Ink - Flash Fiction

Ink had become a rare commodity. As precious in value as pearls. With e-readers, the market wouldn't sustain for continued ink manufacture, while trees were being preserved through the lack of demand for paper. As alternatives, squid and octopi proved a short-term fill-in, but we'd hunted and fished them to extinction, just as we had with oysters.

E-reader titles were produced by computer programmes, Linguistic algorithms and rapid speed digital analysis of word and plot patterns in best sellers churned out the next big thing. Human authors were nearing the endangered status of the humble biro pen. Yet they still resisted, still sought to publish their writing wares. Samizdat made a comeback, mainly written in charcoal from barbecue briquettes. which made its publication rather seasonal in the Northern Hemisphere. If you were caught asking for barbecue stuff in winter, you could be arrested. Some authors shortcut the whole process and composed in their own blood and other bodily fluids, despite the disreputable echoes with certain performance art of the previous century. They wrote on toilet paper which tore easily beneath even their blunted nibs.

In time even toilet paper disappeared from circulation. Authors took to writing on stones and pebbles. returning to the prehistoric dawn of art. They took to the forests where they could forge their own supply of charcoal by burning wood. They decided to further reach back and commune with their ancient brethren, and took to caves. They cast stencils of the alphabet and then holding them against the rock to spell the words they were compounding, they chewed charcoal and breathed its fine powder over the stencil to form the text. Their very breath giving life to and preserving their art. Their expression. Samizdat was eclipsed for artefact and unlike the memory capacity of e-readers which demanded periodic purges, these books remained permanently in print.

Breathless - Friday Flash

He removed the cigarette resting behind his ear and held it to the burning tip of the one still perched between his lips until the flame took whereupon he swapped them round and let the dog end pitch to the ground as he moved to stamp out the embers of its life but since his attention was given to ensuring the new smoke was securely in place his stomp missed the butt entirely which he became acquainted with as he looked down and proceeded to pound the feebly pluming fag end which, were his foot a hand and his shoe a knife, could be observed to be a stabbing frenzy which utterly reflected his mood and temper at that moment to his very fibre as his cells cried out to be nourished so that the butt stood for his meet who was late and was being severely punished for it under the tread of his shoe, but his fury was cut off since in his furore his breath was so abated behind lips clamped on the new gasper to prevent it falling out of his mouth, that the fumes backed up into his gullet and caused him to explode in a paroxysm of coughing which sent the cigarette shooting from his mouth like a dart from a blowpipe which doubly enraged him and saw him unwittingly jack-knife his body as his leg continued to try and obliterate every last trace of the first stub, while his outstretched arm strived to salvage his newer coffin nail so that the differing pulls toppled him over on to the pavement and knocked the wind out of him as he lay there on his stomach panting and wheezing his wordless rage even as the tears of frustration and desperate craving unleashed themselves from their ducts like a crack parachute division exiting their jump plane.

“You wanna give those up, they’ll kill you” said a man approaching him on the pavement. “Looks like you’re out of puff” as he tossed him a little bag of powder. "That'll put the wind back in your sails".