Excerpt: In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

Lillik beheld the orange stamp between his thumb and index finger, and with his head in the palm of his other hand, trained upon it with an expression akin to that of a zoologist who had just received a unicorn.
Gently, he set it on the next crisp napkin on the pile so that it lay in the centre and used a finger to trail it before him so that it was centred between his two elbows. Pressing his closed fists against both cheeks, he stared down upon the stamp with his face craned down, forming a world of nothing but the stamp, the napkin, and the shadow cast by his looming head.
A purple toucan with a beak scratched by the spectrum perched upon the uppermost branch of a cherry blossom tree was printed in the centre of the stamp, alongside some strange foreign characters, basking in the orangey glow of a sun too warm and happy to belong to the solar system Lillik knew and half-heartedly loved, if loving was the same thing as acknowledging that photosynthesis is a rather important process and oxygen is rather nice. It was probably from the easternmost coast of Laurasia. From one of those places which seem like they shouldn’t have post offices at all. Places knee deep in mud and rice fields and people who have nothing better to do than make stamps. Beautiful, beautiful stamps.
He’d probably flown there at some point. He was the best damn pilot in all of Ankrige and didn’t need to prove it. He’d flown everywhere. Except Gondwanaland. No one has ever been to Gondwanaland. And if no one goes there, obviously no one lives there, and if no one lives there then they don’t send letters or parcels to each other, and if there are no parcels, there are no stamps. And if there are no stamps, what else is there? In fact, the whole place probably doesn’t even exist. And if it does, its inhabitants aren’t making much of an effort at existing, if they don’t even send letters to each other.
He’d heard of mobile phones. He’d grown up around them, over them, inching desperately away from them. You couldn’t collect text messages like you could collect letters. They were brief and senseless, fired across invisible faceless networks like shit in the wind. But with a stamp, however, words became something else. Stamps were miniature Picassos which when exchanged, became one thousand words. There was certainly no art in letters on a screen, he asserted, and no beauty in pages which couldn’t be crinkled and caught between landmasses. And there was certainly no irony in the fact that all five of his phones had been ringing non-stop from the moment he’d started gazing upon his cherished rectangle.