Fanatics by Aliyah Knight

"Or babies with pig faces, trick-or-treaters, witches." | Micro #4

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, our Micro theme last month was CULTISH and we received hundreds of creepy, cool, hellishly funny, and also just plain pun entries. I hope you enjoy our pick as much as we did (how Aliyah packs so much in just a few lines is a feat to be witnessed).

We open for August’s Micro of the Month submissions in less than one week. The new theme will be announced via our newsletter sent out Sat, Aug 1st.

The sound of the siren, and then girls were just meat. It was droning, like a firetruck, only made of her voice; her cigarette-singed lace-made melody. I’d been in line for eight hours when the frenzy hit. I was in red ballet flats, ribbon to my knees. Still, I ran. Beside me: carabiner bleeding keys, dye-stripped jeans, skinned shins, bleached pits, bloody nose; we ran, ran. We ran. Rapturous scrum, our bodies splitting like red yolks; one river, one thrum, one beat, one immaculate desire. We ran. The stage was gated off when we hit it, but the barricade was made of nothing but metal and men in hi-vis yellow who saw us and thought, perhaps: pigs. Or babies with pig faces, trick-or-treaters, witches. We stared at those men, and the men stared at our sequins, and we all played the same fairytale make-believe. That we were in our microwave safe-container, ready to be heated, to be squeezed dry like a tomato paste tube, tired out, depleted. That we would go home in our trains and on our phones, and we would unstitch our bodies from the burning, prophet-polished thrill of it. We were waiting for another two hours before she came on stage, and as soon as she did, it was done. She was our Diana, Artemis, and in our gin-sticky wilderness, we were her tree-free nymphs. She pulled apart like warm, moist pork in our fists, and as soon as we had her, we ran, ran.

Contributor’s Note

The word cult is derived from the latin cultus; ‘worship.’ The word fanatic (from which the word fan likely developed) comes from fanaticus (also Latin), meaning ‘mad, enthusiastic, inspired by a god,’ which in turn comes from fanum (Latin again), ‘temple, shrine, consecrated place.’ So, worship. Then, who are our worshippers? Who are our idols? Who are our false gods?

When writing Fanatics, I wanted to dissect, dramatise, and poke fun at our cultural obsession with fangirls. In blessing a type of person that is perpetually at the centre of this conversation around idolatry, fanaticism and parasocial relationships with the literal traits and powers they are often perceived as having, I hope to offer an almost mythic look at young women who are imbued with ferocious passion; one that cannot be overlooked. When the concert stadium is a temple, and the popstar is a god, madness becomes divine intervention, song becomes ritual, and suddenly these ‘crazy fangirls’ are seers, oracles, prophets. And then, of course, when the switch flips, they are warriors and cannibals, armour made of friendship bracelets and tank tops and glitter. Either way, they are formidable.

Throughout Fanatics, our narrator refuses to stop moving. Yes, she runs, but she also evolves. When we meet her, she is one girl in a box-wine-dark sea of girls. She doesn’t stay that way for long. Swallowed by the crowd, our narrator becomes a voice of many. That switch is why I wrote Fanatics. I wanted to ask: what is there to fear in a collective of girls?

ALIYAH KNIGHT is an award-winning Black, queer storyteller based on Wangal land, whose works occupy a space where the personal meets political. Their debut play SNAKEFACE premiered at Belvoir Theatre to five stars from the Sydney Morning Herald, and was shortlisted for the Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing at the 2026 NSW Literary Awards. They are a resident artist with Sydney Opera House, Performance Space, and Sydney Theatre Company. Their writing appears or is forthcoming in Island, Rattle, and Westerly, and they are currently writing their debut novel.