Autumn 2026 – Liliana Matthews – Lilliana Matthews

Imagine two sisters in a treehouse. It is nighttime and they are telling each other stories.

Something scary, with a horse in it.

These stories are scary and yes, they have horses in them. But mainly, they are stories of the past and of the future. Of form and formlessness. Of materials and ghosts.

The first story, set sometime in the future, begins like this. With two sisters, both named after flowers. Briar and Rose come home one day to find red paint encircling their house. This red paint has marked them as unverifiables.

What does that mean?

Insignificant, useless. Poof, they don’t exist. They run from their home and hide in an abandoned house to wait for their mom and stepdad to come find them. In that time, they discover a herd of horses being sent to slaughter. Rose saves one of the horses and hides it in the house. They call him Gliff. One day, Bri gets caught by the painters of the red paint and is taken away, but Rose manages to escape with the horse. Years later, Bri works at a factory where they keep the unverifiables to manage their data and Rose has gone into hiding. When Bri discovers Rose’s whereabouts, she deletes the data system and escapes to try and reunite with her lost sister.

Boring. Where’s the spookiness? I can tell a better story than that:

The second story begins with, you guessed it, two sisters, looking into the past this time. They are named Patch and Petra. As their mother’s health declines, their urge to call out to the dead is awakened. They pretend they can speak to a ghost of a real man who was flattened to death in the Ffirst World War. Patch calls him Glyph, and they imagine his life together. Though, their harmless pastime eventually turns into a shared obsession distracting them from their mother’s impending death.

Where’s the horse?

It’s coming.

Petra also hears of the story of a man executed for trying to rescue a blinded horse the troops decided to slaughter. These stories haunt Petra and Patch until adulthood, when one day, Petra finds the real ghost of the blind horse in her apartment. She calls her sister, with whom she hasn’t talked since childhood. Patch brings along her troubled foster daughter Billie, whom police officers recently arrested for waving a Palestinian keffiyeh. Patch and Petra finally reconcile after discovering the ghost of the horse has disappeared.

What was spooky about that?

The ghosts, of course. The ghosts of the past.

I prefer to look to the future.

…

“Look to the future,” I decipher from her barely legible handwriting. I walk out of the lecture hall, turn over the copy of Gliff in my hand and study the writing from a new angle. Ali Smith’s signature engraved in my copy forever. And, right above her name, the words look to the future. A simple yet impossible plea from Smith. How silly, Ali. How can I look to the future?

“No, that’s ridiculous, the future is just a hazy blob of who knows what, look to the past when you need clarity.” You stand grinning at me. A self-assured smile, as if it’s no surprise you can answer my thoughts.

Who are you?

“I am you. Or, at least, parts of you from the future.”

You are a ghost or a thought, but you exist right here, right now. You are nothing but formlessness.

“And you are all but form.”

I don’t answer. I study your face. You look like me. You are me. But your eyes tell me something I am yet to know.

From when are—

“Two years, to be exact. It’s strange to be back in Norwich. You had a charming time, if I remember correctly.”

I look around the campus. The grey silhouettes of the buildings envelop us in their brutalist embrace. Charming.

“Speaking of brutal, here.”

You toss me a book. A book not unlike the one I hold in my hands. The book, merely minutes ago, Ali Smith held in hers. I look down at my book’s twin.

Glyph. Is this –

“Her next novel. Go home, read it, and come back here when you’ve finished. I’ll wait.”

I want to protest. But something possesses me, and I obey.

“That’s how forms produce themselves, out of a meeting of opposites, of different things; out of form encountering form” you call to me as I walk away.

I look back to watch you from afar, reaching out to me through distance and through time.

…

I return the next day with Gliff to my right and Glyph to my left. You wave to me. Excited to get things started.

“So, what did you think?”

Horribly depressing. I can’t get the image of the flattened man out of my mind.

“He’s haunting you too?”

And what kind of story is it trying to tell? Is it a war novel? A family novel? A speculative ghost novel? It doesn’t know what it wants to be. It has no purpose.

“Can’t it be all of these things?”

Of course it can. But when there’s no urgency to bind these themes together, the narratives unravel and don’t lead anywhere. Your story turns into the season of autumn. Your narratives become leaves, falling off the intertwined branches and flying off with the wind.

“Urgency smurgency. At least these leaves of narratives are grounded in a clear setting. A garden, if you will. All the ghost stories anchor themselves around the world of the two sisters. A tangible world. A world we can relate to. Even the flattened man and the horse feel close to us, not because they haunt Patch and Petra, but because they haunt our news and everything we see and have become numb to today.”

Gaza

You turn a page and read aloud: “There was nothing distinctive left of whoever this person had been, nothing but a gesture to the shape of something that had once been human.”

A human stripped of the space he inhabits because others decided he took up too much of it. Reduced to a thought etched into the ground. A glyph. If you will.

“And it’s still happening now. Yes, these ghosts have gruesome pasts. Yes, the sisters jump from one to the other with a sense of passivity. But there are characters seeing the threats these stories symbolisze, and they try to resist.”

But Billie, I turn the page, “was apprehended for waving a scarf in a markedly aggressive manner” while protesting the genocide. And the man, who tries to save the horse, is executed. The urgency you feel as a reader lives and dies by the resistance failing. It all feels hopeless.

At least Gliff delivers urgency by creating hope within this dystopian world. The sisters resist their status as unverifiables. They escape and Bri deletes all the data that controls peoples’ “official” existence. “Now that I don’t exist, I finally exist again.”

“Gliff has a purpose. But that is the only tangible thing about it. When you zoom out to the world around it, everything becomes hazy. It doesn’t build you a world you can understand. The totalitarian regime is a blurry entity that hovers passively, like a mist. Only showing up as red paint. You can’t see past the characters’ own perceptions. And they don’t know anything either. All left unanswered.”

You are right. The sisters resist. But who do they resist in relation to the fictionless world?

“Maybe we shouldn’t compare them. According to Smith, Glyph is ‘very much not a sequel.’ Maybe they’re just two unique stories with similar names and themes.”

But they aren’t separate. Gliff shows up as a novel in Glyph. The characters even discuss it. Petra calls it “A bit too clever-clever, a bit too on the nose politically, for a novel.”

I watch you contemplating. A thought arises like a lightbulb above you.

…

Let us stop for a second and look back at a memory from years ago. Our memory. I know you’re thinking of it too. The depressed loaf of bread on our television. We must have been five or six. He would yell at us through the screen, begging us to help him escape the nighttime children’s program loop he was stuck in. He was suffering because he knew what he was. A character in a TV show. Children, when staying up too long, would find him in anguish trapped in this square prison. He wasn’t there to entertain. Or to be enjoyed. He was there to disturb young children into shutting off their TV and going back to bed. Leaving him in his doomed cycle of despair. We were never disturbed. We felt bad for him. A talking loaf of bread, who knew he was a talking loaf of bread, trying to escape his purpose. Every single night. And every single night, he failed.

…

“Poor Bernd.”

He tried to outrun his purpose. But by giving him a self-conscious mind, his failed escape attempts shaped a new purpose that he was unwillingly following. Kids did feel uneasy with him on TV. He was neither scary nor evil. He was just aware. When a form is self-aware, it can impact the world it inhabits as well as the world it lives in. They influence each other.

“By putting Gliff in Glyph, it turns to metafiction. It is aware of its fictional presence within the world of Glyph.”

But unlike Bernd, Gliff doesn’t resist its position as a novel.

“It’s there to inform the world of Glyph and be informed by it. We see Gliff’s blurry landscape through a better prescription. The world becomes clear because it’s supposed to inhabit the issues Glyph highlights. People are being displaced, if not totally erased. Israel sees Palestinians as unverifiable. Removed from their homeland because someone’s declared them temporary. Even Patch becomes a victim of this eradicating force. She gets fired and replaced by AI. Her status marks her as redundant.”

“The artifice was what made the place in the picture — as well as the picture — truly alive.” Gliff’s awareness of its status as artwork moulds its narrative world according to the one it projects upon. The world becomes something to hold on to. Something to fully grasp.

“But how does Gliff inform Glyph?”

Through the characters’ active discourse with the novel, Gliff delivers an intertextual plea for urgency. The passive attitude of Patch and Petra embodies silent bystanders. They see the red paint, but if it isn’t affecting them, they keep on walking. They’re not the focus of Gliff’s narrative, though. The character defending the novel in their discourse is Billie, who’s also part of the younger generation. She actively engages with Gliff and is arrested for protesting the war in Gaza. Gliff isn’t trying to reach Patch and Petra in its cry for resistance. It’s calling to Billie. And she listens.

“The novels paint a horrifyingly accurate landscape of our world and though they are two years apart, their message couldn’t be clearer: ‘We are not made of data. We are dimensional, multiplicitous, mysterious, philosophical, rebellious, amiable, fluid living beings, who will not be subordinate.’”

They both leave holes for the other to fill in. They aren’t sequels to each other, but they also don’t stand on their own. They’re symbiotic. They live in each other’s worlds. They converse. They argue. They criticise. They love. They’re like…

“Like sisters.”

And what are we to each other?

“We’re here to inform each other. One day, you’ll go back to see yourself again. And the loop will continue. Don’t resist it. It’s what we are supposed to do.”

…

Tonight, I lay in bed mulling over our conversation. You’re right. The form is less but it isn’t without form…I close my eyes and imagine two sisters in a treehouse.