Pestle And Mortar - Flash Fiction

My mother was a casualty of the war they call life, or life-giving. Sapper me tore her up from inside. Bayonetted trench warfare as I emerged from gerrymandered dimensions of the tunnel complex and out over the top into the light. I detonated into the world. The medics stitched her back together down there, but she was no longer fit for active services to parturition; a pessary to prop up the collapsed sump and berm. Awarded an honourable discharge, with blood clotted me serving as the dishonourable discharge that emerged from her. She wasn’t fit for much in the way of anything. Shellshocked or gassed, it amounted to the same nullity. She regressed in her behaviour even as I advanced. She got down on the floor and played with my sister’s dolls as if they were Action Men. She pulled them out from beneath her skirt pleats like hand grenades and then flung them across the room. I knew they were representations of me and my unwitting violence heaped upon her, unfriendly fire apparently. I enlisted for a permanent tour of Freudian duty, a casualty of war in peacetime as I devoted my unconscious life to reconstructing the fragments of my cluster bomb that had blasted my mother apart. 

"Paternoster Row" - a drabble

As our forces advanced to reclaim the city, a dazzling patch of green sat at its heart. Had the suffocating high rises been temporarily eclipsed by the remnants of the smoke? Or perhaps they had been levelled by the aerial bombardment, restoring the city to its Medieval origins. The green park, the former common lands choked off by private capital, now unshackled so it and we, would be free to breathe freely once again. But as we converged on the city centre, we saw that the green was pulsing. A host of iridescent green blowflies colonising the city’s charred corpses.

Gyre - Flash Fiction

Bodies on display in the street. Burst pipes spewing clean water and dirty sewage like impromptu fountains. I stood at the lip of the crater where my parents’ home once stood. I didn’t know if they were dead or had just fled. Either way it amounted to the same outcome. We were asunder one from another for good. There was nothing keeping me here, but plenty to propel me away.

I headed westwards. Among a gaggle of others. Some stopped and turned around to pray in the direction we were forsaking. Other than that religious prescription, they didn’t bother to look back. They weren’t praying for a return to their homeland. For the rest of us, our new god faced the other way. We honoured the sun setting on our lives by making a headlong pilgrimage accelerating our progress there.

As more joined our throng, we felt like a drove being prodded by an unseen goatherd. I couldn’t see a bell around my neck alerting to our presence, yet wranglers eyed us suspiciously at the border. They branded us with their marks on our papers yet would not let us stay on as their property. They marched us past ranks of policemen stood in front of wire fences, through which locals shook their fists through the mesh and screamed at us. We were put in a temporary camp at their other border, where we were now the ones contained behind wire, resting and wringing our hands through the chinks, but we were missing the third limb, that of any police to protect us from predations by others within the wire.

We moved on. Hanging from trains or 4x4s like creeping vines, though some of us human berries dropped off and were crushed underfoot, or were threshed by non-fruit pickers. Whether juice, pulp or seed, the ferment in our wakes meant we could not lay down roots here. 

And on we trudged. Overhead a flock of geese. The child next to me threw himself to the ground. He thought their tight formation presented them as a fleet of military aircraft, or perhaps their array of freshly released bombs. No one helped him up. These aerial migrators glided unerringly straight where we ploddingly snaked. Their voyage smooth since they were never challenged for their papers. They were ebulliently raucous where we were bone-wearily silent. They flew perpendicularly over us and I contemplated adopting their direction from latitude to longitude. But I could not raise my feet high enough to escape the rut in the sand that our human train had pressed and carried on in line. 

We reached the coast and found that the sea would always welcome us with open arms. Would always have berths for us to lay down and never rise again. Packed into boats like sardines, once the boat was tipped up and emptied, we scattered and were spread out on the waves. The boats sunk but we floated bloated. Until we were hooked like a fish at a funfair (that too would only live for the shortest time), or we finally settled on land, buried beneath its soil.

In Europe as we were passed from pillar to post, or rather temporarily lashed one from the other, I thought of the Wandering Jew. Supposedly our mortal enemy, now we walked in his exact footsteps. Had he closed the way for us several centuries later? He of course had the advantage of being a shoemaker who could thus repair his own leather, where our callused and bloodied hooves were not so fortunate. Our feet aped that of the European messiah where nails had been driven in to tether him to his pillar and post. The natives do not offer us such sympathy, devotion or care. Instead they hit us, shout for us to pick up our feet to go quicker and not to loiter. 

And so we do. We get the same reception in every country we cross into. Which is to say no reception at all, we are not received in the slightest. We are like the interference on TV screens, the white noise on the wireless, with which one turn of the dial they tune us out and restore their home broadcasts. Eventually we wash back up on the shores of our original homeland. We have traversed the earth seeking sanctuary. And right now our levelled home ringed with fire and bullets, our fellow countrymen rounded up and compacted like shawarma meat on the rotisserie before periodically a giant knife comes and slices off the outer layers, looks more inviting than the treatment we have previously received at the closed hands and hearts of our fellow man.

Alzheimat - 300 word Flash Fiction

Broadcasts report that my frontal lobe has been overrun. Lesions of the damned occupy my zones. Shock troops and sapper units deplete my forces. Resistance cells, besieged on all sides. Unable to hold the line. Of my failing self. Just a few loyal partisan remnants of me carrying the fight. Former comrades strafe my grey matter. The neural runways pockmarked by bomb craters blocking take off. Interdicting my diction. I can hear Morse code broadcasts outlined inside my skull. Either that or it is a white noise of electrical waves trying to jump across the ruptures. Mudder, I am ravaged and being stripped of my memories, my experiences, my language and my childhood. I am returning to the state of nothing when I was inside you. Please receive me generously.

They expand upwards ever upwards. Seeking the light, in order to eclipse me. The slow accumulation defying gravity. Honing their aculeation, ready to receive me. To impale me on their spikes. A chalky maiden press. This calcification of my mind. Annexing my powers against me. As I squat huddled at the crown. Dripping rusted parts of my being, to further augment their Babel tower. Stalactite me seeding stalagmite them. Narrowing towards one another, the joust of two knights most unchivalric. If we flawlessly align, our whetted points will just abut, dovetailing harmlessly. Michaelangelo’s god infusing pneuma into a recumbent Adam. The handshake of the Red Army with the American 69^th Infantry at the Elbe. But if the pinpoint precision is out by any fraction of a degree, at best we will scrape against one another and send up shower of malignant sparks. At worst they will pierce my mass and fatally gouge my nucleus.

The tragedy, farce, Grand Guignol, Lehrstücke, kitchen sink theatre of my mind has gone dark. 

Campanile - Friday Flash

The government troops came and took the church bells away to melt down for the war effort. 

The people in the village had no tocsin for when the enemy columns were spotted from the spire. 

They had no means of raising their god to come to the defence of his sacred temple.

They couldn’t call the farmers in from distant fields to come raise a prayer to entreat for their safety.

Nor could they toll the dead to their graves in the shadow of the campanile.

Both the village and its god’s passing were marked by a silent death knell.

Blinkered - Friday Flash

I heard the rasp of the man’s finger down the spark wheel. It’s true what they say, when you become blind, one’s other senses become heightened, for I imagined I apprehended it striking against the flint. I started heaving on the unfiltered tip between my lips but was only rewarded with a few dry tobacco grains suctioned into the back of my throat. Foolish sightless me, the man hadn’t yet brought the flame to the cigarette. No doubt his hand was probably trembling too much and he was afraid I might glean that. The grains were coarse and the paper began dissolving between my lips. I discerned I could taste the scent of the man who had rolled it up, the bitter tang of hatred and despair. Of an army with reduced rations of only the cheapest shag. His troops might be hard up against it, yet it was I who was up against the wall. A bullet pocked wall, that much I knew without having to engage any of my senses, compromised or otherwise. 

“What, not a Sobranie then?”

I didn’t anticipate the cuff across my chops that swiped the gasper from my bushwhacked mouth. Didn’t feel a presaging swish of air, didn’t hear his coarse uniformed sleeve scything towards me. The blindfold had done nothing to accentuate my alertness after all.

“I need another one now. I’m not having that up off the ground”.

This time I did hear the crinkle of his rough worsted, though his arm seemed to be moving slowly rather than with the torsion of violence. The gasper was rammed back in the corner of my kisser. I manipulated my lips to funnel the cigarette into the middle of my mouth, for I wasn’t going to smoke this like some barrow boy or stevedore. I was just in time to receive the flame, whose feeble heat I could feel against my skin. Now in addition to tobacco grains, I could taste granules of earth to boot.

“You Sir, are neither an Officer nor a Gentleman”. I took his silence for agreement. I didn’t even know if he could speak my bally language. 

And what of the rest of my reception and ultimately rejection committee? Do they all smoke in advance of their duty to shoot me? To steady their hands, numb them into unerring aim? I hear no matches or lighters sparking up, but then I no longer trust my senses clouded by the blinkers. Perhaps they will await until after my despatch, lighting up to celebrate a job well done. Or at least not botched. An easy kill, a sitting duck of a target. A cigarette to purge their distaste and their dishonour. They know nothing lies behind my execution other than spite, since the war is lost and no advantage can be derived by my slaying. I hope they choke on their smoke. No, that does not become me. Faced with their position I would act exactly the same wouldn’t I? No, I would never let myself be cozened into such a position.

Normally when one smokes a fag, one indulges in watching the smoke wend its sinuous trail up towards the sky. Such carefree motion helps shapes one’s thoughts at that particular moment. But behind the blindfold I could see nothing of its convolutions. I possessed only internal sensations to fix upon. I breathed the smoke as deeply into the alveoli of my lungs as possible. I imagined I could almost feel the fumes licking up against the pulmonary walls and osculating with its infernal embrace. It was very much like the sensation of the first ever cigarette I had sucked on. A sensation forever sought after again and again, yet never recaptured. Just like the first orgasm. The first parachute jump. The first freefall. The first of each and every one of my daredevil enterprises, pushing myself. Each seeking after that first thrill, never able to reproduce it subsequently. Instead moving on to the next risky exploit. Unaware that all the time adrenalin was my blindfold, the sweat running into my eyes, the accelerating heart serving to blot out all true feeling. Always the quest for onwards and upwards, ever upwards. Now come to a crashing halt, here with my back pressed against a brick splintered by shrapnel and varnished in dried blood.

Two days, maybe a week no more and this damn war would be over. We would win it, yet I am likely to be one of the final casualties for our side. All because I took this outlandish plunge off my own bat. Behind the lines of this beaten army, yet their ideology I knew deep down to be both remorseless and unforgiving. To the last they would not be able to stomach any challenge to the monolith of their assemblage, no matter how gerrymandered. Even with a dearth of numbers on the front lines, they would perforce by their own perverse logic have to take a small platoon away behind the lines to form a firing squad. To eradicate the abomination that my gall represents. The decadence and delinquency that my brazen action somehow symptomises my country and the alliance we are part of. 

I can feel the faint heat of the burning tip close to my lips now. The cigarette is almost done. The reek of it in my nostrils is more like that of the cordite and saltpetre of the recently vacated battlefield. The tobacco and paper fuse to my own destruction was burning down to my own discharge. Now reduced to a dog end, it seared my lips. My nostrils were filled with the scent of burning flesh and brimstone. 

Ur, Um - Friday Flash

One morning Patient Zero woke up no longer in possession of his mother tongue. He did not discover this immediately on rising, for as he sung into the bathroom mirror while shaving, he fully understood the words, though they did not scan smoothly with the ditty’s established rhythm. It was only on greeting his wife that the disjunction became apparent. 

She couldn’t quite make out his words so asked him to repeat them thinking him to be still half-submerged in sleep. He couldn’t comprehend her request, so accordingly asked her to repeat herself in turn. His words sounded familiar to her, but didn’t quite accord with anything recognisable. She thought he might have suffered a minor stroke that had afflicted his speech. But listening with sharper focus, she educed his words weren’t slurred but enunciated clearly in their own alien right. Their lifelong marital communication was preserved intact, though somewhat adapted, as he read the confusion in her face, while she gleaned the panic etched on his.

She grabbed a notepad and started writing down her queries, but he snatched the pad and creased his brow in utter bewilderment at the symbols scrawled there. He handed her back the pad and shook his head. She immediately made an emergency appointment for him at the doctor’s and accompanied him as his translator, albeit a non-proficient one. 

The doctor confirmed that the words sounded almost conversant yet remained just beyond meaningful reach. He summoned his Asian colleague who attested to a similar linguistic diagnosis, though when the two compared notes they found significant points of difference in what they had imagined they had almost grasped. The colleague asserted that he was actually bilingual and would attempt to receive this strange speech with both his linguistic portals ready to tune in simultaneously. The other doctor thought his peer a show off, but acceded to the suggestion all the same. The medic now nearly assimilated the man’s peregrine diction in two different tongues, causing him considerable discomfort as his mind was assaulted by a divergent assonance. When he recoiled holding his head between his hands, his associate smirked, even as he picked up the phone to dial the hospital.

The speech therapist was stymied, but had the stoke of insight to place a call with the languages department of the university the hospital formed part of. The benighted man was struck dumb as he was metaphorically prodded and pinched by a horde of eager linguists each trying to draw a bead on his babble that matched their own specialism. He defeated them all, though each felt they almost understood his verbiage but fell just short. Then one had a bolt of enlightenment when he proposed that since the man’s speech sounded familiar to each one of their diverse coterie in turn, his language must be related to them all. That is, the man was speaking the primordial human language, the Ur-tongue from which all subsequent languages were descended. That was why each auditor had perceived the foreign tongue to chime with that of their own native one.

The academics were delirious. A fully dead language, that longest extinct one, had miraculously been resurrected. Those of a less spiritual bent sardonically remarked that here finally was the reverse of the Tower of Babel. What better prospect for the world than if every one of its future citizens all spoke the same linga franca? The Esperanto contrivance had failed for a dearth of authority. But here was the wellspring of all human language, what could be more prestigiously legitimate?

There was the tantalising prospect of an end to all misunderstandings brought on by translation glitches. They still might not agree on ideas and devotions, but at least they could all argue using the same vernacular. Who knows, the linguists felt that in time the Ur-language could replace all languages and that could only foster unity in man rather than the divisiveness of different argots.

They sat the man down to start to debrief his knowledge. They asked him to write down his parlance but he just shrugged at their mime acts of writing. One of the philologists explained that axiomatically the Ur-language had to precede any written alphabet or other symbolic system. There could be no transcribing it into school primers and grammars for ease of transmission across the generations. Not to be outdone, another scholiast interjected that the Ur-language would not make for an efficacious tool for describing the modern world. It’s vocabulary would be extremely limited, lacking in any terminology for much of the extant technology. It would inevitably depend upon importation words from the johnny-come-lately lingos.

And with that the major nations furiously debated which words should augment the Ur-language so as best to represent and capture the world. These nations came to blows over their etymological claims and thus was the planet plunged into ever greater division and strife. Each country vied to bring the most words into the sacred vocabulary and to outstrip those of its rivals. And rather than resort to a dictionary of insult and point-scoring, the countries turned to arsenals of weapons for which the Ur-language would never possess terms to define them. So that the very language which had accelerated evolution immeasurably, ended up destroying all communication unutterably. 

From the flash fiction collection "28 Far Cries" available in print or for Amazon Kindle

Insanity And Murder - Why Apocalypse Now Is My Favourite Film Of All Time

Sometimes it amazes me that films ever make it all the way through on to the screen, such is the welter of hands clawing at any singularity of artistic vision it could ever hope to possess. Scripts that go through innumerable scriptwriters, endings that are trialled and changed before release, the input/meddling of powerful lead actors swinging their weight, the interference of the Executives worried about bloated budgets and how the film will be received. "Apocalypse Now" had all these and more, yet still emerged as a stunningly literary and mesmeric piece of film-making that for me still outmuscles any film about modern warfare.

Like most scripts, John Milius' for AN was constantly rewritten, even to the point of Michael Herr being brought in well down the shoot, to write interior monologues for Martin Sheen without which the narrative would make far less sense. The film had so much material, that the "Redux" version was brought out twenty-two years after release with 53 minutes of footage omitted from the original (and to my mind adds nothing that wasn't already in there, while serving only to break up the narrative flow). Other inundations on the production included a typhoon in the Philippines which wrecked several sets and forced a hiatus as everybody decamped back to the US. Marlon Brando arrived on set appallingly overweight which made demands on how all of his scenes were shot. Such an ensemble of bon vivants as Hopper, Brando and the then alcoholic Sheen, were forced to make their own entertainment in remote jungles. A recipe for diaster. Sheen aged 36 suffered a heart attack, but bounced back into the production in under two months. Goodness alone what fourteen year old Laurence Fishburne made of it all, having lied about his age to land his role. He was seventeen when the shoot finally wrapped up.

The film uses Conrad's "Heart Of Darkness" for its narrative spine, swapping the Congo for the Mekong. It too is an investigation into a jungle-borne colonial heart of darkness, represented in the figure of Brando's Colonel Kurtz a direct echo of Conrad's character of the same name. Kurtz is the colonial gone native, ascending to a tribal god. Summed up by Hopper's photojournalist character as "The man is clear in his mind, but his soul is mad". It tilts at the "fisher king" archetype of Fraser's "The Golden Bough", a book Kurtz is shown reading, where the infirm king is culled by the young Pretender, thus healing the infertile landscape, in this case Sheen's character is the assassin that must commit the patricide of terminate Kurtz's command "with extreme prejudice". The circle of literary references in the film are completed by Kurtz reading TS Eliot's "Hollow Men", which has Conrad's "Mistah Kurtz he dead" for its epigram.

So with a strong narrative armature in place, the film goes on to fashion a uniquely cinematic treatment of its themes. On an epic level, there is a clash of mythological proportions between Sheen and Brando's characters, resolved to the haunting echo of The Doors' Oedipal song "The End". The complexity of both characters knocks rival films like Oliver Stone's "Platoon" into a cocked hat, since they offer little more than a good versus evil scenario. What elevates AN to a unique pinnacle, is that it didn't just pursue a "war is terrible, war is futile" line, but actually suggested the insanity of war on the ground. Here I believe it is in Lance Johnson, the only other character to survive the carnage by the film's end,  who holds the key to the movie. Johnson is a Californian beach bum and renowned surfer, GI grunt fodder for conscription. A likely stoner back home, his hardening drug use along the course of the journey up the Mekong is the filter through which this war is refracted. He drops LSD and views the stunning battle scene for the bridge at Do Long as an array of psychedelic lights and colours. It is Johnson who gets more upset at the loss of a puppy, than the slaughter of its human family he has recently helped perpetrate. And it is Johnson who is so dehumanized by his experiences, that he readily adopts the pale-face paint on his face and bow and arrow armoury of the legions who follow Kurtz the tribal god once they are in Cambodia. Sheen has to lead him by the hand back to the boat at the film's end, an adult who has fully regressed into a bewildered childlike state.

Vietnam may not have been the first asymmetrical war of liberation from a colonial power, but it probably represents the biggest reversal for a first world power (and of course it was an American war and America has Hollywood). Here was an enemy who would not engage along a battlefield, but rather emerged from below via tunnels, or from above with snipers and booby traps in the jungle canopy. 'Hostiles' who could not be determined from the 'friendlies' and neutrals just by looking at them. This war was already shaping up as something of a hallucinatory battlescape compared with prior conventions, before some of the American troops resorting to drug use to help get them through it. The scene where the Playboy Bunnies are helicoptered in to a stage erected in the river to entertain the troops, is sufficiently unhinged without the use of mind-altering drugs; juxtaposed with the hard material fact that Sheen's character is trying to secure the necessary diesel to keep the boat fuelled for its journey. This hyperreality is what Johnson's character represents so well, and indeed all the boat's crew have no idea where they are heading and to what purpose. It is a delicious irony that this mission is to wipe out one of their own. This level of cultural blindness, of not coming 'to know thine enemy' as Kurtz actually does, is what undermines the entire American campaign (and just about every campaign fought since), which is why I feel the main addition in the "Redux" version, of a long scene on a vestigial French rubber plantation where the characters discuss colonialism is redundant, because it's already utterly coursing through the grain of the film.

These represent the bigger picture, but there are so many powerful vignettes, so much wonderful dialogue within the film that have really seared it into people's minds. I'm unsure what the appearance time limit on a cameo role is, but Robert Duvall gives what I reckon is the greatest cameo appearance ever committed to celluloid, where he just picks an already engaging film up by the scruff of the neck and hurls it to new heights. Much like the boat that his choppers airlift and drop into a Nung river tributary. The film's fiery, apocalyptic opening is played out to the Doors' "The End" and segues into Sheen's inverted face and the opening line, "Saigon, shit I'm still only in Saigon". In fact, I'll just give you a link to some of the movie's best quotes, but I'll end with what is probably my favourite, from the scene of the battle for the Do Long bridge, when Sheen asks a beleaguered GI "Hey soldier, do you know who's in command here?" to be met with the response "Ain't you?" The chaos of an unwinnable, rudderless, aimless war summed up in two lines. I commend you to another look at this masterpiece. But don't watch the "Redux" version. Somehow, by hook or by crook, the original 1979 print forms the definitive film. 

Three Eclipses - Friday Flash

The geisha strummed the three strings of her shamisen for her Samurai master. The instrument's body encased in catskin that held the sweet vibrations like a purr. Its silk strings fashioned of the same material as the kimono in which she was draped. Three ivory pegs chorusing the hairpins shaping her high chignon hair. The three strings rubbed against one another to conjure up the sound of a whole hive of bees. The plectrum caressing against the body to conjure the rhythms of the hooves of her master's horse. Her fingers palpating the frets to make the instrument sound like sweetly dripping honey.

She was his flower in the pleasure quarters and his willow throughout the rest of the house, as she fed his soul with poetry, dance, calligraphy and grace. At night, to preserve her elaborate hair pinned with turtleshell, she slept with her head on a block and a bed of rice around its base to alert her, were her crown to roll off the wood.

Then came the American bomb clouds that momentarily blotted out the sun and stripped all the leaves from the trees. Those birds not in its vicinity, till crashed in their flying, as they conceived night had descended. The bees disappeared. Turtles retreated inside their shells never to resurface from their hibernation.

Now her silk kimono sat uncomfortably. She could feel the silk writhing over her body, as if the worms sought to reclaim their cocoons for their unborn broods. The shimasen's silk strings came away from the catskin body, as they too protested their indenture. Her master took his pitiless steel and rendered Seppuku. His insides unravelling like the insurgent strings on her shamisen. Her tresses escaped their turtleshell grips. No more of flowers and willows. A perpetual winter had eclipsed Japan's ever rising sun.

The silhouette of an American GI stood behind her shoji. He slid the screen door back, his bulk dimming the whole room. Save for the corona of light from the burning tip of his cigarette waxing and waning as he breathed heavily. Try as she might, she couldn't convince herself that it was a firefly in the night attracted by the scent of her hair's pomade.

Taken from the Flash Fiction collection "Long Stories Short" available on Amazon Kindle

Urban Renewal Cubed - Friday Flash

A panoramic eyesore. A blot not just on, but which wholly constituted the landscape, blotting out all sunlight behind its monstrous compass. This housing estate a prototypical design for living back in its proud flesh heyday, garnering architectural prizes. Yet for those denizens forced to dwell there, it represented nothing but a suppurating sore of violence, degradation and stunted horizons.

Nonetheless, today it was coming down. Walls purged of graffiti, in order to have 'marked for demolition' daubed on them instead. Raised by geometrically theoretical architects without reference to the asymmetries of human life, now their grandiosely rash vision was being razed to the ground. The final Euclidean lines, being those as the dynamite blasted the buildings plumbline straight in an elegant curtsy.

However the residents weren't being returned their lives. Having inhabited this area their entire existence pre the pre-fabrication, as well as during it, now they were to be further-flung. More atomised than the levelled bricks and steel.

Over the settling mounds of rubble, the pallid sun emerged from its thirty years of eclipse. The wind no longer had the stilts to whistle through like a bowling alley and skittle any human pedestrians. Earmarked for reconstruction, the site would first have to be cleared of debris, the guilty town planners surveyed about their gross failings. But neither took place. The city fathers' coffers had run dry of money to redevelop anything, while the master builders had hightailed their way into academic tenure. Lecturing the next generation of urban blighters, while sat in oak-panelled Medieval collegial towers.

*

The city's antiquity had taken away visitors' breath for centuries. Approached from the hills, the vista opened up into the spangling splendour of its domes, spires and minarets. Yet the stucco had plastered over the cracks. Frozen enmities glazed behind the friezes. Grudges moulded over the centuries now hard set into the cornicing.

Some of the houses had still borne the stigmata of a painted red cross to indicate Gothic plague. Well now all the houses bled with the pestilence brought down on everyone's heads. Furious fusillades of neighbour against neighbour.

Since the mosaic of races had started to unravel. The hand-woven gaily coloured welcome mats, no longer adorned domicile entrances. Only piles of sandbags instead. Once harmonious pediments, pockmarked through the impedimenta of military ordnance, triangulated through their cross-haired sights up in the hills. The picaresque daubed facades now pebble-dashed by shrapnel. Bricks and mortar torn up by Realpolitik's mortars raining fire.

Brightly coloured houses were gouged by the scorched carbon trails of shells. Rendered further drab by blackout drapes, tarpaulin and camouflage netting between the husks of houses, likely secreting a gun emplacement. The miscegenated colours of the city's terracotta and slate, now uniformly turned sombre olive or grey. Telescopic theodolites surveying for urban clearing, by way of ethnic cleansing. The clot that never heals.

*

He sat on the window sill staring up at the wan disc of the sun. It had yet to burn through the clouds, so flattening it against their filmy shroud. The moment it did so, he risked the sun also burning through his retinas. He thought he might rather welcome that.

Resembling little more than a stage lighting gel, he tried hard to imagine the sun as a seething ball of nuclear fusion. Nothing but brute raw power, smashing of atoms and remaking matter into energy. He speculated on the sound all that elemental pounding would forge. His own fire roared as it burned its pipe-fed gas in a humble Newtonian and Charles' manner. Yet such rumbling was outmuscled by the hiss of the gas valve releasing it into the duct.

But then he recalled that there was no air out in space. That it therefore lacked for a medium for the sound to be carried. The light energy from the sun could pass unhindered, yet the energy converted into sound died on solar lips. Much like the voice of god.

The creeping advance of the light had woken the birds. Their aubade broke out across the trees. Flowering and nourished under the sun's tentacular reach. A programmed growth and an instinctual repertoire of song. An adaptive symbiosis between bird and tree. Light the conjuror summoning striking everything into life.

He sensed that the sun was growing stronger, its orange hue intensifying. He closed his eyes, but a corona was still imprinted on his retinas in an after-image. Like scar tissue. With his eyes still rammed shut, he rubbed the skin over his forearm. It was bumpy and welted from when he had sat here before and simply driven his arm out through the window glass, gashing it sufficiently to engulf the feelings swirling around inside his head. Trying to attain the zenith of touch, to promote it to the perigee of his constellated senses.

The blood transfusions he'd required to prop him alive. Somebody else's pith and plasma coursing through him, yet he felt nothing different from before. The delightful tug of the synthetic thread of  the stitches long gone now. Something not him intimately welded to his skin, until they dropped away. Then there was the plaster cast set in place to thwart his wanton unpicking, to let the ravaged tissue heal. A protection from himself. His so-called loved ones had adorned his false cast with their signatures. Peeled off and disposed of when the cast came off. But they'd had the last laugh when he came home from his hospital sojourn and found that his mother had organised for the broken glass to be replaced. Didn't they understand that he was engaged in trying to alter his very own fabric? Yet they persevered in the notion that the house and every other surface appearance was to be restored to familiarity. When all he wanted was to forge a new seam.

He'd garnered some satisfaction from the wound's raised fibrous gnarl. And still he picked at it remorselessly. Piquing the baby pink keloidal skin. He was desperate to override its code. His code, that DNA programme which recloned him time after time. He yearned to cast himself anew. Even if only this tiny portion of his arm. If successful, there would be other vitreous panes and glass shards to recontour his body. The gorgeous scar tissue that reverberated constantly under his sleeve. That fired his nerves and suggested that he was alive. With touch finally at the apex of the hierarchy of sensation. Eclipsing the light. The sound of nuclear fusion in his ears from across the void.

Rich Pickings - Flash Fiction

The day had begun oh so very languid, even for a vulture. The golden egg was nesting at its perch in the sky, but the barbecue plumes rising from the feeding zone were playing havoc with any upthrusts the egg might be engendering. The clouds seemed to be all upside down, originating from the landing strip rather than just above their heads. While grey and black leaves were floating up to their heads and emanating heat. None of the wake had left their roosts and half of them hadn't bothered opening their eyes and unblinkering them from beneath their wing. Without sight, a vulture is blind. But although there was nothing to see down there for now, it didn't take their colony's human familiar to whisper in their ear about the whereabouts of a fine banquet large enough to feed them all. They were used to fires burning the ground. It seemed to usher in the greening of the earth, which drew the animals which meant they would not go hungry. But these particular fires promised more instantaneous victuals. The ones that usually stood tall like shrunken trees, but were forever shaking their branches and emitting fire. The larger versions of their own familiar and he seemed particularly excited this morning. They all knew they just had to wait for propitious winds. The food wasn't going anywhere, unless the hyenas got wind of it. Curse them and their scent senses so close to the dust.


* * *


The human familiar seemed to be in capricious mood today, for he whispered the rendezvous in the ear of his very own mate. Dutifully she took to the air, her petite wings forking a wondrous flabelliform in order to harvest the air. Beady eyes up and down the branches crept open like sprouting buds, tracing her elegantly soaring spirals. Fanning salivary impatience in each of them. The familiar was dismissed with a promise of propitiation, as each in the squadron took to the wing and felt the warm wafts cradle their undercarriages. Convinced of the inertness at ground zero, the she Scout initiated her spiral earthwards. She landed just a talon's stretch away from the repast. Fresh if a bit smoked by the look of it. She hopped demurely on to the man shank. It was for show really, since she knew she would have to defer to those accustomed to High table and await her place in the pecking order. Even being the lead in taking her place couldn't afford her the first slice. Her beak wasn't vigorous enough to make the cardinal sawing cut. This offering didn't seem to gape any ready mouthfuls. Basic rations it would be then.


For as fast as the rest of the clump descended, they were still outwinged by a crack battery of lappet faces. How ridiculous they looked with their dangling skin flaps. If they weren't so belligerent in pulling rank and preventing their smaller cousins from dining alongside them, such pendulous bonnets might be mistaken for a tasty pink morsel on offer during the frenzy. His mate duly hopped back off her mounting and stood aside as the lappets set to work with their slash and gash. There was nothing for it but to wait in sufferance for some graciously neglected tidbits. That is where their smaller beaks would reward them, since the so called elite forces for all their heavy ordnance, couldn't finesse their dragooning. Still required the lighter infantry to go in and tidy up afterwards.

Now they were joined on the sidelines by the ossifrages. These weaklings could be shooed around easily enough, but as they tended to incline their scrawny necks after the canned stuff - to the point where they were known to fly off and drop the indigestibles from a great height to splinter them open - the two groups weren't really competing for the same pickings at all. The odd one from the combined corps made a show of pecking towards the fare, but the lappets weren't bucking any insubordination and hissed and growled them away with an eclipsing span of their wings. The forbearers would just have to await the signal. When the lappets stood down, pissed themselves clean and sat back to bask the blood on their crowns dry.

His mate had taken it upon herself to daub herself in soil. Smirching her beautiful white feathers towards a dirty pink. Was she attempting to mimic a lappet's apron perhaps? Camouflaging herself for a daring raid. But as she lifted a wing in order to anti-preen herself, the human familiar could once again be descried insinuating into her cocked ear. She began to pad away from the margins of the spread and over to some bushes. He crooked a crafty glance around and saw everybody else's attention was fixed one way or another on the dismantling in the open. Then he followed his mate. The pair of them awkwardly picked their way through the buffeting thorns and bowers, that up in the sky would normally present them such comfort. And there it was. A special table reserved just for the two of them. More modest in size than the communal trough, but that ought to mean softer meat for carving. Thank familiar it didn't seem to have been cooked in any way, so much more pleasant on the palate that way. A veritable raw treat.

The pair of them approached the buffet. The eyes were pointing upward, but had the telltale lack of reflected blue sky and gold egg in them. He loved to start with the eyes, such a delicacy for hors d'oeuvres. The orbs rolled back to the corner of their sockets. Both birds jumped back startled and were immediately rebuked by barbs. They stood in place, staring very hard, trying to pierce for immobility. He silently cursed the human familiar who was nowhere to be seen. His wife was more daring. She waddled up towards the heap and he could see her hanging feathers begin to congeal with the red marinade issuing from it. That in itself was a good portent. She hosed herself down even as she continued walking. She circled around its smaller protuberance, avoiding the eyes, until she was poised at its apex. Then she gradually unkinked the crook of her neck as she elongated it over its head and bent her crest so that her eyes were directly over those of the esculent.

And there she stayed imperturbably frozen. He kept looking back to see that none of the others had caught on to their find, that's indeed if find it turned out to be. But they were either engaged in feeding or peevish biding. He returned his gaze to his mate. Still she perched ineffably still, craned out at full extension. Not one feather ruffled by any tension in her neck. If he himself were currently soaring on the gyres, he might look down and see her so transfixed, as to conceive her to be a ready meal as much as the lump she was verifying. The sauce had reached his legs now. He raised one then the other as he was void of urine. He chanced to look up at the sky. The gold egg had also shifted on its foot across the azure. His wife must be near a definitive course of action by now? Here she goes. Unfurling her wings like a shroud. Like an lure reserved just for him. She didn't jump back when brunch's eye rolled forward to meet hers. She merely contented herself with holding its cloudy gaze.

"Are you an angel?" thought the boy to himself. He couldn't smile for all the blood in his mouth suctioning his lips shut. "You've got dirty wings. Is the path through the clouds up to heaven covered in dust? The same dust as lies here on the earth? At least it can't be lined with garbage like here... Is it a ladder? Or a tunnel? Oh my god! It is a tunnel and it's straight into Hell isn't it? Conducted through your dark eye. That's the exit from this earth. My god forgive me!"

His eye fell back into the recesses of its socket. The levee of his lips burst asunder as the blood surged out. His mate hopped back a pace. He ventured to join her behind the head. They watched the blood tide ebb, at which point she dipped her crown and delicately pulled back the wormy upper lip. An open invitation for him to bring his beak to bear and tuck in. The human familiar walked away, cupping something unseen in his arms.



This story taken from my first flash fiction collection

available from Amazon Kindle