How will we know when we’ve got it all wrong?

Stories of 50 words. Not 49. Not 51. 50 words.
How will we know when we’ve got it all wrong?
‘She’s chatting shit mate, she loves you.’
‘I ain’t chatting shit, it’s over.’
‘She is chatting shit.’
‘I ain’t chatting shit. I’m movin’ on.’
His blue blazer confirms he is a Soldier of Christ, boarding the 139 to Waterloo. He stays downstairs – those upstairs already condemned
HelloSteve.IknowJanetischeatingonmewithyouandyouusemydesktofoolaroundoneverynightandIknowyoualllaughatme.
Wednesday night is party night and it’s my turn to bring the music. He usually staggers in about 11.
Steve arrives at the polling station without a placard.
What good is that? I say.
Moral support, he says.
But no one knows you’re here.
George carefully mops up the remaining bean juice with his last bit of sausage.
‘Did you know,’ he says, stabbing the food into his mouth, ‘Franklin Roosevelt won a silver medal in the Peru Olympics in 1891?’
Someone in my dictionary is up to no good. Words slip, slide; old truths melt away as new ones emerge, dark and glutinous, always just out of reach.
We watch children mourn their futile endeavour as the tide engulfs their sandcastles. Ellie lies with me as the water laps at our feet and we find his ghost in the clouds.
We find shelter from The Horde in the old courthouse.
Casey marvels at the cornicing, the domed ceiling, the utilitarian furniture.
That’s not really how it works.
No?
You can’t really rob a spa.
Gavin put the gun in her mouth.
I want a free massage. Now.
How can a violin be haunted, I said. Maybe it’s got a ghost living inside it, like a little mouse, he said.
Before The Contamination my job was much easier. I’d never complain, of course, but stopping Outcasts from scaling a 188-foot waterfall to flee has been tough since they drained Lake Erie.
Bulgaria was the last to fall. They even had hotel bellboys, for fuck’s sake.
Robert knows too much. At first light, I run the bath, yank out his Pain Threshold chip and throw him in the water.
‘You can’t expect a crushed child on your watch to go without consequences.’
If you are interviewing grieving parents in their cramped Victorian living room, try not to knock a photo of their dead teenage daughter off the mantelpiece.
The vacuum whine woke him every morning.
She met him once in the communal hallway to apologise, her son lingering behind a haircut.
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