Thought I’d practice some dialogue. It began as a 100-worder and grew. I quite like these three characters, might work on them some more. Strong language.
I hover on the pavement, waiting for my new workmates to follow me out of the building. Home is left, but I think Amy goes right. I point right.
He checks the clock. 2.34am.
He listens to the rolling tide of her breathing, and sighs. His bedside clock ticks. The boiler stirs briefly, whirring for a few seconds before clicking off into silence.
It was very realistic. It reminded him at first of that McEwan novel. James had been off chasing Pokemon, yet in the sickening thirty seconds between lost and found, Adam found wonder in the brutal clarity of horror
Fifteen minutes after turning out my light, Dad is back in my room. I simulate the breathing pattern of a sleeping child as he lies down next to me and puts his hand on my back.
She smiles apologetically when they meet in the communal hallway each morning.
‘Sorry about the noise,’ she’d said when they first met, her son lurking behind a haircut in the doorway. ‘It’s my thing.’
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.
I kick lazily at the dead leaves and wait for them to file past and offer one last condolence before drifting back to unchanged lives.
The next day: Ring ring. Dad picks up.
We’re watching that fat nanny film.
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.
We skip Geography, race to the cliffs and dance incoherent patterns on the roof of a World War Two pillbox. Harry pulls his trousers down and pees over the cliff edge until the wind blows it back onto his legs and the three of us collapse in laughter.
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.
‘Truman, you can’t expect a crushed child on your watch to go without consequences.’
Derek Granger stands up, gulps down his Coke and burps. I stare out the window at the July snow.
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.’
After more than two weeks of 50-word stories, I thought I’d combine a couple to expand into a longer piece.
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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Just Punch The Clock 