Hole Punch
Page 17
They put you in the X-ray machine.
“You’ll hear back in six weeks.”
You finally feel the effects of your increased dose of anti-depressants.
You take a photo of your vomit on your bed.
It's all yours now.
Your vomit.
Your bed.
You convert every dirt surface into repeat pattern designs.
“This puke will be on all the pretty girls' dresses one day!”
Your cat jumps on the bed.
Your cat's face in the vomit.
He scoffs away.
My steps outside your door.
I knock.
Don’t answer your door.
I'm dead.
Under your eyes you see me die.
My steps outside your door.
I knock.
Don’t answer your door.
I'm dead.
Don't answer me.
You don't answer me.
Am I still here?
You don't answer me.
I'm dead.
It's all yours now.
REPLACEMENT
My replacement is a small, metal box.
“So you are on the out,” emitted the box through its internal speech bulb. “Never mind old man, I’m sure you’ve got some good retirement money saved up.”
“I don’t,” I said. “I’m on a temp contract.”
My fifty-six year old arthritic hands shake.
The box laughs.
“You're a temp? You're kidding me? No one has been on a temp contract for twenty-one years! How long have you been working here?”
“Twenty-two years.”
“What a loser!”
Twenty-two years ago I wouldn’t let the metal box laugh at me. I would have ripped it apart and turned it into an art installation.
“Oh, I see,” said the metal box, tickling through my thoughts. “You’re one of those art failures!”
Emmett Corcoran comes over.
“Thank you for your work over the years,” said Emmett.
He hands me a leaving card.
Emmett is still baggy-eyed and flaccid, but he hasn't aged a day.
“How did you stay the same Emmett? You're not any older?”
“I'm Benjamin. Emmett hasn’t worked here for fifteen years.”
“Tell me how you stayed the same?”
He pushes my hand from his face.
“I'm Benjamin, not Emmett.”
“Would you get security to escort me outside?” I ask. “One last time?”
* * *
Ten minutes later, after I politely leave the building, I look down the once suburban street. The cemetery has been turned into Micromarts and Multicores. A gang of teenage toughs lounge around a laser bench. They are cubed off their faces on Millimax.
“Would you help an old man get cubed?” I ask them.
The ugliest teenager held up a sign:
“SOD OFF PERVERT. EAT, SHIT AND DIE!”
The end credits fall down on my cartoon lies.
JULIUS
"My favourite song is HAPPY BIRTHDAY!" said Julius, eighty-six years old, in his nappy and bib. "Because when we sing HAPPY BIRTHDAY it means it's MY BIRTHDAY!"
NARROW
“My husband is dead from the war,” said Susan.
The conveyor belt of trigger guards rotated in front of Susan. It was her job to polish the trigger guards.
“It’s their fault they are dead,” said Mary.
A bucket full of polished trigger guards in front of Mary. It was her job to put the polished trigger guards into a big bucket.
“My son is dead from the war,” said Amy.
It was her job to attach the trigger guards in the bucket on to some other piece of gun.
“It’s their fault they are dead,” said Mary. “Those Germans!”
* * *
In a school cookery class, teenage girls made Union Jacks with icing on the tops of buns. Young Edna had a tear of pride in her eye. She couldn't wait to give a bun to her sweetheart, Tommy, before he went to war to kill Hitler.
* * *
"You're a traitor to your country Tommy!" declared Captain Britain with a gun pointed at Tommy's head. "Drop those bombs on the Hitler Youth! Or kiss your Kraut loving face goodbye!"
Tommy pressed the button and loads of German babies died.
* * *
Tommy ambled off the boat on crutches. He saw Edna, he waved to her with his hand of only two fingers.
"Tommy!" shouted Edna, fat with baby. "I thought you were dead! I fell in love with an American! He got me pregnant and ran away!"
* * *
Fifty years later, on Remembrance Sunday, Tommy held a little paper flower and thought it meant something. On television, American Idol was on.
"Bloody yanks!"
He screwed up the paper flower in his crusty, old claw.
“Disrespectful,” said the old woman when she read this.
WRITING
Sue Kendall, prize-winning author, stood in front of her creative writing class.
“After reading your stories you have proved to me that all writing is autobiographical.”
A hairy hand popped up, it was Simon Silter.
“But Mrs Kendall!” he said. “I wrote a detective story!”
“You wrote a detective story because you’ve saw detectives on the television.”
“I wrote a time travel story!” said Keith Penfolder.
“You saw time travel on the television.”
“I wrote a vampire romance!” said Menstruating Fat Val.
“You saw vampire romance on television.”
“I wrote an autobiographical account of my parents being killed by death squads, and of how I had to walk all the way to England,” said Abioye.
“You saw death squads on the television. All your stories are just things you’ve seen on television. If all fiction is autobiographical, then your stories have shown me that your lives are about watching television. Your lives are not interesting, therefore not worth writing or reading. I, however, am influenced by what I have read in books and I have won prizes for my first novel, The Chain Whistler, a historical romance set in Colonial India.”
ESCAPE
Victor Qubert adjusted the cutlery in the kitchen drawer.
“Why won’t you stay straight?!”
He hated their bad angles.
“Please Victor,” said his wife. “Don't.”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,” said Victor.
His wife gave him a hug.
“I think this new therapy of yours is really working out. You’ve not talked about our finances all morning. We’re going to have a great Christmas this year.”
“Did you pay the gas and electric!?”
“Please Victor,” she trembled. “Don’t.”
“You're always controlling me! You’re no better than the numbers! You're no better than the smudges! The smudges! The Smudge!”
Victor was slapping himself around the head.
“Please Victor!” pleaded his wife. “You’ll wake the children up and we haven’t put out their presents yet.”
Victor angrily turned towards the cutlery in the kitchen drawer.
“I have to get these straight first!”
His wife ran away into the living room and did some of her usual crying.
“It’s not good enough,” said Victor as he aligned the tea spoons. “Can’t she see this is important? Every morning I come down here and she and those shitting kids have screwed them right out of ORDER!”
“They’ll never be perfect Victor Qubert,” said a voice from inside the kettle.
Victor turned to the kettle and raised his fist.
“Leave me alone! You’ve caused enough trouble! You started all of this!”
“There is something missing from that drawer, Victor Qubert. One of your children left a butter knife in the sink.”
Victor punched the kettle from its mooring.
“You think I would trust you after what happened last time?!”
Victor stood triumphant with his foot on the dead kettle. He felt free.
“You’ll never be free, Victor Qubert!” said the air vent above the stove.
“SCREW YOU!” shouted Victor.
He grabbed his car keys and walked past his crying wife and out of the house.
* * *
Victor Qubert drove down the road laughing. He was driving at one hundred and twenty miles an hour on the dual carriageway. He wound down his window. He swerved between the other cars. They beeped at him.
“BEEP BEEP!” shouted Victor Qubert. “BEEP BEEP! BEEP BEEP! BEEP BEEP! BEEP BEEP!”
No matter how loud he beeped he could still hear the Smudge.
“I love you Victor Qubert.”
Victor pressed hard on the accelerator.
PITY
They queued all the way out around the Flat Exterior. Vertex analysed their water-gunked forms.
“Disgusting,” configured Vertex.
They splodged up to the Reception Fold one by one. They clutched bags of rubbish. Vertex couldn’t believe the Overmind had opened the Boundary to these wet, human refugees. These faulty amphibians.
“Next.” emitted Vertex.
A fat lump squidged into the chair opposite Vertex.
“Please complete this cube,” emitted Vertex. “Upon completion of this cube you will be assigned a protective cube.”
The fat lump looked at the simple, eight-dimensional format of the cube-form with his puzzled, fat splodge eyes.
“I can’t see any cube,” said the fat lump. “Where am I? What is this place? I don’t understand.”
Vertex’s angles held in an integer of impatience.
“Disgusting,” configured Vertex.
“I can’t see any cube!” repeated the fat lump.
“Fill in the cube and you will be assigned a protective cube. Otherwise, you will have to get to the back of the cube queue.”
* * *
Meanwhile, in the Counting Column, numbers were counted.
“We have nine hundred and eighty-five billion more of them,” said Spreadsheet. “What is the Overmind conflating?”
THE PEACE-MAKER
We are free to sit, think and do nothing. There is no threat of war anywhere, not even a threat of argument. There has never has been any conflict ever, not since the Peace-Maker changed history and saved us.
If we were to start a fight with each other, the Peace-Maker would arrive in a swirl of vortex, wearing his tight jeans, check shirt, cowboy hat. He would spin his gun and spit a hunk of brown tobacco on the floor. He would shoot us both.
The Peace-Maker is never wrong. He stops an argument from ever happening. He fixes history. The Peace-Maker makes our peace. He is our Peace-Maker. He is the Peace-Maker.
The oldest statue in the universe is of the Peace-Maker. Every night we stand by the Peace-Maker and we thank the Peace-Maker for making this peace.
REASON
On the television screen they sat and talked in chairs.
"What was your motivation for making art?" asked a concealer squelched head.
"I did it because I wanted to be on the telly," answered the other squelch form. "I wanted to be on the telly."
* * *
Sat at a dressing room table, make up smudged, wig askew, the old man wibbled all smudgy muscled in his silk dressing gown.
"I'll be remembered!"
He cried eyeliner tears.
"I'll be remembered for nothing!"
His son held up a camera.
"That's right," said his son. "Cry for Youtube, come on pops, let's see those tears."
LAVENDER
In St Paul's Cathedral, Garry Lavender sat between two old women.
The organ played and Garry looked up at the arrangements of ornate mathematics; tidy, rehearsed and geometric towards one point.
After the organ had finished playing, Garry went to light a candle for his departed friends. He looked directly at the flame and remembered so many.
* * *
Outside the cathedral, Garry sat on a bench and fed bread to the pigeons. Some of the pigeons had missing feet, disease and poverty had rotted them away. It wasn’t fair that these creatures were further from Heaven's glow. Their sphere wasn't fair.
Garry opened his notebook and drew pictures of the dying birds. He wondered how they fit on the Circle of Ascension?
An old, homeless man sat next to Garry and looked him up and down.
“You some kind of homo?” asked the homeless man.
Garry ignored the homeless man.
“Why are you wearing pink? Are you looking to get a hiding?”
Garry put his book in his pocket and walked away, tripping but not falling.
“You’re looking for a good hiding going about dressed like that,” said the homeless man.
* * *
Later that day, Garry waited in a café with a bundle of yellow daffodils. He looked at their inner contours and wrote in his notebook:
“Serene. Reproduction in sweeter scents. A contrast to the butchery of human touch; dark, temporal and primal.”
Across the café, a couple is holding hands and laughing. Garry’s eyes wandered to the window and he looked at a squirrel, then a bird: a little robin. Garry smiled.
“Hi Garry,” said Liz.
Garry had been waiting for her.
“Hello Liz,” said Garry.
“Looking as resplendent as ever,” said Liz.
“Self-expression is vital,” said Garry.
Liz said “thank you” for the daffodils and she bought Garry a big glass of milk.
“Have you been looking after yourself?” asked Liz.
“Yes I have, and I have been looking after the budgies. I have sixty-four budgies in my house now. That is almost as many budgies as there are houses on this street. Some of my budgies have ascended. In total I have had two hundred and eighty-four budgies.”
Garry showed her a page of his notebook, it had lots of drawings of budgies with their names written underneath. Some had obituaries:
“Luther: as fine in death as he was in life, a beak so sharp and eyes so bright.”
“Even though they move on,” said Garry. “I always manage to gather more into my care.”
“You are so loving Garry,” said Liz. “It’s good that they have you to look after them.”
“Budgies are closer to Heaven than we will ever be.”
“What do you mean?”
“Budgies are on the inner circumference of the Ascendency Circle. Next to the Seraphim. Budgies are angels on Earth.”
Liz smiled politely.
“It’s fine to believe in those things as long as you aren’t hurting yourself or other people.”
“But how can we not be hurt Liz?” asked Garry, “We don’t deserve to be happy. Not really. That’s why no one is ever happy. We only get what we deserve, that is why we hurt. It is in our nature to hurt.”
Garry turned the pages of his notebook to show Liz.
“I have many notes on this,” he stopped on one page and passed Liz the book.
Liz looked at the page. It bore a strange drawing of worms wearing human clothing,
“I have decorated the pages too. Very finely decorated them. These notes will guide humanity. Attention is in the details!”
“Do you think you'll ever get over it?” asked Liz, changing the subject. “What happened back then?”
“People are in darkness. There is no changing what has happened and worse things have happened since. Worse things will continue to happen. It is the nature of our sphere. We aren't the ones that need to be looked after. My duty is to the budgies because, unlike us, they were created to ascend. It is their needs that matter. They can reach heaven and we cannot. I need to tell everyone what matters, then everyone can look after them with me.”
The homeless man, from earlier, pushed open the door of the ca
fe and pointed at Garry.
“You're going to get a good hiding! What are you? Some kind of puff! I'll burn your house down!”
Garry stood up angrily and spilled his milk.
“No you won't!” he shouted. “I am protecting them! I won't allow a single budgie to burn ever again!”
ABSENT
Under the nothing sky It sits there. The dirty, stupid, big-headed, ignorant mistake. Not paying Its Mother any attention. Looking up at the nothing like It thought It was something.
“You are rubbish! And small! Except for your big stupid head!” said Mother.
It ignores her and stares upwards.
Mother gets one of her better children to throw a rock at the Mistake's over-sized head.
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA,” laugh the good children.
They laugh, they point, they laugh again.
The disgusting Mistake stares up at the nothing sky. The Mistake is ignorant, selfish, shameless and full of pride. Thinking It was better and thinking It was something.
“You are nothing!” said Mother.
The Mistake stares up at the nothing.
“No one likes you!” said Mother. “Your own family hates you! Your Mother doesn't even want to see you!”
Another stone is thrown.
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA,” laugh the good children.
Ignore It, thought Mother, let's just get back to digging our new home. Where we can be together forever. We can leave that Mistake behind us.