readers digest

flash fiction in 500 words. harder than it looks, even harder to make it any good. still not happy with it but i'm learning, i'm learning. enjoy.

'I'm sick. I sleep all the time these days and when I'm not working I lie down, I read comics, writing letters I won't send, eating food dry and raw because I forget to cook and thinking, thinking, thinking.

I've stopped reading the newspapers - there was a story the other week about a fortune telling fish. Apparently this miracle fish was predicting flash floods and minor earthquakes in the lowland provinces of Japan and the local people had become torn between worshipping it as a piscine deity and grilling it over hot coals. At first it depressed me that this fish had warranted more column inches then say, the rising crime rate or the economic downturn but then I figured, what the hell, let the fish have it's glory. It's just my mood these days. I think it'll pass.

I don't watch the tee-vee anymore either. The batteries for the remote control gave up four months ago and I haven't got round to replacing them. This suits me fine. I've heard its beginning to eat itself, television, digesting and regurgitating ideas into slickly produced pools. Soon there won't be any programming, just a long shot of the same image being replayed over and over again.

So I'll just keep on writing my letters. I have a pile of them now, all to my brother.

He's dead, my brother, he died saving another kid who was drowning in six feet of water. Six feet man, can you believe that? Some people are that tall and then some, it isn't much. The kid survived, it was my brother who went under. The papers called him a hero and the mayor gave my grieving parents a medal - a posthumous award, which made about as much sense to me as banana skin shoes. He didn't need it, we didn't need it, so it sat growing dust on the mantelpiece for years until my father put it in a drawer and we forgot about it.
My parents still get letters from the kid he saved - isn't there an old Chinese proverb which says 'if you save a life you are responsible for it forever'? The letters are growing more infrequent as the time passes and pretty soon they'll stop altogether, but right now he wants them to know that he's graduated in law from UCL, has started training as a barrister with a firm in London, how it's all down to Tom, all down to Tom, your brave son brave Tom.

They're the letters I do send. The letters to my brother are the ones I can't. The ones in which I tell him I'm sorry for wading out into that murky water, with it's lethal shelf which falls away beneath your slow moving feet. I want to tell him that some days my mouth still fills with the blind, mineral taste of the river and I feel like I might choke on it. I want to tell him but I can't. '

story 7: what the ducking hell ?

*a note on this. i do not know what i was doing or what i was aiming for when i wrote this. i should be clear-headed - i haven't smoked or drank for a couple of days (maybe that's why) and i've been sleeping better than usual...so i don't know what went on here. it's messier than a crime scene. i do like it, in a way. but i also apologise...*

Her looks were average, but she had the legs of a duck. Slightly bowed, flat footed and webbed toed. The skin on them was scaly and tinged a vagrant orange like a boiled sweet sucked to a sliver on the tongue. When she moved the anatidae limbs caused her to stoop slightly, feet splayed slightly outwards, her rounded buttocks twitching and swaying in a neat waddle. There were soft downy feathers on her upper thigh in tawny browns, and no matter how often she plucked them they always grew back, bristling through the livid skin.
I can help you, he’d told her as she’d waddled through the park one morning. Trust me I’m a surgeon.
He was too, Dr Evern Dem Swiss no less, the swizz, the cheat, the fraud. Lara had looked down at her squat limbs, no thicker than a child’s arms and nodded tearfully. She had never dreamt of being any different but now that Dr Evern Dem Swiss had planted the seed of the idea it sprouted inside her gut with probing blind tubers. Seven days later she had arrived at the home of Dr Evern Dem Swiss, her feathered appendages tucked neatly beneath the folds of a long skirt.
The good Doctor had opened the door carrying two long, painfully sharp looking knives. He struck them purposefully together, drawing each wicked blade along the other with a metallic whicking sound. They had greeted each other, and as Lara had stepped through the door she noticed the smell of damson plums, rich and cloying.
Jam ? She’d asked.
The doctor had shaken his head. Plum sauce he’d answered, and furrowed his brow. To go with the pancakes.

story 6# the vaininator

take the case of micheal laftley. i put a ‘drink me’ label on a bottle of hair tonic and he did – now he has a lustrous mane of thick brown hair lining the silken column of his throat and can’t breathe without sounding like a blocked hoover. food gets caught in the bristles on his pink trachea and remains there trapped, fragments of omelette and sandwich.
amanda was nineteen and convinced her thin lips crippled her otherwise extraordinary features. when she found out she was allergic to cats she wiped her wizened chops across a tabby, feline back. Her lips mushroomed into bloated pink.
amanda suffocated on a furball when she was twenty-five. sad day.
garth was a being of almost unbearable physical beauty – a tight cheeked Adonis almost biblical in his sculpture, he would regularly leave his bedroom door open so that the russian housemaid could let her gaze linger on his chiselled, taut buttocks as he dressed. vanya would peer with her furtive, thrusting glance through the doorway, and garth would see her slavic gluttony and it would please him.
over the years she siphoned over forty thousand pounds from his various accounts and, when his buttocks were slapping fatly at the upper reaches of his thighs, deflated cheeks gouged with deep creases, vanya raised a glass many miles away and toasted his wealth.
vanity makes fools of us all.

story five# privet, no peking

we ate roast chicken and drank red wine in bed. the meat pale and slippery, steaming hot, grease staining the duvet in irregular little islands. he wrote his name, drunk, on my arm and fashioned a nervous plait in my hair as i lay back on all the pillows, stacked beneath me imperiously. earlier, he’d claimed he didn’t need one and lay curled on the swell of my breasts instead. i taught him how to curse in spanish and he’d told me not to show off, then smiled, teeth stained claret.
as the night faded and the empty bottles rolled off the end of the bed whenever we’d moved our feet i’d asked him why he’d done it.
silent, for a moment, but he didn’t sigh as i’d expected.
he told me because he’d needed the money, that he’d been desperate.
my fingers smelt of roast chicken and his chest hair. i told him i’d have lent him the money if he’d been that desperate, that he’d just had to ask.
then he did sigh, and rolled over, snagging the covers.
in the morning his name had blurred and bled on my skin.

story four# word war

He was a collector, he was a collector of words. The sound a penduluming drop of liquid makes as it hits the surface ? SplInk. The sound of wet glass being wiped by a dry hand ? Fweeeep. The brittle sound of ice cracking in a warm glass ? Frickle. Scrrrrrrip. Tethered not by dictionary, nor thesaurus ('those linear, insular, bound dungeons of language') he spurned the common language for sound and shape.
"You can't say that" they'd say, "they're not real words"
"According to who?" Mouldering Dave would ask.
They'd referred to a Rogets, an Oxford Concise, a Cambridge, the thick heavy tomes, and said "These are real words.""Ah yes," Mouldering Dave had nodded sincerely "The language police."
He'd seen the expression on their faces, the smooth sheen of pity, could read their thoughts as though their eyes were transparent, he's old, humour the demented old man, he's not long for this world anyhow.
Splam-dips he called them, or occasionally, a Nockle.
It was a shame then, that when crossing the road on shoes which made a dim fleep, fleep at the back of his head he did not hear the froooooooaaaaa of the oncoming car.
On his gravestone they had put; ' Mouldering Dave. Never at a loss for words.'

story three# meretricious mister marvellous

*i have edited this quite heavily, the original is a bit longer and will be included in some compilation or other at some point.*

It wasn't what any of them had expected, although they had talked of nothing else for weeks. In it's conception it had begun as the smallest thing, the embryo of an idea, taking shape and manifesting into cream teas and jumble, tombolas and raffles. No-one could have anticipated it. Least of all the Women of Perranarmykle, the closest thing the tiny town had to a village committee. Now they sat, the nine of them, heads lowered, wondering how to fix things. Sue spoke first, Sue, founder of the sponsored knit-a-thon and the primary school bring and buy.
"There must have been something we could have done."Margaret’s eyes had taken on a dull sheen of disbelief. A coil of hair hung, unchecked, across her lined brow.
"It's not as though we could have prepared for it."
"Perhaps," said Helen, her glasses reflecting the light, turning her eyes into blank, silver pennies, "Perhaps it'll blow over.""Blow over?" Clare's voice was guttural, she who orchestrated the Best Dressed Dog Contest.
"There's no need to shout." Sue said rudely, and took a pinch of the Finest Cake Winner.
In the village hall the light was dim and growing dimmer, the sun a dizzy red ball hanging low in the sky. Shadows slid easily down the walls as though greased, oily, slippery dark matter which congealed in corners. No-one noticed.
A small town, a nothing town, a small clench of houses surrounded by the looming spectre of a church, hedgerows trimmed within a pubic inch, manicured privet and fern. The sign which told you as you came in, ‘Welcome To Perranarmykle’, and was so scrapingly grateful as you left, ‘Thank You For Visiting Perranarmykle’, now hung, corners drooping in easy rust. The scandal of '84, when Sarah Thornbow had eloped with the Pastor Crane had sent a shudder through the village, but that, eerily like everything else, had been powdered and sugared, pinked and dusted down by the nine to nothing more then a fragrant memory. The sign in the muted church hall read "For We Alone Must Fight", but now in the dying light - the ochre and amber of a weary day - it looked like ancient parchment, something used up and dried out.
The darkness shadowed their faces further, made them look rangy, like kicked curs.
"He asked me," Helen said into the gulf of silence and heads turned, almost creaking on tired tendons.
The afternoon had begun with an un-forecast spring chill, a brisk April breeze, causing metallic clouds scutter across a drab sky. On that wind the scent of spring rain, and something darker, less fluid, the air had seemed to thicken and grew musty, like pulling canvas away from senescent, brittle furniture. Helen had been bent over the tub of money, a bright sign reading "50p All Ages" which shivered briskly in the breeze when the stranger had approached, his oilskin raincoat buttoned up to his nostrils and hanging down to his knees. He bent over, leaning in towards her and Helen instinctively drew back, recoiling so fast she stumbled back a step or two. His breath was warmed veal and low, greased spices.
"How much for a stall?" he'd asked.
"I - I -" Helen felt her hands flutter to the scrag of her throat and she forced an insipid smile "It's full. I'm afraid.""Don't be afraid." he'd said and tossed a coin into the pot. She couldn't be sure, but later, as she was counting them out, she found a coin of soft ruin, bruised and knuckled at the edges, and blamed him. It was Sandra who'd noticed the dark stall hung in fluttering canopies of greys, the colour of diseased oysters. As she watched Edward Pascoe, clutching his young daughter Posey by the hand, lifted the flap and ducked under the awning. Later, Clare said she'd touched one of the billowing dark curtains and said it felt wet, dense and moist,
"Like sealskin," she offered.
It had been a small tent, propped up on warped sticks of willow, with a clumsy entrance slit from top to bottom in jagged strokes, and a listless flag the colour of maudlin funerals. Despite it's height of merely six feet the top and edges of the flimsy roof were gilt with frost, as though at a mountain's peak. The shape was square but seemed to waver before the eye, growing and shrinking in equal measure until your perspective throbbed like a diseased tooth. Outside, no signage, just a steaming copper kettle hung over a slump of glowing coals.
It was Johannah who had noticed when the candy floss machine, unchecked, had begun to spew its cobwebby innards all across the counter and onto the grass where the wind blew it in gossamer strands across the near deserted field. In the distance the carousel ground it’s pirouetting horses to a slow, laboured halt, and the music ebbed into an uncomfortable stillness.
“There’s no-one manning the raff-” Johannah began and stopped at the flat, loose expression on Sue’s face.
She was stood three feet downwind of the black tent and as the flaps lifted daintily they caught a scent of exotic secrets, dusty spices and dark, obsidian runes. Johannah started forwards but Sue put a hand on her arm.
“Don’t.” she said firmly.
"Are they all gone ?" Marie asked listlessly, leaning forwards and scattering notes on Best Fern before her. A twitch had begun in the fleshy pouch beneath her eye, but she seemed not to notice.
The nine, adumbral in the gathering folds of the evening. Outside the hall a long stretch of silence. Even the twilight birds were still.
"All gone." chimed Alice, and turned her head to the dank orb of sun.
"They all went in. They didn't come out."

story two# the emperor of white noise

Above, a dark sky studded with stars, below, the mire of puddles. Beyond late and getting later, it was now early and the shadows curdled in muted light. They called him the Emperor of White Noise, the King of Sound. He took me to his room and showed me sonorous notes in vast, sonic booms. Seventy thousand records, and not one of them contained music.
I'd asked if they were all sound effect records and he'd replied, oh yes. Shivering through Artic Tundra 4 and crouching beneath the velvet swoop of A Plane Leaving the Tarmac he'd looked at me, eyes glittering behind the oversized lenses he wore. Asked me if I wanted to hear something really powerful. Something he'd made himself.
Before I could answer he'd pulled down a freight of equipment and smiled a raw grin. As I'd lent back on his filthy bedcovers he told me not to worry.
At first, there was nothing, and then a mooching slump through the speakers, dense sweet musk, barely noise at all. Smelting of sound, I raised my head and told him.
Vanilla ice cream. He nodded.
The next one. Slight and luminous, full of shrykull shards, scrooching and mimble, I almost put my hands to my head. He was nodding as if he understand, but the sound was furflous, a neon blue ten watt bulb strobing and straking.
It's the moon. Yes, he'd replied, a full quarter.
I'd asked him how and he'd replied that he knew sound.
We took the equipment to the garden where the moon turned our shadows to bone. The later the hour, the clearer the resonance and so we poured the night in through the filters. It oozed in black shleems and crooked murms, revealing the shape of the hours.

story one# the pursuit of melancholy

His name was Jack but we all called him Slim on account of his shape. His pores wept a sour smell of defeat, and a permanent cold hitched the back of his throat, plugging his speech, making it sound thick and laborious. Slim had once given me a necklace but I had told him it wasn’t my size and he had taken it back, swallowing it up in his clumsy hands. Slim had a hooked nose and trousers which finished an inch or so above the ankle and a scalp of tightly coiled curls.
“Talk to me.” He’d said one day in the canteen, leaning forwards.
“No.” I’d replied and felt a warm jolt of pleasure as dismay punctured his face.
But one day Slim showed me. One day Slim showed me everything.
School camp found us spending four days in a draft-speared farmhouse on the lip of a valley. Overhead, pewter clouds plundered the humidity, leaving us clammy and irritable, stung up the backs of our legs by nettles and flayed by thorns. The third day was a ramble through woods which carried us three miles along the spine of hillside and towards a giggling river, shimmering with minnow flashes. Slim had held back in the group, carefully picking his way through the ditches and around the steep mud banks lining the edges of the slurried pathways, lined with a gleaming mulch of leaves and peaty bracken. Occasionally he would incline his head towards a birdsong, writing notes in his careful, joined up hand on the back of his clipboard.
When Slim went missing on the return journey it was me who spotted him ten minutes later, standing in a small clearing almost hidden from the path, a grotto formed by the drooping branches of trees. I was tired, the light almost leeched entirely by the sky, and the insect bites on my ankles were starting to itch. That might have been why I grabbed his bony shoulder harder then I meant to, startling him into an awkward jerk backwards that nearly sent us both sprawling.
"Everyone's looking for you," I said, "and it's nearly dark."
"I know." Slim said.Slim remained where he was, knees folded, head stretching forward like a vulture.
"What you doing ?"
"Come and see."
I bent low and shuffled further into the hole. Something squelched wetly beneath my boot."See ?" His fingers indicated a bud, a folded white heart about the size of my fist attached to a thick green vine.
"Very nice, Slim."
"Wait." Slim said, and then again, "Wait."
I leant back a little, scratched my bites, peered at a fresh scratch on my wrist. Slim said nothing, Slim was waiting.
Eventually, alarmed by the thickening soup of shadows pooling around my feet I said,
"They'll be wondering where we are.""Not long now. Besides," Now he looked up at me, his smile a dark slash in the fading light. "You can't get back without me."
He showed me the back of his clipboard, where he had drawn a map.
"Sit down."I felt the first twinge of fear, the primitive fear of being alone in a creaking, darkening forest, alone with a gawky stranger who, after all that time, had me right where he wanted me. So I sat, and I waited, and as the moon rose I fell into a mild doze.
"Wake up, Daisy, wake up" Slim was saying and his face was dark hollows.
"I mumbled muzzily but Slim was dragging me upwards, voice tight with excitement.
"Look"
The floret, the tight white heart was unfurling, petals curling back with elegant speed, revealing dazzling yellow at the centre.
"It's a night bloomer." Slim was explaining, "They only bloom once a year."
As each unfolded itself, showing a pink-tinged underbelly, they drifted to the floor. I saw the sweet curl of white flutter past me, a feather, a flower feather, my thoughts were giddy and so Slim had to say it twice.
"Lean in." I did, and caught a whiff of it's perfume, spiced and mildly exotic. The sylvan flower now in full bloom, a coronet of white in the darkness, petals arching back.
"Thank you." I said, to him, and meant it. He smiled and nodded.
Above us, the black sky, and a jangle of stars.