HLNPNTS

Helena Pantsis is a {writer}, columnist, editor, and student from Naarm, Australia. They study creative writing, publishing, and editing at the University of Melbourne.

"Probably one of the greatest writers I've ever known, and also just a very good girl in general."
— My mother, 2021

HLNPNTS

FEATURED WRITING

I was born without a face
Meanjin

Like The Truman Show, only opposite, / where all the cameras are turned away from me. / A torchlight repelling darkness wherever it / shines; I need some semblance of watchfulness or / a capsule of un-ill, taken and swallowed blue.

Grow-A-Boy
Going Down Swinging

It’s true that you’ve never been good at talking to boys, or people, or even yourself when you’ve needed the encouragement, but no one could ever say you weren’t a talented student. When it comes to standardised tests and IKEA furniture, you’ve always excelled. So what if you can’t find a boyfriend? You can just grow one.

Something Like People
Overland

Something replaced my mother. I knew it when I first saw them standing over the sink, their eyes glassed over like marbles. They looked the same, had the same dye job and thick fish-eye glasses. They sounded like her, even moved like her, my mother, somehow, but off.

Surrogate Mother
Island Online

Her mother drew the washcloth over her, outlining the jagged edge of her spine and caressing the gentle curvature which came to be by the bending of her. Her body grew transparent under the weight of the water, her skin shrinking against the porcelain. The spiders spent more time inside these walls than she had. She hadn't been home in years.

If I Were a Black Widow This Would Be Fine
Voiceworks

I didn't eat in the week after you died. After the cremation I couldn't stand to use the oven. The heat radiated like the incinerator your dad kept in the backyard when you were a kid and all I could smell was the burning of you. You would never let me go a day without a meal, but you weren't here to tell me otherwise. Instead, your parents filled the space of you, leaving two lasagne a day by our house-my house-for weeks after the funeral. I think they forgot that only you ate meat. So I set out for a cross country journey to throw your ashes over Cape York.

Losing Dogs
Above Water 2021

I remember the races, standing by the side of the track and yelling, sputtering, flicking peanut induced sweats from the bones of our wrists. Dad had the money ready and in hand, making bets on the races in between the ones in which his own dogs ran.

Sometimes he'd ask me to pick the numbers, and I'd pick five numbers from the air, feeling towards them using instinct or sheer magnetism, and he'd rough my hair and smile.

Friendly Face: Day 3 - Micro-micro Fiction Winner
Going Down Swinging

The cannibals next door never bothered anyone; they mainly ate the flesh of the dead anyway, which was great for the environment and the state of our local cemetery.