Extra-Curricular - Image gallery

While I don't often get prompted for stories from visual images, when I initially post them to this blog I usually try and accompany them with an image to encapsulate them.

So with my new collection of flash stories "Extra-Curricular" being published in September, here is a gallery of images associated with some of the stories.

 "Night Vision"









"Echoes"













 "Drones" 

"Confirmament"

 "Overpass"

 "Eyes In The Back of His Hands"

"Hollow Point"

"Pinboard Wizard"

 "Wings"

"Life Class"

"Boustrophedon"

"Performance Anxiety"

"A Round, A Bout"

"Crowd Sauced"

"The World Alchemist"

"People Watching"

 "The Disenchanted Forest"

"Flea Circus"

"Compound Fracture"

"Disbanded"

 "Bedroom Ballistics"

 "Blood Angel"

"Wrist Assessment"

Available for pre-order on Amazon UK, Amazon US, I-Tunes

Book Trailer - "Extra-Curricular"

     My new (5th) collection of flash fiction will be published on September 18th. "Extra-Curricular" has 44 tales (45 in the print version) arranged around a school timetable.

Here is the trailer for the book, with the first story "Night Vision"

Blind Date Dialectic - Friday Flash

Needy or carefree?

Careerist or nester?

Earnest or wanton?

Antagonistic or placid?

Lacy or leather?

Realist or fantasist?

Manhater or hussy?  

Pussycat or scold? 

Golddigger or kindhearted?

Artful or unaffected?

Affectionate or ardent?

Mardy or relaxed?

Waxed or bearded?

Fearless or mousy?

Frivolous or prudent?

Prudish or uninhibited?

Unintelligent or forensic?

Neurotic or unsentimental?

Augmented or natural?

Turpitude or chaste?

Hassled or poised?

Poisonous or juicy?

Judgemental or tame?

Amazonian or pacifist?

Fisting or cunnilingus?

Gusher or shrivelled?

Vajazzled or trim?

Frigid or freak?

Speak or spurn?

Yours or mine?

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. 

 

Review - "The Desire Machine" by Arbonauts

Decades ago I went to a lot of dance and physical theatre in London. I tried writing in the hope of working with some of its practitioners. I even attended conferences about the relationship of both to conventional theatre. As my own artistic interests changed I drifted away from stage performances and stopped going to such events. Arbonauts' new show was a welcome re-immersion in that world and brought back much of the awe and pleasure I used to derive from such spectacle.

First the space, a shaft servicing Brunel's tunnel under the Thames at Rotherhithe. Entrance through a low door, admitting one audience member at a time. Inside the venue, a music soundscape designed very precisely to meet and fill the angles and recesses of the brickwork. It might have been interesting to move around the space and experience how the sound worked differently within the various pockets, but the 'auditorium' was too crowded to have the chance to do this. Centre of the space was an erected carousel with round disc floor and cables to form part fairground ride, part birdcage.

The performance started with some aerial work amidst the cables, the lighting working well to blur the outlines of the performer, their sinew blurring with the cable so one becomes indistinguishable from the other. I was very much put in mind of Steven Berkoff's company's extraordinary performance of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and that insect's aerial movements.

And later when the lights are more powerful and you chance to look up at the brickwork to see the giant projected stages from the stage, you're put in mind of the filmic "Nosferatu".

But for me the real tours de force came from the dance and movement of the performers on the ground. The first deeply involving tableau was when a bridal gowned Rachel Alexander stood stock still in the centre of the rotating stage, just her arms stretching out as part inviting embrace, part clock hands. two other performers moved subtly shaped by her orbit, with exquisite precision when in close proximity of the bride, manipulating the space between these two bodies between intimacy and disinterested proximity. I have always preferred angularity in dance to smooth, sweeping curves and I delighted in the spectrum of flections of both performers and the space between them.

But the highlight of the whole show was the performance by Dominique Vannod, angularity supreme across her body as she moved on all fours trying to conquer the restraint of the turning disc. The sharpness of her bones (shoulder blades, wrists etc) jutting through the skin in seemingly impossible ways was breathtaking. It conjured both insect and some larger beast, suggestive of being multi-limbed and not just restricted to the normal two/four of the human. Simply spellbinding.

 Dominique Vannod

image courtesy of Ludovic des Cognets 2013 (from different Arbonauts show)

If I had a quibble, it was with the snatched phrases of dialogue which i just felt couldn't bear the weight and intensity of what was taking place on stage. Even though these were taken directly from the source book, Angela's Carter's "The Infernal Desire Machines Of Doctor Hoffman", phrases like "I am my own self-antithesis" just seemed trite to my ear. But then maybe that's just the ghost of the old writer for physical theatre rising in me again.

Slit Slot Aperture Gash Vent Perforation Shutter Foramen Chink Cleft Peephole Outlet Eye - Friday Flash

Seephole: He rang the door buzzer. While he waited for footfalls on the other side of the door, he weighed up the buzzer tone as to whether it was like that of a quiz contestant jumping in to answering a question, or the production team blazoning an incorrect answer. Or even just calling time. He saw the cover of the peephole being moved aside as the light changed and he fired his pistol straight through its glass as to where the target’s eye and a bit further back his brain, would be. The mark had got the question asked by his executive producers entirely wrong according to their way of thinking. It was not ever a question he could have answered entirely to their satisfaction, but a better answer would have seen him fire the gun through the letterbox and into the groin. Scarcely a consolation prize, but you would get to live to fight another day. Blood started to seep out into the hallway from threshold. That could do with sealing by a door sweep he thought to himself as he turned and left.

Pea Shooter: The archer stood pressed invisible against the arrow-slitted casement, raining his shafts down on the heads of the besiegers. They in turn brought up their bombards in the shape of church bells and chamber pots and prised him out of the masonry like shelling whelks.

Concentration Camp: The perforations of the leaves’ stoma were gently respiring, when along came the aphids. Their stylets shot forth through the vent of their rostra, as they proceeded to puncture the vessels of the plant and siphoned the liquid sugars under the pressure of the breach. In marched the legions of ants to palpate the aphids to release the concentrated honeydew from their rectal orifices. Any aphids that threatened to sprout wings to secure more lebensraum for themselves, were stripped by the vigilant soldier ants and held in place.

C Camp: Her smile was permanently imprisoned behind her brace’s steel bars, only ever seeing the light of day in the exercise yard of a yawn.

Convex: He could prescribe the sitter’s emotion, for he was the lord of light. At his whim he determined the shutter speed of his camera, shining the light on this aperture of their life they had exposed themselves too in this one fleeting moment. He himself had no chink in his own emotional makeup, shuttered off and shadowy as befits the omnipotent. 

Collide-o-scope: She was dilatory. For a full two seconds after the metal screen had juddered clear there was nothing on the other side of the window. Finally she mooched in and started rubbing herself. He tried to fall in step with her rhythms, but found her motions too laggardly for his own pace, more listless than lingering. And then the screen guillotined her display. He struggled for coins in his pocket and then to penetrate them into the slot. The screen began its withdrawal, revealing her feet planted firmly on the floor and slowly exposing the rest of her body in stasis. Like corroded clockwork she rose up from the chair and began her slow coursing over her body. He found himself quickening all the while, contending not with her rhythms but against the dread drop of the shutter and the one-armed fumble for money to put in the slot. He was timed out again. 

Catherine Wheel: Sputum was emitted from the gash of his mouth like a girandole. But it wasn’t being showered in spit that concerned her. Nor was it the amount of perspiration welling up from his pores and running in rivulets down his skin. She remained unperturbed by the imminent discharge of semen from the blinking meatus of his member. No, she was anxious about the stork-bite vein bulging in his forehead that it might burst and cull him. Not that she would be upset over his grand mort following on immediately from his petit one. She was alarmed by the prospect of his deadweight crashing down and fracturing a rib or two. Adam’s revenge finally assuaged by Eve’s forfeiture in kind. 

Bar None: What he had come to realise was that it wasn’t a stork which delivered your family’s lot, it was the slot machine. The never so aptly named ‘One-Armed Bandit”. That which stole away your adult life so effortlessly, it was as if it did indeed have one arm tied behind its back as it prised away your pleasures and spited your future happiness. Unless you hit the jackpot with your offspring. Three ‘Lucky Sevens’, and you might, just might land the perfect, undemanding, self-sufficient child, but the odds are just about that, seven times seven times seven, or seven cubed,  one in every 343 of your kids turns out like that in your drop bucket. Three bells, that’s a doozy winner too right? Not if she’s female, more like Hell’s Belles as in Macbeth’s three witches all rolled up into one. A couple of cherries and you got a nymphomaniac on your hands when she hits teenage. The watermelon? Don’t tell me that don’t look like a woman’s pudendum? A lemon, well I don't have to tell you what that means… It’s also called a fruit machine for a reason, if you catch my drift. Chances are good, or bad, you may end up with a son who goes a different way through the catflap. What? Yeah, me and the old lady will give it another spin I reckon. Our last chance saloon. 

The Interrogation - Flash Fiction

We’ve seen you… caught red handed in the act… got you on film… we just need the names… Who’s that? Who did you just say? Stay with me now. What was that name again? … Damnation! … We’ve lost him again… Revive him! Oh not now! Who’s that? Oh hello Sweetie… Yes… yes, not now love… I’m conducting an interview… I’ve asked you repeatedly Sugarplum, please don’t call me at work… Wipe that smirk off your face… No, not you Love, just talking to my colleagues here… They seem to find something funny about the situation… What? For a job yes… Um, a secretary… No not it’s not a woman… Categorically not… What? You’re joking? No alright, alright, I’ll do as you say… Bring him round! … No I was talking to my colleagues here… What? Well um he’s sat the other end of a long table, so he needs to come to the phone doesn’t he? … Well yes, I suppose I could go to him… Hang on then a sec, I’ll go give him the phone… I’m just walking over there now… It is an awfully long table my pet, we’re in the, um boardroom… Loosen the bindings… I was talking to the interviewee Baby Cakes. Just how we’re um prepared to be a bit flexible on the terms of his contract… What? Oh that was just me snapping my fingers… To um, turn off the, um video recorder… They don’t need to hear our conversation… Yes, we record all interviews for training purposes… I know Dear, I’m a model interviewer and my technique is used throughout our organisation… Sit him up a bit… What? No, he’s slouching in his chair. I’m afraid your call has rather broken the mood of the interview… No, I wasn’t criticising you my Honeybun… What? yes, I’ll put him on the phone now… Say hello to my wife Mr Timpson… What was that? What? … Yes I know Cherie… Grunts yes… But you could tell they were male grunts right? … Well he was just er helping my guys move some things… His hands were full… Big heavy boxes full of files… Well we want to get an idea of how he responds to orders don’t we? Whether he’s a team player… No I can’t just bring the guys over to our house to help us shift the lounge furniture around… It’s unprofessional… And an imposition…Well yes, I have the authority, but in truth Angel it’s a bit of an abuse of power… I will do it, I promise I’ll get round to doing it… Yes I swear on our children’s lives… My Treasure, was there a particular reason you called me? I really must get back to work… What? No that wasn’t a whip you heard… Knock it off you clowns… No, just my colleagues having a bit of fun at our expense my Dumpling… See this is why I prefer it if you didn’t call me while I’m at work. There’s no privacy here… What? We’ve got a leak? Just call a plumber. Or get hold of the Water Board, tell them it’s an emergency… No! No! No! Take the towel off him. It’s too much! Turn the hose off! … What? No, I wasn’t talking to you there Lambchop. Towel? Um yes we had a spill here too. A cup of um tea… Don’t want it staining the carpet… You’ve had to put towels down too? Yes that is a bit spooky… Do you know where the stopcock is Kitten? … That’s not funny boys… The electrodes, with all this water around are you mad? No not you Frou-Frou… Look Buttercup, I really need to hang up now. Just I’m right in the middle of this thing… You fools, you loosened them too much! That bang? I think one of the boxes of files just fell on to the floor… Pick it up would you? Set it back on the um table. Bye bye Button, I’ll see you tonight as normal…


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