The Collector

Posted on by inkbiotic

Winston was a rich man and he had used his riches to create a fine collection of oddities: deformed foetuses preserved in jars, two headed lizards, ancient scrolls dug from the desert. He would connect to auctions by Skype and buy the rarest, most beautiful artworks and antiques, then lock them in his basement to be wrapped in black velvet and seen by no one. He had worked his way through brokers, sending them out to find artefacts owned by serial killers and dictators. He collected tumours and torture instruments. He had letters written by dying soldiers to their loved ones, and letters written by child cancer patients begging Father Christmas for one last chance. He told himself that his collection held all that was human, that while other people played with emotions and relationships, he had the actual physical proof of all that humans could be.

Over the years the collection had lost its thrill. When he had first started to make money, it had been fun to see just what he could own, to discover how much money could buy. Yet the answer was always the same: everything. Money could buy whatever he could think of. And if the question was already answered what was the point in asking it?

One Tuesday, Winston was sitting with his new broker, Gerald. Gerald was desperately trying to tempt Winston with a new selection of ephemera, while Winston looked on bored at the catalogues and photographs.

“And this one is actually selling the shrunken heads from an ancient cannibal tribe, the entire collection! And this was tricky one to track down, but a human heart kept alive on life support. Look at the video, it’s still pumping!”

Winston shrugged, he felt as if boredom was engulfing and digesting him, he could barely be bothered to focus. Then Gerald stopped speaking, put down the catalogues and shadows flickered through his eyes. He moved as if his vertebrae were clicking into a line, one by one. All traces of doubt left his face, and he smiled, ever so slightly. Through his haze of ennui, Winston could see the change, his self-effacing employee becoming almost demon-like. He was curious. Then Gerald said,

“There is one procurement I haven’t offered you before, but I think you may be ready.”

Winston leaned forward.

“Human souls.”

Winston leaned back and sneered,

“They don’t exist, what is this nonsense?”

Gerald chuckled,

“Oh they certainly do,” he leaned across the marble table and hissed, “and if you want them, for the right price I can get them for you.”

Winston sneered with slightly less conviction,

“Well, I have the brain of a Dalai Lama and the hands of Mother Teresa, I saw no evidence of a soul.”

“Of course not,” said Gerald, smiling and unblinking. “You’ve never had a soul, how would you recognise it?” Gerald dropped his voice to speak so quietly that Winston had to struggle to hear him, “You may have the junk of humanity, but it’s ultimately meaningless, I can give you its very essence. Just think, you will finally be complete.”

 

Adventures in Daring

Posted on by inkbiotic

Cassie was always vivacious, with a laugh that turned heads and a smile that filled her face up with teeth and excitement. I hadn’t seen her since school, but those things hadn’t changed. We sat in the restaurant and barely noticed the food as we shared news of old friends and new jobs; we talked about travel and cars. We downed two bottles of white wine and took it in turns to flirt with the waiter. Then she leaned over the table conspiratorially, grinning that wicked grin and speaking with uncharacteristic hush,

“So I’ve joined this website,” she said, “it’s like a sex site. You talk to strangers on the site and make plans for all this crazy hook-up shit. Like I told this one guy he has to go to work wearing women’s knickers and then I’ll show up at his work and give him a blow job. It was crazy, he actually did it!”

I felt jealous at her daring, she felt no fear, she never had.

“And this other guy, I told him to meet me down at the public toilets in the park by my work. I said he had to just wait in the end toilet with no clothes on ‘til I got there. I kept him waiting an hour, and then when I turned up, I gave him the best sex of his life. It was totally wild!” She started laughing, delighting in her mischief. A waitress brought the puddings over, and as the conversation paused, my friend stared out the window, her face suddenly sad and lost.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, I couldn’t remember ever seeing her look sad before.

“It’s just, it’s been a lot of fun, but it’s made me realise what dogs men are. You know? I mean, I’ve met up with maybe twenty men and not one of them was interested in a long term relationship, they just wanted sex.”

“Oh,” I wanted to say something helpful. I wanted to say that maybe men on a sex-with-strangers website weren’t the kind to look for love. That maybe a dating site might be more effective. However, Cassie’s sadness had vanished and the wicked smile was back,

“Anyway, I’ve decided fuck-em, I don’t need men anyway. I’ve joined this new site just for women seeking women. I got my first contact yesterday, she wants to meet me in Trafalgar Square, and she told me I had to bring some handcuffs. It’s going to be wild!”

Stream of Consciousness: Barkeep

Posted on by inkbiotic

I’m not going to pretend I had a plan with this one, it’s just whatever rambling spilled out when I gave my head free reign…

train graveyard

There was a rich low dead sky and only Jack to see it. Mutant fish circled in dirty water and Jack tipped his hat politely before spearing one of them with a knitting needle. There was a hush and he knew it wouldn’t last. Too many monsters lived and ruled, too little respect for calm and delight.

He had danced with bears once, in a circus, in front of the gaping slack mouths of locals and yokels, their fat slapping fingers and thick yellow drool. Three bears and him in a blue dress with yellows curls sticky-taped to his forehead. The bears never mauled him, although they would try and shred anyone else who came near them, but Jack, never. He felt they knew that he was lower, more debased than they were; he was twenty paces deeper into Hell than they would ever go. He had spent those days trading the last few scraps of his dignity for a bottle of gin and whatever half empty beer cans he could find, he called it a living.

The job wasn’t going to last for long, nothing was. Even then he was knew that in two years’ time none of it would matter any way. The bears would be dead. The ringmaster would be dead, every last one of the sneering, stretched faces in the audience would be peeled and blackened back to the skull. There wouldn’t be a brain left containing the memory of his clumsy lumpen dancing, no one would know he clapped his hands in time to the pounding of his feet, every memory would shrivel and shrink into nothing.

Except he would know. He had worked to conjure up this cowboy image, played out to no one, in the hope his memory would eventually fizzle out and he’d just be this guy, but it hadn’t happened yet. Jack swung the whisky shot to the back of his throat, a lava stream of pure oblivion and defeat.

“Hello Jack, long time no see,” said a smooth voice over his left shoulder, it was exactly what he wasn’t expecting. Resting his hand on the bar he swivelled his stool around to look at the dame. Clear green eyes, peeking out from a grimy face, a large duffel coat that showed off her curves not at all. A pipe and earrings made out of decapitated mice. He didn’t need to notice the accessories to know that she was different. Of course he knew she was different, he knew everything about her. She was trouble, with a capital T, and capital all the rest of the letters as well.

“Did you save me a seat?” The candy-edged lilt to her voice was beginning to crack into a threatening snarl, he knew how this conversation went, he’d had it plenty of times when the bars were still filled with drunken laughter. She’d survived. Of course she had, she would have made every deal with every devil. That they were the last two humans alive in a world of monsters was a delicious irony.

“Any second now you’ll be tipping that glowing pipe tobacco over my pretty little head, right?” Jack drawled, letting the whisky sooth his brain to a muddy soup, he’d need to be thinking like fudge to get through this, slow and squidgy; tac sharp thoughts would get him nowhere.

“I waited under that bridge, Jack. I waited for hours. You never came.”

“Well…I er forgot”

“Forgot?” The candy edge was gone now, all he could do was speed to the finale and be ready with some spit to put out the embers of what remained of his hair. Then a glimmer of a coherent thought made itself known.

“Wait a minute. What bridge? I was never meant to meet you under any bridge.” She faltered.

“You are Jack though, right? Jack of the rambling club, Jack of the lonesome wolf brigade? Jack One Leg One Arm?”

“Not me lady. I’m Jack of the dancing bears. Jack of the leaping salmon. Jack Two Legs”

“Oh Good Golly, I am so terribly, frightfully sorry, Christ how embarrassing.”

He swung back round to the bar,

“Another whisky barkeep, and make this one a double!” he shouted cheerfully, briefly forgetting that no barkeeps were left alive.

Short story: Love is odd

Posted on by inkbiotic

Funny how emotion leaps out from the ridiculous, how it falls out unexpectedly. I fell in love in biology class, because no one could slice up a sheep’s eye like Shakti. I watched entranced as her deft brown hands worked without hesitation, her gaze steady, she didn’t flinch. She didn’t squeal like a lot of the girls did. Instead subtler emotions played across her face: the slight furrow of concentration, a twitch of sadness at the corner of her mouth, a pout of determination.

We only shared Biology for a few weeks, while Mrs Short was off, then Shakti returned to being just a face in the halls. Except she wasn’t, she couldn’t ever be again.

The next time I saw her was at the school dance. Her hair was piled up with glitter, and she was trying to walk in stupid shoes, giggling with her friends and going to the toilets in a cluster of perfumed hysteria. I was wrong, I thought, she just the usual, pretty but dull. Then as some sneakily supped vodka (apparently hidden in the cistern of the girl’s toilets) did its thing, she kicked off the shoes and boogied in bare feet, that’s when I saw her again. Unfettered, unique. Now I knew she was the one, my destiny, I just had to find a way of proving that to her…

Flash Fiction: How Much More?

Posted on by inkbiotic

But really, how many designer shoes do we need?

How many more different sizes of technology to connect us to the world?

We’ve already filled up the sky with bricks and lines, splitting the horizon into tiny segments, isn’t it enough yet?

How many new ways to wash your hair? Or clean your teeth?

New ways to excercise, new management restructuring,

Can’t we just leave it all for a little while?

Curl up in the crook of a tree,

And sleep?

Living in the Shadow of my Genius

Posted on by inkbiotic

People think that I’m boring and harmless, I love that. They call me mousy. They see my pimples and my chubby midriff, they see that I pull my t-shirt down to cover it like I’m embarrassed, like I could ever be embarrassed. They see my inexpertly applied make up, and they think, Aw, poor thing, she’s insecure.

It staggers me to think they can’t see it’s all an act. Even though I put the effort in, it shouldn’t be possible to fool all of the people all of time, yet I do. Hours spent in front of the mirror trying to get my make up just wrong, practicing the nervous tics and twitches. Every time one of these witless cretins tips their head in a magnanimous gesture of pity, I want to wink. Just a brief duck of the eyelid, enough to leave them wondering. But I won’t, I am the consummate professional. My vanity is not a weakness, my ego enables me; I have achieved perfection. Not only in my harried and feeble appearance, but in my art.

Of course, my art is not for the masses, only handful of brilliant minds see my work and marvel. It is exclusive. But for them I shall create my masterworks, my genius displayed in spattered blood and shattered bone.

I can slice meat from bone with a single cut, slice a jugular with one deft swipe, insert a needle into the spinal column in the lower back and suck out the juice. I have mastered the art of the false clue – wearing the wrong shoes, dropping the wrong ticket. There are no supersleuths to outwit, it isn’t difficult when there are only thugs in uniforms. No lightning fast computer mainframes, only slow databases, created so ineptly that nobody can be bothered with them.

And just like everyone else, they think I’m too dull to do anything as exciting as murder. So even if evidence sends them my way, their eyes just skim straight past me as I stammer through the interview. They believe me the ultimate innocent. And I love that.

Echopraxia

Posted on by inkbiotic

I am sitting at the front of the bus, going anywhere. I didn’t check the number on the front of the bus, I know I’ll end up somewhere. I sit on the top deck, front seat, enjoying the trundle and jolt, listening to phone chatter and the honk of the bus. I could almost hear the bus driver’s stress rattling his heart.

Sometimes people come and sat next to me, huffing and fussing so wrapped up in their own worlds and their need to get somewhere. For a while I live through them, listen to their phone dramas, the chink-chink of music through their earphones. I remain unobtrusive, the only movement is me biting my nails. That’s a habit I’ve had since I can remember, I go through a few weeks without, then I have a blissful afternoon going nowhere and gnaw away to fill my attention.

Then a woman sits down in the seat across the aisle. She starts chewing at her fingernails too. Lots of people do, and it takes a while to notice the oddness: each nail she bites is the exact same as the one I’m biting at that moment. Right forefinger, left little finger. I stop. She stops. I start, she starts. So I play a little. I scratch my left ear, she scratches her left ear. I shuffle in the seat and cross my legs. She shuffles in her seat and crosses her legs. It’s a beautiful thing and I want to catch her eye, but I’m scared to spoil it, so I stare straight ahead. Knowing that through these little moments we are connected, sisters.

When she gets off, I feel slightly heartbroken. No one ever notices me, but she did. She paid attention. In a small way, it was beautiful. I carry on to nowhere.

The Face of Nincompoop

Posted on by inkbiotic

I’ve probably watched you. Remember when you were in your bedroom and you tripped up trying to pull on your socks? I saw that. When you got in the shower too soon and stood huddled in the corner to avoid the cold water? You looked ridiculous, I laughed. When you tried to take the pie out the oven without gloves and dropped it? Remember that? I do.

I probably know all your saddest secrets. The faces you pull in the mirror, trying to figure out how to be sexy. Where you keep your diary or your stash of money. The TV crap you consume in secret and tell no one about. I hate to break it to you, but you aren’t unique. The reason I know you is because I’ve watched enough people to know that you’re all the same. I’ve seen the hidden face of the human race and it truly is the face of a nincompoop. This isn’t cynicism, I’m not having a bad day; I know. I’ve watched.

I became invisible the day I died. the afterlife isn’t quite the predetermined thing it’s made out to be. There are options. I didn’t pay too much attention to the form, once I spotted the Be Invisible option I was sold. For the first few hundred years all I did was watch. The human condition is a sorry one. Technology grows ever more complicated, but common sense? That never changes. And it started to get irritating. About the same time as my ability to interfere manifested, the never-changing stupidity of my ex-species began to really irk me.

The lottery, Valentine’s Day, friendship cliques, one-up-man-ship, fashion. When you no longer get to play these games you realise how laughable they are, how much time and space is taken up with the futile.

So I began to play a game of my own.

It was just toying really, I happened on an inept young fool and my patience snapped. He couldn’t get anything right. He broke his new kettle because he couldn’t work out how to press the button to open the lid. He bumped into the TV, snapping a wheel off and then couldn’t work out how to fix it, so he watched TV on the wonk. He never figured out how the storage heaters work; they aren’t that complicated, but no matter how many times he read the instructions he got it wrong. He embodied all that was pathetic about the human race, so I began to play.

His books were all in alphabetical order, so I shifted them about a bit. When he was at work, I put his toothbrush on his pillow and bunched up his towels into the shape of sleeping figure in his bed. I smeared his window with butter and I wrote “Idiot!” in the condensation in his shower. It took him a surprisingly long time to notice my interference, but when he did he assumed quite naturally that he was going mad. His frantic calls to his mum were some of the funniest conversations that I’ve ever listened into. Made all the more delicious by knowing I caused that.

So I carried on. I turned all his books upside down. I squirted washing up liquid around the rim of his toilet, so it frothed every time he flushed. Every day when he left the house, I put a small line of crisps inside his door, so that they crunches when he got home and stepped inside. I painted his toenails while he slept.

It was a good few months before his hinges started to become properly loose. Nearly a year before they fell off altogether. It happened while he was running away from the small collection of insects I had put in his bed. It sounds like a trivial thing, but by then I had push his mind to breaking point and it only took a tiny nudge to finish the job. He ran out of the front door, into the traffic and got run over by a bus.

And I thought to myself Well now, this is fun, why didn’t I think of this before?

Humblebrag

Posted on by inkbiotic

I tend to drop things. Yeh yeh, I know, everybody says that, everybody likes to think they can drop things, but for me it’s true!

Some people work hard for years trying to drop things, but for me it’s a gift, I don’t need to work at it. Sometimes I drop things without even trying. I’ll be carrying my shopping down the road, or on the phone, or even juggling, and then suddenly I’ve dropped something!

Today I’ve dropped: my coffee, three pens and a potted fern.

I feel for people when they say they just can’t drop things. I can’t imagine what that’s like. Just going through life holding onto everything, how dull!

Maybe it’s a spiritual thing, I’ve always felt connected to mystical beings and I believe that angels may have given me this gift. Or it could be my determination, I always say if you truly believe in yourself then you can do anything, but maybe that’s just me. 🙂

Snug

Posted on by inkbiotic

He curled up snug, while the wind howled elsewhere. Smelling a little of feet and vinegar, chortling while he hunkered down to his duvet, marvelling at the all the joys a life could hold.

He found it safer not to own anything worth stealing, to keep his surroundings stable. He made sure to avoid reaching out with delicate tendrils of affection that could so easily break. His heart had been broken once, an unreturned smile that he had proffered to a stranger and snatched back too late. Never to forget. He kept his heart wrapped in wodge of fat, a parcel made of a thousand, thousand fish finger dinners and chips.

He kept his attention still, a tiny kingdom without much thought where he could rule supreme. The television kept him busy. He had all he could ever need.