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Dilemma

It was one of those nights - she didn’t settle me. Sleep was a long time coming. She wanted me to be romantic, sometimes, and I wanted her to play the whore, sometimes. Perhaps that was the secret, a balance of acting talent. The Oscar winner would never pair with the soap opera regular. Surely we could make a deal, both B-movie material as we were. B-movie acting wasn’t far from Slush or filth after all!

Things were right, things were wrong. Overall they were right but… disappointingly so. Sometimes I wanted to start a fight just so we could make up. There was fire but there was also rain. The wrong things could seem important: money, work, furniture, the television.


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Friend?

Do you remember the big kid from school? Loud, laughing, always smiling? He liked to do impressions. Was it Beavis or Butthead? I could never tell.

He tried to kill himself, took too many pills; or not enough - depends how you look at it. I didn’t see it coming, did anyone?

I can see him now, his green face laughing. Maybe I should visit soon.


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Jimmy

Jimmy bit into the chocolate bar, sticky goo trailed to his slow, chewing lips. He felt something tickling his hand, he looked, it wasn’t a stray string of caramel it was a stream of black ants. The ants shone metallic black in the sun - they continued to pour from the bitten end of the chocolate like some dark, shielded army from an underground fortress.

Jimmy had stopped chewing and was now spitting the crushed bodies of the forward guard onto the concrete. Some of the swarm gathered the bodies, bearing them aloft back to feed their young.

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Oranges

The oranges hung, rotting from the branches, nobody had come to pick them. Wasps buzzed among the branches becoming drunk from the fermented juices. Some of the juice dripped in sticky threads to the dry, brown grass below. Small insects had become imprisoned as they had tried to gather the sweet syrup - their own miniature Pompeii.

Along the dusty track a cloud of black flies swarmed around the old man in the stock-still rocking chair on the porch. He had gone to sleep after lunch eight days previously and not stirred since. It would be five more days until a neighbour found him.

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Old

They’re all around you. These people paid to guide you through your last days, months or years of cosmic loneliness. Every now and then you release some drool or other fluid – sometimes not so fluids too – just to give them something to do.

Your mouth is permanently open in a bottomless laugh and your unblinking eyes see everything.

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Mouth

What the hell do our mouths get up to at night?

I swear to god, you brush your teeth before you go to bed but every morning you still have the morning breath and that taste like you’ve been licking a slaughterhouse floor.

I conducted a little test. For a whole day I ate nothing, I only drank fresh, clean water then brushed my teeth and went to bed minty fresh. The next morning: still the same thing.

Now I have it all figured out. It’s the toothpaste. It comes out of the tube minty fresh but it’s designed to react with human saliva so six hours later it tastes like death. That way you need to brush again and double their sales. Genius.

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The Teeth are Falling Out of my Head

The teeth are falling out of my head. My guts are rotting and pouring out of my ass. Skin is falling off in great, translucent snake-peel sections and I have my doubts as to how firmly the flesh is clinging to my bones.

My brain is stew, scrambled and boiled dry. I have never felt more alive.

It is a hangover morning, one where I couldn’t move until lunch. The feeling never lasted past lunchtime – lunchtime just took a few steps back.

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It’s Not Just Me

It’s not just me; it’s the whole world - give or take. Only yesterday I turned on my TV set and I wondered when the devil took charge. All his merry children were dancing across the screen, each one a tongue of hell’s flame. It was ok, I had a deal to make with old Lucy; a list of names, Satan to make them all curl up and die then he can have my eternal soul in return.


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All Mouth and No Trousers

I saw a girl - great mouth. Lips like you wouldn’t believe. Swollen, red and pouting.

I had a little vision where she was all mouth and I had no trousers.

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I Hope I was a Good One

I wonder if how good the fuck that created a person has any bearing on their being?

Sometimes, I swear, I am surrounded by premature ejaculations.

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Photographs

I see them around the house, the photographs that will appear in the newspaper if I should suffer an untimely death.

Each one is like a full stop on a period of life: baby photo, school photo and graduation photo. Each has (or will have) a successor and will never move beyond it. Tradition dictates that graduation will be followed by wedding and wedding followed by family photographs. As if to say: ‘your latest accomplishment defines your whole existence.’

If a day should come when someone needs to submit a photo for me please be different. Send the papers my baby photo - let the caption below say ‘Adam, 46, died in an accident at the weekend’. Or send in that blurred shot taken when we were drunk and laughing, I like that one.

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One in a Million

You see it all the time 'The chance of this happening are one in a million' or 'Don't lose any sleep, there is only a one in one point five million chance of this happening'. Be it a car crash, a plane crash or cancer there is always a set of odds associated with it.

There are in fact over a million bad things that can happen to you.

If you add it all up we don't stand a chance. Either that or there's some unlucky guy dying of cancer who gets in a car crash then the plane taking him to hospital crashes into a mountain.