(This is a story from when I was sixteen or seventeen, and so not very good. A discussion of why it is not very good follows in the comments below the story.)

I sighed. It had been a long day, made longer now by the incessant traffic. I was forced to stop once again behind two red lights and a cloud of grey smoke. Another car was in front of this one, and another, and another.

I put my left elbow on the edge of my car door, uncomfortably pressed against the window, then rested my cheek on my knuckle, feeling the bones of my fingers press against my jaw. With my other hand I twisted the dial on the radio. A pop song played almost indistinguishably behind a wall of static. I tried twisting the tuning dial, but all I got was static, sometimes with a song phasing in, sometimes with nothing but the electric crackle.

(more…)

Sat now, alone at the party, my can empty in my hand, dented in several places where I had absently crushed my thumb and fingers into it, I considered getting another one, scanning the crowd for either an opening I could push through, or someone worth talking to, and was just about to stand when an unfamiliar girl threw herself down onto the sofa next to me.

“Hi,” she said.

Her face was thin and sharp, with a narrow nose and green eyes that looked away as I met them; cheeks rose-tinted, vasodilated; hair the colour of dry leaves, or of beer held to the sun, sticking out like straw, jagged and uneven because she cut it herself. In her hands, which rested on the patchwork fabric lap of her dress, she held two slim bottles. I did not think she was pretty.

“Hey,” I said, smiling, pressing the lager can between my fingers until it clicked and crinkled.

“I’m Remi,” she said, laughing nervously. Her laugh was not musical. “My name’s kind of a joke.” She looked down at her hands, tapped her fingers on the glass of one of the bottles.

(more…)

I’m not sure whether she likes me or not, I mean, she made love to me on the living room floor, but she might have just been being polite.

Willowy, slight as one of the twigs bristling at the end of her nostalgically-fashioned broom, camouflaged against the day, she stood, sweeping. In her ears, as if straight into her conciousness, music played through tiny white earphones. Her hips swayed with the rhythm of music and sweeping, her eyes down-turned towards the sodden leaves that plastered the concrete. A black plastic sack rustled next to her, its crumpled surface rippling in the November breeze. It was a warm day, the first after two of wind and rain.

She did not see how it happened, heard only, above the sound of her earphones, the cry of surprise, the sharp scrape of metal on concrete: the sound of a bicycle losing its traction on the decaying leaves and throwing its rider to the floor. She looked up, pulled out her earphones, saw a student lying in the road, curled into the foetal position. She gasped, dropped her broom, ran towards him. There was no one else around. Already the student was picking himself up, assessing the damage. He wore an open chequered shirt over his t-shirt, the sleeve of which had been ripped by the fall.

(more…)

Jack suffocates

She had a commitment to magic, Tim thought, as he watched Gemma brush her hair; a commitment to glitter and sparkle, to pretty clothes, and looking pretty, and to the manufacture of pretty pictures. In his own way, he too was committed to fantasy and fabrication. They had little else in common, but that suited them. “We’re not going to be boyfriend and girlfriend, you know,” she had said several weeks before. “I know,” he replied. “I haven’t got time for a boyfriend; it just complicates things.” Instead they had sex, animal and meaningless, regularly, at weekends usually.

It was Saturday morning. Her hair had recently been the colour of candy floss, and before that, shocking pink, but had since faded to the bleached milky hue of evening clouds. Several strands of it clung to the brush. She turned.

“Are you still here?”

It was a joke.

(more…)

“Michelle!” Jonathan said, recognising her immediately as she stood on his doorstep, the ten years separating this from their last meeting having left her face virtually untouched, save for the delicate lines flowering at the corners of her eyes, the tan darkening her skin, and the intangible shroud of maturity a decade’s experience had draped about her.

“I can’t stay long, I’m afraid, but I couldn’t leave again without calling in to see you. It’s not a bad time, is it?”

Jonathan said it was not, invited her in, asked her how she was, if he could get her a drink, apologised for being in his pyjamas and dressing gown. He felt again nervous and excited in her presence, as if those feelings had been lying dormant all these years. He had thought never to see her again. He made tea, led her through to the living room where his daughter sat playing with wooden blocks.

“Hi there,” Michelle said kneeling in front of the child, “what’s your name?”

(more…)

The wars of the future were mostly bloodless and mostly painless. With energy weapons that cauterised instantly, only the shock of loss and the pain of another human’s death persisted. And it was always painful to see a soldier suddenly missing an arm, a leg, too stunned to realise their loss or, worse, with a perfect hole through their stomach, barely aware they had been hit, not bleeding but with laboured breathing, faltering internal processes, fading, slipping into death. It might take them minutes, even hours to die this unnatural death, but it was inevitable; unpreventable in the heat of battle. And so, if fearful insanity did not first overtake them, the soldiers might record a frantic farewell to their loved ones on their helmet-mics, rarely anything more.

It’s hard to imagine the horrors of mustard gas in the 1910s, all those years ago. It seemed that since long before then mankind had been devising new ways to kill each other. Every now and then throughout the sordid history of war someone would invent a defensive measure; a new type of armour, a gas mask, a nuclear bunker. But this would only slow the mounting death-tolls until a bigger gun, a better bullet, was invented. Now he had the handheld laser rifles, and there was something uniquely terrible about their clean ineffeciency. They were bloodless, which made them, falsely, seem humane, and neither of those adjectives have any place in war. War should be bloody and it should be inhumane. Soldiers shouldn’t die in painless delirium: they should scream and writhe in the dirt, and when the people back home see the images on their screens, they should squirm and say “no, that’s not what I want for my children.”

.

-   -   -

I don’t know where this came from and since I currently have little to no interest in writing either science fiction or war fiction, I doubt it will go any further. Still, I kind of like it.

We wake up next to each other, sprawled out and overlapping like we’re each in bed alone, warm but not too hot. I roll over and your hand’s on my back. It’s eleven already. We kiss and I get up to fix you breakfast: Choco-Shreddies swimming in milk. I bring the bowls up, and cups of tea, on the tray with the oil-painted fruit on it. Your hair’s tousled and you get some chocolate on the corner of your mouth. I wipe it away with my thumb. We stream some cartoons on my PC, like we used to watch when we were kids, our knees bent up together like mountains under the duvet. Then we get dressed. You straighten your hair like you like it, even though I prefer your bed-hair. While you’re doing that I take the tray back down and go clean my teeth. When I come back I smooth out the duvet and we’re ready to leave.

I lock the door behind us, noticing as I hold back the handle so it shuts properly, that cracks of naked wood are beginning to show through the faded blue paint. I think maybe I’ll paint it tomorrow. We start walking towards town. The sky’s overcast and the air’s cold. You’re wrapped up in the red-brown scarf and hat and gloves I bought you last Christmas, and your black coat, but you still walk close by me for warmth, and squeeze my arm when a sharp breeze cuts across us and makes the leaves pitter-patter along the pavement.

(more…)

A stiff sporadic wind blew sand against Joe’s bare chest and whipped the crests of the breaking waves into a froth. Some of the sand caught in the thick hairs that covered his chest and shoulders, most of which were black, but a few of which, particularly in the bright August sunshine, had a silver sheen. Joe brushed the sand away, felt it scratch against his skin as it resisted the movement of his hand. It seemed strange to him, when he thought about it, that all sand had once been rocks, as big as boulders, or as big as the cliffs that guarded this eroding stretch of coastline, or as big as anything, and all these rocks had been worn down and worn down until they could not be worn down any more and all that was left was these minute grains; millions and billions of them.

When he was a child, Joe’s father had once told him that there were more stars in the universe than there were grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. Joe had looked out across the yellow-grey expanse and thought that on any beach alone there must be millions of grains of sand. That had been forty or so miles up the coast, near Scarborough, where Joe had spent his childhood summer holidays, and nearly the same number of years ago. He rarely went up there now, having little cause to, but knew the town had changed with the years that had passed. Time changed stars and sand too: stars burned out and all sand would eventually be pushed deeper and deeper underground until it was again pressed back into rock.

Joe’s reverie was broken when he saw a girl, perhaps fourteen, maybe younger, wading into the chocolate-coloured waves. A full bust, that belied her apparent age, protruded awkwardly from her chest, covered by a dark-coloured vest-top. Joe watched her, thought she was pretty, thought she was the type of girl he would once have stared at with a beating heart across the classroom, but not the type of girl he had married.

(more…)