Bleed For Me - Flash Fiction

Cascading blood occludes his wound from my gaze

Scrabbling with my hands to excavate the crimson glaze

Two ring fingers stumble into the crevice of the gash

Now it’s my very own flesh veiling the slash

I bring the bloodstained tips up to my lips

Flick out my tongue like a skittish thrips

Wincing at the cupric sting salted mix 

Elliptical drips floor splash sero-eclipsed

The weep has ceased

His soul finally released

I rake his trunk up to my breast

Clench him fiercely against my chest

The glutting blood abutting my chemise

Blotting an etched scarlet frieze by degrees

Singularly my overhanging cornice so engraved

My navel neath twin promontories unscathed

I demand to match the exact contours of your wound

Attune you to see why my blade had you harpooned

How very dare you withhold your pain self-seeking
Matching weddings rings demand we share everything

Manichean Synchronicity - Flash Fiction

The jeroboam smashed into the hull, signalling the liner’s launch ~ as the pub brawler wielded a jagged broken bottle to slash his foe’s face.

The HiFi was playing Mongolian overtone singing ~ as the lover’s fingers snapped the hyoid bone in her throat.

The sculptor’s chisel released the form that was inside his imagination from the marble ~ as the prisoner plunged a self-fashioned blade into another man’s gut.

The dignitary pulled on the sash to part the drapes so revealing the painting ~ as the burglar tightened the curtain tie around the homeowner’s jugular.

The mayor cut the ribbon to declare the arts centre open ~ as the barren woman drove the scissors into her rival’s pregnant belly.

She laid the final rocks in the Zen garden ~ as the crowd pelted the adulterer with stones in the public square.

The farmer was handed a machete by his field labourers for symbolically reaping the final sugar cane of the crop ~ as the genocidal slaughter was propelled by machete wielding militias.

William Burroughs shot paint tins to Jackson Pollock his canvases, (not his best work) ~ as the gambler shot fifty-eight concert-goers in Sin City

Always Date A Nail Biter (Never A Bed Wetter) - Flash Fiction

Three and a half minutes to soft boil an egg. Less if you’re at altitude because of the thinner air. Then you have to open it up to get at the nutritious albumen. A spoon or knife to trepan the shell, but then it’s filagree finger work to peel away the brown calcite shards. Tough to do if you’re a nail biter rather than a bed wetter. I reckon he’s both.

A minute and a half to hard boil a man’s brain. Like at altitude, the oxygen gets thinner until he passes out. With your hands around the carotid arteries, the brain in his stupid ovoid shaped head will seethe and boil. He will grab at your hands in a desperate bid to free his airways. But because he’s an onychophagist, he causes you no pain since he has no acuminated keratin to pierce the surface of your skin. Same way he could never peel away a cracked egg shell. Bitten to the quick for a real slow death. Not only is he unlikely to scrape any implicating DNA material from you, even if he did, there’s no finger nails to lodge it under for safe keeping and later forensic reconstruction.

So much easier than drowning the bed wetters in a bath tub.  

Murder App - Flash Fiction

The assassin’s paymasters had paid other masters of their trade to piggyback the software. The geosocial sex app now became the locus of a most decidedly unsocial hook-up; La petite mort supplanted by la grande mort. That final great big kiss off. A lust for life terminating in its extinction. The lovelorn, the unfaithful and the promiscuous, formed the largest pool for her to locate her designated targets. On any evening, it was only a question of time before the right matching profile loomed into her focus. The lamb for slaughter gambolling right up into her lupine claws. Of course her own (faked) love profile was out there in the ether along murder mile and occasionally people wandered up to engage her. But one glower from her murderous countenance was enough to make them scoot on past. The only protection against this Trojan Horse was chastity. But the names that got on the paymasters’ list were not there because they were exemplary citizens. 

Lull-a-by-Baby

Nursey Nursey bring me your boxy teat

For I crave a proxy milk treat

Of course my surrogate little one

And then off to sleep with you and all done

Oh no Nursey for I like to watch and see

The light come together in embrace over me

I am afeared of the solid shadows of some

Who would eclipse me, unless one be my mum

Your mamma is like you confined abed

Unlike yours we have a name for her dread

Beware no monsters coming in the night

For you arrived during the day full bright

Having eaten her out as full blight

When she popped you into the light

You swallowed the key to lock her caramel brown

Swiped the bung to tamp her blood back down

Is that why her soft pillows cannot give suck?

They smelled divine when I was first laid there

Not like the brack brew from your slack old sacs

How do you lactate when you lack for an heir?

Oh sweet child for someone so choosy

You surely fierce sup me bluesy

You really must lay back your head

I’ll lullaby you full comforted

Sing you a song to row you safely across

Morpheus’ fosse until we recover Helios

Your rhythms cert seem soothing

But your cadence I glean to be reproving

Besides I’ll do no such thing as yield

The dying of the light and my mother unhealed

It will take more reassurance

Than the filched milk of a fireside milch

Such as a nanny goat can provide

My nostrils filled with the reek of sulphide 

Your rotten eggs and brimstone sap

I yearn only to nestle in my mother’s lap

I’ll fire you a tallow to calm your forebodings

Though a flickering wick brings qualms anew

No more nocturnal comings and goings

Goodnight my sweetpea, adieu

Ha the candle affords me still sight

A shaft of flame peeling back the night

No terrors can remain concealed

I espy Nursey yonder in our field

What could she be doing the old witch?

Some midnight herbs to treat her twitch?

Good morning Nursey what a fine dawn

Your look tired, your face all drawn

What were you up to after last vespers?

Saints preserve me with continued willpower

Forever putting me through the wringer with your pesters

So I’ll tell you my little bloomer

For just why I was out under the lunar

With pruning knife I threshed fresh flowers

Are they to adorn my mother’s grave?

Why would you say that you rave? 

Let me feel your head for a fever

Can’t permit another to fall to the reaper

Then take me to drink in their pretty colours

Affirm giddily to possess fitting lustres

To lift the spirits of my ailing mother

Belladonna and poisonous milkweed I’ll wager

The only venomous thing is your lips

Clamped on my bruised and bloodied breast

Squeezing for dear life until the squeak of pips

I don’t believe you, for all the blood and the rest

I venture you infused her with tainted tincture

Under the cloak of her childbirth strictures

Just long enough for her to linger 

Before you apply the fatal cincture

Are your mammaries laced with bane?

Also to carry me off mad with pain?

So you can have my father all alone

Blind with grief stumbling into the arms of a crone

Nursey Nursey wants to play housey housey

Her plan all sown to acquire the throne
Now I know how a never gravid makes milk
My father all trussed up in your spider's silk
Strokes and dandles your udders rancid
Fomenting just like an ant palpates the aphid

Stem Cell - Friday Flash

He was going stir crazy here. Which was odd since this hotel room was infinitely more luxurious than any jail cell he’d occupied. A double bed which was both too spongy for a spine seasoned against prison cots and which moved on its castors rather than being chained in place to the floor. The space afforded by it being ‘King-Sized’ was also fazing. A bed fit for a king, but a king currently without a realm to lord it over. He couldn’t settle either in its middle, which seemed too far from either edge for any emergency exit, while to favor clinging to one side over the other still unnerved him, as all that expanse behind left him feeling vulnerable to any shiv attack from that direction. Even turning the bed and moving it against the wall hadn’t solved that unease. 

The carpet was too plush under his feet, which entailed he had to keep his shoes on to cut out the excruciating feel of the pile against his callused flesh. The curtains were made from such a flimsy fabric, it meant too much sunlight came through the tiffany material and stopped him from sleeping, when he was used to the pure prison blackout at night. And the en suite bathroom with the fluffy robe, let’s not even begin to dissect the alienness of that set up. He supposed hotel rooms were not intended to have their guests holed up in them twenty-four seven, hence their design of punishment through sumptuousness. Frills rather than thrills. 

Yet there were some compensations. Not least the mini-fridge, though that was finite since he had banned the maid-service from entry which meant that his fridge couldn’t be restocked. Neither could he risk room service, besides his supplies of jerky and chips were holding out just fine. So he was rationing his consumption of alcohol. But it was hard man, so damn hard. He stared at the fridge door but it was early yet. 

He spun off the corner of the bed and scooped up his knife from under the pillow. He strode over to the dresser and picked up the block of wood and resumed his carving. Another habit he’d carried over from prison life, though out in the free world he was afforded a better quality of blade. Scrimshawing it was called, practised by sailors on the high seas to while away the tedium of days without any land being in sight. Those fellas were just as incarcerated as any guy with three strikes and out on his rap sheet. And they hadn’t gone into it any more willingly than cons; they’d been press-ganged by thugs, just as crims were by cops.

The wood hadn’t yet taken any firm outline to suggest what it might be in the shape of. At this juncture, it could become an image of anything. Like human stem cells. Odd name that, ‘stem’ implied it was a stopping up of something. Like stemming the blood flow. The gush. Stemming the source of a leak. The snitch. And of course the word ‘cell’, the single word that had most defined his life up until now. The cell as a unit of one, of isolation and punishment, yet here in biology just one of a huge structure built by millions of replicas. There was no uniqueness in that. He knew ‘stem’ also meant the trunk of something, the solid structure at the centre holding everything together. From which all else sprouted. He couldn’t hold both meanings of the word together in his mind. Stemming was unutterably to do with lopping off a body part. Deadheading. Pruning. 

Though unformed, the wood was definitely erring towards the human. Blockish voodoo. Though it wasn’t a conscious impulse, he knew that it was heading towards a simulacrum of his wife. He even had a lock of her hair in his wallet that he could append to the figurine if he chose. But it would be pointless since she was already dead and beyond the persecutions of sympathetic magic. Or shouldn’t it really be unsympathetic magic?

He looked at the blood red digits of the digital alarm clock by the bed. Yes at last, it was time to allow himself to crack open the fridge.  He opened the door and was aghast to see there was just a solitary miniature bottle left. Nine pins down on the bowling lane, no chance of either a strike or a spare. The label announced it was a tiny bottle of Chardonnay. Wine wasn’t really his bag, but one thing he knew was that if it came with a screw top rather than a cork, it was likely low-grade. Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers. He hesitated, for while he felt at ease pitching the spirit measures straight from the bottle down his throat, it didn’t seem quite right doing it with wine, miniature or otherwise. He retrieved a glass from the bathroom. It was meant to stow a toothbrush, but he hadn’t brought one with him. He poured the wine, its puddle barely covering the bottom of the glass. 

As he sipped the drink like a bird, he opened the tiny freezer compartment. In between the ice cube trays lay another miniature bottle, though one without recognisable label or branded shape. He removed it and held it up to the light of the window. The blood had frozen to a darkened hue. He knew the cells were all dead, for he’d not added any chemicals to remove the blood’s water content. Yeah he’d stemmed this leaky cell for good. Iced one bitch snitch that would never testify against him. His knife had wrought much more direct unsympathetic magic on her flesh. No spousal immunity for her.

He drained his glass and transferred the blood miniature from the freezer to the chill part of the fridge instead. He had one more bottle left to drink after all, then he’d hightail it from this place.

from The Masquerade Crew's prompts, Chardonnay, a hotel room and a knife

Stained Glass - Friday Flash

He stood in the centre of the church’s murk. The heavy wooden pews were empty, but he conceived the devotees kneeling there would be swathed in darkness. Only the votive candles gave any illumination. Kindling the memories of the dead in order to light the ways of the still living. And thereby keeping them plunged in gloom.

As he moved he saw he cast no shadow. No place for light and shade in this particular realm he mused. He studied the stained glass windows. The only stab of colour in a world of black or white truth. The reds and blues were heavy and thick. They absorbed all the brightness from outside and devoured it. Imagine that, windows that actually served to stop up the light. The lapis lazuli ultramarine was very pure, untainted. While the cochineal reds were smoky, full of tiny grains. The reds were mainly used for the clothes of supplicants and the headwear of women, covering up the sinful flesh. Blue was for the garb of the saints. It was crystal clear to his eye the message of the glass. Only the halos were yellow and less dense, admitting a tiny amount of light to make them glow. 

He looked up into the heart of the cupola. There the colour was in the murals, while clear glass allowed the light to stream down into the upper reaches of the church in ribbons. The dizzying heights where man could not scale and approach the face of god. They would have to content themselves with contemplating him from far below on their knees. Looking up into the divine light as insects. The architecture of power was so transparent. How could people have fallen for this? Did they really believe this to be the natural order of how matter was arranged? One step outside of the church’s heavy wooden portal would have delivered them into the blinding sunlight of summer. That should have informed them of the artificial manipulation of light and dark they had just exited.

“Let there be light” the holy writ had commanded. So he picked up a floor candelabra and swung it at the stained glass. The glass shattered with a dull tintinnabulation. Ha he thought, let these serve as a call to prayer. He continued striking at each window in turn. The light outside seemed almost tentative, as if it were unsure whether flooding in might be a trespass. This only enraged him more.

“What are you doing?” spluttered the priest who had been summoned by the bruit. The man turned to face him and struck him with the iron candelabra. The priest fell straight to the ground groaning. The man leaned down and picked up a shard of the broken glass and drove it into the priest’s neck. The holy man’s white collar began to stain red. The red against the blood was of a light hue. The man studied the glass in his hand. It was a red slither and he regarded how the man’s blood was the same shade as the dark cochineal and couldn’t be picked out against it. Just as he imagined it would be. He drove it back into the man’s jugular.

He examined his hand as it too was bleeding. He was about to bring the cut to his mouth, when he caught himself. Leaded windows and five hundred year of insect dye was probably not conducive to his future wellbeing. He smirked and moved to exit the church. As his last act of desecration, he blew out each of the votive candles. Extinction was the only indisputable truth. He turned back into the interior of the church and was delighted to see that the light had apologetically begun to flow through the broken windows and begin to lift the gloom.

*

With slides spotted with red under microscopic lenses and the DNA drawn from his blood on the glass shard recovered from the dead priest’s neck, forensic science were able to bring the man to book. This was the natural arrangement of matter. And god’s, or was it man’s, arrangement of justice.

Music Can Be Murder - songs about killing

Rock and roll lifestyle eh? It's one thing throwing a telly out of a hotel window, but the business sure is obsessed with songs about the ultimate crime, that of killing and murder. Here's 20 of the best.

1) Roberta Flak - "Killing Me Softly"
The grandmammy of them all, Roberta's purring delivery slays me every time. So sweet, there's almost no hint of the menace behind the lyrics.



2) MC 900ft Jesus - "The Killer Inside Me"
This guy was so criminally overlooked as a performer that it kills me (see what I did there?) Lots of dark undertones in his delivery have jaunty, half really sinister. Genius.



3) Talking Heads - "Psychokiller"
Can't remember if this was their debut release, but what a song to announce your arrival with. New York art-punk, with French in the lyrics just to underline the artiness of it! From when they were still you know, like good.



4) Neil Young - "Cortez The Killer"
I was never a big Neil Young fan, his voice a bit too reedy for my tastes. But plenty swear by him so I honour that. An American singing a song about imperialism, what are the chances?



5) Barrington Levy - "Murderer"
This has the uncanny feel of someone discovering a body, and screaming murderer, murderer into the air to announce it to the whole community so they come running. I love it so much, I used it in my novel "Time After Time". The French call and response audience aren't really up to the challenge!



6) 999 - "Homicide"
Another overlooked minor classic, this is a rare British example of the genre. Musically pretty sophisticated for what was essentially a punk band. Don't you just love the scratchiness of the video? Ah punk nostalgia...



7) Mekons - "Kill 1980"
Actually scrub that, as the next few show, there are plenty of British examples of the kill song genre. Post-punk-turned country-folk-punk Mekons this song saw the introduction of the violin to their line up and to good effect I can't help but feel.



8) The Cure - "Killing An Arab"
This song gets into many of my charts, as it was seminal to both my musical and literary development. An older cousin of mine suggested that I listen to this song and then read Camus' "L'Etranger" both of which I duulky did and was blown away by both. The 'cool' points at school I was initially seeking after from consuming both just no longer seemed to matter...



10) Robert Cray - "Killing Floor"
Classic blues, there are lots of versions of this from Howlin Wolf to Led Zeppelin, but most weren't live & in colour!



11) Bodycount - "Cop Killer"
Yup, that song that caused all the furore in the US. A very average bit of thrash metal, elevated to legendary status by the outrage. Will the authorities never learn? As John Lydon once sung, "Ignore it and it will go away"



12) Dead Kennedys - "Kill The Poor"
... or the other way is to do it with lashings of humour and irony. Mind you I think this still managed to upset some folks who thought the sentiments were real.



13) Angelic Upstarts - "The Murder Of Liddle Towers"
Liddle Towers was a minor professional boxing trainer who died after being arrested by the Police. Two different bands (The other being Tom Robinson Band) penned songs demanding the truth about his death to be investigated, possibly something of a record, but one of those moments when music tries to advocate for something useful.



14) Adam And The Ants - "Killer In The Home"
When Adam Ant suddenly hit on the formula for chart success in both music and look, this song was the only one from that period that I actually liked. Mind you he still slipped in one of his trademark pirate/red Indian/highwayman references in that trite way of his.



15) Carter USM - Midnight On The Murder Mile
For a duo, this band sure made a racket. They signed my copy of their album when they did a set in the record shop I was working in. Since all their songs were paeans to South London, I asked them to sign it 'to a North Londoner'. Nice chaps.



16) Muse - Assassin
The idea of Muse being angry enough to kill anyone makes me snort! Still, fair song musically.



17) John Lee Hooker - I'm Gonna Kill That woman
... unlike blues singers who you entirely believe they're capable of murder. Awesome. One of the few songs Nick Cave hasn't been able to do justice to in his cover versions.



18) The Bug - "Murder We"
Lots of The Bug's songs are exceedingly angry no matter who the guest vocalist is. An angry man clearly. And dubstep is usually so mellow...



19) Rage Against The Machine - "Killing In The Name Of"
I dunno, I always found this song a bit too bloated to get its sentiments across, but when it was hijacked to prevent some crappy UK TV talent show winner becoming the Christmas chart topping number 1 that was just fine by me. Still didn't go out and buy it though.



20) Snoop Dogg -  Serial Killa
Hima so bad he drop 'is 'aitches when  he raps. Can't take this seriously though I probably should

Acting Out - Friday Flash

He religiously viewed every programme he appeared in. He'd played detectives, uniforms, white-suited forensic officers, witnesses and persons of interest. (though for some reason, never the murderer, perhaps because of his good looks and the producers' executive decision that a murderer had to look evil). He could portray evil, he'd once played Iago at High School. But no dice, as with his whole acting career which had never taken off, not even second spear carrier in a local community production. Hence he'd eked out a career doing bit parts in crime reconstruction shows.

All the roles he'd played, shared the same fate as that of the corpse, (which he'd also played on occasion), you never heard their words. You heard them speak, but their actual words were muted low in order that the voice-over cut across it. He never understood why sometimes they were even given scripts, or else encouraged to improvise, if the words didn't matter a dime. The real detectives and forensic officers were the voices that demanded to be heard. They were placed central in the mix. And through their expertise, the corpse got to tell its story after all. So in the final reckoning he was always more mute even than the corpse.

But not today. Today he was dressed in a sheriff's uniform and armed with a badge. Yet he wasn't on any set, nor even on a location shoot. They may have been making shows where attention to the smallest detail was uppermost, but TV production companies were rather lax about their own security. And so he had smuggled out a uniform. Was the badge authentic? It would be good enough to gain him ingress.

The uniform he'd plucked meant that his next appearance would have to be in Texas. Inevitably, it would only be Texas or California. No point him stealing a uniform of law enforcement in Delaware or Oregon, the serious crimes there were too few and far between. No, thank god for the bloodlust of Tx and Ca.

He'd driven for three nights to get to the right county to match his assumed jurisdiction. He was proved correct when the combined authority of the uniform and badge granted him an invite across the threshold of the remote farmhouse. He withdrew the knife, (the gun that came with the borrowed uniform was only a replica) and plunged it into the belly of the man. The victim slumped to his knees, but the would-be killer knew that he had to move into overdrive. For he had to set the scene for the experts.

In the case of a home invader disturbed in the act, the tendency would be for a quick stabbing and then fleeing the scene, since the primary aim was burglary, not murder. The randomness of how the killer and the victim come to be brought together makes it hard for the police to get to the identity of the former, because there is no overt connection. But this is where his plotting kicked in. Though this was to be a stranger killing, he wanted to muddy the waters further, to throw the so-called professionals off the scent.

Hence he thrust the knife once more into his helpless victim. He tried to work up a frenzy of stabbing, but he found it tough going. (He had considered trying the act with his left-hand, but he wasn't confident that having never stabbed anyone before that he could successfully execute it wrong-handed). The knife seemed heavier and more resistant each time he tried to extract it from the man's flesh. He would have thrown up, had he not summoned up his old Stanislavski technique to offset the physical repulsion with some happier affective memories.

Finally the man toppled over fully and he listened for his death rattle as the breath ebbed away from him. Now came the time for full misdirection. The excess of sharp force trauma might suggest a psychopathic killer. He had idled with the thought of imitating an extant serial killer's MO, but he knew from the shows that copycats never quite reproduced the signature of their inspiration which always tripped them up as clumsy imitators. Besides, this was all about making his own voice heard for once, though of course no one was to know that it was his voice. He had also flirted with the notion of bringing misleading clues to drop at the scene, but his research had shown that The Manson Family's attempts to misdirect with random objects and bloody messages daubed in blood had ultimately helped guide the police to them. No extraneous props. They tripped murderers up as much as they did actors on stage.

He wanted to suggest that he and the murderee were in fact acquainted. But the bluff and counterbluff would be enhanced by pretending to cover it up as a stranger murder, like a home invasion gone wrong. Donning his gloves, he rifled through the house, careful to look as though he was searching for riches, but leaving obvious boons intact. Thus tipping off future investigators that robbery was not really the motive.

Then there was his mode of entry. While flashing his badge had allowed him unforced entry, he now had to counterfeit a burglar's entrance. He went to the French Windows and let himself out through them. You'd be surprised how many fools punch out the glass from the inside so the shards fall outside. Dead giveaway that it's been done after the event. Even those smart enough to punch out the glass from the outside, don't realise that the CSI guys can tell whether that glass has been walked on or remains pristine. If the latter, it means no robber came in through the windows. So he marched through the broken glass strewn across the carpet.

Satisfied with his own mental check-list, he peeled off his clothes and put them into a bag. He would conceal them in full-sight back at a TV studio, simply adding them to the laundry basket of soiled costumes. He wasn't sure if they were thoroughly cleaned or just thrown out as unusable. Those that had screen blood and gore caked on to them at least. And another benefit of dear old Texas, was that his wide-brimmed sheriff's hat had allowed him to secrete a hair net beneath, thus ensuring there were no stray strands of DNA-laden hair to betray him.

One final survey around the crime scene determined that his Method had been faultless. His only regret was that as the case was likely never to be solved, he had no chance of appearing in a programme reconstructing it in the future.

Calliope, Caltrops And Cantos - Friday Flash

He reached back into his quiver and strung a fine quilled verse into the arched bow of his lips. He released the quivering tension within the shaft of his glossa and hurled the finely crafted heroic quatrain at his adversary. His aim was directly targeted between the other's eyes.

The other man raised his forearm up to his own brow, seemingly in a gesture of warding off a powerful blow. But his arm continued its motion over his hair as if peeling off a layer to directly access his own cranium beneath. His other hand flicked up over his mouth, then his nose and out toward his rival and brought in its stead a cataract of iambic pentameter projecting from his mouth like a Catherine Wheel. A furious fusillade of frenetic phonic flow. It felled his foe, who ricocheted back into the amplifiers like a skalded cat. But the conqueror did not refrain form his flow in order to don the proffered victor's laurel wreath. Instead he strode over to the crumpled casualty and brought the mic to his ear and poured a villainous villanelle of five withering tercets and a final quatrain which perforated the wretch's eardrum.

He would have served time for assault, this man who was in a hurry, but plea bargained in stanzas from the dock and agreed to serve in his nation's army. There he found a bounded outlet for his innate aggression, but his unusual aptitude for language meant that somehow his insurgent attitude towards authority was missed by his bamboozled ranking superiors. He represented his unit in mixed martial arts and in slam poetry contests and swept the boards in both. Gradually he rose up the hierarchy with stars and stripes pinned to his jacket. His rhymes softened from those jagged shards of the street, though his brutal rhythms became utterly martial.

He was given his own troop to command. His men were utterly loyal to him, for they knew no bullet could best him, nor any inferior superior officer could outblast his versified attacks on them. Even Generals took his adept poesy as a sign that he was a deep thinker. Gradually he began to strategise for divisions of men. Working in his tent by a candle glued into a skull by magma of melted wax, he plotted the ellipses of armies in the field like the rhythms across the paper. And when he had cracked the required manoeuvres, he relaxed by penning some battlefield verses to inspire his troops.

And while the prisoners of war were being rounded up, he took a tour of the latest liberated hamlet or suburb. He composed verses as he went. Paeans to the bilious, oily smoke plumes rising like diabolic elementals. Rhapsodies over the trituration of brick, the warping and shredding of steel structures. He coupleted cabling splayed and jutting from the mangled remains like jungle tendrils. Inverted pastoralisms. Villages rendered deserts under flame, towns metamorphosised into wastelands ("Take that Thomas Stearns Eliot, you only wrote about a figurative one, whereas I have both brought it about and them composed an epic treatise on it). He staked out a unique territory of a poetics of ruin and back home his adoring public loved his metered missives from the front.

But increasingly in his tent at night, it wasn't only mosquitoes which pricked his skin. He began to agonise about how the harmony and beauty of perfectly harnessed language in the form of a poem, could sit astride such horror and destruction. And more pertinently, how the same two forces pulling in contradictory directions could both reside within him simultaneously. How could he be a great, gifted man shone down upon by the creative light of the gods and muses, if he was also this terrible inhuman monster who lay waste to everything natural and manmade he encountered? And to then make art from it? To engender suffering and then romanticise it? His work went so much farther than mere propagandist doggerel of military and patriotic glorification. Rather it was the very essence of the human soul he was touching with his words. Because his own soul was so utterly debased? That could be the only explanation. Sowing dissonance everywhere in his wake, in order to plumb a personal seam of assonance?

In the isolation of his tent afforded by his stature and rank, he took his military pistol and brought it to his head seething with rhymes. The successful warrior could not be a poet. The successful poet could not continue to fight. As he pulled the trigger, he lost his first ever battle in his life.

Microclimate - Friday Flash

The wind was blowing the sheet rain away from the vertical. Where the trajectory propelled through the wash of the streetlamp, it was briefly illuminated like tracer fire. Then it dived back out of the spill into the blackout just above the ground. Only the bombination of their report against the concrete, evinced their persistence.

The occasional dipped car headlamps bounced their skittering rays along the slicked road. Cast an illusion of the rain recoiling upwards off the tarmac, spiting gravity. Even from those headlamps with their own runty wipers to keep their lenses clear of waterborne refractions.

The cars precipitated a further, less transient coalescence in their wake. Those miniature rainbows formed in oil stained puddles by the kerbside. Molecule to molecule interdiction with the forsaken slick perdus, while the rest of rainwater sped by through the gutters plunging towards the storm drain.

As with the car headlamps, the mound of matter on the pavement was wreaking a distorting effect on the local meteorology. Its bulk served as a levee, damming up the water coursing across the paving flags. Until the flow reached critical volume and spouted like a cataract, inroading the gutter.

The blood running with the runnels of rainwater failed to break up into any rainbow spectrum. Blood being thicker than water but not oil, it just sat there in its own immiscible layer, gradually diffusing through the sheer volume of the rain.

The blood was seeping from a body. Where the bullets of rain hit that body, their soft-tipped heads penetrated the sodden clothing and bit into the flesh. In the dark, it appeared that the lump of flesh was being riddled by gunfire.

As the body lay there with its mouth draggled open, the rain zeroed in. Maybe the corpus would be extinguished by drowning rather than exsanguination from the hole in its gut. But the water kept sluicing back out through the downturned corners of its mouth. The body seemed like it was trying to speak, but only liquid words poured out.

The wind was also whipping through the body. As if the skin breach was a vacuum sucking in the air trying to staunch itself. The street litter propelled along in the gusts brushed the body, but none would stop to seal the hole. The magma eruption of blood that had attended the initial piercing, had ebbed as the tectonic waves of pain subsided into equipoise. The body's internal pressure now effaced by the sensation of the driving rain against the numbed flesh. The body's temperature had dropped closer to that of the surrounding atmospehere, so that the weak puffs of expiration emerging from the mouth no longer condensed against colder air.

Inside a building, another body was drumming its fingers against the window sill in syncopation with the rain striking the pane. A cloud had descended upon that body and occluded the previously warm front. A storm was surely building.

This story is published in my third collection

available from Amazon

Basildon Bond - Friday Flash

I got your latest letter. As it always does, it helps speed up time for me, by structuring the eternal hours of nothingness in here. Several days reading it over and over, thinking about every last word on the paper. Gauging the surety of the handwriting that can betray falsehoods like a polygraph can. A week or so maybe composing the response inside my head, taking me up to the time when I qualify for my paper or stamp allowance. To say nothing of the night time nourishment, the sustenance under the sheets.

For you may credit we only have our swapped words, that I have no sense of what you look like since you have never sent me a photo, let alone visited me in the flesh. But you have ceded me one physical impression of you. For your scent infuses the paper on which your letter is written. Transferred maybe by your fingers dancing across its tissue behind the pen, or maybe when you fold it to slip into the envelope and bring the gummed strip to your lips and lick it to seal both your words and your essence inside. Until I set you free, inhaling both word and musk deep inside me.

I won't lie to you. You're like heroin to me. The smack of you wears off a little more each time I take to my bed with you. I develop a - I won't say tolerance- well let me explain it like this; Your scent reanimates me. I reclaim my own reek as I reinhabit my body gone numb in here. As my blood begins to course through me again, it pushes your fragrance to the periphery. I have to choke it all the harder towards the end of the fortnight when you have been almost wholly evicted from my nostrils, full of the stink of me. I have to beat my limp meat so far more fiercely because you are barely present to me.

Does that shock you? It shouldn't really. How else did you imagine me using what you send me? What I want to know is whether I provoke the same response in you back there in your rinky-dinky house behind its trim white picket fence? Do you inhale me up from my clumsily chiselled letters on this cheap [a[er that rips and tears beneath the furious notching of my nib? Is your brain filled with the spice of me? That prison stench of tobacco, fear, blood, shit, semen and sweat? Does the tang of me flow around your bloodstream? Do you run your tongue over the letter seal to taste my sputum where I originally licked it sealed? Do I, incarcerated here on the other side of the country, force you to choke your own sex? I doubt it somehow.

Words and thinking see. I appreciate how your letters stimulate that at least. Something someone said in Group Therapy set me thinking. I probably completely misinterpreted what was being said, but that's what the likes of us in here do. We take things for our own purposes, run with it, put our own stamp on it. Once the notion took hold of me, I zoned out the rest of that particular session. See I'm the one behind bars and yet you have erected your own little cage for yourself. Where you can lock up your dark parts of the psyche. Safely leaving you clean on the outside behind your picket fence. It's through me, through this correspondence that you can look on that pustulant, shrivelled soul in the cage. Poke it. Make it flinch and dance for you when you choose to set the cage swinging on its hook. All through your association with me.

But I won't dance for you. You can't prod me. You need to take your own suppurating heart out of the cage and let it breathe and expand. Let it see the light and either embrace it or try to extinguish it. For that is what the darkness inside means. If something is outside me, it isn't mine, so I just seize hold of it, take it into me and make it mine. Unless I simply am not interested in possessing it. I can help you break your heart free of its restraints. If you follow me. Do as I tell you to do.

Cos seems to me you want it both ways. The thrill of associating with me, hard up against the utter security of me being held at arms length confined in prison. What would it be like if I broke out? If I came to you and solidified the fantasy? Tearing you away from your rinky-dinky house as the getaway car smashed down the picket fence as we sought to outrun the cops. Would you happily join me on the lam?  Always be you having to go out to buy us food because I had to lay out of sight, never sure if the customer in the queue behind you was a plain clothes cop waiting to jump you? Would you happily reload my semi-automatic as we shot our way out of a police cordon? Cos I don't believe you want any of that at all. Cos either I'm stuck here for life, kept apart from you, or that would constitute the only reality for us to be together.

So here's the test. Here's how we can be eternal cell-soul mates, even physically removed from one another. Here's how you pledge me your undying love, that dark heart that I know beats within you.  And which attracts you to me. I will kill a man in here, choke him with my bare hands, or shank him with a knife. But only if you tell me to. You tell me which one out of a choice of men I'll give you, the manner of despatch and what trophy you want me to take and mail you as proof. This will be our exchange of eternity rings. Do this for me, and our scents will be forever commingled in our nostrils. I won't have to trust to receding perfume on writing paper. Whenever I have my own reek in my head, there you will be too.



Taken from my 3rd Flash Fiction collection "Long Stories Short" available for free Kindle download June 4-7th 2016

Quantitative Easing - Friday Flash

The man was bigger than he had adjudged from TV and newspapers. Not that it made any difference really. He wasn't sufficiently anatomically apprised to be making adjustments in his thrust.

He would only get one stab at this. Whether it proved to be fatal or not was irrelevant, it would certainly prove cataclysmic. And injurious of course, it had to prove injurious to him. But this wasn't to be a frenzy and a flurry. Self-control had to be maintained in full. His act had to buy him an audience with the man. For he was too grandiose of office to attend to his constituents in his weekend surgeries, but had lackeys do it for him.

Besides he himself wasn't a constituent, not in this affluent neck of the woods. Once, when he still believed in Parliamentary Democracy, he'd written to an MP who was introducing a Private Member's Bill which was utterly oppressive to certain sections of society. The MP had curtly replied, telling him to take it up with his own local MP. He then wrote back again to say that since this was his own personal piece of legislation, he ought to shoulder the responsibility of answering all correspondence arising from it. The MP never did him the courtesy of a second reply.

That was the thing about our representatives, other than once every five years, they didn't really give the populace the time of day. And yet they proclaimed we were all in it together. This was errant nonsense of course. Even in times of a booming economy, there was a rump of the deprived and dispossessed. Left utterly cut off from any trickle down of wealth and which the government continued to neglect and positively shun even when blessed with resources to try and re-embosom them. But now of course, in time of total economic misery, those struggling and suffering become swelled in number. The rump is now formed of those insulated by their wealth and protected by alarm systems and steel gates.

Well, with a humble three inches of flashing steel, an implement we used to manufacture for ourselves only the factories and ore plants were sold off for scrap the last time this Party were the government, he was going to demonstrate that they could not hope to remain separate and aloof any more. That's why the knife was so apposite. Him holding the handle at one end, his target snagged at the blade's point. There was no dodging that indelible connection.

He leaped out at his target and thrust hard. The man's shock seemed to be still interlaced with looking down his nose at his assailant's breach of decorum. But then he started bursting out in sweat and his nose seemed to be dissolving, much indeed like a toffee. His shirt may have been blue, but his blood wasn't. The two men were ineluctably merged, the man's blood staining his own jeans. Right, the conjunction made, his captive audience skewered on the end of his tempered steel, time to cut to the point.

"As Chancellor of The Exchequer, what is it that you can do? Quantitative easing, but only to a limited degree, because we don't want to sink into the state of Weimar Germany and have to cart a wheelbarrow of banknotes around just to buy a loaf of bread. Then there's all those foreign junkets you take, parachuting in a Royal Prince, in the hope of landing some lucrative foreign contract. Nice work if you can get it. Don't see a lot of trickle down to the likes of me though. Maybe if I worked in an arms factory. And then third, since there's really not a lot you can do to foster growth, instead you look to make cutbacks and savings. The economics of austerity behoving the soothing mantra that we're all in it together. Only what services do you choose to cut? The NHS, but if you don't die on me, it won't be their services you'll be calling on will you? The police, god last summer's riots should have shown you what that leads to, feel secure now do you? There's blood on your manicured lawn here. Drains, Trains and water supplies, how can we a first world country that receives so much rainfall be suffering drought? Immigration officers made redundant so that any terrorist is almost free to wonder through overburdened passport control. And tax inspectors, so that corporations and your rich pals get off paying virtually nothing. Yet in their chronic mismanagement of the economy, still they award themselves unspeakable bonuses and pay rises, because they're private businesses and your government refuses to intervene in their affairs. Find the money from them. if they don't like it and hightail it for foreign climes, then they won't clog up the queues of people waiting to get back in the country then will they?"

The man was trying to speak, but his words were being serrated by his labouring breath, which the other noted was less than perfumed. When they did emerge as a croak, this was not the plummy, rarefied voice he was used to hearing pronounce from the Despatch Box in Parliament.

"War-ter... War-ter-nnn..."

Still no please or thank you the other thought to himself, but the tone was less than imperious and scarcely imperative.

"Do I look as though I'm the type of person who can afford to indulge in buying bottled water? I'm told that explorers can drink their own urine in extremis, but if I unzipped my trousers here and now, I think it would send out the wrong message entirely. I don't want to humiliate you, as much as equalise you. Quantitative equalising it might even be called. Besides, I don't have a silver spoon to ladle the water between your lips, while yours seems to have dropped out somewhere in the grass".

The man slumped forward into the arms of his adversary.

"See I here and now renounce my citizenship of the country you have been charged with the privilege of overseeing. I feel what few rights and benefits to membership of such a civilised society have been progressively stripped away by you and your ilk, so that there is simply nothing left worthy of subscribing to. No values and no value. Consider this severance as my notice to quit."

The man silently bubbled some blood on to the hand holding the knife. He took it for a seal of accord.

Yes, we are finally all in this together he thought to himself as he gently lowered him to the ground, the man's head resting in his lap. He was bleeding out like the country had too. He waited for the police to arrive, though with the drastic reductions to manpower, he expected a rather long wait.

I started doing #fridayflash when I put all other writing aside in order to promote and market my self-published novel. But as you probably all know, the ideas don't stop throwing themselves at you like wanton strumpets and flash writing in small bites seemed the perfect solution to feeding the piranha fish nipping at my synapses. Well it's been a year now with just one week missed and the art of flash has taught me a lot about writing. But I yearn to return to the longer novel form. I've got 3 other novels all in finished drafts, but can't decide how to proceed with them. Then there is the labyrinthine WIP I set aside at 40,000 words in, the time the published novel came out. But the twin prompts of NANO (which I'm only shadowing, not doing formally) and approaching my life-long nemesis of genre fiction have combined to give me the solution - a wholly new book and yes, a whole new direction for me as it's genre-based! Having started it on Sunday last, here's the opening 1000 words serving for my #fridayflash this week.

Thanks.

The two outriders slew their front wheels across the gravel, each throwing up a little cloud of brown dust. There was no other motion as the particles forged their sedate, wispy descent back to earth. Only once this tiny portion of the landscape had been allowed to resettle itself, did the two men faceless behind their mirror visors permit themselves to stir. They flicked their kick stands and adjusted their body weight to let their bikes sag from under them as the levers bore the burden of steel and chrome. Still in perfect unison like synchronsied swimmers, the men dismount and remove their leather gloves. One stares ahead of him, while the other surveyed where they had just come from. He spies the outline of a sleek saloon slowly growing larger as it gobbles up his own bike tracks, like Theseus retracing his route through the labyrinth marked by string. He briefly looks over his shoulder at his partner, the statuary symmetry between the pair finally sundered. The other curls his index finger tip to tip with his thumb and jags the 'aok' gesture back at him. They await the arrival of the car.

The car's tyres throw up a quartet of dust nebulae, out-muscling and out-trumping that of the outriders. But these brumes dissipate and disperse as if the car had wanted to spite their reunification with the ground. Behind the dark tint of its windows, the car sits utterly still, like a cat ready to pounce in the long grass. Not even the slowing revolutions and cooling of the extinguished engine dared broach the bated breath of the moment. Finally the tension is broken by the passenger window being cracked with the apologetic whine of low voltage electricity. The nearest outrider marches stiffly up to the car, ducks down to fill the purview of the voided glass. His voice little more inflected than the dull drone of the lowered window. He rights himself erect, steps a couple of paces back, then opens the door as if trying to die stamp himself. From within the interior, one trousered leg swivels, flexes and braces itself against the ground. Followed by a second. The further outrider can only see a pair of black leather shoes beneath the plimsoll line of the open car door. Virtually every day they play out this same scene in different settings, but never with any variation in the actions, the angularity and the algebra. A natural choreography evinced between men of rank.

The leather shoes pivot and the plimsoll line sinks as the mass extrudes itself from the upholstery. The outrider muses his habitual bafflement as to how so huge a bulk can be squeezed into such a confined space. The start of the old joke about how you get a family of elephants inside a Mini plays through his mind, but as usual he can never reclaim the punchline since the man mountain is barking queries at him that demand his attention. His partner is pointing beyond and the gelatinous mass of the superior's head makes an elliptical motion that could be either nod or shake, such are its indeterminate boundaries. Damn, it's happened again. The rear seat passenger has slipped out unnoticed and unremarked. Certainly the car's chassis never even dipped half an inch. For a big cheese, the luminary was awfully small in stature. Mousy. Bird-like. As gauzy as the dust cloud pressed out under his bike wheel. The superior is clearly exasperated that yet again the VIP has emerged on his own cognizance and not at that of himself who is supposed to be running the show. His bear of an arm extends, virtually eclipsing the whole of the cock sparrow. "We haven't established the security of the area yet". The VIP passenger approaches the superior officer and limbos under the outstretched arm without having to crook his body at all. "We've got a forensics team working at the site haven't we?" The larger man's redundant blockading arm drops with an audible displacement of air. "Nobody is trying to wipe out a forensics team. There's nothing to be gained from it". The large man moved swiftly in defiance of his girth, in order to interpose himself in front of Tiny Tim who had started to walk further into the gravel.

The smaller man could not help but be impressed with the man's dedication. If there was a sniper out there and he discharged a round into his covering minder, he fancied the man might deflate like letting the air out of a blow-up balloon. Presumably that's why he had been given the detail. But this whole rigmarole, outriders, bullet-proof saloon, tinted windows, minder, it just made him so uncomfortable. Giving the misleading impression that he himself was some kind of dignitary. When there was never any way to dignify these scenes he was charged with attending. Death scenes.

Fortunately, in the most miserable of circumstances that is, the present circumstance appeared to be in so blighted a spot, there was no crowd of bystanders. No members of his personal fan club to cheerlead him in his work, when all that was called for was a respectful quiet for the deceased. His presence usually engendered a delirious crowd which soon managed to turn every murder scene into a red carpet vigil. When the red carpet was usually woven of blood. But then there were flibbertigibbets at hangings of old, so maybe he shouldn't be so condemnatory. No Press today either, which was a blessed relief. Sometimes they deigned to turn their cameras on the scene of crime, but mostly they didn't even bother. They tended to be the celebrity pap smearers, rather than from the crime desk. Always their telephoto lens were pointed at him, Simon Moralee. Queasy superstar of the criminal investigation world. Maybe that's also why "Jellyneck" Morton had been selected as his minder, to block the clear shots of camera lenses as much as rifles, though the department was never averse to the unfailingly good publicity Simon raked in on their behalf.

Simon Moralee, the man who always got his man (or woman). The man possessed of a unique ability, which made him god's gift to the profession. Which every day made him want to turn his back on it all. If he ever took that fatal step, then indeed he would require a protection squad. For the populace would tear him limb from limb in such circumstance. And in passing over into death, he would be able to finger every one of his killers as his last act on earth. Providing a neat circularity to his life. Back to that moment his gift-curse first announced itself to him. When at seven years old he cupped his mother's lifeless head in his arms. And had a searingly clear image of her killer revealed to him.

Open Season

A new piece of fiction, inspired (if that's the right word) by my muse Jenn Topper @revolucion0, who provided me a topic to share bile on and I just kind off riffed from there. Compositional soundtrack provided by Public Image Ltd.

* * *


A perfect day for a round over the golf course. Roiling grey clouds, a stiff breeze off the sea, that metallic tang of precipitation suspended in the air. Certain to clear out the cobwebs all right. Time for the full eighteen holes, or just the front nine? He would just have to see how things unwound. He donned his leather gloves and hoisted his golf bag over his shoulder like a soldier on the parade ground. Only the weight of it caused an imperceptible sag.

The Royal and Ancient course lived up to the venerable tradition implied in its name thank god. A proper links course using the natural features of a rugged coastal scarp, rather than pastoral landscape architecture commissioned to make Japanese businessmen feel at home. Unfortunately this did entail the Club rules were also hidebound by tradition. But today is Friday, within the first week of April, so he gets to break with stultifying tradition. It means he can play the course clockwise.

He exits the Clubhouse having signed in and having his credentials checked. Bona fide member, who would have thought given his family roots? Like all club members, he'd had to check his mobile phone in at the reception desk. One of the few real boons of the fustian rulebook. Golf was not to be relegated to a subsidiary of doing business. No deals cemented beneath horizontal sheets of briny rain, stood leaning on your club like a shooting stick, clad in ridiculous plus fours tucked into tartan socks thank you very much. People were gathered here just to play the game and no other purpose.

He marched past the first tee. Towards some shrub and high gorse just off to the left of it. The strap of his bag was beginning to carve a welt into the skin and he absently shifted it further away from his clavicle. He stepped daintily over the out of bounds rope and unshouldered arms with only a slight a purse of his lips indicating a release of taut breath. An insect disturbed from its pollen gathering, fretted around his shadowing mass. Its bombilation carried more conviction than the apologetic unzippering of his bag. Seven surgical scrub hatted clubs popped into view, like junior doctors crowding round to observe the operating table. Bumping and boring into one another as he delved in amongst them with a gloved hand. Reaching into the innards, to extract a thin metal tube. Feeding it upwards between the jealously jostling clubs, drawing free like a langorous rocket leaving its silo.

Next he almost had to thrust himself deep into the bag's interior as if he too were prospecting for pollen. But he emerged unscathed, bearing the stock which had nestled itself flat on the bag's floor. He brought the two metal planes together and snapped them into place within each other's receiving grooves. The other graphite clubs bowed their heads in mute acknowledgement. Mere cudgels, when this had an infinitely greater driving range.

He moistened his finger to determine the directionality of the wind. Pronouncing himself satisfied, he proceeded to remove the elongated loupe from his single breasted pocket. He brought it up to his eye and nonchalantly twizzled the shallow focus fluting. With a sudden surge, he craned his neck so that the scope was partitioning the sky. Crosshairs biopsying a little clump of grey-brown cirrus. The black outer frame around the lens curtaining off the rest of creation. Suddenly something prised open the circular screen and insinuated itself briefly across his vision. Just as the projectile threatened to pass from his line of sight, he locked on to it. A golf ball, with tightly turning revolutions. Another notch on the focus serrations and he could see its dimples, like the surface of the moon. Like the near symmetrical spacings of holes in the cardboard targets at the range. The ones he took home with him and hung up on threads of cotton. Just so as to filter and dice the light, creating lacerating chiaroscuro ribbons throughout his room. He retrained his eye to ground level just as the sphere plopped silently earthwards. The backspin carried the ball back past the hole as he secured the scope on to the rifle, his tongue just protruding from the corner of his mouth.

He relaxed into his stance and scoped the first green. The red pennant of the flag was billowing out away from the sea. Pointing him at the congregation before its blood red demand for sacrifice. Seemed to be a threesome. Who was going to make the cut and who wasn't? Simplicity enough, no less stacked than the voting for new Club members. Nominated and seconded. Didn't have to be eagle-eyed to drop this one with two shots to spare. Yellow should not be a colour ever to adorn the male of the species below his waist. Above the waist is honourable, the souwester of the trawlerman, the high visibility jacket of the coal miner or railway track engineer. So this one is for all those invisible men in their high visibility jackets. The mark tilts his head back, laughing at his playing partner's remotely unheard wit. As the mark settles over his putter, he synchronises with his own teeing off. His opening salvo for the day. The birds in the trees flap over the rifle's report. It's just Nature's way. Damn, whiffed completely. Shanked it badly to the right, both tee shot and putting green. He delicately adjusts the sights and reconvenes his grip. The mark is bending down to retrieve or maybe mark his ball. Coin or other marker he idly mused. The mark's companion is about to putt, when the (presumed) thud of the stiff collapsing to the ground brings a flaring turn of the head and an accusatory putter raised at chest level. Before it is slowly lowered. Still, two shot penalty for that breach of etiquette surely? He'd leave that for the scorecard Secretary to resolve as he picked up his bag and proceeded over towards the Second tee. Or more accurately, the high grass beyond it.

He took a swig from his pewter hip flask as he strode across the wild grass, making a mental note to avoid shooting in the chest area, lest the target have a miraculous stroke of luck and be saved by a hip flask of their own absorbing the bullet and leaking malt instead of blood. Twenty bullets for a par round on the front nine should suffice. In order to win the notional Claret Jug. The Third hole had a nasty dog leg that meant he could not possibly have a clear bead to anyone on the green. So dropping a shot into a bullseye knot on the gnarled trunk of a specific tree, (which if you stared at long enough you could mistake it for a human face from a distance) entitled him to a Mulligan. Advancing from the tee to behind a high mound of earth around the fairway to continue. It was only fair to proceed in this manner. He had his rules too you know. But the Second was no "gimmie" either.

He settled himself into position just in time to catch sight of a behemoth of a man in checkered knickerbockers slowly lower himself to the grass in incremental stages. As the man finally levered himself flush, he himself felt the earth tilting just a smidgeon on its axis beneath where he stood. The thud of dead or soon to be dead weight, seems to have reverberated all the way back to him here in the Rough. The man's chin on the grass seemed to suggest he was communing with the worms as to the lie of the hole. Which would be true enough in a few seconds or so. He shook his head clear and winked one eye shut again in order to realign the cosmos. Yet in that interim, the beast had turned with all the elegance of a dreadnought, so as currently to be presenting his red checked posterior to the crosshairs like a monkey on heat. Now the eclipser of planets removed his baseball cap and still holding it in his hand, brought the ensemble round to scratch his voluminous rear. Oh to plug the cap straight into that mound of flesh. But no, rules are rules, besides there was no telling if that amount of blubber wouldn't sap the bullet of all velocity before it could burrow into a sweet spot of carnage within the body. Whatever the beached whale was sizing up seemed to be taking an inordinate amount of time. Bristling with impatience to play through, he squeezed off a round into the man's playing partner who was stood there holding the pin. He toppled to the ground with just a hint of fade to the left of the pin. Another golfer scratched. The behemoth's cap was suspended in midair, the peak just kissing the twill of his trousers.

The twin parts of the tricky dog leg had proved easy enough to negotiate. Pressed there against the earthen mound, he was trying to weigh up the lie. The victim had half fallen into a bunker, head wedged into the sand and out of sight, like a pot-holer too big for the aperture. But visibly he was still alive, since his leg was twitching and thrashing the green beyond the bunker. A last outpost of protest before the oncoming tsunami of blackness? Get in the hole, get in the damn hole! Of course the other three from his convivial fourball had scarpered for the trees. Even pranging a buggy in their genteely electrified haste. But their lack of indication of a gimmie through any ministrations made to their stricken friend, left him none the wiser as to whether to wait for him to drop into the hole. Or whether a further inside the leather putt, putt, putt was required to get this albatross off his neck. This is when you really need a caddie to help you out.

He could at least prevent that leg from twitching. But that would mean a bogey. He took a quick check of the four cardinal compass points and saw no trace of any handicappers. So he strode out from beyond the mound and on to the fairway. The gun down by his side, he moved as jauntily as if he'd just hit a peach of a shot straight down the middle. Stepping on to the apron, he started to address the awkward lie. He neared the man sprawled over the bunker, stopping only to replace a divot where the man's putter had incised some of the turf in its sudden fall. He surveyed that the overhanging ridge of the bunker was sufficiently high to swallow him up to any viewer from a southerly direction. He had to figure that there would be no fresh players teeing off from holes one and two, so those directions ought to be safe as well. The carry of the gunshot might be a problem, but if he timed it with the squalling wind, he should be able to cover it up. And any explosion of sand thrown up by the force of the bullet could be a genuine sand trap phenomenon. He swivelled the man's legs round so they folded into the bunker. "Winter rules old chap" he said. As he removed the man's limbs from the green, he saw the blood glaze on the manicured carpet. Double bogey he thought to himself, but his hands still didn't waggle as he loosed off a round into the back of the man's head. He raked the bunker with a few more rounds, then headed off to the Fourth with its water hazard. Three down, six to play.