Triple Decker - Flash Fiction

Angular and cursive. Square board, looping calligraphy. Rounded shoulders a curse. Since the wood kept slipping from them and dragging heavy on his arms (though nothing akin to those shoppers cat-cradling stringed tote bags between the crook of their arms). Yet his was a small sacrifice when you had the burden of the whole world to carry. His load was doubled, since he was double timbered. Above his head, the seat of the rational, the prophecy that the end of the world was ‘nigh’, a suitably arcane and archaic word for an imminence. Below his chest, like a tumescent fig leaf, a ligneous chastity belt, was another board exhorting the repenting of sins as advisory avoidance behaviour. 

Bulbous and blockish. Dimpled gutty covering the gut spread of the host, paint wash pointed directionality. The man’s encumbrance further augmented by a hand-held placard proclaiming a ‘Golf Sale’. But the urban gallery he was playing to were giving him the bird(ie) as they dodged and weaved his bunkered down sand-trap. The cardboard rondure was more millstone round his neck than albatross. Weary of dropped shots and shouts of "fore!", the caddie decided his location was shanked and conceded the hole. 

He felt in good shape on the green, when the oncoming end of the world approached him personally. They bumped wood and began gesticulating with arms restricted to moving only out at their sides, rather than able to jab and poke their adversary. "Hey Ball-ache, this is my patch" expostulated the man supposedly without a future or any stake in one. "People don't want to hear your doom and gloom Bub, they just want to enjoy themselves". “I herald the end of the world, what do you presage other than bad taste plus-fours and single mittens?” They began to lock horns, 'nigh' man bending at the waist to try and swat the other with his second storey board, while the Bogie man countered by wedging his hand-gripped sign to ward off the blow. 

"There ain't room for the both of us and I was here first. I am the Alpha and the Omega, so you need to go stand on the other side of the road Heathen!"

"Sorry to apostate the flaming obvious, but I've got a giant arrow daubed across me. If I stand on that side, then I'm pointing potential customers away from the shop not to it".

"That ain't my problem Fuzzy. I don't have me no arrows, though even if I did its heading would be clear no matter which way I was facing, since it would point straight down, to Hell!”

God’s aegis began shinkicking, but since the handicapper used his board as a shield he could not make a clean connection. Then they started belly-bumping, wood clacking on wood like bushido sticks. 

Polygon frame and stencilled. Cut off corners, mottled pizza runes. Deep crust stuffed with human being in lycra base and felt hat toppings. Another sandwich board enters the territorial fray. Ostensibly he comes in pizza. The boxed-in scrappers don’t want to know, just what they kneaded like a hole in the head. They both round (well one squares up, the other does indeed round) on the interloper. They quickly dominated him, his soft felt dough providing little protection as they proceeded to dole out one hell of a mozzarella kicking. “Ow for focaccia sakes!” he screamed as the other two threw themselves on top of his flatbread form and slowly started pureeing him. Passersby snickered at the triple decker sandwich boards with flailing limbs. 

 

Memoirs Are Made Of These - Friday Flash

He didn’t know where to pitch his personal statement. He could legitimately tilt it to the depths of impoverished misery, but if he overplayed his hand then that might be cause for refusal. What did it matter where he had come from anyway? The whole objective was to shed that burden and to start a new life here in the new world and to build up a new story and a new being wholly from scratch. But then he remembered the grainy satellite reality TV shows he’d siphoned back home and how the back-story perennially counted for more than the talent being displayed.

This wasn’t any story he recognised, not least his own. The monks were offering him words and when he pursed his brows trying to find any familiarity bearing to his life, they clenched their straps and made his whole body pucker with agony. Under such a preceptorial regime he learned the intricate details of the rituals he had partaken of, the blood and the babies, the bestiality and the sacrifices. Laid prone there on the rack, he saw himself stood attending the Sabbats, a whole shadow life he must have previously sleepwalked through. But then he had always struggled to recall his daily activities because they seemed so unremarkable.

He narrated his story in tattoos. Each year he had another chapter inked to his flesh. It took him twelve months to compose the layered image that would encapsulate all the nuances and dilemmas of the event he was indelibly marking. But the scroll of the parchment of his own body meant that, unlike most pictorial scripts, his tale was non-linear. And only ever fully revealed to a lover abed. Nor ever complete, unless his embalmer cared to append the epilogue to his skin.

‘Good sense of humour’, which supplicant at the font of dating agencies would fail to proffer that? Even when it wasn’t true. The worst ones are those who proceed to try and be amusing and fall flat on their unfunny faces. No, maintain a level and even tone. In keeping with his claim to ‘professional’. But there again that epithet could conceal a whole host of sins. A professional darts player, or a professional sanitation engineer actually translated as a good old fashioned dustman. This was so damned hard, one hundred and fifty words to describe himself clinchingly without lapsing into cliche. Didn’t really matter, it all came down to the photo anyway.

Their surveillance meant that they had infiltrated every aspect of his life. Names, dates, places of meetings and supposedly sub rosa communications. Every forensic link and association with just about every activity he’d ever been engaged in, was laid out before the rest of the village. These sessions were called ‘Self-Criticism’, but it was just a forum for peers to lay into one verbally and break the spirit. Based on time-honoured  jealousy, greed and petty vindictiveness rather than any more lofty ideals. They constructed a treasonous, deviant persona that he couldn’t recognise as himself, but which by the end he had to admit to and then recant. Which was a pity, as he found himself drawn to such a person.

The composite that the online data capture  had constructed of him, made for a veritable Frankenstein’s Monster. An ethical environmental consumer with a huge appetite for sweatshop and non-renewable sourced products. A technological Luddite with a penchant  for electronics. A proud Baby-Boomer militantly cynical about the 1960s and 70s. A vagrant homeowner. A pet-owning misotherist. From the cradle to the grave contradictions. Arrhythmic algorithms. Capitalist umbilical cord and monstrous Long Tail both conspired to clamp around his neck and constricted the life out of him. 

He had been charged with delivering the notes for the Priest to compose into the eulogy. The Priest had never met his late father, so he could get absolutely anything past him. So long as it conformed to customary bounds of taste and respectfulness. Taste and respect, yes this would not be a speech admitting to any great passions. Whatever his own feelings towards his father, the priest would not be able to lamintae any of his own. Any whiff of ardour conveyed by the Priest could only be a sham, a performance on his part. Like an actor reciting his lines, lines written for him by a playwright. He was now the dramaturge, He could make this funeral ceremony take any course he decided. For now he, not his father, was the great Director in charge,