, moon in Scorpio. We look for monumental shifts – moments that will mark us forever. We expect growth to come in newness, in strength – but it also comes in loss,’ she started, looking down and wiping her eyes. 

I hovered over the play button, waiting. 

‘This week we lost one of us. Not a believer, but one of us – because the planets are in us, no matter our beliefs. We’re broken that we’ve lost a soul. We’re more broken, still, that it is violence that will bring us growth, newness, strength.’ She looked down at the camera, her eyes glassy.

‘At 7.15pm on Sunday, following a rally, an individual that belonged to the group known as The Cusps was arrested for inciting violence. Following her arrest she obtained a weapon from a police officer and attempted to murder him. In her restraint she was, unfortunately, she.. She lost her life,’ she began to look towards me off-stage but stopped. 

I hit play.

She took a deep breath and squinted at the teleprompter in front of her. 

‘Today we, regrettably, announce,’ she stopped as she heard the crowd scream and point to the screen behind her as the grainy black and white security footage came on. She turned back and looked quickly, gasping.

‘That it is now illegal to identify as a Cusp,’ she started again, louder and faster now as police were bashing Jove on the screen behind her. 

‘What the fuck?’ I said out loud, holding the screen and looking over to my mum onstage. ‘What the fuck is this? Jove!’

‘The Justice Department will be announcing severe punishments for any group violence against us,’ she screamed over the crowd now, her hair falling over her face as she leant forward on the podium, focused on the teleprompter.

Jove was handcuffed behind her back on a chair, trying to stand up as police punched her again and again. 

I ran onto the stage as Jove fell forward over herself, her body folding in two. Projected on the screen, she was lifesized. I cast a huge silhouetted shadow next to her.

The police reached under her shoulders and threw her back. Her head fell towards the camera and I saw her face, her eyes still open. 

Mum was staring at me, her eyes wide and pleading with me to look away. She turned and lost her balance as she saw Jove’s face, falling over with the podium. The crowd behind me were chanting, their hate fanning the stage like a bushfire. 

I closed my eyes and wanted to see Jove, but I couldn’t. I wanted to feel her eyes on me and when she would say so much with only a look. Instead, I saw a room of blue. I felt empty and dry and yet I was panting like I was coughing up water, being pulled backwards while my hands reached out; I was becoming heavier and heavier but moving neither way, just torn where I was. I was born into a room of blue, and I was the person that I am now, already. I was hate. I was myself there now in that very moment, I was the little boy and I knew that every moment was going to lead to this one. I wasn’t what I was because they told me I was, but because they didn’t give me any other choice. Then I saw punches, landing again and again. I didn’t know who was being hit this time, but I knew they were my fists, reaching upward as I was being pulled down.

by Sparrokei

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