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.
Christmas Equations
If you eat too much to move but then you drink so much you puke, does it all balance out?
If someone you love gives you something twice as expensive as what you got them and you tell them that their proper present didn't arrive in time but you'll give it to them on the 27th how many kilo-humbugs of pressure are you under?
If parent A calls at 15:10 in the afternoon expecting thanks for gift X and parent B is already on call waiting to ask if you liked present Y and you've had alcoholic drink Alpha and your attention is distracted by your girlfriend in Christmas-themed lingerie ensemble Delta how long before you say something inappropriate?
What is the square root of snow?
Using the cosine of the angle of inclination that the tinsel hangs at and drawing a tangent that bisects the tilt of your drunken uncle in his chair and a line perpendicular to the snarl of your auntie at what point do these segments intersect in an argument?
Christmas toys are known to become more complicated the more you progress into adulthood through an exponential function Y(x)=fddx² with fdd equal to your fuddyduddyness ratio and Y(x) the amount of time before you break it and realize you really should have read the instructions first. Calculate Y(x) for the latest Transformers that now exist through four dimensions and require 3D glasses.
What is the molecular composition of brandy butter on fire when you poke it with your finger? Can you express the formula without using any four letter words?
If a Christmas tree has seven tiers of branches with each tier supporting an evenly-distributed odd number of baubles and you introduce a stochastic cat element into the equation how long will the gap between the first bauble smashing on the floor and the tree toppling onto your sleeping grandmother be?
Same as previous question but with the stochastic cat accidentally wrapped inside a box beforehand.
If eighteen people wish you a Merry Christmas but only eleven of them also subsequently add "and a Happy New Year", and seven offer Seasonal Greetings but only three of them sent you cards, how much cheer can you expect to feel on January 2nd?
Express how bitter you are that the other kid was picked to play Joseph in the nativity play sixteen years ago over you and later managed to snog Mary behind the manger as a non-linear function.
If a Nintendo Wii, a Sony Playstation 3 and an X-Box 360 are equidistant from your center of gravity what are the probabilities of you getting to each of them in turn before a rabid gamer freak who camped out all night on Oxford Street?
Answers are due by December 31st
A Solstice Carol
As night fell on the 21st of December we entered the longest period of darkness for the year. At 22 minutes past midnight the planet would reach the apogee of its celestial orbit, and the northern hemisphere would be tilted away from the sun due to the obliquity of the ecliptic. We would have effectively entered the darkest time of the year, the farthest point from the sun.
"All a bit dramatic really, isn't it?" said an apparition beside me. My eyes had not yet adjusted to the darkness surrounding the bright VDU and I didn't recognise the voice immediately. There was something familiar about the shape though. My nose wrinkled at the smell of bad barbeque in the room.
"I'm all for dramatic, but it's got to be flamboyant too. Put on a good show." It was Raymond.
Raymond had grown up in the same street as me and we would frequently mess around in my front yard. Raymond and I had tried eating dirt together for fun. Eventually we grew up and apart and I moved away, whereas he fell in with a bad crowd. Raymond had poured gasoline all over himself by accident while trying to vandalise a kid's playground one night and had set himself on fire. There was the crackling sound of charred human fat supurating as he exhaled tepid smoke from his lungs.
"How the Dickens are you?" he asked me. "You're long overdue for this. You'll be visited by the three ghosts of holiday depression and hopefully by the end of it all you'll feel a bit better" there was a cough and the wet splatter of blood going into his hand. Immolation has always been my worst fear. I screwed my eyes shut and when I opened them Raymond had gone.
Two hours later as I sipped at a hot chocolate my hands still shook and my thoughts could not be diverted from my nightmare vision. Eyes wide open and fixed on the wall ahead of me it was only when I heard the soft purr of her voice by my ear that I became aware of the presence of my first visitor for the night.
"Masaa el kheer" she said, and her arms enveloped me, skin like honey, smelling faintly of milk. "Esmee Al-Hamm, hal tatakallamu alloghah alarabiah?" she paused, as if expecting a reply. "No?" she continued in English "very well, allow me to introduce myself, I am Al-Hamm." she shifted in my lap and I realised that she weighed next to nothing.
"I represent the ghost of all your regrets, all of the mistakes that you continue to dwell upon years after the event and outcomes have been consigned away to history, the experiences you retain and allow to define you as you are now."
"You blame so much on the past and your upbringing, your parents divorce and spending the holidays torn between the affections of two families who just wanted you to be happy" she gave me a smile before finishing, "just remember that it was never your fault" and with that she kissed me on the forehead and left.
A short while later, having accepted the preposterous nature of the evening I was settling in with a book by Oscar Wilde.
"Either the wallpaper goes, or I do" said the young man sitting across from me, with a thick South American accent "Its good wallpaper as wallpaper goes, and as wallpaper goes, it went" he added and affected a Grouchoesque eyebrow wiggle. I was so taken aback I forgot to even blink. "I'm Saudade" he said holding out an open hand before raising it to his nose and sticking out his tongue as he wiggled his fingers.
"Al-Hamm said you spend all your time regretting the past and I'm told you approach the future with a sense of wary trepidation, always expecting the worst so I have to ask, when do you stop to appreciate where you are and what you've got? What have you got to feel miserable about? In the words of H.H. Munro, you've simply got a highly developed instinct for being unhappy. Cheer up kid, it might never happen" and like an acrobatic harlequin he cart wheeled out of the room.
It had gotten very late by this point but I found myself unable to sleep, knowing that one more visitor had been foretold before the eventual ordeal would be over. As I lay there though I began to speak to myself.
"Can you taste that? Can you sense the self-destructive unfulfillment that you allow yourself to endure? Sehnsucht, my dear boy. As intangible and indescribable as abstraction itself. You have no understanding of its form or function, only the potential that it represents. By your very awareness of it you enforce the impossibility of ever grasping it. It is the chronological opposite of nostalgia, it is foreboding of uncertainty. Know now that you will live a long time and never be able to pin it down, so just let it go."
That said I drifted into a peaceful sleep and dreamt of my childhood. The sounds of Johnny Cash drifted out from the kitchen as I played in the yard and Raymond appeared at the fence, smiling. Could he join me? Of course.
Punchline
It had always been my ambition to become a comedy writer, like my hero Antoine Horchner, the famous comedian. I admired his ability to take irreverent daily commentary and turn it into surrealist visual poetry, leading us through aural paths and tunnels and dodging the obvious punch lines for ones that blindsided you one after another as the stage show culminated in raucous laughter.
When I started my new job I discovered soon afterwards that one of my colleagues was the webmaster of Antoine's website and I spent ages devising some way of dropping the perfect joke into his lap so that he might mention it to Antoine, credit me with it and maybe I could follow in the footsteps of my idol. Eventually I told him one I had crafted over several months, involving a teaspoon, an escaped panther and a chauffeur wearing lingerie under his suit. It would take too long to write it out fully here, but understand that this had nuance and subtext and timing and everything a good anecdote requires.
"Tell me that one again" Sergio said and took notes second time around. I felt certain that it would make its way to Antoine now. Sure enough Sergio came looking for me a week later. Did I have any more? "Lots!" I lied. Sergio handed me a card with an address and a phone number but no name on it.
I called the number that night and immediately recognised the voice of Antoine Horchner on the other end of the line. He sounded weary and hung over although it was only seven in the evening but that didn't stop him from inviting me round for drinks. I spent half an hour in the street outside his house just psyching myself up.
"I'm really one of your greatest fans" I extolled when he opened the door, ashen faced, holding a cigarette and shuffling along in his slippers. I got a distinct Krusty the Clown vibe from him but tried to suppress it, this was Antoine Horchner in person after all, the man who tears apart religion on stage between parables about furry animals, who does the best impersonations of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry arguing with Bambi about gun control, and can break out into songs with words that sound like they should be rude but really aren't.
"Come on in, we'll get you started" he said and motioned for me to follow him down the hall. We passed a dining room, a living room, a guest bedroom before we arrived at the library. Inside were three other people, all a little older than me.
"This is Kate, Richard and Dan. Kate writes the religious animal stuff, Dick works out the impersonations and Dan rhymes all my songs up for me. Guys this is D, he'll be writing stuff about cross-dressing chauffeurs being attacked by escaped animals for silverware for the next show. Show him where the coffee is and try and keep the noise down."
Meander
She swallows a handful of pills and chases it all down with what could have been Diet Coke, could have been Pepsi, in fact it was probably Coke Zero, we just started buying that stuff because I'm supposed to be losing some weight ever since my mother... oh, wait, yes, back to her.
There's a shiver as she tips her head back like that scene in Leon when Gary Oldman does that Beathoven/Mozart scene and shoots the family up with a Mossberg pump-action shotgun, and isn't it creepy that I recognised it as a Mossberg? I mean seriously, who even notices that stuff? Could have been something alcoholic now that I think about it. The drink I mean. Anyway.
"What are those for?" I ask without really looking up from my Superman comic. What? Richard Donner's writing them these days. You know what, fuck you, you probably liked the second movie just fine with all the slapstick bullshit and the guy on roller skates being blown backwards. Whatever. No, wait, it was Batman, the Grant Morrison stuff about Son Of Batman, talk about retconning, more like reader conning. Although how cool would it be to be Bruce Wayne's son?
"They're just pills for something. Medical stuff" she replies in that typically female way of doing something blatantly within your eyeline and then trying to act all coy and see if you really do care. Its like a test and if you fail it then a little part of her heart dies to you and if you ever drop below 60% its argument time and if you ever drop below 30% then God help you, get a blood transfusion on standby. What were the odds of my girlfriend and I both being A negative? Course she weighs like half what I weigh so we have to hope that she's in the accident and not me, I can spare a few pints for her but she'd end up looking like a Californian raisin if she had to return the favor.
"Come on, what're they for? If you're sick I really should know" because it never hurts to show you care. Those people who say its just as much effort to be nasty as it is to be nice must be pretty naive cause I tell you sarcasm is a default setting in my genetic structure followed closely by assholish comments and maybe some scathing irony before we even get to 'nice hair' or 'have you lost weight?' Plus its usually more fun to be cruel. If people reciprocated your niceties and actually appeared genuine then maybe it would be more worth it, its easier to read disappointment and offence in people than it is to have them feel you actually meant what you said.
"I was diagnosed with mild Attention Deficit Dis..." but by that point I'd stopped listening and already gone back to my comic book. It was definitely Coke Zero. I could just go for some of that right now.
El Lector
Cecilia fanned herself with the newspaper for a few seconds, tilting her head away so that the light breeze flowed over her taut neck and down into her cleavage. She felt the tickle of errant hairs as they danced against her shoulder blades before they settled against her lithe almond skin. Garcia was watching her intently, she could tell out of the corner of her eye. He would pretend to have been watching because of the movement of the paper, but she knew his eyes were caressing and undressing her slowly.
Putting the paper down again she slid the long white cotton skirt she wore up over here knees, and drew the hem all the way along the top of her right thigh, tucking it into the waist band. The material fell in swathes to her side and between her open legs and she extended her slender naked leg outwards, putting her foot onto the small wooden stool before her.
Picking out some filler tobacco she pinched it into a mass as thick as her own thumb and started to roll the binder leaf around it. As the youngest torcedora in the room Garcia had ensured that she was always sat in the front row where he would watch her from his chair as he read to the assembled women. Cecilia liked to close her eyes as she rolled the cigar along her thighs, listening to the deep tones of his voice as he read to her. With her eyes closed she could imagine that they were alone, and the feelings that pulsated through her as the tobacco was rolled back and forth always left her tingling.
She longed to discover what it would be like to sleep with a man, any man, but the factory owner, Sebastian de Rivera, insisted on perpetuating the myth that his cigars were genuinely rolled on the thighs of virgins. The entire staff save Cecilia were a gaggle of women mostly in their thirties and forties, none of whom had ever known the company of a man intimately and all had a severe addiction to smoking. Garcia was the owner's son, a strapping young man in his mid twenties who only agreed to work as a Lectore de Tabaqueres because of Cecilia.
Garcia faced a dilemma though because yesterday he had run out of books to read to the women. There were no new Zola, Cervantes, Verne, Hugo or Marx left to read and in desperation he had raided his mother's shelves. He reached for the first book as he watched Cecilia adding the wrapper leaf and smearing the tasteless vegetable gum that would secure the whole phallic symbol together before she added the branded ring to it.
"He descubierto una nueva autora" he announced to the women and opened the book "Jackie Collins, El mundo esta lleno de hombres casados"
Before the end of the day the factory was in flames, most of the women had scattered throughout the city and were now useless to Sebastian de Rivera and Garcia and Cecilia had eloped to Anguilla.
Disorderly Conduct
I sat staring at my dinner, inconsolable. My wife seemed worried that I was uncommunicative and unresponsive so she left the room to make a quick phone call. She was well aware that in the winter months I would frequently succumb to bouts of depression and lose my appetite and she tried to combat this by preparing some of the most delectable meals any man could hope to eat. But I couldn't.
"I've called a Ruminator. He'll be here shortly" my wife announced and even started to cut the steak up into small squares. Skewering one piece on the slender tines of my fork she lifted the mote of meat to my lips. I shook my head, refusing to open.
There was a knock at the door and my wife leapt up to answer it. A man walked into the room with a small toolbox and he stood beside me, peering down at me.
"Hmmm, yes, and you say he's got no appetite?" my wife nodded in response.
The Ruminator took the fork and sampled the steak. It had been prepared in a succulent garlic and lemon rub and cooked medium, lovingly tenderised beforehand. He cut himself a much larger piece and wolfed it down, making appreciative noises that I ignored in abject dejection. He then opened the small toolbox he had brought with him and removed a salt shaker, adding some low sodium salt to the green beans and eating those as well. The horseradish mash that my wife has spent years perfecting followed soon after.
When he had finished, the Ruminator asked for a minute and sat at the table quietly. His stomach gurgled.
"Do you think you can help him?" asked my wife after a while. The Ruminator simply lifted one hand to silence her.
"Ma'am, it's my job to help those who can't even break their holiday funk and bring themselves to enjoy such a delicious meal as that was. After all, our company motto is we chew, you swallow. With that, he leaned over the table close enough to kiss me, pinched my nose, drawing my head back and my mouth open, and prepared to regurgitate.
Misappropriation
The swish of her skirt as she pivots left and right, wriggling on the spot as if her feet were nailed to the floor in her glorious shoes. Her eyes scan the room beyond me, checking who is watching and who is engrossed in another conversation and who sees her with me. I can smell warm maple syrup and hear Goldfrapp and her eyes sparkle as she looks up at me.
"These are the sort of situations where you want to have witty dialogue that we can both write about later. Ask me if I'm flirting with you."
"Would you like to flirt with me?" I respond instead.
"No, ask me, and then I say 'would you like me to..' oh, very good."
"Yes, I've seen The Graduate too. How about something more original?"
"What have you got?"
The walls are a miasma of stains and cracks, elaborately filled with crystal growths and arranged in such a way that the structure's immediate dilapidation actually turns out to be carefully crafted. The setting feels surreally fake, as does the conversation.
"I have a theory, regarding machines with moving parts."
She takes a sip of her wine and continues to vacillate left and right; "I would like to hear your theory" she says and takes another sip.
"The difficulty in understanding any machine is knowing all of the moving parts and what can go wrong and why. And the problem with someone like you is that you won't stop moving. You're like a will-'o-wisp constantly evading and dodging and keeping the focus of the eye on you."
She pauses for a moment, considers the theory and then shrugs.
"I just need to go pee" she says at last.
"How very witty" I reply.
Slice of Life
He looked at the single remaining slice underneath the glass bell, sitting on the stand on the window sill. The stand lifted the cake up and away from the sill on a slender neck. The glass was crystal clear and always rang with a satisfying tone whenever he lifted it. He'd already lifted it seven times since receiving the lemon meringue tart. He had been thinking about lifting it one final time and polishing off the last of the tart when the phone rang.
His mother had died. That morning, in her kitchen. A sudden stroke brought about by an aggravated heart condition. The paramedics were sure she was dead before she hit the floor.
No more lemon meringue tarts sent through the mail, carefully wrapped in a reinforced box to be placed beneath the glass bubble of the cake stand she'd given him when he moved out. This was the final slice and there would never be another like it.
How long would it keep in the airtight bell? Would the sugar and ingredients she used keep for days, weeks, months? Eventually it would go stale, despite his best attempts to preserve it. Nobody knew how to make lemon meringue like his mother.
Perhaps he could have it analysed in a forensic laboratory where they would work out with chemical precision what the mystery ingredients were, what the proportions were, how she mixed, how she folded, how she had created such perfection. But it wouldn't be the same, they'd have demystified the whole thing and broken it down with cold calculation, removing any love or enthusiasm, any feeling whatsoever.
He stared at the slice, marvelling at the canary yellow lemon filling, the browned peaks and snow white troughs of the meringue and the crumbs of the biscuit base scattered around it. Through the crystal it seemed that it could exist forever, untouched, uneaten and it would always taste as good as he remembered it. But he knew it couldn't; eventually he'd have to eat it, eventually he'd have to say goodbye.
Returns
The first we knew anyone was even in the flat was when a small metal cylinder rolled into the room. It sat there for a beat before a tiny orange spark ignited at one end and thick smoke started pouring out of the canister in voluminous opaque clouds. I turned to say something to my girlfriend just as a heavy booted foot kicked the door open.
In standard two-man formation the first two soldiers burst into the room, laser sights sweeping through the acrid smoke which had caused our eyes to start watering and our throats to constrict. There was the huff and puff of men wearing gas masks and the click of metal on metal from the various knives and pistols that adorned their webbing.
Just as I stood up to protest this home invasion a dark shape swung towards the patio door and crashed through the supposedly break-proof glazing. We were showered in shards of blunt plastic glass as another two soldiers rappelled through the windows and landed hard on the carpet.
"Down! Everybody down!" screamed one of the men as he pushed a squat ugly submachine gun into our faces.
"Is that a Heckler and..." I began but a gloved hand punched me in the throat and I fell to my knees grasping at my windpipe, sucking in bitter air.
"Shut it four-eyes" said the squadron leader as one of his subordinates started pulling everything off our shelves. My girlfriend helped me down flat onto the floor where it was easier to breathe and we waited as the soldiers tore through the room, all the while being held at gunpoint.
"Ah-ha!" shouted one of the men triumphantly through his gas-mask and protective goggles. He slung his MP5 around behind him and approached the leader of the troop, holding out something we couldn't make out. The leader took the objects and hunkered down beside us.
"Naughty, naughty. These DVD rentals were due back a month ago."
I started to stammer that I was more than happy to pay the late fees but the head obscured behind polarised lenses and rebreathing apparatus like some sort of alien visitor shook solemnly.
"You should have read the small print sunshine."
Musings
Recently I've found myself thinking a lot about solipsism, which appeals to the part of me that adores irony, how its this recursive and impossible to disprove concept like an argument with someone where you both know you can't win it like it was a videogame and you both wish you'd saved just before you started the topic so you could revert back to your saved game and steer the discourse somewhere else.
This is the same part of me that dwells in schadenfreud when he sees a colleague transfer only his playlists and not his actual music tracks from an old work PC to a brand spanking new one. The old one is taken away for reformating and all he has are the lists of everything he's lost. So he hooks up his iPod to the new machine thinking that he'll be able to pull the music off his iPod onto the new machine and his fresh install of iTunes resynchs his iPod, erasing the only remaining copy of all his music.
Sometimes I wonder why I don't do this blogging thing where you address an audience and instead focus on refining fictional writing and attempts at distilling humor out of things only I seem to find funny. Like, recently I saw a nature documentary where they revealed that enough penguins in one place turns rockfaces red with their shit, and yet pigeons are confined to shitting in black and white and it appealed to me, it seemed to show that nature had this perverse sense of humor; that penguins, birds that exist in black and white, shit in color, and pigeons in their technicolor lives are stuck shitting in black and white. Nobody else thought it was funny.
I haven't made up my mind on solipsism yet. And I've decided that neither have you.
Parasomniac
We're lying in bed and I've just turned the lights off. I tell her my idea for writing a piece about losing sleep over insomnia and she laughs. Must remember that one in the morning I tell myself, but by the time I finish the thought I am already asleep.
Devastating Effect
I was minding my own business, walking to work and a van pulled up beside me. Two men in green medical scrubs rushed out and grabbed me, bundling me into the back and onto a gurney. I tried to protest that they'd arrived at the wrong accident, I was just having a bad hair day, but I was given an injection and promptly drooled all down my suit.
When I came to and eventually remembered that my name was not Victor Eugene Crispin and that my favorite color was not in fact Blum I tried to get out of the hospital bed and discovered heavy restraints prevented me from leaving. I tugged at them ineffectively and lay back on the crisp white starched pillow, ignoring the drool puddle. In my mind I ran through the sequence in Terminator 2 where Sarah Connor escapes. I needed a paperclip.
After a few minutes of fruitlessly searching the immediate surrounding mattress and sheet I discovered no errant paperclips or convenient restraint keys or cutting tools. Everything was blunt and fluffy; a bit like me.
"Don't fight it, bru" said a voice from the next bed, the silhouette was obscured by an opaque curtain between us "there's no escape. You're in here until you hurt yourself."
"Don't you mean so that I don't hurt myself?" I replied, but the silhouette shook its head.
"You'll see"
I resumed my search for lock picks; at least it was keeping my mind occupied.
A few hours later, after night had fallen, I had picked the stitching of the mattress and worked part of one of the individually wrapped springs free. Twisting it this way and that I broke off a large enough piece of wire to jab into the lock and twiddle it around a bit pretending I knew what I was doing. In a convenient piece of plotting the lock sprang free and I was able to undo the rest of my restraints. A quick survey of the ward showed that there were maybe twenty beds, all occupied. A glance at each chart confirmed that there was absolutely nothing wrong with any of us though; every last patient was perfectly healthy.
I headed for the exit. The sign above the door said Casualty, but I did a double take and read it again; not Casualty, but Causality. As I stood there trying to work out what a Causality Ward was an orderly and a nurse appeared further down the corridor.
"Stop right there!" barked the nurse and the orderly moved into a tackling stance. "No, we can't risk injuring him" she hissed and the orderly instead brought out a small dose of painkillers and tranqs.
"What's going on here, why am I being held against my will?"
"Now, now, back to bed with you, nice soft safe bed. Give him the pills" she added and the orderly approaching menacingly.
I backed up and slipped, tumbling backwards and landing awkwardly on my arm, promptly snapping the ulna. I screaming in pain and gratefully accepted the proffered pills but the nurse was now even more furious.
"Damn it, he injured himself, despite our best efforts to avoid it. Take him to Casualty."
We'll Make Great Pets
When I was nine years old I went exploring at the bottom of my Aunt Elizabeth's garden and found a gap in the hedge that led to an overgrown path that I followed. I reasoned that as the gap in the hedge opened onto Aunt Elizabeth's garden I hadn't actually left the garden, as I had promised and that I was merely exploring an extension of the garden.
At the end of the path was a plateau. It wasn't exactly an insurmountable sheer cliff-face, more a tectonic hiccup, and I scaled the side with a creeper that hung down from a gnarled and exotic overhanging tree. Once upon the plateau I looked around in wonderment; I had discovered a lush and tropical jungle teeming with life.
As I stood up to my ankles in a puddle of blue clay a herd of phosphorescent pygmy bovinodons scampered past, chased by a hungry snosodile who slithered across the clay. I looked upwards and saw wheelie-birds circling overhead. The air was filled with the chirrup and song of cochinoctopi. One buzzed past me and I ducked as its eight dragonfly-like wings propelled it into the sky.
A small Zamboceros approached me, snuffling through the undergrowth, searching for food and I brought out a Penguin chocolate biscuit and removed the wrapper for it. The Zamboceros mewled and ate it quickly in two bites, but scampered off in fright at the dull thud of an approaching predator.
The canopy above me parted and I was peered down upon by a real life Acerbiasaurus Rex, I kid you not. What did I do? I ran of course! I ran until I reached the tree and I slid down that creeper and all the way back up the path and through the gap in the hedge and up the garden until I was at the back door. Aunt Elizabeth wouldn't let me in until I had taken my shoes off so I sat on the steps and knocked the blue clay from my shoes as I took them off. I heard a mewl and there was the Zamboceros; it had followed me home.
I asked Aunt Elizabeth if we could keep it but she said no. She got me a goldfish instead, the bitch.
Typical
When the end of the world was announced I was stuck in traffic. Had I left the house maybe thirty minutes later I would have been able to turn the car around and head home again, instead I was surrounded on all sides by other cars like that REM video.
The radio announcer broke in halfway through Morrisey and stuttered at first.
"F... F... Folks" he started, and nobody says folks these days, "I've been handed an announcement..." he then went on to explain that this was not an Orson Welles style radio hoax, that it was being broadcast on all TV channels and posted on all news sites. Even the emergency band was reporting it. Some technobabble about a doomsday device left over from the Cold war that a trigger-happy idiot had gone and activated. We had thirty minutes. The announcer signed off saying he'd leave us with the ten best Stones songs and he was going to try and get to his wife and kids with what little time he had left.
I rolled down the passenger window and shouted across to the guy in the next car. He seemed to be listening to music from a dash-mounted iPod dock. He ignored me, so I got out of my car and lit a cigarette from the glovebox. Marcie didn't know I still kept a pack in there.
"Can I get one of those?" said a girl, she looked half my age and was wearing denim cutoffs and a baby-t that had eighties cartoon characters garishly emblazoned across her perky breasts.I handed her the pack and leaned in close to light her. She smelled of vanilla.
"You think its for real?" she asked and I nodded solemly. Somehow it felt right; the human race wiping itself out through random stupidity and obsolete defense doctrine.
I sat on the hood of my car and felt it cave in slightly, but I didn't care. She sat next to me, her fingers shaking as she took long drags on the cigarette.
"We could go fuck in the back of my car. No way I'll get home to my boyfriend in time."
I considered it for a minute and in the fraction of a second when I blinked, I saw her behind my eyes; young, vital, welcoming, with soft unblemished skin. We would be urged on by a sense of impending finality, both rushing our own bodies to climax, using one another merely as the means to an end. There would be no need to woo her or call her in the morning, no time for guilt afterwards. Everything gone in the blink of an eye.
"I think I'm just going to sit here and wait for it to happen. That guy over there won't turn you down though." I said as I jerked my thumb over to the iPod guy in the next car. Because as tempted as I was, there was always a chance that the radio had got it wrong.