Rareripe - Flash Fiction

“Their firm bodies exuding faith in the future” - Laurent Binet “The Seventh Function Of Language”

Sunken bloodshot eyes. Heavily lidded like an escarpment. Only the sempiternal rheum moraine, suggestive of occupation within the caliginous orbs. A vestigial liquefying blink reflex. Dried out, desiccated and doped. Blunted through the constant triggering of those miasmic fumes, like a smoke alarm having its batteries removed. But also through any possible experience of surprise having atrophied. Like all emotions. Never any tears to drive runnel cleansing trails through smut smirched faces. Supernumerary tics erupting elsewhere on the countenance, as if to compensate for the mouldering nictation. 

Noses constantly impressed with a finger at the nostril. As if trying to expectorate their coagulate soul, which is of course an impossibility. Unable even to break down the sclerotic wall, that so immures their heart, that they cannot detect their own pulse beyond. Perhaps that's why they breathe shallowly like a panting dog, in spite of a low heartbeat rate. No pulse means no adrenaline response engendered. Thereby no perspiration either. 

Mouths that eschew any movement of the top lip. Lest a scintilla of such expansive enunciation above an uninflected muttering, offer the utterer as jumped up beyond their station. Asking, no demanding, to be slapped back down for his pretension. His aspiration. A disarticulating anti-intellectual radar no less sweeping than that of the Khmer Rouge.

Heads unable to be hoisted by necks forever pinioning gazes down at the pavement. Partly locked in place, through scanning palm-cupped phone screens like dowsing twigs piloting their journeys. But also to ensure avoiding challenging eye contact with knife-wielding sentinel peers, demanding the shibboleth of your postcode before grudging grunted grant of passage. 

If the emissions are imitative of the tubercular, the anatomies verge on nineteenth century rickety. Liposucted by nourishment-free fast food. Willowy bodies with Dutch Elm fungal paunch. Uniformly sallow skin trespassed only by florid roseolas and pustules. Baggy and saggy clothes ape/accentuate the flesh's amorphousness contours. 

Penetralia scooped out by surfeit, sensual responsiveness hollowed through habitude. A degenerative self-negation through the flesh of another, also negating themselves reciprocally. Sexless sex. No corporeal double helix convolutions, to ignite and conjure the chemical angels stood on the pinhead unseen within. 

Their flabby, formless bodies exuding no presence in the present, let alone any awareness of futurity.  

The Riots In London

"Mindless thugs" has been the loudest outcry at the rioters.

They are not mindless, they are mindset thugs and such simplistic labelling as ever allows people to not go any deeper than the surface in response.

What is this mindset?

It has developed over the last 30 years since the last set of riots. It is the same areas in flames as before. Any Londoner could have probably predicted the most likely boroughs to experience problems. That tells me nothing significant has been done to help those communities bring themselves up to a happier state. They were communities largely thrown on the scrapheap in the 80's. Sink estates with mass unemployment and educated in sink schools that were no better than holding centres for the hours of school. Now we are seeing the children and grandchildren of those original rioters and their peers from the same estates out on the street and causing mayhem. It's hardly genetic, but when the envirinment is unchanged from that of 30 years ago, it produces the same outcomes.

What has changed over the years, is the development of American style territorial gangs, largely with knife in place of gun. it's a really depressing development and has been allowed to go unchecked over twenty years. Gangs provide the 'family' membership that their own flesh and blood have abdicated from. God knows how many fatal youth on youth stabbings and shootings there have been up and down the country but particularly in London. Carrying a knife makes the individual feel indomitable. The same indomitability they feel when through force of numbers (as the gangs join forces) they come to be in control of the streets and able to do as they please.

Suddenly instead of mooching around outside the shops and malls of a weekend, all of a sudden now they can help themselves to its stock, or destroy it for whatever perceived grudge. They are already used to petty criminality, through harassing passers by, mugging and demanding with menace. They are not being organised by any 'master criminals', nor by anarchists. If anything, they are leading and these other opportunists with their own agendas are coming to the party.

Do you recall the mass gang fight on the concourse of Victoria Station when a youth was fatally stabbed? Two gangs from outside the area, one from Fulham (South-West London) and one from South London arranged to meet and fight and came fully armed. they arrived on their bikes. So these gangs are highly mobile and as we know, communicate fluidly and rapidly. They can target and organise themselves to move about the capital & keep the authorities completely off balance. They are at present taking revenge on their haunts of the High Street, places they have spent so much of their lives at just killing time. Well now they're killing these places.

Feral is an adjective bandied about. It's clumsy but not without some pertinency. Three generations of economic neglect and parental neglect has bred swathes of completely unrestrained youth. They share nothing of your values or moral codes. Judging them accordingly wouldn't even register. they are not going to own any property in their life, so have no compunction about torching that of others. They are totally lost generations. They do not care, they feel impervious to every accusation you may care to throw at them. It simply would not compute.

This is the outcome of neither an economic deprivation nor a political protest. Banks (and by extension bankers) are not being targeted, so it's hardly the outcry borne of sophisticated political analysis. Yes shops have been ransacked, but of a certain type. Electrical goods, phone shops, jewellers, bike shops, sportswear shops - these are all lifestyle items for youth that we as society have been peddlling for decades as worth owning. They already own Blackberry's, are currently wearing Hollister or Nike; what they are helping themselves to is the latest model, the latest edition, exactly how capitalism and consumerism encourages us all to keep upgrading. Chemists and supermarkets provide the fuel of drink & pills to sustain their rampage through the night hours. Those shops that aren't relevant, such as carpet shops, get torched. There is an element of 'if I can't have it, I'll make sure you can't either', in tandem with the destruction's adrenalin pumping. And the power of being able to operate over the law and to be in control of the streets.

We reap what we sow. Generations left to drift with minimal adult guidance, with little education, without any aspiration other than gross material ones, without any sense of endangerment, without any imbued moral value or sense, without any stake in society. All they needed was an opportunity to realise their own unbridled power. After the student demos suggest the path, after the cutbacks in police numbers and the detriment to moral, here was the opportunity.

Some of us have been telling the politicians for 30 years about "Broken Britain". It got reduced to a soundbite. After the 80s riots and her re-election, Mrs Thatcher's acceptance speech pledged to do something about "those inner cities". Scarce anything has been done and here we are again, geographically if not for quite the same motivations. As the Scarman Report which came out of an inquiry into the Brixton riots of that time, still has too many of its recommendations ignored; as politicians of any political stripe refuse to face up to our society's deep-rooted problems; as we hide behind outrage and lumping complex factors into buzzwords; as we continue to face up to the fundamental arrangements of our society on ownership and ruinous consumption, then we have no hope in hell of mending anything.

These generations are lost I'm afraid. What we have to do is try and mend things to prevent the next generations going the same way.

Assassination City - Flash Fiction Glinting Glaze

An entirely different theology, but they honour the hashishi of old. Though choice being what it is, their blunt is cut with sharper chemical prongs. Adulterations of purity by these child soldiers.


For they fail to spend their day honing the blades. Or directing thrusts into imagined effigies. Not even hefting the handle from hand to hand, ambidextrous seeking after a chink of an opening.

Instead a desultory shambling around home like wraiths. The kitchen being their favoured haunt. Near the cutlery drawer. Sheffield steeling themselves. Until they get the call.

Then their reflexes reveal a razored acuity, belying the rest of their body's slouch. As each slides open a drawer and slips a knife into their waistband. Ramrodding every embraced spine to attention. Then they pull the sweatshirt sheath around it and shroud their own bowed head within its hood. Off to prayer, to heed the Street muezzins. A fibre optic mediated doxology. Yet still summoning the immemorial demand for sacrifice.

Now out on patrol. Sweeping the perimeters. The reconnaissance doesn't take long. Through the glass of a corner shop. Bedecked in pointillistic stickers, 2p a global minute, situations vacant, fireworks inside and lucky lotto. Parallax weaving their target as he moves like a puppet beyond. Time to cut his strings.

Still no name. No matching photographic likeness. But his camouflage is blown. Though he shoplifts from the same Chainstores as they, the blip of colour leaching from his back pocket coyly betrays him as he intended. Donning desert fatigues in the jungle; urban bootblack leaving tracks in the snow. The bandana ribbon binding the package in which he delivers himself up. A label bearing just a four character cipher. Ticker tape passing across their scanning cortex; SE17. May as well be wearing a high visibility jacket. With or without kevlar underneath.

In two houses, the isotopic elements of melted down nuclear families sit down to lunch. Both are without son and heirs who are absent as is Sabbath custom. But neither family can find any decent whetted blades to carve their Sunday Roasts.