Welcome to Acerbia; population: π
This is the archive of the many and fabulous adventures of . Like a hard-bitten son of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius taught to write by William S. Burroughs; continually reincarnated, debated over by intellectuals and literati at cocktail parties the author can't get invited to, the target of scorn and ire from women everywhere, frequently mistaken for a former member of the Warsaw pact, named after the Italian explorer Giuseppe Acerbi, slowly rewriting the Book of Cataclysm, this is postmodern fiction at its most playful and creative.
Praia
My great-uncle David was something of a world traveller, a trait that he passed onto his nephew, my uncle David. The world was apparently a safer place in their days, and I worry what sort of world my children will have to contend with as it seems to become more dangerous with each passing year.
There is a photo of the three of us, three generations of Davids, all sat together in a pub in Dublin where my great-uncle had retired to in the eighties. On this rare occasion my uncle David had just finished a tour in the merchant navy and was telling us about his recent trip to Rio. The picture was taken by the barmaid my great-uncle was too old to flirt with and I was too young to.
"So every morning I would wake up at seven and would stand looking out from the balcony at the praia. That means beach by the way," he added for my benefit, "and this girl of maybe eighteen, every morning like clockwork, would walk down the street to the beach. Tall and tan and young and lovely. She was such a sight to behold."
I spotted my great-uncle David blinking twice from the corner of my eye. I didn't know anything about girls at this point in my life, and all I had was an orange juice, but there was something about hearing them tell their stories which would always fascinate me. Usually whenever my uncle would tell one my great-uncle would tell an even wilder one until the discussion had spiralled into outrageous tales of pirates off the Barbary coast and corrupt port officials being bought off with blood oaths.
"She'd wear this tiny thong bikini, barely covered a thing. And you just couldn't help yourself but say 'ah' as she walked by, she was like a samba that swung and swayed so gentle like the wind."
He took a large draw from his pint and wiped the foam from his top lip. I could see his eyes fixed on my great-uncle, daring him with a look to try and top this story.
"So I started setting my alarm clock fifteen minutes earlier so that I could be down in the street in time to see her walk by. But no matter what I did to attract her attention, she'd always just walk by. Each day she'd walk to the sea and look straight ahead. I'd smile, but she never saw me. But I'd watch her so gladly, my heart declaring my love for her so sadly."
My great-uncle could hold his peace no longer and thumped his half finished pint down with an audible clunking noise. Some of the fermented liquid splashed up the side and over the rim, trickling down over the white knuckles of his wrinkled fingers.
"Yer a bloody liar. And I'll tell you how I know is because I told this story when you were no older than he is now" he indicated me with his ring finger "In a place just like this with my old friends João and Stan back in the early sixties. I even had to help translate everything into Portuguese so João would understand."
There was the welling of tears in his eyes and the pinching of the lines either side of his forehead as he recollected his time in Brasil decades before my uncle had ever been.
"The part you're leaving out, you little trickster, is that I eventually did get her to notice me. Her name was Consuela and it turned out that she had restricted peripheral vision and was long-sighted. She never saw me because she was half blind. I invited her up to the apartment I was renting in Rua Montenegro but she refused to get into the elevator. I never did understand why."
There was the twinkle of something in his eye. I couldn't tell you what. My uncle had remained in bashful silence throughout this, feeling guilty at having been rumbled. My great-uncle took a sip and clasped both hands around the glass before finishing.
"I can't get into an elevator anymore without thinking about that girl from Ipanema."
Gambit
It started with the taxi driver looking round and asking if I was a betting man. I replied that I wan't normally, but it would have to depend on the event. He stopped the small cab and climbed out, walking round to the trunk he opened it and brought out what looked like a cat travelling-basket. He opened the passenger door and dropped the basket onto the seat beside me before running round and climbing back into the driver's seat.
We set off again and I peered down supiciously at the wire mesh covering the front of the basket. A rabid hissing sound was coming from the basket and with each bump in the road the basket would rattle and shake as whatever creature resided within bounced off the sides. I was reminded of the opening scenes to Jurassic Park where the viewer only sees glimpses of the Raptor in the steel box before it eats the poor bastard sent to open the gate.
"Here," said the cabbie, reaching round and passing me a thin plastic tube, "can you drop a few of these into the basket?"
I looked at the tube and recognised them as caffeine stimulants. The tube declared it contained the world's strongest legal dose of highly concentrated caffeine in pill form. Guaranteed to keep horses awake for weeks and to prevent whales from dozing off. Just holding two in the palm of my hand made my fingers twitchy as my skin absorbed pure caffeine.
Tossing the pills into the basket, I heard crunching noises as the creature inside greedily wolfed them down. There was another flurry of activity like a kitten caught in a garbage disposal and suddenly I could make out two large red eyes staring out at me like distant warning lights through the dark fog of a stormy night.
"We're almost there. I promise you, not only are you going to make the fare back but you'll make a tidy profit on the side too."
Suddenly I began to think about why the cabbie was missing two fingers down to the first knuckle on his right hand.
We had arrived at the back entrance to a large warehouse. He backed the cab up between two big rigs with trailers and leapt out of the cab to collect the basket. We headed through the back door and into the dim, dusty warehouse beyond.
"Don't sweat it, Bowser's been in training for four weeks solid. He's at the peak of his potential. Aren't you Bowser?" he asked, shaking the basket violently. The response from inside the basket sounded like rutting cats being pushed through a blender and was just as violent. The cabbie had to hold the basket with both hands to avoid dropping it.
From narrow corridors of stacked crates we stepped out into a wide open area, illuminated by a single dangling bulb on a wire. The floor was dusty with sawdust and a dozen serious-looking men, some holding similar baskets, others clasping handfuls of fur close to their chests stood waiting.
"About time short stuff," one of them growled.
"You're up first. You and Terry here."
Terry looked like an accountant gone bad, a weedy man with spectacles and a pocket-protector full of pens. His white shirt was rolled up at the sleeves and he had tiny bloody scratches all up and down his arms. He was standing beside what looked like a child's paddling pool if it had been designed to keep Hannibal Lector's kids happy. Barbed wire was strung around the rim and there were lumps of bloody fur all around it. The cabbie moved in close to whisper to me.
"I've got it all covered. I've been bathing Bowser in Jolt Cola for the last few days. He's more wired than a Tasmanian devil. Go talk to that guy over there and put all your cash on Bowser, whatever the odds."
I placed a ridiculously high bet with the bookie and walked back over to the arena. Peering carefully inside I saw a small furry rodent with large ears and a stiff tail prowling with malicious intent around the inside of the ring, just waiting for its next opponent. It was only then that I realised that this was an illegal chinchilla deathmatch arena.
The cabbie grinned like a loon and opened the mesh gate to the basket, tipping it up to drop Bowser into the ring. If only either one of us had realised the strain that four weeks of intensive training, Jolt Cola baths and enemas and constant caffeine pills placed on a small rodent's heart. Bowser was dead of a heart attack before he even hit the floor.
I'd just like to say that no chinchillas were irreparably harmed during the researching of this post.
Libros Digitalis
Its not all shit. Sometimes there are roses amongst the shit. Declared today and available on both sides of the Pond.
Never Threaten To Eat Your Co-workers UK / US
I think my piece takes up two pages, but you shouldn't only buy it for my contribution, you should buy it for all the other great content too. And the funny cover and the first class editing that melds seamlessly into the folds of the pages... anyway, this is the bit where everyone to whom I said "I'm going to be published" and they replied "Let me know when and I'll buy a copy" is supposed to reach for their wallet or purse.
That includes you, mother.
Flicker
Plink.
Plink-plink.
Plink.
Plink-pli-plink!
Plink.
My eyeball trembles with each flicker of the strip light. The excited neon in the tube mimics my occular nerves as another pulse of blood causes my eyelid to droop momentarilly and stick ever so slightly before fluttering open again, all in a fraction of a second.
Plink.
I'm slowly managing to decode the message, but its taking all of my concentration and my mind has turned to soup. My hand is grasping a pen the same way that an iguana would grasp a pencil upon discovering that one end makes funny marks for the first time. I can't look down at the desktop until the flickering stops and the morse-coded message ends.
Plink-plink. Plink... Ppppppppp....link!
I realise that the pen has run out of ink and the sound of scratching on paper has been replaced with the etching of plastic on varnished wood. The pen has splintered in my hands and still I cannot look down. My face is trapped in a grimace of contorted agony, the plinking causing the only visible reaction to show across my face as I flinch with each flicker.
Plink-link-ink-nk. Plink. Plink-plink. PLINK!
And with that the strip light gives out and dies. The area around me finally goes dark and although the ghost-writing has stopped my hand trembles still, the muscle spasms translating up my arm and causing my shoulder to cramp and my neck muscles to seize up. My head twists down in a blistering wave of pain and my eyes, still streaming from staying open for so long without properly blinking are met with the message scratched into the sheet of paper and the desk:
Bru, you seem pretty stressed, yah? Have you thought about taking a vacation to the Carribbean? maybe some time away from London would do you good. There's an awful lot of pent up aggression going on here that you should probably tell your therapist about. Also, I just don't feel like continuing this... I mean what's the point? Might as well just qu
Shark Ahoy!
Breaking news over at Uborka. Ewan the Shark located!
Facade
Sometimes you forget that there's a person behind the site, eh? Even though what you're reading can be about the most exciting or banal of subjects there's this whole voyeuristic ethos behind it and you forget that behind those words there's a living breathing person with hopes and fears and desires and motives, some you can understand, some you can't.
Conversely, when a writer is trawling his logs as I am wont to do on occasion and you only see Google hits for your archives you start to forget that there are people out there, people who return day after day and want to read whatever you've written. Maybe they stop after a single paragraph and maybe they scan through, and sometimes I've had delightful conversations with people who have actually sat and read through properly and picked up the nuances and running jokes. There can be no greater reward really than to have the measure of your efforts justified with a similar level of feedback.
For years now its been apparent to me that those posts where everything that needed to be said has been said go without comments. A big glaring "0 comments" as testament to the failure of the author to engage the readers on any level they could relate to or feel comfortable talking about in front of others. How frustrating that a poorly written post will garner the exact seem result, leaving the author none the wiser if they have entertained or not.
I've been focusing so long on entertaining you, the audience, that perhaps I have neglected to relate to you all as people and taken your continued presence for granted. So here's a rare insight into my life at the moment that you wouldn't normally be privvy to if a friend who is far too far away from me hadn't convinced me to trust more in the genuine good-nature of you good people.
In the course of any existence there has to be change, otherwise life stagnates and dies. You've seen them, they're the ones who aren't actually living they're just surviving from day to day. They're looking forward to short-term goals like the next football match or what's for dinner. They're usually called Tracey and Brett and they drive Ford Cortina's with their names emblazoned across the top of the windshield.
No such limited existence for me. I've had my Permian singularity back when I was eleven and my parents decided we'd all go live in France. That sort of thing can really give you a sense of perspective and expands your horizons. You find yourself immediately responding with a world's eye view of events when you're going to school with ambassador's kids and CEO's sons. One of my first kisses was from an Eastern European head of state's grand-daughter. Much to her eternal shame, natch.
My Cambrian singularity was likely when I first discovered sex. Wow, that was a pretty life-changing singularity. Those of you who know are nodding, those of you who don't will just have to wait and find out for yourselves. I rarely ever use drugs, I'm not a heavy drinker (Mark, you call me a lightweight and I'll glass you, you ale-drinking wimp) and I don't go running for that exhausting endorphin rush some people rail on about. Sex is just the ultimate recreational activity...
If I had to pick an Ordovician it might well be the first time I read Fight Club and actually understood that the purpose of living was not to amass wealth or collect things, just... things, filling up your lifespace. Consuming things, eating things, buying things, possessing things. Identifying yourself through the extension of your things, the brands you're associated with and how much they cost you. I don't begrudge anyone their iPod or their Gap clothing, their Porsche or their Manolo Blahniks. Well done for being so successful, but understand that it doesn't validate you as a person. If you place any importance on the status symbols rather than the quality of the products then as my mother might say you've got more money than sense.
Of the rest of the experiences in my, admittedly brief life to date, the only remaining singularity, my Devonian so to speak, is my recent break-up with my long-time partner Ann. This has proven to be a very difficult thing to deconstruct after such a long time. At first I figured it would be as simple as seperating out the books, CDs and DVDs, but I'm also finding that there is a lot of mental unraveling to be done.
There was a difficult period of discussion and a sense of failure that somehow we could have prevented this. We went about reassuring our friends that this was what we both wanted and that this wasn't down to the actions or fault of one of us at the expense of the other. And then we gravitated into a calm eye of a storm where we could be seen in public together and go to the cinema and still share a joke and dinner.
This is the limbo I find myself in and at times it can leave me very confused, as if nothing has changed. I can almost deliberately forget the week of discussions and supporting reasons and theories and counter-theories and posits and realities that brought us here and my mind will discount it all as a mistake. Except it hasn't been, it isn't. Its a life-changing singularity that I'm still going through, this is just the quiet bit in the middle, before the actual actions are put into motion.
This is what is going on behind the scenes that you don't see, this is the truth behind the decline in Acerbia.com and I'd appreciate any insight or opinions my readers might have to add, be it in comment form, or in an e-mail.
Compulsive
So why have I been so quiet? Two reasons, one is a pretty nasty bout of flu, the other is that I had a wisdom tooth pulled as part of a New Year's resolution to get my mouth all fixed up. The tooth extraction was the final part in the dental reconstruction and now it's just regular cleaning trips and check-ups. But I wanted to talk about something slightly more serious, concerning the anguish and pain of having a tooth pulled.
Mastication. I'm not afraid to admit that I'm a compulsive masticator, I just love to masticate. With the left or with the right, add a bit of tongue to keep things interesting... y'know? Its just something you do when you've got nothing better to do with your time. Its to keep you occupied, nothing more. All you other masticators out there know exactly what I'm saying here.
There's nothing to be ashamed of, we're all grown adults. The dentist said it was perfectly normal to want to masticate and that all people do it, no matter how much they might deny it. So I'm going to come right out and just admit that there's nothing I enjoy more than a bit of mastication. Sometimes I even masticate in public, only not with my mouth open or anything cause that'd just be cheap and gross. No, mastication in moderation is the name of the game.
Of course, after mastication comes that tough decision of whether to spit or swallow...
Legend of a Cowgirl
...it was so in your face that you had to be thrown, and it happened one night. You woke up and went, "What?" It was weird! It was something like "The X-Files," 'cause, you know, "The X-Files" is huge, it’s all over the world, and you've got Scully-Mulder, Scully-Mulder, Scully-Mulder, front page, no clothes, no clothes… And imagine if an episode came up a Monday night, at 2:00 in the morning, and they killed off the characters, and you went, "What? How come they finished that? I was quite- I was watching that… Just Monday night and they…?" It just throws you, you know?
Eddie Izzard's Glorious
She disappeared without a word. Its been months since it happened but somehow that makes it all the more shocking. She was so open and frank and honest and... and she had the best porn. Fine, it boils down to her having the most diverse collection of links to porn and the fact that she wasn't just a website, she was an education.
So, in memory of the Reverse Cowgirl, just as I've had previous designs inspired by some of my other web heroes I've updated my design to reflect hers. God bless you Reverse Cowgirl, I wouldn't ever have known what felching was without you.
Stranger Than Science Fiction
Another page turned, another nibble of the biscuit and another sip of tea. It looked like Blake would have this one finished by closing time. It was something from the seventies, he didn't have anything else by the same author and the setting was austere and unimaginative, the characters were science fiction archtypes with bizarrely mispelled names and it all seemed to revolve around a quest through time and space to find a mysterious glowing egg.
He sighed audibly in the empty shop and thumbed at a dog-eared corner. Somebody had made it this far into the book years before. Perhaps they had gone no further, something Blake was finding perfectly understandable at this point. The natural coffee-browning of age was apparent around the edge of the paper and he could tell that bending the spine past sixty degrees would cause the ancient glue to crumble and the binding would collapse. He had pencilled a price of four pounds and fifty pence onto the first page.
Looking up from the book for a second he watched another couple try and enter the fetish shop across the street nonchalantly. They always looked like children raiding the cupboard for chocolate. They'd come out half an hour later with an opaque black bag full of things that required batteries and lube. Blake never felt the stirrings he felt he should when it came to kinky sex. He hardly felt any stirrings at all unless there was some exotic alien female with orange skin and green hair involved and to his dismay those only ever occured in some of the pulpier offerings in his shop.
Continue"Stranger Than Science Fiction"
The Lovecraft
The date was going really well. Devonia had turned out to be a scintillating conversationalist, knowledgeable in as many if not more obscure corners of trivia and minutiae as I was. The evening's dinner and drinks had evaporated like Einstein's proverbial theory of relativity required them to and now I was standing on her doorstep as she fumbled for her keys with the promise of coffee in the air.
"Oh look," I said, pointing at a strange little symbol that had been chalked onto her catflap, "its like a warchalk... y'know like 'other cats welcome here' or 'free kibbles n' bits, c'mon in for a cat orgy' or..."
"Its a ward against evil" she said flatly without looking down. Then it was door open and lights on.
Torched Weasels
If you were to imagine (akin to a rather older post about a previous job) that my current job was, instead of what it actually is, to juggle weasels doused in lighter fluid and set alight then a recent conversation I had with one of our technology suppliers and partners would have gone like this:
Me: Uh, hi there valued flaming-weasels juggling partner and supplier of lighter fluids.
Them: Howdy! This is several people linked in through a conference call, none of us will actually be able to supply any individual input regarding our participation in your weasel flambé circus endeavors but we just love tossing those crispy critters about the place and pretending we know what we're doing.
Me: That's great, glad to hear it. Now, you've been supplying the technology to set our weasels alight for the past six months now, and you've been doing it yourself in your own territory for three days now.
Them: You got it buddy. We're really happy about it too. We just love how you do things in Merry Olde England. You British people are just so cute.
Me: Acerbic and witty, too.
Them: You betcha!
Me: Now, the reason for this call, is that I've been monitoring your weasel juggling performance levels and its become clear to me that although you guys are the world's leading dousers of small elongated mammals in highly flammable propellants... you've actually forgotten to douse the weasels you're juggling with anything and you've been tossing the same three bloody weasels for three days straight now. Your turnover has been ridiculously low and furthermore I feel the need to point out that only one of those is actually a weasel, the other two being a chinese mongoose and a pygmy kitten respectively.
Them: Ah.
Me: Now, considering that when we began using your product to douse our own weasels and turn them into balls of squealing torched-fur delight you assured us you were the best in the business, totally professional and knew what you were doing... I have to wonder if thats now entirely true.
Them: We'll get out tech people onto the problem straight away.
Me: You do that. My weasels aren't getting any colder.
Unhelpful participant in conference: Can I just take this opportunity vis-a-vis our nascent territory partnership to say that we as a gestalt endeavor to torch as many juggled weasels as is humanly possible in the shortest amount of time is something we're all very excited about and that we're confident our proprietory lighter fluids have become the quintessential element in your own success at burning up little furry weasels.
Me: May our partnership live on in infamy without the irony of you lot being incapable of dousing weasels in your own product.
Thank God I have you lot to tell these things to, otherwise I could end up going insane.
Fortune Cookie
I went to see one of my models yesterday, despite the fact she refuses to model nude for me now that I'm single again. Xiao Chen thinks I'll be indecent and she'll have to break my fingers, something she'd rather not do as she's quite fond of my work of her. She met me at the door to her Notting Hill house in nothing but a red silk peignoir. I knew she was doing this just to mess with my head in a Mrs Robinson-fashion.
"Say hello to Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" she said and waved to the car parked across the street where a gentleman in a suit was sitting pretending to read the Sunday Times.
"Why's he here?" I had to ask.
"The MOD think I might be in danger. After fourteen years, to think that anything would happen now is simply ridiculous."
Chen was a ground technician in the People's Liberation Army Air Force in the late Eighties when she was approached to supply information to the coalition on the J8 fighters that China had sold to Iraq. In return they granted her asylum and a tidy yearly dowry from her majesty's government. The dowry runs out next year though so she's started exploring alternative incomes.
She loves it in this country, in China she was an engineer who hit things with tools, here she can pretend to be a Shiatsu massage master and fondle people for money. I tried to convince her to blog but she's read Belle-du-jour and doesn't think anyone would believe her if she wrote about charging Feng Shui-wannabes in Notting Hill thousands of pounds to rearrange their furniture and "let the dragon breathe freely in their living space"
The irony is that all her furniture is Swedish. Her stereo is Danish and her choice of music is exquisite. She put on her import CD of Strawpeople's Greatest Hits and handed me a sketchpad and pencils. She's in her mid-forties and wants as many testimonies to her beauty as she can get. As Auckland electronic vibes and female vocalists serenaded us I began to outline her face.
Shades of Gray
Juno slid a token across the table to me with two impeccably-manicured fingers. It looked like a poker chip and I picked it up, dribbled it across my knuckles, palmed it and then quickly revealed it in my other hand to a warm smile from her. I looked down at the ceramic chip and felt the rough earthy texture of the rim around the embossed glossy center with the pad of my thumb.
"What's this?" I asked.
She clasped her hands together under her chin and leaned forward through the rising steam of her coffee.
"Armin says you're ready to join. You've been a rising star within the company and he wants you in on the next level."
I continued to toy with the chip as my fingers instinctively returned to the coin tricks I had learned so many years ago. My dexterous feats went unnoticed and for a while the only sound was the soft tapping of the ceramic on my knuckles.
Juno reached into her purse and brought out a long, thin, rectangular envelope and dropped it into the middle of the table along with a handful of Euros to pay for the coffees.
"See you there." she said and as she left I looked down at the chip and realised the glossy alabaster white embossment was the silhouette of a horse with the letter Q on its flanks. I lifted my hands from the table and recognised the emblem of a Swiss Airlines ticket amongst the spilled contents.
I began to feel slightly dizzy at the thought that our mysterious CEO had asked his private secretary, and some rumors suggested she was also his mistress, to send me to his private chateau in the Alps. It felt like something from an Ian Fleming book.
Embargo
As I stood on the forward deck of the cargo-container transport CRX Atlantic Horizon the entire vessel shook from another explosion in bay four. I remembered Master Chief Daniels telling me that bay four was full of consumer goods from Chinese factories; shoes, soft toys, possibly some fireworks. The explosion was enough to throw several of the empty containers from the top of the bay overboard, causing the massive ship to rock sideways, like someone stepping out of a rowing boat.
In any direction I looked there was nothing but the open sea. The distant horizon was darkening slowly and off the port bow the raider's pursuit ship continued to burn. One of the Atlantic's crewmen had been deadly accurate with his grenades and only a handful of the modern-day pirates had made it on board. The rest of the crew had tried fighting back with shotguns and melée weapons but being merchant seamen by trade they weren't skilled enough to repel the trained mercenaries. Their bodies lay scattered across the decks.
The Captain had kept me out of the way until it had become apparent that the raiders didn't care for his cargo, they were looking for me. He brought me forward and was rewarded with a bullet to the temple for his troubles. When D'Aronique stepped forward from the raiders' midst it all became crystal clear, he was here for revenge and using the raiders as a way to catch us in the open sea. I cursed at the frenchman in every language I knew and failed in my attempts to bribe the mercenaries over to my side with money they could just as easily plunder from my corpse.
D'Aronique had other plans though. He had obviously spent quite some time cooking up his revenge and he wanted to savor it. He radioed for a rescue helicopter and gave vague coordinates before taking me down to the engine room and setting the charges. By some miracle I had managed to escape in time and make my way up on deck but the explosives had gone off in the meantime, disabling the ship and setting her adrift from the shipping lane. Christ only knew how the rescue chopper was going to find it. Maybe they already had, I had lost track of time down below.
"So you managed to escape, you sale pute" D'Aronique shouted over the noise of the fire and multiple miniture explosions. "I had hoped to send you to the bottom of the ocean. To sink you as you sank my company."
He held a pistol in each hand, the one in his right by the grip, the one in his left by the barrel. He threw the extra one across the deck to me and it slid over the dappled metal before coming to rest at my feet.
"It is fitting that it should end like this. Two men of the world, alone, with no more distractions. No middlemen, no lawyers, no negotiators, just the two of us." It had been a long struggle from the boardroom over a year ago when I had finalised the buy-out to this moment. I had become so complacent in my job that I had convinced myself the frenchman had been thoroughly beaten, never expecting him to want to get even.
"How do they say it in the cowboy movies?" he paused and looked out over the empty ocean, the sky behind him a dark void contrast against the orange flames from bay four. I picked up the gun and racked the slide back.
"Draw."
The Ugly Bird
This was written almost ten years ago. Parts of it suck, parts of it are amusing. Imagine it as if it were a cartoon and your enjoyment will probably increase. I'll reformat it over the course of the day to be slightly easier to read...
In the southern desert on the continent of Pangea there was a tree, a crooked tree with an enclave of lush vegetation around it, although the tree itself looked as though it had been dead for years. In this tree sat a nest and in the nest were five eggs. The biggest of the eggs was red and the surface sparkled at night under the warm blanket of the night air, the rest were a dull yellow and of very little interest.
When the time was right the yellow eggs began to hatch, and one by one the inhabitants of each brittle sarcophagus broke free and in turn helped the next. And so it was that four ugly and damp chicks tried their best to crack the glowing shell of the fifth egg, the most amazing of the five eggs, and when after exhausting themselves pecking its shimmering surface it finally broke open the chicks were greeted by a creature entirely unlike themselves. It had wet wings, the chicks could see that much, but it also had four legs, which they did not. It had a more curved and imposing looking beak than any of they did, and taloned hooves on its fore legs and sharp claws on it's back legs.
The largest of the chicks tossed the weak and pathetic intruder out of the nest instinctively and it fell with a feeble "meep!" into the vegetation below.
The chicks ate the shells and what creatures had been left for them, and when the time came they began swooping out of the nest and searching for rodents and small prey on the desert plains.
The fifth chick instead learned to prowl the underbrush around the tree, it's wings not strong enough to lift it back to the place it was born. It slept every night at the roots of the tree under a protective canopy of vegetation, as if compelled to by a maternal influence.
Seasons passed and the chicks became birds, large carrion birds that
terrorised the plains, scourging for food but deliberately avoiding the lush oasis at the base of their tree for they could feel that something was down there, looking up every night.
Timetable
I was heading to a pub to meet a friend for a drink. She texted me, using predictive text, to say she was going to be late:
Buses all full, there as soon as one stupid little cup comes that isn't fucking full
To which I just had to reply:
Your bus floweth over?
The Artisan
She had arranged to meet him in a bar, more of a dive really than a bar. She hadn't been in before but assumed that this was the sort of establishment where people could go about their business without interference from the Authorities or the staff. She needed something that only the underworld could provide.
Slinking neatly into a booth with a large umbrella-filled cocktail she chewed on a cherry on a stick and waited. And waited. And waited. People walked past the booth, huddled together, heading for the back rooms to conduct private business. Sometimes she would see one of the patrons scribbling furiously with a stubby pencil on a receipt as another made outlandish requests of them.
Finally he arrived, dressed in black, a leather duster trailing around his combat boots. He stepped up to the table, watching her eyes intently.
"They say that light without darkness is blindness."
She racked her brain for a moment before replying
"My badger has become unruly and his fur is matted. He needs a shave."
The tall dark stranger nodded, acknowledging the agreed-upon code phrase and slipped into the booth beside her.
"So, you need something crafted, something you've heard only I can provide."
"For a price"
"Everything comes with a price. What you're asking for is illegal and therefore very difficult to craft. I need payment up front before delivery."
"How can I be sure of the quality of the merchandise?" she asked, flicking the tip of a straw.
"You'll just have to trust..."
Suddenly the door burst open and four prim-looking men with messy hair, all smoking pipes, with their left hands tucked into their jacket pockets came rushing in.
"Nobody move or you're all as dead as Chaucer!"
The young woman stood up and screamed, "The Authority! No!"
"Yes, I do believe it is us to whom she is referring" said one of the scruffy Authority "and we have reason to believe that some unlicensed creative thinking is going on on these premises and that the notorious Zen Buddhist Monk joke may be available to buy here."
Even the barman went wide-eyed at that accusation. He seemed to balloon up with indignation and pointed a brisk finger directly into the booth the dark stranger and young lady had been huddling across only moments before.
Two of the Authority stayed to cover the door and another two appeared from the corridor leading to the private rooms, having kicked in the backdoor. The remaining two men moved with learned patience and enjoyed a few nail-bitingly tense puffs on their pipes before bringing out reading glasses and bracketing the stranger and woman in the booth.
"So tell me truthfully now my dear fellow, you didn't really think you could steal such a dangerous piece of unregulated literature and get away with it did you? Further folly on your part of course was to try and impart that knowledge onto an unprepared public. Now please do tell us how you expected to get away with this?"
The dark stranger looked left and right at each of the menacing old men who had brought with them a cloud of musty-smelling paper scents and flakes of dandruff. Cornered, he knew there was no escape. He stood up and shouted out loud enough for everyone in the place to hear.
"What did the Zen Buddhist monk say to the hot dog vendor?"
All six members of the Authority reacted at once as if controlled by a singular hive mind, drawing copies of The Complete Works of Shakespeare and opening them to a random page before commencing to read aloud. Their cacophony of Bardness drowned out the punchline for everyone but the young lady sat directly beside the stranger who could only give a faint smile and agree to herself that it would have been worth the every penny.
D, the Uber-Loser
In every generation there is a chosen one. He alone will stand against the single women, the babes and the forces of marriage. He is the loser.
So, cosmic occurrence alert, timed perfectly to coincide with my defences being at their lowest; a Sunday. Supposedly once every four years we have too much time stored up and we have this release valve, which has been agreed upon by everyone to be this extra day called February 29th. Legend has it that on that extra day the forces of darkness can make a request and have it granted by the Elder Gods and mere mortal men are powerless to resist. Sounds like a job for... the Loser.
My first clue should have been when I looked out the door and the neighbor across the hall was lounging on a bed of rose petals in expensive lace lingerie in her doorway. I wasn't very awake and she's been known to do weird shit before so I kinda glossed over the sight of her pouring maple syrup over her lithe curves as she winked suggestively at me. I closed the door and went back to reading my book about war.
Next clue that yesterday was a special day was in the café when the waitress took my order and grabbed my left hand to check my fingers. She scribbled down her address and phone number on the bill when I paid to leave. On the back were a fax number, a pager number, an e-mail address, an IM moniker, her measurements and a fifteen-word description of what she'd do to me if I agreed to marry her. Of course I didn't discover any of this until I was well out of reach.
Strolling down the street my third and final clue was the rampaging horde of women in wedding dresses tearing up the street towards me. One of them squealed, "I know him, he just separated with his partner of seven years! He's single!" and the chase was on. It was like a scene from that Chris O'Donnell movie, only funnier and more terrifying at the same time. A barrage of bouquets cut off my escape and I ducked into a cinema to hide.
The girl behind the counter charged me £4.50 and gave me a pre-nuptial to sign. I threw cash and a coy smile her way before charging through the doors into the last place they'd look for me; a Jennifer Aniston movie. I mean, single man in a Rom-Com?
A scouting party of bridesmaids with deadly orchid throwing-stars crashed in behind me moments later as I cowered in my seat beside a happily married couple. I shared a look with the husband who reminded me of the pity you feel for polar bears in the zoo. The wife hadn't noticed me yet and the husband must have felt the deep stirrings of his bachelorhood driving him on to a selfless sacrifice. He began tugging at his wedding band but extra-sensory antenna caused his wife to look round. In the darkness her eyes glowed red with the fires of a woman nigh scorned and he let out a whimper.
A bride leapt into my lap and I was pinned into my seat with swathes of taffeta and cream satin. I was trapped like a rat in a... rattrap, my witty metaphors and analogies fleeing me like the vestiges of the single cynical male that they are. She peered down at me through her veil with mascara eyes and all the roses in her hair looked down with her like pseudopia, there was nothing left for it, I'd have to use my guile and wits to get me out of this situation.
"Oooo, get you. I love your hair, who does your make-up? Nice shoes."
The predator sniffed at her prey once more, suddenly doubting that she had caught a genuine mate. All the sensory inputs confirmed it, but my limp wrists and head cocked to one side made her doubt her instincts momentarily. Was this male the right kind for her? The veil was lifted and the eyes moved in close, so close that I imagined I could see clear into her twenty-something spinster soul and the lonely yearning girl beyond. Her crimson lips drew back and she finally spoke.
"Say 'commitment' "
That's when I knew I was fucked.