Category: fiction

Look, Orrgo, at the Earth monsters: they only eat things that are alive, even the poor plants.  And they drink the fluid that the fish fuck in.  This is a hell world.

I wonder what horrors come out of their waste holes. Perhaps… perhaps one of us should put a finger up there.

In the times before, there was a local nutter who would walk around the shops smiling and nodding to himself, like “I understand what happens here. I belong here.” Today, with the sky gone black and the sun under attack, I envy that crazy bastard, I really do.

I was born into the generations who lived with constant low level planetary fear. Every unexplained flash in the night sky could have been the start of nuclear war. Life seems duller now. And that’s why I bought the bombs. To brighten your nights. Smile.

Flat gray post-funeral day, feeling like a human shovel as you dig into your mother’s hoarded life-debris. At the bottom of the midden of corner-shop crap, the book of her crimes. And you recognise your father’s chest tattoo covering its scabbed boards.

He put the old, cold gun to the back of her head and the treasure of her memories became scattered rubies on the snow

Radio crawls up his arm and teases pixels out of his skin. Phone in hand and a name carved in his forearm. Slapping the prickled flesh dead before an unwanted call tunes into his ear.

The first ever time someone takes your hand, and the first thought you have is “this is everything” and the second is “what happens when it’s gone?”  The space of time between those thoughts defines the shape of your life.

So tall, so somehow unreal, the unfathomable adults standing over us when we were small, and now they are all dead, and we look in old mirrors and see how tall and unreal and unfathomable we are now

Even to ourselves