This week’s spotlight shines on the intriguing short story ‘Else / If’ from Andrew Roff’s debut collection The Teeth of the Slow Machine.

Post written by Polly Grant Butler

‘What do I write about?’ I whinged to Maddy, scanning the dizzying selection of books that lay before me. Maddy, who speaks with reassuring authority on basically every topic (a much-needed antidote for my indecisive temperament) immediately suggested ‘Else / If’, a short story by Andrew Roff from his debut collection The Teeth of the Slow Machine.

Reading the first sentence I was suddenly in the throes of a fierce anxiety, inhabiting a memory of my previous employment. Part of that job required using HTML to create marketing templates for luxury car brands. Although HTML as a language has a certain romance to it, the cutthroat corporate environment I had found myself in did not. Most of my tenure coincided with Melbourne’s two-year on-again, off-again lockdown, meaning the unravelling of my mental state was folded between the symbols of code <!>. Maybe this was a fitting mindset to approach Andrew’s story with, given much of the collection is about technology and corporations.

‘Else / If’ is written as a series of commands, about the relationship between a woman and her partner, who is sick. Coincidentally, this story actually addresses the Covid pandemic, juxtaposing HTML, which concerns machines, and illness, which is so human. The protagonist grapples with the possibility of loss by attempting to calculate her way into, or perhaps out of, the future.

I am always interested in writing that experiments with form, particularly when it uses the language of the contemporary moment. But as well as being innovative, this is a beautifully poetic story, which quickly replaced thoughts of my own life with the perspective of another, as I imagined the desperation in her feelings and her fear.

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