The Word To Come - Friday Flash

She came round lying in the recovery position. Her mouth was dry and gritty, while her leaden tongue felt like a lump of rock. She wasn’t in her bed however, as her hand groped sightlessly under her. To judge by the impression reported by her fingers, she appeared to be prone on a ceramic floor. She granted herself five more minutes rest and turned on to her back. Something careened in her mouth, as she experienced the hard smack of an object against her teeth. Yet no pain signals lit up the nerves. Come to think of it, her roster of aches and pains that was habitually ushered in with the dawn, was also absent. 

She pincered two fingers together and delved into her mouth, as she finally batted open an eye. Instead of the expected fleshy grub of her tongue, her digits encountered something smooth and unyielding. She withdrew it carefully and inspected the mineral interloper. It was a red gemstone, garnet in all likelihood, cut into the shape of a heart, but not one she recalled from her personal trove. She was well acquainted with garnet, since it represented her birthstone. 

She sat upright and tried to take in her surroundings. There didn’t seem to be a door set into any of the walls. Looking down she saw that the floor was composed of tessellated tiles, each which had a letter of the alphabet inlaid into it, cast in differing precious stones. She rose up on to her bare feet. She was nervous about treading on the stones in case they had rough edges that might tear into the flesh of her soles. So she sank once again to her haunches and gingerly brushed her hand over the gems of the letter ‘E’. They seemed flush enough. 

She scuffed her way to the perimeter and proceeded to trace a circuit around the entire room, her hand breasting the walls searching for a depression or anything that might suggest a portal. There wasn’t one to be found, but she did note that the dully twinkling stones in the floor letters didn’t contain garnet. She deduced that she already held the key in her hand. Now to find the lock.

The letters must be telling her something. She studied them and discerned just twenty-six, one for each letter, with four blank tiles in the corners. Blanks weren’t worth points in Scrabble she ruefully recalled. The letters did not seem to be arranged in alphabetical order, nor as on a Qwerty keyboard. Stood in the middle to where she had returned, were an ‘E’, ‘A’, ‘S” and ‘T’. Craning her neck she saw that ‘J’, ‘Q’, ‘Z’ and ‘X’ abutted the blank tiles. Clearly they were arrayed according to frequency and that meant that she was probably expected to transcribe messages by walking on them to spell out words.

She traversed the word ‘Help’, except that in order to move from the ‘H’ through to the ‘P’ involved divagations through extraneous characters, so that she actually spelled out ‘Hearldvp’. Nothing doing. Then it struck her, she might employ the garnet like a marker in the game of Hopscotch. She gently lobbed it towards the ‘H’ but it bounced and settled on the neighbouring ‘Y’. While she was berating herself for lifelong inability at anything sporty, the gems fabricating the shape of the ‘Y’ lit up. That must be it then, how to eliminate  the effect of walking on intermediary letters. The letters she deliberately lit up would solely be the ones spelling out the words. Now all she had to ensure was the surety of her aim in targeting her chosen characters. Throwing involved too much uncontrollable caroming. She would have to slide the gemstone along like a shuffleboard if she wanted to escape her prison.

She transcribed a path to spell out the plea ‘Let me live’, but immediately wanted to edit it to ‘let me out’. She wondered how she could delete things. Perhaps the blanks held the key, that they represented an erase function. But why were they perched in the corners and the least accessible? An encouragement to getting it right first time she supposed. She decided to try and merely reverse the order of the word to be struck out, even though in this case she was transcribing the word ‘evil’. It seemed to work, as instead of the gems remaining illuminated, they were extinguished. She completed her plaintive ‘let me out’ but the room did not shift its architecture to accede to her request. 

She then re-rendered the message, this time using the blank tiles as spacers between the three words. It still yielded no ‘Open sesame’, even after she spelled out that very injunction. She sat back down forlornly to consider her options. She had been moving along a life-sized Ouija Board. The very thought sent a shiver down her spine. Yet she wasn’t cold, despite bare feet on cold-fired clay. Nor was she hungry or thirsty, or in need of relieving herself. She felt none of the physical sensations of a ravaged body. Including not one of her customary pains. Was she dead? Had she passed over into this atrium in limbo? Was the garnet, her personal birthstone, there to endow her rebirth? Presumably as this was March, or at least it was the last time she was aware, she would be reborn with a new birthstone to mark it.

Then the question became what she was supposed to write on this floor keypad. Was she supposed to petition for her life, one letter at a time? By doing what, begging for a new one, or accounting for her old one so that it merited a second spin of the wheel? It would take an eternity to account her whole past life just ended. Ended, but not concluded she reminded herself. Or maybe this was Eternity itself, an endless retelling of her story? To stave off the final surcease of extinction, she had to keep talking, or in this case spelling. She had to sustain the inlaid floor gems spangling like a low-rent disco Scheherazade. She slid the garnet over to the letter ‘I’...

Nu Skin - flash story

The amino acid readers had levelled the playing field for love. You saw someone you fancied in the arms of another man. At a glance you can see you do not match up to her physical type. So you merely whip out your reader and scan the paramour’s DNA. His reaction would inevitably be conflicted. Flattered that you recognised him as a superior looking man worthy of emulation. Moderately perturbed that you were about to challenge him. The reader’s particle field serving as a gauntlet being slapped across the love rival’s cheek. For, after a single night having your DNA reconfigured under the auspices of the machine, the next morning there you were a perfect physical replica of the beau. Then it was solely down to charisma and personality to swing the women’s choice between her two identical specimens.  

Yet it wasn’t quite so simple. The body might have changed overnight, but the psyche had to permit itself time to get used to it. In the same way that first time you shaved your new face and its unfamiliarity would trip you up time and again and lead you to slice your visage to ribbons, you also had to project your new features appropriately. You could not carry yourself the same way as you had with your former body. You had to ease into your gait, figure out the space it inhabited, how it moved and gestured. Too precipitant and you would sink any chance you had with your object of desire, since your mismatched clumsiness with your own self would paint you as inherently undesirable. For all the instant  transformation, the shrewd suitor still had to play the long game of love.

National Anthems - Songs About Countries

10 songs with countries in the titles. Let's get these adopted as the national anthems of these countries!

1) Armenia - Einsturzende Neubauten
Based on an Armenian folk tune, the metal deconstructionists do what they always do and cast their ineffable stamp over it so that it's not anything you or I would recognise as a folk song! But at its heart it retains its soulful wail.



2) America The Beautiful - DOA
Canadians have a chip on their shoulder about their neighbours to the south don't they? Still, they have a point here perhaps...



3) Castles In Spain - The Armoury Show
When Magazine broke up they formed an even more arty group called The Armoury Show with half of the members from the band Skids. This was perhaps their most famous song as they didn't last terribly long.



4) Sweden - The Stranglers
This video is baffling, unless you realise that mysterious drummer Jet Black who never spoke in the band, was from Sweden, so when they go "all quiet on the Eastern front" while laying a head on patient Black's midriff, that might just explain what's going on. But that's probably no help at all is it?



5) Lebanon - The Human League
So the band that sung about suits pursued in cocktail bars and exclaimed how they only played synths because they couldn't master guitars here suddenly go all serious minded  and resort to guitar strings too. *Shakes head*



6) Israel - Siouxie and The Banshees
Yes that is Robert smith of The Cure playing guitar in the video. He helped the band out for a while, so you had the King and Queen of Brit Goth Pop temporarily in the same band. No idea what this somg is on about mind...



7) Holiday in Cambodia - Dead Kennedys
If I could get serious for a moment here, this song did more than anything to prompt me to keep aware of the situation in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, an interest I've maintained undimmed over the last 30 years. And it's actually a song to beat trendy liberals with rather than the situation in Cambodia at the time back in 1977.



8) Haiti - Arcade Fire
I have one album by arty band Arcade Fire, most of the tracks on it are called "Neighborhood", though this track is on it too. Note, when you have that many musicians in an indie band, it is impossible to make any money. Just sayin'



9) Vietnam - Jimmy Cliff
Something slightly incongruous about this jaunty reggae beat backdropping a song about the Vietnam War and a mother being informed of her son's death.



10) India - Psychedelic Furs
I never quite got the Psychedelic Furs, though I did like "Pretty in Pink"

Nappy Rash - Friday Flash

They say every body has at least one book inside them.

Or maybe I just read that somewhere. Not in a book mind, more likely in my baby daughter’s entrails, or rather what issues from them. I snappily browse the latest output from her digestive tract and pronounce myself satisfied with this particular edition; as well as being reapprised with what I had for dinner, now since plagiarised and offered back as part of her own developing opus.     

Unfunnily enough, none of the literature on parenting delves much into the subject of the chromatics of your offspring’s off-loadings. Whether, their off colouring, denotes that she may be off key. The topic crops out barely a pothole, in what is otherwise a mountain of exalted agglomerations of evolutionary know-how. A repository teeming with the species’ collected works on rearing. A clearing house of formative sagacity. With its ante-room periodicals and primers of anticipation; its delivery suite of digests and catalogued consultation; its study of referenced providence. All in all, an abundant library to lend us the abstruse familiarity of our foundlings. But as you pile-drive through the textbooks, the guidebooks, the TV-advertised partworks with free-ring binder, the cribs, monographs and how-to handbooks, clambering towards the pinnacle of human apprehension, the view emerges of the speciousness of this species wisdom. For, despite all the incunabula, you are simply left holding the baby, probably at half-arm length out in front of you, much like you might hold a book. 

So much for the manual. There isn’t a solitary one worthy of the misnomer, throughout the entire damn voluminous paper trail. Me, I’m shivering up to my elbows in droppings back in the pothole. A single little kick amidst the full-of-the-joys-of-being-alive salvo, and my daughter’s nappy pregnant with discharge has slithered across the changing mat and positioned itself perfectly, to catch the down thrust of my elbow as I swipe her legs up in the air to dab at her bottom. Baby shit on my fingers, baby shit on my ulna. Forewarned is not forearmed. 

Once we’ve unerringly pulped all the trees, which might you consider be worse; to have toilet paper but sacrifice books; or to retain the publication of books at the cost of wiping your arse without any intercessional medium? That’s assuming the whole world hasn’t infarcted and collapsed in on itself, under the weight of impermeable, non-degradable, disposable nappies plugging all our landfill refuse sites.

Penmanship - Flash Fiction

The man was lying asleep on his side, his hand tucked under his face for a pillow, when he was shaken awake. His whole bed was aquiver and he suffered that shooting vertigo as the block mattress was shot up vertically. The tethers bound him in place. He knew what was to follow.

 

The metal probe projected horizontally towards him. Its point was dulled so that there was no spangle reflection to blind his eyes. To help veil him from its unerring assignment. The stylus started cutting into his skin. His wounded flesh responded by filling in the cavities with blood, but the duct mounted beneath the stylus squirted some sort of anti-coagulant to sluice the blood away as soon as it tried to dock with the skin.

 

He shut his eyes and gave into to the lapping swish of the chemical reagent jets. He had endured the sensation so many times, his nerves had ceased to fire at the trespass of the spike. It was gouging out characters on his skin, some of which he could flick his eyes to read, others which remained beyond his purview. Because of the irregular contours of his body, the words spelt thereon were not arranged in sentences. He was not a flat plane like the leaves of a book. And that seemed to be the very object.

 

When the stylus had finished its calligraphic furrows, there was the customary pop as the liquid stream was shut off and replaced by a more viscous fluid. Here it comes, as a black ink was sprayed into the scores in his skin, until the trenches were full to the top. The probe performed its shuffling retreat as it was winched back. He leaned his head back against the metal block and turned to one side. He saw the arrayed ranks of others trussed and coloured exactly the same as him, though he could not make out the inscriptions on their flesh. A printing block army. A typeset textual host. And then it began.

 

In rapid fire, the typebars were launched forward headlong, pressing the composed human monotypes against a giant white canvas of indeterminate fabrication. The letters were intaglioed, incised against the blockish lumps of uninscribed flesh to create the impression of three-dimensional lettering. Not unlike that of graffiti taggers, though this was intended as far more of a formal imprint. For this was the justice system’s record-keeping of its proceedings, or at least the footnote annotations thereof. For this race it was important to have the sentences produced with differing depths and alignments and not just necessarily legible in a linear fashion. Their justice resonated with greater and more intricate profundity in that way.

 

The impact at rapid velocity against the canvas always knocked the human print stamps immediately spark out. They came to when a sprinkle of water washed over their face. An alert that the cleansing and maintenance procedures were upon them. Now their blocks were positioned to the horizontal and they passed through a vertical plane of some muslin like material ingrained with an astringent that served to flush out any vestiges of ink squatting in skin recesses. A blast of heat was quickly applied to evaporate any surface liquid and scour the flesh prior to silky spurts of an aqueous polymer coated the degraded flesh and quickly flowed to seal it smooth. The fusible skin would harden and set within an hour and the human composite stick would be good to go once again the following day to record the judgements handed down.  

For Valentine's Day...

                                                     

"I wish I had choreographed it all out in advance. Maybe a treasure hunt of little ditties placed throughout his apartment. Just to keep pricking the scabs. Closet conference to have read: ‘Love lies bleeding, love lies limp. Forehead’s receding, you dress like a pimp.’ Bathroom meditation: ‘Roses are red, violets are blue. Always said you were anal, now you’re flushed down the loo’. Kitchen corkboard, affixed with pins: ‘Love lies bleeding, love lies limp. Get some other scrubber, dirtying her hands in your sink’. Required bedtime reading: ‘Roses are red, violence black and blue. To the pisshole in your prick, figured to add just a few’. You simply never think of it at the time do you? Just as well really. Doesn’t even scan properly."

from the novel "A,B&E" A revenge tale where it is a dish best served "flush across a bloke's cranium"

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