The sunlight is coming. Horrible, cruel sunlight. Better the dark. Better for hunting. Better for eating.
But where to hide now that molten, baleful eye returns to the sky?
It skitters this way and that. Twitching. Searching.
Then a dark hole. Cool. Quiet. Inviting.
The scorpion scuttles into the shoe.
Life, in a word, has kept me away. I have been writing, but on other longer form things that may or may not find there way here. For now I will continue with a flurry of shorts…
It followed her around the whole day.
It got a few raised eyebrows on the train but it was good at embarrassing people into silence. It was almost like its special skill actually.
It waited patiently at her desk for the big meeting. And then it surprised everyone!
The stain.
What is this crab thinking she wonders? As it is pulled from its watery home and thrust rudely into a bucket with its already incarcerated kin.
She realises that they don’t think – not in a way we would recognise. But still there lingers a doubt, a nagging whisper in her mind that this is wrong. That all the crabs should just be left alone. A cloud passes the sun. For an instant she imagines a vast alien hand reaching down for her, yanking her to a realm beyond her ken.
She doesn’t go crabbing again.
‘With a duly set precedent the administration would be able to act in such a way as is of some benefit to the organisations involved.’
The hosts right eye twitches and he gulps down frustration.
‘Yes or no,’ he repeats.
‘Look the prerequisites…’
‘Yes or no,’ the host roars.
In the gallery the producer’s mouth hangs agape. The view is locked on the host’s snarling face.
‘You ambiguous fucker!’ The host launches himself. Hands outstretched. The camera startles to life and pans away.
‘Yes or no!’
A clarion call to those watching.
The fickle hand of fate cast him off as a patriot and returned him just as confidently in the guise of traitor.
The young boy stares back at him with wide, curious eyes. Oblivious. Innocent.
Then the bell tolls midday, the trap opens and the noose does its short work.
They’re fertiliser. They’re useful. Not like the real fuck ups: the soil. Cheap, plentiful, stood on.
They’re not much better. How much difference is there really between soil and shit at the end of the day?
But required enough that we’ll keep them around. For now.
With no will and no living relatives the house and its contents are up for auction.
The room is a disaster of audio tape cassettes. Most of the boxes seem to have degraded and vomited their contents into a communal chaos. All seem to be unlabelled.
It takes him three hours. He decides to take one; part souvenir, part curiosity.
His old cassette player is in the garage and that’s where he listens to it.
Ten minutes of crackling static. Disappointed, he is just about to give up.
Then the screaming starts.
Human and real.
Far too real.
He tells himself it’s only for a minute.
Just a minute. A minute’s not long. That’s not breaking any rules.
Just one delicious minute.
To savour.
To chew over and enjoy and feel deep down in the hot, dark places he keeps secret.
Just a minute.
Creeped myself out a little writing this one – random word prompt was ‘minute’.
The chips are down kid. Have you got what it takes?
I didn’t think so. The very essence of you is damp. Limp. Flaccid and worthless. D’ya know that?
Of course you do. You look at it every day. I’d say it oozes out of you but even that is giving you too much credit. You understand? Oozing is too dynamic for you.
Am I surprised?
No. To reiterate it’s writ large on you. A sandwich board floating on the insipid sludge beneath.
Now get the fuck out of here.
Go. Now.
The crater was like the shell. The ground torn open to expose her amongst the misery, death and suffering. He found her there, a survivor some how against all the odds. Wrapped in white, innocent and ignorant of all the terrible crimes around her, like the pearl at its heart.
I asked my partner to suggest the word at random, she chose ‘pearl’ and I wrote this.
Alastair Merson 