Witness: a field journal of annihilation
Spider Morris
Threshold
I saw it in a room built for silence. A body shaped from wood, horns, glass and the suggestion of breath. The plaque named it, but the eyes did the work. They were polished to a wet stillness that returned my reflection thinner than I felt—more transparent. I stood, I sat, then I stood again. It did not move. It watched. Or I watched the watching and became something thin enough to pass through.
I left with a headache lodged behind my eyes and a cold pip of metal caught in my throat. On the tram home, every building window became a pupil. I kept checking my phone, seeking for a blink that was not mine. I promised myself I would not go back to who I once was. A promise broken before the tram doors opened.
First note on eyes
When I was 11 I killed a rabbit. A white one, ridiculous in scrub: too visible for the hawk above us and too visible for me. It was an accident until I picked up the second stone. The first stunned it. The second taught me the way soft things give. Blood made the fur stick to my fingers, and I could not let go—the eyes would not let go of me. They didn’t plead; they didn’t accuse. They held my face in place and made me notice—notice what I had become. My reflection sat there, trembling on the slippery slope of its iris.
It has never stopped. I tie a scarf around the mirror sometimes—a child’s trick, a curtain. The eyes are duller then, but they are never absent. Even the teapot has a black shine.
The Witness, or something that pretends to know
The sculpture returned me to those eyes. Not the form, not the posture, not the technical skill that made wood breathe. The fixity. The patience that consumes time without touching it. I felt a measuring. I wanted to pass the test without knowing what it asked for. I wanted to fail it in a way that made a sound.
I began to write to it. Not letters, not prayers, more a ledger of the gaze. I described the eyes of commuters; the eyes of dogs; the eyes left behind on camera traps and security feed loops. I wrote that fear is optic: it dilates. Shame is an optic: it refuses light.
I already see my hands, red in the old basin.
Soap makes clots slicker, not smaller. I scrape with my nails and the lines under the nails hold on like seeds in soil. Later I eat toast. I do not taste the toast. I sleep in fits and the fits are clean.
Field
I told a friend I was researching. Survey methods, population estimates, flight initiation distance—all those neutral terms that let you stand near a living thing without admitting the nearness is a want. I wrote down ranges, elevations, the brief greenness after rain. I wrote down the word valley and immediately scratched it out. Valleys do not belong to us. We borrow them.
I stopped describing anything that might turn a place into an emblem. A hill is a hill. The wind is the wind. Leaves shake because air moves through them. The rest is our accident.
Prey
I did not think I believed I would travel, even as I mapped my route with a finger across a screen. The imagination is a means of transport more efficient than any plane. It carries cost and consequence in lighter luggage.
I printed out a boarding pass. I practiced keeping my face blank at a counter. I rehearsed the answer for why I was here, which was nothing, which was everything.
On the last night before leaving, I stood at the sink and remembered the rabbit’s eyes. They were not pleading; they were reminiscent. The eyes of a sculpture did the same work and never closed. I had to know if a living gaze would grant me the same mercy.
I knelt in the scrub. Breath is a knife. My teeth make a small sound: an animal click, a metronome for cowardice. I am both running and still. The horizon buckles and rights itself. I am not sick. I am very calm. The calm looks like sickness from the outside. The calm looks like devotion.
On being watched
There is a difference between being seen and being known. I would say that, then I would take it back. Perhaps there is no difference; the knowledge that matters is the one you generate, only when you notice yourself under notice. You arrange. You prune. You pose. Even when alone, you select your face for the corner of the room that holds the most shadow.
Who is the witness? The answer changes with light. Sometimes it is a god I declined; sometimes it is the rabbit; sometimes it is a future reader with a red pencil. Sometimes it is my own left eye watching my right.
Crossing
Airports are classrooms in which bodies learn obedience. Shoes in trays. Belts off. Hands up. The practiced humiliation of making yourself ‘scan friendly’. I could tell you which line I took, but I will not. I will say only that I performed the small theatre and no one applauded. That is the point.
On the plane I wrote, ‘If I do this, I will be rid of the second stone’. If I only imagine this, perhaps I am kinder? If I only imagine this and call it restraint, perhaps I am crueller.
I land. The wheels kiss the runway with a sigh that sounds like relief. I pretend the sound is mine. Gravel ticks under tyres. My hands remember the weight of a knife I have not yet bought. Everything is prelude and everything is recall.
I can smell iron where there is only rain.
Terrain
Thin light. Slopes that tilt and tilt back. Old walls shouldering terraces. A path that has been taken enough that it forgets its first step. I make a list of sounds: a dog, a far-off motor, feet on stone. Somewhere below, water fusses over rock.
My notes grow cautious. I do not want to pin the world to the page. Pinning reduces it to posture instead of life. I record weather as sensation only: cool on the knuckles, warm across the neck when the sun arcs, a brief sweetness when a plant is crushed under the boot without my permission. The boot is always doing more than I intend.
Stalking
I wanted competence to arrive like a kit left behind by a stranger with my shape. It does not. I crawl badly. I cough into cloth. Stones shift. Every book I read abandons me, and this is right: the books were excuses. The body is the only manual that knows what it means to be a page.
I see shapes that are not the animal and names for them that are not mine to use. I see birds and do not name them. I see a shadow like a bow and do not draw comparisons. I narrow myself to a movement and the pause after movement.
There. Not there. Then there again. A fibre pulled through air until it catches on a knot. The eye shines and deadens. My heart starts a small auction for my ribs. Who bids. Who wins. I am both.
The shot
Somewhere between breath and the idea of breath, the scene resolves. The animal stands where the animal must for me to write what follows. I hold what I must hold. I am close enough to smell earth touched by hoof. The skin ripples when a fly passes. The head lifts and the ears collect the world. The world is too much for the ears. The world is too much for me.
I say nothing aloud. I say many things inside the mouth. The mouth is a room lined with old arguments. I take aim, or I do not. I choose a knife, or I do not. The blade is a syllable. The trigger is a pronunciation. The body ahead of me is a sentence I cannot finish without breaking grammar. I break grammar.
I feel heat rise into my palms as if the animal hands me a pot. The first sound is a slap of hard against soft. The second sound is my breath forgetting its training. The third sound is the one I am still hearing now at the table, pen tapping, as if the table has learned to echo.
The body
If the animal fell, I cannot be sure when. The sequence is a net I keep throwing into a lake. It comes up with weeds. Sometimes there is a fish. Sometimes a mirror. I’ve tried to recall the weight. I’ve tried to recall the exact tilt of the head, the lid of the eye half-closed, the small bubble at the nostril that did not know it was a pearl. I’ve tried to recall whether my knees were wet.
I am certain of only one thing: I was seen. By the animal—before, during, after or by what the animal stood in for. By myself, finally, because there is no after to the kind of seeing that includes you. Once included, you have been counted. You do not go back to zero.
Evidence, or lack of
There is no trophy. There is no photograph I can show that is not a blur of brush and wish. I cleaned a blade that might have been clean already. I wrapped clothes I might not have worn in a plastic bag that will never open. I mailed nothing to myself. I watched and wished for news that never mentioned me. I listened to the hall for footsteps that did not arrive. Waiting for some kind of acknowledgement; recognition of what I had done. My own witness. I slept and woke, and the pillow smelled of iron—the brain is an iron foundry, and dreams strike sparks.
I remember the exact number of flies. I remember a dog crying, as if for me. I remember eating an orange and tasting pith. I remember staying at my desk the whole time, wrist sore from the angle of the pen, a cup of tea cooling three times because I forgot to drink it. Both are true in the way a coin is true on both sides and empty on the edge.
Return
Rooms again—the kind that holds books upright and expects you to do the same. I returned to the sculpture, the shape that began the ache. The room looked the same, but not. The gaze was the same, but not. My heartbeat remembered the old pace and then learnt a new one. I stood with an ordinary visitor’s posture; however, what resided beneath the surface was much different. But no one can spectate unless I let the visage down. Someone behind me cleared their throat. Someone in front of me leant too close and stepped back. The eyes did not blink because glass does not blink. The eyes stayed as eyes.
I did not apologise. To what. To whom. I watched until my own eyes watered. A guard asked if I was all right. I said yes. I was not lying. I was not telling the truth. The truth is a set of keys, but I do not know the door.
On mercy
It is easier to believe that the act was a mercy when the thing you might have harmed cannot answer. A rabbit cannot say whether your second stone helped. A carved animal cannot report pain. A living one can make a sound that returns at night and thins the borders between rooms.
If there is mercy here, it is not for the animal. It is for the person I am not becoming. For the one I could not avoid becoming, if only to convince myself that it wasn’t always this way. Mercy is a word I use to talk to the part that knows words are not sufficient and keeps asking anyway.
Observation log
Eyes today noted in sequence: the bus driver, tired, rimmed; a woman’s child holding the rail, staring at the floor as if it would answer; a sparrow near the cafe table, bead black and everything at once; my reflection in a window that kept other reflections like a collector; a scan of the sculpture’s eyes on my phone, which changed and did not change as I zoomed; the mirror while brushing teeth; the blank back of a spoon; a cat in an alley that froze and measured me. I fear it saw right through my every layer and into the rotten inside as it bolted into action and left.
I walk home at dusk and every car windshield is an eyelid. The city blinks. I blink back. I am held and released with each traffic light. The sky lowers its soft eye and pretends not to see.
Confession without confessing
If you asked me what I did, I would tell you a story that fits your question. If you asked me what I wanted, I would tell you a story that shames me and therefore might be true. If you asked me whether want became act, I would tell you a third story composed of previous stories stitched with clean thread.
I am not asking for absolution, because absolution presumes a court I refuse to recognise. I am not asking for condemnation, because condemnation would be a relief. I am writing because the page does not flinch; because the page is a sheet of patient eyes that reorders what it sees until it fits a geometry of lines.
Coda
I sometimes dream the rabbit’s eyes are set in the sculpture’s head, but when I step closer, I see my eyes there instead. In the dream, I lift my hand to touch, and the glass is warm. In the dream, everything that has ever watched me breathes at once and the room swells like a lung. I wake already being looked at. I wake already looking.
There is a story in which I never left my desk. There is a story in which I knelt in thorns and learnt how much red the ground can hold. There is a story where both are true because I am only one witness, and a poor one at that. The animal, if it lived, has moved beyond me. The animal, if it died, has moved beyond me. Only the eyes remain.
I sit with the ledger of the gaze open, and I make my last entry for now. I do not revise. I set down what I know, which is not knowledge but an arrangement of seeing. I place the pen where the pen goes. I listen as the room listens back. The page takes the weight of my hand without protest. The door across from me is closed. I can feel the presence on the other side. I do not open it. I do not need to. I was witnessed.
Spider Morris is studying a Bachelor of Arts (Creative Writing) at RMIT University. They are focusing their passion for short-form prose and fiction on chasing stories that bite, linger and haunt. As the author of ‘Witness: a field journal of annihilation’, a hybrid non-fiction piece, they blend lyrical observation and raw intimacy.
All pieces thumbnail credits: Adbul-Rahman Abdullah, Witness 2025, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Courtesy the artist and MOORE CONTEMPORARY, Boorloo/Perth. Photograph: Andrew Curtis
Image credits: Adbul-Rahman Abdullah, Witness 2025, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Courtesy the artist and MOORE CONTEMPORARY, Boorloo/Perth. Photograph: Andrew Curtis