Photographs like these make me question Australia’s gun laws. I love our gun laws, I really do—we can’t have guns and that’s how it should be. The state ought to have the monopoly on force, and the proliferation of guns challenges that.

But when I see something like this, I want a gun. If I ever walk into my house one day and some dreadful incident leads it to be full of mould, I would love the power to be able to walk over to some end table, open a drawer, pull out a gun, stick it in my mouth, and end everything.

I feel like a mould infestation is one of those things that challenges the idea of “responsibility”. It’s something that, objectively, happens arbitrarily, like most cancers or being hit by a drunk driver. And yet if it were to happen, the responsibility lays solely on the victim. They have to deal with it, they have to accept it, they have to clean it, they have to check their every piece of property—there are so many levels to the victimisation of a mould infestation that, frankly, to even attempt to consider a life beyond the initial shock of the discovery is not worth it.

It has been raining in Brisbane for over a week straight. It has only just barely started to break in the last few hours—a quick lapse in rain here, a quick lapse there. Short pauses, barely long enough to pop up to the shops. The rain hasn’t ceased. And everything is moist, inside and outside. In the vilest, most disgusting sense of the word.

I find comfort in knowing I live within a few minutes’ walk of the Story Bridge because I know that no matter what happens, I can be dead within less than ten minutes. I can just say “no” aloud, release that word to the ether, and head to that bridge. 

Regardless, mould makes me wish I had a gun.