“His photo-montage, A Vocalisation of a Broken Chasm, also shows visual depth.”
“ A Vocalisation of a Broken Chasm is from a later point in his career, therefore it would be churlish and improper for us to analyse it out of chronology with the work, that is, at this moment, under our scrutiny.”
“I seem to have drawn us away from the focus of our analysis.”
“Yes, I very much think that you have. Let us return our attention to this piece: Projecting Elements of a Disassembling Head.”
An unshaven man with a can of super strength stood behind them.
“Looks like me mum,” he said.
COWARD
“But how will I be able to express myself with my vacuous, community-affirming sculptures if the government cuts arts funding?” said the twitchy, calcified coward. "I would have to ask daddy for money."
MUSIC
The day I learnt that I hated music was at an “event”.
On the walls they projected randomised colours that meant nothing. On the stage people touched up trendy objects that made sounds like everyone’s already existing records. The organiser strutted about in front of the musicians and their instruments. The organiser wore a big, special hat and he shouted into a megaphone:
“MUSIC IS THE REASON TO LIVE! WE COMMUNICATE THROUGH MUSIC! MUSIC! MUSIC! MUSIC! THANK YOU FOR COMING TO THIS MUSIC EVENT! MUSIC IS THE REASON TO LIVE! MUSIC! MUSIC! MUSIC!”
Everyone had a bit of a dance and the people on stage jutted their big, serious heads back and forth. I wanted to vomit myself dead.
Afterwards, the organiser with the special hat talked to his friends, they were all nodding.
“Music is the binding glue of society! I would be nothing without music! Music is what brings us together! What do all cultures have in common? Music! Music is universal language!”
I hate music.
CREATURE RBX11A
They had to turn off its database as it was time for its centennial reboot. Creature RBX11A relaxed the USB implants from its datacore only to blink, scared and lost, at the plastic, real surface of the Non-Polygon.
“I NOT KNOW OF WHOM I BE WITHOUT I AM CENTRIFAX!” cried Creature RBX11A, weakly flailing its clamps.
MIX
She opened all the tins in the kitchen and poured their contents into a mixing bowl. She squeezed in a whole bottle of ketchup. She threw in an entire loaf of bread. She mixed it together with her hands. She banged her fists rhythmically on the kitchen counter. She roared a sustained howl and submerged her face into her beloved nightly mix.
* * *
She lay with a big tummy on a hospital bed.
A doctor looked at her over his glasses and tutted:
"Some naughty girl has eaten all the Easter Eggs this year."
* * *
Back home, she sat in her new wheelchair and she opened a letter from Animal Services:
"We have confiscated your dogs and they are being sent to fat camp. Then they will be adopted by someone who doesn't stuff them with chocolate and sausages."
Her numb, chubby hands tensed and the paper shook.
"Not my babies!"
* * *
The Local MP laughed.
"Greedy little bitch!"
He deleted her email and forgot about it.
SALTED FOG
The Queen Dung tightened the string of her sweaty oral straps around the excited, tooth-barbed, stickle-prick tower of King Almost Came.
His every scalp-scale defence opened to release a spunky smog mist. Every citizen of Pervert Town languidly lapped at the moist, salted fog.
Sequentially they jerked and rubbed themselves in hope of creating a Mexican wave of cock pukings and fanny squirts.
PRINTER MURDER
The office engineer opened up the photocopier and was so surprised by the contents he vomited.
The coroner opened up the corpse of the office manager and the corpse was full of photocopier parts.
The newspapers were full of articles about this strange murder.
“OFFICE MANAGER'S ORGANS SWAPPED WITH PHOTOCOPIER PARTS”
“Care to enlighten the public on who committed this grisly murder?” asked the reporting reporter.
“No,” said the investigating investigator. “We have not investigated it yet.”
The murderer shouted at himself in a stationary cupboard.
“My manager blamed me for using all the printer ink! So I put my manager in the printer and I put the printer in her!”
There was a knock on the stationary cupboard door.
"Leave me be! I need my personal bloody SPACE!"
THE BAFFLING CASE OF THE SNAIL EGG HOSTAGE SITUATION
Chitters the hamster ate grain from his bowl. His cage was next to an apartment window which looked out at the Martian Habitation Dome townscape of girders and hydroponics.
Chitters paid no attention to the townscape outside and he paid even less attention to the hostage negotiation taking place inside the apartment.
“I want forty thousand metacoins in my account by the end of the day,” demanded Max Freeway to the creature on the vidscreen.
The Snail Lord Sleed laughed.
“Or what?” he asked oozingly.
“Or I’m going fry all your eggs and eat them with beans on toast!” Max held a spherical snail egg to the screen. “If you want these eggs back in your clutch then process the money straight to my account or else drop it off at my apartment: Z26B White Tower. My name is Max Freeway. My account number is -”
The Snail Lord Sleed laughed so hard bubbles blew from his barnacles.
“Why are you laughing? Oh wait! I just gave you my details!”
Max switched off the screen and grabbed the bag of eggs. He looked at Chitters in his cage.
“Sorry boy, I’m going to have to leave before the Police get here.”
Max Freeway opened the window and clambered outside. Chitters went to sleep.
* * *
Max Freeway clung to a girder, one hundred metres high. A Police helicopter pulled up beside him.
“Max Freeway!” shouted Sheriff Den Apparti through his megaphone.
Max Freeway dangled the bag of eggs in one hand.
“I’ll drop them!”
“Max Freeway!” repeated Sheriff Den Apparti. “Those eggs are not fertilised!”
“What?!” shouted Max.
“THOSE EGGS ARE NOT FERTILISED!”
“You’re lying!”
“No I’m not!”
“All cops are liars!” shouted Max Freeway. “You're not taking me alive.”
He let himself drop from the girder.
* * *
Later that evening, Max Freeway lay bandaged and asleep in a bed at the Saint Bowie Hospital. Sheriff Den Apparti paced back and forth across the linoleum floor.
“Because you revealed your name and where you were, I was able to deduce your location and stop any further kidnappings. Another victory for the Martian Police, and to me, for solving the Baffling Case of the Snail Egg Hostage Situation.”
POST-SPUNK
He stood in the smoking area of yet another pub. He was fifty-eight years old but he could still impress the girls with his stories of post punk.
“Yeah, I saw the B52s before they were big.”
She took a sip of her glass.
“Okay,” she said.
She fumbled in her handbag for her cigarettes and he got an eyeful of her cleavage.
I’d like to get myself between those B52s, he thought.
“I saw Joy Division back in the old Factory records days,” he said.
She glanced to the side.
“Really?” she said.
“Yeah.”
I’d like to get inside her Joy Division, he laughed inwardly.
“And the Happy Mondays,” he added.
When I wake up with her, after a whole weekend of squirting, that’d be a very Happy Monday, he thought; confident of his private, sex based, alternativ
e music related wit.
She finished her cigarette and went back to the bar, maybe she wasn't interested?
He walked past her and took a photo of her bum with his phone. He went to the toilet and locked himself in a toilet cubicle.
He stared at the photo and he stroked his dry, flaking penis.
“She’s got a good Public Image Limited!”
He gasped as a tiny bit of yellowed juice dribbled on his hand.
He went to the sink, looked in the mirror and he rubbed the semen into his balding quiff.
“Post Spunk!”
LAZAR
A blast of electronic trumpets.
“After last weeks mass demonstration by Alien Rights Groups our most superior Queen Garsix III will make a historic announcement regarding the exploitative humiliation of alien cultures. First though, a comedy performance by everyone's favourite moronic, alien freak: Lazar Phlicks!”
“Good evening ladies and gentlemen,” said Lazar Phlicks. “I am a stupid alien.”
The audience clapped and laughed.
“I am Lazar Phlicks and I am a stupid, alien freak.”
The audience clapped and laughed.
“When my people first saw your War Brick in our sky, we thought it was God.”
The audience clapped and laughed.
“We didn't understand space travel. We had never seen anyone come from beyond the stars. So we thought the War Brick was from God. Some of us thought it was a giant square bird.”
The audience clapped and laughed.
“We were so terrified when you attacked our planet.”
The audience clapped and laughed.
“When you burnt our cities.”
The audience clapped and laughed.
“All my family died that day.”
The audience clapped and laughed.
“I miss them so much and I feel so alone.”
The audience clapped and laughed.
“The Earth Empire soldiers came to our villages and they put me and the other survivors in chains. The soldiers told me that the way I cried was funny.”
A heckler stood up from the crowd.
“Cry then! You're rubbish now! Get crying! You’re bloody rubbish! You've not been funny for ages!”
The crowd started throwing mashed foetus from their bags of genetic waste. This was always the funniest bit of a Lazar Phlicks show. When he fell about the stage ducking for cover. Lazar Phlicks was good at physical comedy.
A blast of electronic trumpets.
“On this historic day,” said Queen Garsix III. “In light of the latest Alien Rights demonstrations: I have decided on a compromise. Instead of enslaving and humiliating the aliens, we must take an ethical approach. We must look inside ourselves and think of the horror we are causing. To allow these abominations to exist, in any form at all, is an offence against our planetary pride. No more shall we allow aliens to assimilate themselves into our culture. They cannot reap the benefits of the Human Empire. They do not deserve our blessed exploitation! From this aeon forward we will make those pricks burn! We NEED to make those PRICKS BURN!”
Lazar Phlicks was hit in the face by a blob of stem cells.
“Burn that prick!” shouted the heckler.
BILLY
Billy wore shorts with a computer joystick glued to the front. He wiggled it and pressed the fire button.
“Pew pew pew pew pew pew.”
Billy wore a hat with a rubber duck glued on the top.
“Quack quack quack quack quack quack.”
Billy wore pointed shoes with clowns drawn on them.
"Shoe shoe shoe shoe shoe shoe."
Billy's tortoise was on a lead and sleeping.
“Nyak yak yak yak yak yak.”
Billy laughed.
CAMP AMERICA
Jeremy looked at the hospital signs. Ward 34 she said she was on. He couldn't see the sign for Ward 34. He wandered past rooms full of old, sick people. A yellowed old man stumbled past Jeremy.
“Bleurgh!” said Jeremy.
An old woman slipped in a puddle of her own urine.
“Yeuck!” said Jeremy.
Jeremy stopped a nurse for directions.
“Where is Ward 34? Where is my mother? Where is that bitch? How dare she get ill and drag me here. She shouldn't make me visit this dirty proletariat hospital! What right does she have?”
“If you follow the signs that way-” began the nurse.
“I don't want to follow the signs! I'm asking you to do your job and show me where she is! I don't even want to be here! She thinks that just because she gave birth to me that I have to see her on her death bed! Well I don't care. Just take me to her. I'm not wasting my energy navigating my person around these sick sacks of shit!”
“I'm sorry sir, but I can't take you there, I have to look after the patients on my own ward.”
“Your patients are only going to die anyway! Why not try helping the living for once? Bloody NHS!”
Jeremy stomped off down the corridor.
He eventually found Ward 34.
“Where is she!?” he said to the ward clerk who was pushing some stool samples on his trolley.
“Who?”
“My mother!”
He leafed through a folder.
“Erm...”
“Come on! Chop chop!”
The head nurse of the ward came out.
“What's all this shouting?”
Jeremy pointed his finger at her.
“Where is she!?”
“Who?”
“My mother?!”
“Don't you know her name?”
“I can't bloody remember! She has the same surname as me! And you should bloody well know who I am!”
“Jeremy...” said a weak voice from behind a curtain.
“There! Found her! Fat load of use you were! I'll have your job for this!”
Jeremy went to the bed, his mum was all wrinkled, weak and with tubes up her nose.
“Hello mother, or should I say goodbye? I got the English Language job at Camp America. No thanks to you. I would have gotten it quicker if I was born into privilege. If you'd married someone worthwhile instead of my stinking povo father. So what did you want to see me about? Is it the fact you're going to be dead soon? Well, tough titty mother! Don't think I'm going to be fawning all over you for your last will and fucking testament! I don't give a flying poop! Poor, sad, lonely, old mother! It's what you deserve, after all the hell you put me through! I had to work my way up! Well good news! Finally, you are dying, and tomorrow I'm flying away to the good, old US of A! Vegas! The Grand Canyon! Texas! The Big Apple! The White House! Why did you have to be British mother? Why did I have to be born in fucking Blackburn?! You could have at least moved to London! I had to do all the hard work! I didn't come here to make peace mother, I came here to gloat! I'm leaving you behind with all the rest of the human garbage! I hope you die painful and slow! I hope me and the President will nuke this shit stack off the face of the Earth! Don't think I'll be paying for your funeral either! They can toss you in the bin for all I care! Camp America, here I come!”
SILVER SCREEN
His motorbike vrooms down the quiet road. Night lights reflect from his visor. Fast, synthesised music plays through his headphones.
“I’m in a film!”
He accelerates more.
TOOTHLESS BONE THING
In the basement of a house in the woods, the toothless bone thing sucked on nails and bits of old stuff.
“Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrr!” said the toothless bone thing.
Scant skin on face.
Many layers of dead.
“Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrr!” said the toothless bone thing.
At night, the toothless bone thing peered up through the caged window and sniffed for mice and insects.
* * *
In the basement auditorium of a university in the city, the professor pointed his stick at the toothless bone thing.
“A prime example of humanity without culture!” declared the professor to the auditorium of scribbling psychology students. “Found in a basement, suckling on nails and saying 'murrrr'.”
“Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrr!” said the toothless bone thing.
“Reduced to the state of an animal,” said the professor, he jabbed the toothless bone thing with his stick.
“Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrr!” said the toothless bone thing, weakly batting away the professor’s stick.
“Uncultured!” jabbed the professor.
“Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrr!” said the toothless bone thing, weakly batting away the professor’s stick.
“Sub-human!” jabbed the professor.
“Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrr!” said the toothless bone thing, weakly batting away the professor’s stick.
“Empty!” jabbed the professor.
“Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrr!” said the toothless bone thing, weakly batting away the professor’s stick.
“Shell!” jabbed the professor.
“Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrr!” said the toothless bone thing, weakly batting away the professor’s stick.
“OF!” jabbed the professor.
“Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrr!” said the toothless bone thing, weakly batting away the professor’s stick.
“HUMANITY!” jabbed the professor.
“Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrr!” said the toothless bone thing, weakly batting away the professor’s stick.
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