(published 2003)
It amazes how time blasts along. This book, at one time, a Great New Thing, a Booker Prize winner, now celebrates its twenty-third birthday.
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Category: Short Fiction
Week 590 – ‘A Scottish Soldier Is Worse’, ‘Perfect Skin’ Is As Good And A Happy Century!!!
Week 590 has crept up on us.
I am writing this before Scotland’s last group game at The World Cup. They began well with a win over Haiti. Let’s just say that the game with Morocco didn’t go so well. After seventy seconds, the whole of Scotland screamed ‘Awwwwwww FUCK!!!!!’
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Dirty Glass by Hugh Cron – Adult Content
“Dirty glass…Fuck!”
…The first time that Martin had really focused on a dirty glass was decades back, in another one of his lifetimes. He’d had a few lifetimes and each had caused him a different level of grief.
Martin thought back to that morning at 8.00am, when he had been told that he had to check on a property. He found that depressing, fuck all was said about checking on the resident, no, he had to check on the property.
He pulled up beside the row of Maisonettes and sighed as he saw that the main entrance door was hanging off its hinges. He headed into the building. It always made him laugh that this was a building that you had to go inside, to go upstairs, to then go outside to get to the front door. He rattled the door. He could hear some mumbling and drunken giggles, “I hope that’s a lovely lady with nice tits!!”
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Sunday Whatever – Njal the Beardless, Life Coach by Michael Bloor
A piece that didn’t fit neatly into any category and yet was just too good to let to. So, a Sunday Treat from long time friend of the site Michael Bloor. Check out his back catalogue, it’s impressive.
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Week 589: Blessed Benedictines and Bad Celery
We should keep the past closer than we do our enemies. There is much ago worth remembering, and not just in what George Santayana had to say.
For example, nearly a hundred years ago, the great Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) penned a bit of advice that, upon my finding it some seven decades down the road, has stayed with me and is one of the few guide stars in my life (I live in one of the cloudiest places in the world, so my guide stars are often metaphorical and/or flat out imaginary). Regardless, in her “Constant Reader” book review column, published by the New Yorker on Saturday, 28 January 1928 Mrs. Parker wisely warned readers against the perils of assumedly healthy eating and at the same time averred a particular form of hydration that has always been superior to simple and extremely boring H2O. (As it goes with natural items found in abundance, drinking water when choices are plentiful is as dull as dentist office decor.)
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Nickel by Steve Eckroad
“I’ll flip with you for who gets to do the spacewalk.” Jonar affected nonchalance as he and Mirth entered the lift labeled South Maintenance Bay #14. Mirth was planet-born. She didn’t even notice the oddity of such terrestrial words as ‘South’ stenciled on the passageways and lifts of a rotating space station. Jonar wondered if she had somehow converted her picture of the complex decks, lifts, and corridors of the giant, wheel-shaped stargate into Cartesian coordinates in her mind. To the station-born, like himself, such terms were complete nonsense. The designers of the Pleiades SuperTelpher should have used terms like out/in and spinward/anti-spinward. So obvious for something spinning in space.
“Huh?” Mirth looked up from her tablet where she was furiously directing her Avatar to beat Solo to the Emerald Cave where the spice minerals were found. She mentally gestured ‘Pause’ to the VR and asked, “What do you mean, flip with me? If you think that’s a new way to get what you want I’m not going for it. You might as well give up, Jonar.” She turned back to her tablet, wishing she had the implant version of the game so she wouldn’t have to hold something. But it was expensive, and she was still paying off her school loan.
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Week 588 – Has America Enough Tennents? You’ll Need More…Seriously, Import more!!!
Well here we are at Week 588.
I was going out on Tuesday to a swanky restaurant and I thought about wearing a tie. Not just a tie, I’ve been in trouble for doing that before. I realised that apart from weddings and funerals, I only think about wearing a tie but never do. I think a tie is smart. I have quite a few. I’ve lost three stunning black ones due to loaning them to people for funerals.
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Simply Sinsational by Leila Allison
After eating, drinking and making more of themselves, Raccoons live to roller derby. It comes naturally. You don’t need to use magick to make them like it. Just bring a pack of Raccoons to a roller derby track, supply a generous heaping of beer and snacks, place Rachel Welch’s brilliant Kansas City Bomber on the dvd and the critters know immediately what to do without spell casting or even training.
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Literally Reruns: The Child of Smoke by Alex Sinclaire
Alex Sinclaire is a brilliant writer on the subject of darkness. No matter how dire the hell he takes the reader through, you never want to go back even though that feels like the safer plan of action.
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Week 587: Sometimes it Helps to Hear Another Voice
(Elliott the Pigeon is on Vacation this week; Daisy Kloverleaf and her brother Fenwick are the header stars. Daisy is on your left)
One of life’s burdens involves processing repetition. Some people are sensitive to it, others meet it with the awareness of a cantaloupe. I am not always smarter than produce, but I have a keen sense for repetition. Therefore I know that the eternal concepts of Good and Bad dictate the perception of welcomed and unwanted repetition. A woman who keeps peeling off twenties is obviously a good thing to have repeated at you, but unless she is gaining something worth it the peeler may have different feelings in her cold little heart–that emotional storage bin that imploded eons ago and is so compressed into inner dimensions that it takes three journeys through as many event horizons just to reach the outskirts of her kindness. You may assume that she, the peeler, has developed a sense of negativity for the old “again and again.”
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literally stories 