AustLit

Author's note: This is a new fictocritical work, about nursing to death my two parents in Columbia, Missouri over the same two and half years that saw the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the rise of Black Lives Matter, the election of Trump; events that saw me return to my home in the Midwest for the first time for longer than the few days it had been for over three decades. And while I appreciate that the violence and undoing of these events are not related nor commensurate according to a logics of scale—I do not want to be ‘whitesplaining’, in this sense, reducing differential inequities or to be making my narrative the one—nevertheless the events are materially entangled in what Karen Barad might call a ‘strange topology’ or ‘geopolitics inside a morsel… an implosion/explosion of no small matter’.1   It is this matter and the mattering that has taken place since, that ties racism, the rise of neo-fascism, to the death of my parents, to a hauntological that won’t quit; a brutal facticity of indeterminacy that is constitutive; what I call composting death.