Celebrity Sociopath

Posted on by inkbiotic

The prime minister, commonly known as Ethelred the Inept, was fiddling with his calendar. The date showed 15.02.2301, which was correct, but he wanted it shown as a series of pictures; he hoped that would cheer him up on what was turning out to be another crappy Thursday.

He had been chosen to run the country as damage limitation. A global financial crisis had been arranged to properly distribute more money to the very rich and as always, the result was a grumbling and dissatisfied public. In order to provide distraction and a clear focus for anger that would lead away from the actual cause of it, a buffoon had been promoted well beyond his abilities to head the country. And besides, no one intelligent wanted to do it. Ethelred’s job was to be incompetent in a flamboyant and headline grabbing manner, something he had achieved with aplomb. However now the situation had spiralled out of control, hatred towards Ethelred had resulted in strikes and explosions, so urgent meetings had been held among his advisers to come up with an alternative plan. Ethelred was not invited to these meetings, he didn’t know of their existence and only got to hear the final decision.

While Ethelred fumbled with the wavy finger technology on his calendar, a civil servant called Jim attempted to explain the situation.

“It’s important to focus the public’s anger on simple targets that aren’t you, prime minister,” said Jim. Ethelred gave a big sigh,

“But why do they hate me? He said, plaintively.

“Well, in part it was losing Big Ben to a Russian diplomat in a dare, sir.”

Ethelred gave a coy smile,

“High jinx!” he said, Jim remained impassive.

“And the pig brothel,” continued Jim.

“It was consenting!”

“Not the dead one, sir.” Ethelred started to play with his calendar again, he found it boring when people criticised him.

“So we’re going to bring back Big Brother, the TV reality show,” explained Jim.

“Oh yes, that was brilliant, all those idiots!” said Ethelred, perking up again.

“And useful, sir. People would pour all of their energy into hating the powerless and completely ignore what important people were up to.”

“Why did they ever get rid of it?”

“They simply ran out of people desperate enough to be on it. It was inevitable really.”

“So presumably you have a plan to get round that?” said Ethelred, checking his reflection in the back of a spoon.

“Yes, sir. We’ve decided to combine reality TV and cloning.” Ethelred dropped the spoon.

“What?”

“We’re going to use DNA from some of the most famous murderers of the last century. Proper serial psychopaths. We’re going to clone them and put them in a house together.”

“And they do what?”

“The usual tasks, silly costumes, electric shocks, bargaining, and of course the public will vote to throw them out.”

“Wait, you can’t just release murderers to the outside world.”

“Oh no, anyone voted out will be executed, of course.”

“And the winner?” asked Ethelred, Jim gave a small embarrassed cough,

“Will be released to the outside world.”

“Wait, but you just said…But the people won’t stand for it will they?”

“On the contrary, the public will love it. They love an evil rogue turned good. He’ll be welcomed into the community. His lovable quirks, cheeky grin and refreshing honesty. We saw it time and again with hated celebrities. Truly awful people would go on Big Brother, and act slightly less awful than people were expecting and everyone would love them. Think how dramatic the turn-around would be with Jack the Ripper or Sweeny Todd.”

“It’s a brilliant plan, let’s do it!” said Ethelred clapping his hands, completely oblivious to the fact that the decision had already been made.

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…

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.

Coma

Posted on by inkbiotic

Last night I woke up clawing the walls again, my nails broken, my eyes open but seeing nothing.

I must have been looking for you.

I don’t know why I thought you’d be there beneath the wallpaper, just as I don’t know why I thought you’d be under the desk, or trapped behind the fridge. It’s the logic of dreams, something unfathomable to me. That’s what you’ve become now too. Watching your stillness, I think: I used to know you; how you liked your tea, the sound of your feet on the stairs, what made you laugh like a seal. I knew your love of having your neck tickled and who your childhood heroes were. How can I have known so much, but not have learned how to find you and bring you back?

Today I brought a different book to read, a murder mystery. You’ve always hated them, but I’ve been thinking: if I only read you things you want to hear you’ll have no reason to wake up. So I’m trying this. I may even leave off the ending, taunt you with the unsolved mystery. It’s not nice, but it’s tough love. No other kind of love seems to work.

Watching your stillness. This isn’t you, you were never lazy. You must hate lying there for weeks on end. Affecting nothing. You used to affect everything, a whirlwind of trouble, causing havoc. Now the havoc is only in my head.

It’s time to get up.

I don’t know how to say those words so that you’ll hear them – should I shout? Should I whisper? It’s time to get up now, you’re late for the party.

Everybody’s waiting.

Maybe I’ll find you tonight, I’ll grab your hand and pull you through to consciousness. You’ll be in the last place I look, and I’ve looked almost everywhere.

Watching your stillness, I wonder: do you even hear these stories I read you? They tell me you can hear, but maybe that’s a kind lie to keep me sane, to keep me tethered to the waking world. It doesn’t keep me sane and the tether is fraying. And I keep wondering, maybe I can’t find you because you’re hiding.

Maybe you don’t want to come back.

When I’m not dreaming about you, I don’t sleep. My restless brain ticks through scenarios, things I could have done differently, signs I could have noticed. I knew you weren’t looking after yourself well enough, but I also knew your pride, that you’d hate to have me interfere. I should have interfered. I let you down. I let you get lost. I let the fits claim you, cut you out of this world and steal you away. Watching your stillness, watching you lying there, day after day I wonder what it’s like to be so peaceful. Maybe I should be jealous, I think I am, a little.

Maybe I should come to you.

I’m not doing so well here. My exhaustion makes the daytime blurry and jumbled, my thoughts fractured. I drop things, I forget things. I put the kettle in the fridge, I’ve broken three plates and your favourite mug, I’m sorry, I cried about that for an hour. Sometimes I ramble on. Sometimes the only words I speak are to you, speaking them into this void. Waking life is a mish mash of frayed hope and bungled practicality. And then I dream, and the images are sharp and clear. I dream I’m searching for you, pulling apart our home, scouring the streets. One night I dreamt I was wandering the desert; I could feel the sand oozing between my toes, feel the heat of the sun as it sizzled my skin. I think I’m starting to cross over. Day by day I loosen a little from reality, maybe soon I can join you in nowhere, in the bone cage that holds you.

Would you know me there?

Can we carry on our lives there? I think I’ve changed, become brittle and vague. Maybe you wouldn’t like me now, maybe you wouldn’t want me tainting the peace. Maybe now I’m the whirlwind.

The nurse is pestering me, visiting time is nearly over and I’ve not even started reading the book I brought, too busy trying to explain everything to you. I can feel my blood humming, my breath barely skims my lungs. I don’t think I even replied as she fussed around your bed. She thinks you’re here, she thinks this is you, this lump beneath a blanket. She thinks this is me, with the startled expression and the shaking hands. She doesn’t see my stillness as I start to dislodge from this tacky world of sharp edges and bright colours. She wants me to go, but I’m not ready.

How can I leave, when I still don’t know where you are?

Misunderstood Genius

Posted on by inkbiotic

All objects are art, it just takes an artist to point it out. But my mum literally cannot see that. It’s like she has a piece missing in her brain. Instead she sees all this irrelevant shit. Says stuff like,

“That’s not art, that’s a bit of the hoover. I need that to clean up this pig sty of a house. You’ll have to dismantle your sculpture.”

Dismantle my art? Doesn’t she know anything? That could kill me, it’s like tearing out a piece of my soul. So I say,

“No, mum. Actually that’s a physical expression of all my childhood dreams in a unbroken representative space. Reminiscent of Renoir, as seen through the eyes of a millennial in torment.”

Then she says,

“You don’t even know what half of those words mean!”

“No mum, you don’t know what they mean. I looked them up.” That told her.

Superhero Encounter

Posted on by inkbiotic

It was a bog-standard task. Take the cherry picker up to the roof and fix the leak. To be honest I could do it without the machine, there’s loft access and apart from a few holes, it seemed pretty solid. But that wouldn’t justify us spending over a thousand on the cherry picker itself, so for that reason I was sitting in the cab about to go sixty feet up in the air. And then I heard the shouting.

I saw the two men running towards me, their shiny spandex suits rustling, silky capes flowing out behind them, that’s how I knew they were superheroes. Although I didn’t actually recognise them, a couple of the more minor characters, I guess. I was leaning over, trying to understand what they were shouting about, when the larger of the two men leapt up into my cab in a single bound. The other struggled a little, the bars were too far apart and I’m sure he caused himself some pain, but he made it over.

“Hey missy,” said the superhero, “get us up there, now!” he was shouting unnecessarily, he was only a few inches from me. And I don’t appreciate being called missy either, I’m a woman doing my job, not an insolent child.

“You can’t come up here. This cab isn’t supposed to hold more than two,” I started to explain, but the bigger chap was having none of it.

“Listen, we’ve got five minutes before that building explodes,” now he was doing that forced whispering that superheroes do, and he gestured to the very building I was meant to be fixing, “and there are people trapped inside. We have to get up there now!” He shoved past me and began fiddling with the controls. I looked at his sidekick (clearly he was the sidekick) who gave me an apologetic shrug.

I turned back to the bolshie superhero, not particularly worried, since he didn’t seem to understand how a dead man’s handle worked and was pressing every button and pushing every lever in a totally futile manner.

“It seems to me that if the building is about to explode, then we want to be as far away from it as possible,” I said. To be honest, I didn’t believe him at all, these superhero types are always kicking up the melodrama. However, the caped crusader wasn’t flagging, he put a hand around my throat and shoved me up against the railings, hissing into my face,

“Take us up there, now!”

Seriously, is it that difficult to say please? Anyway, I took us up there, slowly, because the machine doesn’t go up fast, no matter how much a superhero screams at you.

To cut a long, anticlimactic story short, I got them both up to where the super villain held the woman. They smashed through the window and swooped inside. The window was open, so I don’t see why smashing was needed. She started screaming, which helped no one. They rescued her, she got her shoe caught in the window frame and started screaming again – seriously? Where do they find these women? There was a tussle with the super villain, who I was quietly rooting for. More screaming, whispering, and smashing stuff (I feel sorry for the cleaners). They rescued her, and I took them back down again. Slowly.

She never even said thank you to me, just stood leaning back against the railing (I made her put a harness on, she had no awareness of safety) and snogging the superhero. The sidekick ran out of quips about half way down, so we continued the journey in silence, just the slurping of the other two to listen to.

And of course it was them who got the TV interviews and the front page photo, nobody asked me. The superhero even lied about how he got up there, said he flew, the twat.

Bitch

Posted on by inkbiotic

You will not believe what this bitch did to me. It was at the station, she was sitting slurping at coffee, her bag on her lap and she wasn’t even looking at it. I think if someone doesn’t even watch their bag, then they’ve probably got too much money anyway, I’m just helping relieve them a little of that baggage. You just know she’s had everything handed to her, no one ever handed me anything. Nothing but pain.

Anyway, I know what works with an idiot like that, just act natural and walk past her grabbing the bag. So I walk past her and put my hand around the bag, and she looks up at me. So I flash her a smile, you know? Like we’re besties and she wants me to have the bag. I’m thinking by the time she realises, I’m already out of the station, right?  So I flash her the smile and she throws her coffee at me! Hot coffee! She could have scarred me for life. So I’m dripping boiling hot coffee, all down my new jeans, and I’m shouting at her, because I can’t believe what a psycho she’s being, and without even looking at me, she walks off. Just walks away to catch her train. Bitch.

Behind the Door

Posted on by inkbiotic

The sun was shining and she’d got an A for her essay, life was good. As they strolled down the corridor to their next class, she felt that the world was her onion.

“There’s something weird about that classroom,” she said, stopping and gesturing with a wave of her books. “Have you noticed? The door doesn’t look like the other doors, it’s too thick, with bars across the little window. Freaky,” she added, trying to peer in.

“Just leave it!” he hissed in response.

“What? Why?” he really was unnecessarily huffy at times.

“It’s better if you just don’t pay attention, it’s safer,” his voice was becoming a whine now and her curiosity had only grown, filling her concentration.

“Why?” she asked again, adding a small pout, she liked to know things, she didn’t like to be left out. “Is it a cult? Or a nudist colony?” Their college was like hive for unpopular courses and rooms rented out to oddball organizations.

He sighed and leaned in close to her, his eyes darting back and forth.

“That’s where the war is. You can’t do anything about it, it’s best if you don’t look.”

“What?” the answer was so unexpected she wasn’t sure how to reply, but he said nothing and was already scurrying away down the corridor. “What war? What are you talking about?” but he was gone.

Impatient with his nonsense, she barely hesitated before opening the door and looking inside. She watched for only moment before slamming the door, but the images stayed, hovering just beneath the eyes, ready to flash. A child’s face in horror, his arm severed; a soldier holding the head of his dying friend; an explosion that caused nobody even to raise their heads, their ability to feel already exceeded. She ran.

Nobody listened when she told them about the room. She suspected that some knew, she saw the shifty, desperate look in their eyes. Anyone who didn’t know, saw her as yet another hysterical student with a ridiculous complaint. And she was tired, an exhaustion that seemed to play with her certainty, so that she wasn’t sure. Had she really seen it? Was it as bad as she had thought? Maybe it was an acting class, maybe it was just a film playing.

Sometimes she would be sitting in class and she’d hear the sound of gunshot, or distant screams, but the teacher only spoke a little louder and his expression never changed. There were days when the door to the war would be open a crack and inside she would glimpse a moment of death, but she learned to keep her eyes straight ahead. The war wouldn’t ever end, it was best to not look.