Very Slight Stories

Pinocchio

2009-07-07T02:44:00.000-07:00

   Myself, Jimmy and Chadwick were walking down a quiet country road one Saturday evening when we met one of my neighbours, a man known as Pinocchio. I don't know what his real name is. I was starting to have my doubts about some of the stories he told. Does he really have a tractor full of butter? I've never seen it, and I spent a long time looking for it. Has he really directed over a hundred films? Sometimes I'm convinced he's telling the truth about this because he can talk at great length about the film-making process. But sometimes I listen carefully to what he's saying and I start to have my doubts. He once said, "It's really just a matter of having a talkey bit followed by a stickey bit and then have a man get struck by lightning by dropping some cats on his head. Isn't that right, Seamus?" Seamus is the assistant director. Pinocchio says 'Isn't that right, Seamus?' every few minutes regardless of whether or not Seamus is there. When Seamus is there he always responds to this by saying 'It is', regardless of whether or not it's right.
   When we met Pinocchio on that Saturday evening he told us that the people who had just moved into the house near the old mill had gold eyes. We thought there was a good chance he was lying about this, but we had to find out for sure, so we went to visit these people.
   They didn't have gold eyes. We couldn't tell them that we had only visited them to see if they had gold eyes, so we said we were there to welcome them to the locality. They invited us in, and we thought it would be rude not to accept the invitation. There were eight of them in the living room, four men and four women, and each one of them had perfectly normal eyes, but there was something strange about their hands. We had been drinking earlier, and Jimmy had reached the stage of intoxication where he no longer felt a need to think before saying something about other people's hands. He asked them if they'd mind putting their hands away. They said they'd be only too happy to oblige.
   It took them over an hour to get out all the boxes and carefully pack their hands. We drank beer as we watched them. When they had finished the job they asked us where we got the beer. I told them we bought it from the man who follows us around the place, selling us beer. They bought some beer from him as well, but myself, Jimmy and Chadwick had to hold up the cans for them, or else they'd have had to unpack their hands. Jimmy was sorry he ever asked them to put their hands away. In hindsight, their hands weren't all that odd, certainly not as odd as the portrait that was drinking milk.
   They asked us to stay for dinner. I didn't want to stay because I was afraid we'd end up feeding them as well, but there was also the fear that they'd injure themselves making dinner without hands, especially as they were all slightly drunk, even after just one can of beer. So I said we'd stay.
   Thankfully they decided to put their hands back on to make dinner, but because they were slightly drunk they got their hands all mixed up. When they realised they were wearing each other's hands they started touching each other and laughing. I thought it was going to be a long evening. I said I needed to step outside for a minute to talk to the man who sells us ice cream. Chadwick came with me, but Jimmy stayed inside. He seemed to be enjoying watching them touch each other.
   The ice cream man told us he was still having trouble with the giant hand that reaches down from the sky and taps him on the shoulder. It was affecting his nerves, and it was affecting his ice cream as well -- it tasted awful. Chadwick said, "I have a plan that will prevent future assaults on your shoulders and make them more fashionable as well. Your shoulders will be the envy of all other shoulders, ankles, elbows, necks and even some heads. My cousin Imelda has just launched what she calls a 'fashion range'. She has jackets with all manner of things attached to the shoulders. Telephones, lobsters, dolls' heads. Shoulders are 'in', apparently. People in fashionable society will think you're backward unless your shoulders are adequately decorated. On one of her jackets there are metal spikes on the shoulders, and this is the one for you. That's the thing to keep the hand away. It might tap your shoulder once more, but it won't do it twice."
   So we took him to see Imelda and he bought the jacket with the spikes. He couldn't wait to go outside and taunt the giant hand. Myself and Chadwick went back to see how Jimmy was getting on with his new friends. Dinner was nearly ready when we arrived. We explained the reason for the delay in returning, and when they heard about the giant hand they were horrified. This hand wasn't put back in its appropriate box, they said, and now it's out of control. It needed to be captured.
   They abandoned the dinner. They went outside and they got harpoons and crossbows from their shed. As night set in they set out to hunt down the hand.
   Despite their best efforts they couldn't catch the hand. It always outsmarted them. It would creep up behind them and tap their shoulders. After a few months they were starting to go mad, but they couldn't give up the chase. It was a bit like Moby Dick. The hand was their white whale and they were obsessed with its capture. They thought they'd look weak if it got the better of them. Eventually they shot down a weather balloon and they pretended that this was the hand. It looked more like Moby Dick than a hand. Pinocchio and Seamus filmed all this. In fairness, it made a good action film. The premiere took place in the village hall. So that's one film he's definitely made, but I'm still not sure about the other hundred.

A Short Story

2009-06-30T06:49:00.001-07:00

   You can make some long stories short and still be telling them at dawn. Stories about trips to the moon rarely get finished before a new day begins. Some people say you should chew gum instead of telling a story. They point out that chewing gum will rarely keep you up all night and that listening to someone chewing gum is more enjoyable than someone telling a story about a trip to the moon. I have a story about the time I found a set of false teeth. I didn't want to put them in my mouth without testing them on an animal first, so I put them into a dog's mouth, but he ran away.
   In the longer version of this story, there's a trip to the moon. But I can easily cut that out and greatly reduce the length of the story without diminishing its impact, and ensuring that it has a chance of competing with someone chewing gum.
   I chased the dog through the fields, and then... [Scenes Deleted] ...I was chased by a farmer with a pike, two astronauts, a priest, two volleyball teams and a motorbike gang, along with the dog who had my false teeth. You could tell that the gang were evil because they kept jam in their mouths. They'd stick a knife in their mouths to get the jam and spread it on bread. I'm not going to mention where they kept the butter. The chase came to an end when I came across a man who was standing on a wooden bridge over a stream. A strange noise was coming from his brain. You could hear the sound through his nose. Myself, all the people who had been chasing me and the dog all listened at his nose until dawn. It sounded as if something in his brain was chewing gum. The dog was lulled to sleep by the sound, and I was able to remove the false teeth from his mouth and put them in my own mouth without anyone noticing. I casually walked away while everyone else was distracted by the sound from the man's nose. The motorbike gang were making their breakfast. They had started a fire and they were frying sausages, eggs and rashers on it. I think it's best that I end this story before mentioning where they kept the food.

Stacey and George

2009-06-23T07:00:00.000-07:00

   Stacey and George were perfect for each other. They both liked metal. She had a pierced nose and he had two staples in his fold. Her mother didn't like George. His gooballs nearly popped out of his head when Stacey told him all her mother had said about the traffic in and out of his head. He didn't like the thought of having her as a mur-in-law and she didn't want a son-in-lawn with green hair that he hadn't mown in over a year. But he needed to impress her for Stacey's sake.
   They spent a long weekend together. You could drive a but-bus through the space between 'They stayed with her aunt' and 'her aunt lived in a hole'. In the evenings her aunt drank a lot of whatskey and dot dot dot I remember when I was what I was when I was no-high to a dot's meow. In every hour there would be a few seconds when she'd make sense before rolling what she'd made up into a ball and throwing it out the indow or in the outdoor or at the painting of a wet piano. On one of those occasions she told George he could impress Stacey's mother with a bit of entrepreneurial flair.
   They decided to leave on the following day when the aunt's friend Violet arrived and it became too crowded in the hole. They went to his uncle Albert's house. Albert had ten spare bedrooms and he was delighted to see Stacey and George because he wanted someone to house-sit his house while he went to visit Mrs. Foldegold to see if she'd made any progress with her latest invention (child-proof locks for eye-lids). The journey to Mrs. Foldegold's house would take a few days. He used his M pony while his L pony was being repaired.

   George had an idea. He could start a guesthouse while his uncle was away and he could advertise it as a haunted house to draw in the crowds. Making a success of this would be just the sort of thing to impress Stacey's mother.
   Tourists arrove in their droves when news of the haunted house spread. George and Stacey had to send most of them away. They got a man called Clive to pretend to be the ghost. He used to do some odd jobs for Uncle Albert. They found him in the garden using a squaredriver to fight off the cloudboys who advance on him with tennis rackets.
   The house looked spooky at night.

   But the only ghostly thing about Clive was the slow flecks of snow flakes falling from his shoulders in the moonlight. The guests were angry because of this obvious charade, but then the real ghost appeared. When she introduced herself as Mrs. Gladflug she gave them all enough of a fright to make cow bunnies jump Dover the white cliffs of the moon when the sun's gone down. She saw that she had an audience and she started talking. The more she rambled on, the more she eased their fears. She spoke about a day spent working in the gardens around this house. "The mothibirds were flyering around my hairspace and my hair piece was making grumpfudge. I made them go getaway with my fly-swisher. I dig dugged a hole in the gardilawn when the flyspider's backs were turned, digged dug. I found a box of gold in the hole and I was afraid in case whoever had birdied it there might come back and find me with their gold. So I buried it somewhere else in the garden to give me time to think. But I took too long to think and I died before I had a chance to use the gold or lose it on horses."
   All the guests were excited when they went to bed. George and Stacey were happy with a job well done, but when they woke up in the morning and looked out they saw a garden full of guests with shovels and lawns with holes. Everyone was trying to find the treasure, and Uncle Albert was due to return later that day.
   George and Stacey needed to work quickly to repair the damage done. They filled in the holes, but they needed something to cover the places where the earth had been dug up. George took all the old garden furniture, statues and junk out of the shed and he used these to cover the sites of holes. He used the junk to make sculptures. He created a garden as weirdiful and wonderful as a pack of multi-coloured chancers tumbling down a mountainside. Uncle Albert was delighted with it. He told all of his friends and neighbours about the garden, and many tourists came to see it. George became a successful gardener, which greatly impressed Stacey's mother. She loved what he did to her own garden, even though he still refused to mow his hair.

Mabel Hobbeloe's Circus Truck

2009-06-16T07:10:00.001-07:00

   Mabel Hobbeloe's circus truck will come to town. You'll be sorry if you're not there for her arrival. Mabel has no time for losers who feel sorry for themselves. Are you a loser? Are you a monkey? (I have to ask that question for legal reasons). If not, come to Mabel Hobbeloe's circus truck, where you'll see mechanical animals and clowns with hair that moves of its own accord. Bring a friend, even if you have to tie them to a trolley and wheel them there. You'll be able to exchange that friend for a gift, which will be presented to you by Mabel herself.
   I don't want to work for Mabel Hobbeloe anymore. I want to leave, to walk away through the fields and keep walking. I'd live off the land I travel through. I could survive on berries, as long as they don't kill me. Mabel keeps belittling me. Her husband, Gordon, never takes any notice. He wears a smoking jacket and smokes his pipe all day long. He only speaks to give dispatches from the world in his head. Yesterday he told me there were rats in the map room. Today he told me the rats had been taken care of with the appropriate amount of bloodshed. He would have known if the amount of bloodshed was inappropriate if the soldiers (they're really just his cousins) were crying. They get very upset when there isn't as much blood as they had been expecting. Mabel is abusive most of the time. When she gets very drunk she gets very abusive. Before her level of drunkenness reaches 'very' she isn't abusive at all, but I have to listen to her talk non-stop about things I have no interest in. Last night she spent hours telling me about her rivalry with Glory Baffelsack. She hates Glory Baffelsack because he has a bigger truck, even though it's only slightly bigger. He should have a much smaller one because he keeps crashing it.
   I want to leave Mabel's employment, but I don't know how to tell her. I came close to telling her once. It was when Gordon came to me one afternoon and said, "The pilgrims eat all the lettuce in my garden. I left out poison for them, but it only makes them drunk and they start mating. I've tried throwing beans at them, mainly for my own amusement. They bought me a coconut, or at least they said they bought it, but I think they probably stole it."
   He didn't have a garden, so I went to see what he was talking about. I found his cousins unconscious on the ground. They were covered in beans. I had to clean them up, and listen to their drunken rants when they became semi-conscious. This was the last straw. I went to Mabel with the intention of quitting, but she must have sensed what was coming. She started talking before I had a chance to say anything, and her voice was very gentle. She said, "I'd be ever so grateful if you'd sweep the rugs before the evening crowd arrives. And perhaps you could fold the brown paper bags as well. Empty them first. Put their contents into the red suitcase and leave it outside for someone to steal. Thank you once again. I'd be lost without you."
   She walked away. I didn't have the nerve to say anything. I looked to my right and I saw the open fields. Part of me wanted to run away and not look back. I came very close to leaving, but I didn't. I got the brush and I started sweeping the rugs.

The Door

2009-06-09T06:45:00.000-07:00

   I found a silver spoon. I put it with the spanner I had found earlier. According to the set of instructions in my manual, I should knock on Nick's door after finding a silver spoon and a spanner. I needed to find out who Nick was and where he lived. I consulted my book. Before I came to the bit about Nick I had to read many chapters about a man who had spent most of his life varnishing hovercrafts. As he worked on the hovercrafts he was mentally writing his memoirs on the walls of his mind. It took him nearly forty years to complete his memoirs. To recite them, he'd have to imagine walking into the vast mental mansion he'd built. He'd start reading from the walls in the hall, where he'd written about his ancestors. He claimed to be a direct descendent of a cathedral.
   I spent all night reading and re-reading these chapters. In the morning, the police knocked on my door. They knock on my door nearly every day. I did what I always do: I ran away.
   I ran down winding roads that had no interest in ending. I kept running until I came to a door. I noticed that there was neither a frame nor a house around the door. I opened it, and at the other side I met a group of people who were doing their best to keep a party in full swing, despite the fact that it was in a field. They told me that the train drivers were hiding behind a ditch, waiting to pounce. At the first sign that the party was wilting they'd lay down tracks and drive the train right through this spot. So the people in the field had to keep the party going or they'd lose the field forever. I joined them. They were glad to have another volunteer fighting for their cause.
   After midnight, the field's scarecrow was replaced by a seacrow, and the atmosphere was lightened. No one had to put any effort into keeping the fire of the party lighting. Dozens of new guests arrived, all drawn there by the seacrow. My assistance was no longer needed, so I left the party. I tried to find the door so I could go home and apologise to the police. They'd still be waiting outside my house. But I couldn't find the door in the dark. I heard a woman say, "You'd struggle to find it in daylight as well."
   I turned around and I saw one of the women who had been at the party. She had followed me away. I asked her how she knew what I had been thinking, but she didn't answer. She said, "You shouldn't walk through doors if you don't know where they lead."
   "How do I find it? I'd like to go back."
   "Do you know what will be waiting for you on the other side?"
   "The police. I'll probably have to buy them something. Maybe cufflinks this time."
   "Never walk through a door if you know what's on the other side and it's policemen who need to be appeased with cufflinks."
   "There are other things I'd like to get back to, like my house."
   "Go back through the window."
   "How would I find that?"
   "Follow me."
   She led me to a river and she told me to dive in. "It doesn't look like a window to me," I said.
   "Why do you think there are curtains on the riverbank?"
   She had a point there.
   "If there was enough light," she said, "you'd be able to see what's on the other side of the window."
   I had to take her word for that. Jumping into a river seemed appealing anyway, so I dived in. I heard the sound of breaking glass when I hit the water. The riverbed was covered with small, smooth pebbles. When I returned to the surface, the woman was gone and the landscape was different, but it was a familiar landscape. I was in a river near my house. I was glad to be back, but I was sorry I hadn't said goodbye to the woman, or thanked her for her help.
   When I got home, the policemen were asleep outside my front door. I went inside without waking them. I had a few bottles of aftershave that I got as Christmas presents, so I wrapped these, and when the policemen woke in the morning I gave them these gifts. They thanked me, and they told me to forget about whatever it was that had brought them to my door. They couldn't remember what it was.

How I chose the aunt

2009-06-02T07:20:00.000-07:00

   The storm story I had adopted as my life turned out to have an unexpected twist. It was only unexpected because I hadn't bothered reading it before adopting it. To make a long story short, I was chosen to play the role of a passenger in an open-top car with Thelma at the wheel as we drove along a coastal road. Take a drive with Thelma and you lose the will to live. I decided I needed to be accompanied by an aunt, but which aunt? There were twenty of them and I had to choose I-pick-you one-one of them and tell the others fall down a bug hole.
   Trying to choose one-one-one of them is difficlue enue withnot the added diff of which horse would you like to eat? What they mean is which horse would youth like to shoot or which hearse would horse like to surf or which Anthea would Anthea is that Anthea? No, it's Clare. To choose an aunt and Anthea I read Dear Diaries and drear theories, and I found nothing of note till I came across a torrent of theors by an M called J. He wrote his theories on blank white paupers. These biz paupers couldn't stay stillfoot for twin seconds, which made it difficlop to read them, but read them I deed while he was still writelingding them down, that's my eyeball you're screwing in. How many paupers does it take to screw in a lightball? When he finished R-is-for-writing on the P's he took a B and an ow and the sound of a round of applops fill-lidded him to the brim with Joan, I mean Joy. Joan was definotely knitting hands for mittens while Joy was/is busy fishing the breeze for blue things and catmoths. Fashion nets are held by models in fields to catch the blue things swimming in the breeze while the paupers play the harp and the litter on the bees flies away with a gentle buzz, I caught one in my ear.
   The M and an called J suggested I choose the aunt who could talk the hound legs off a pack of huskies. Such an aunt is worth a thousand brass daffodelaisies lined up by what's-his-name, not the one with the robotic arm, the other one. This is why I chose Aunt Dorothy. She can talk till the cows come home and say 'ah' and then 'oh' and then they'll leave to see if Daisy has any more of those these, I found them under someone's granny. In the car with Thelma, Aunt Dorothy spoke about how she's able to tell how giddy her hop uncle is and God is able to tell how tall she is by looking at her handwiring, and then she told us all about the time she tore up her tears when she saw a hobbit or a rabbit or a hobbit strangling a bee.
   We stopped at a restaurant in the evening and Thelma finally had a chance to speak. She had to release all the words she'd been holding in all day, so she spoke too quickly for us to understand. It was a relaxing sound. She spoke until her head rang and she answered her head and a man said, "Did you hear the one about the Englishman, the Irishman and the raisons they made?" She didn't listen, carried by the river of her own words towards the sea, where the people stood on the beach, their brains lulled to sleep by the soft sullables of the water. Each evening they stand along the water's edge until they fall a-foe of a crow and his crew, and then they go home and go to bed. We went to the sea ourselves. It was a perfect way to end the day. Neither Aunt Dorothy nor Thelma had a word to say. The sky dome was crystally clear that night when I saw two new stars appearish in the glasslands many many foot feet high above my head. I ten-counted those stars to two or is it six, I'll check with the horse.

Nathaniel

2009-05-26T07:03:00.001-07:00

   Nathaniel consisted of four men and a woman. He lived in a house over looking the sea. Each of his constituent parts had a separate bedroom. On summer evenings he'd eat his dinner in his garden, and his constituents would look out over the sea as the sun began to set.
   He felt an inner conflict when two of the men fell in love with the woman. To ease the tension inside him, he looked for activities to occupy his mind. On a Sunday afternoon he went to the local cultural centre, where he saw demonstrations of traditional handcrafts. As he was looking at a woman using a spinning wheel, he noticed that two of his parts were missing. The woman and one of the men had gone off on their own. Nathaniel was very disconcerted by this. When the two missing parts rejoined him after half an hour, he had to go home to sit down.
   Nine months later the woman gave birth to a girl. Nathaniel had just got bigger, and more effeminate. This worried some of Nathaniel's constituent parts. One of those parts had a beard, and he considered himself to be the most important part because of the beard. He was afraid that Nathaniel would undergo a sex change. The man who lived next door feared becoming a fox. This is why he always made sure he wasn't a fox before leaving the house. He'd look in the mirror before going outside, and he'd carefully examine his face for fox-like features. When he walked down city streets he often got the feeling that people were looking at him, and he'd be afraid that he'd turned into a fox. He often ordered chicken in restaurants without thinking, and he was always horrified when he'd realise what he'd done.
   The bearded part of Nathaniel made all of Nathaniel stand in front of the mirror for ten minutes every morning. He was looking out for signs that Nathaniel was becoming even more effeminate.
   One morning the bearded part of Nathaniel saw another man with a beard in the mirror. Nathaniel had grown overnight. At least this time he'd become slightly more masculine again, the bearded part thought. But when he looked closer he noticed that the newcomer was wearing a fake beard. It could be a woman in disguise.
   Overall, Nathaniel was glad to have the newcomer. As well as growing overnight, he had also become a brilliant cook. He had acquired the ability to make potatoes out of toffee. These tasted much better than the potatoes made out of potatoes that Nathaniel had been eating all his life.
   As they were eating the toffee potatoes in the garden one evening, two gangsters arrived and they aimed guns at the part of Nathaniel with the fake beard. Being shot here wouldn't prove fatal to Nathaniel, but he still didn't want to be shot. He had to think quickly. Action was called for, and this is what Nathaniel came up with: he started singing. He could sound demonic when all of his constituent parts sang together. When the gangsters heard the sound they lost their nerve and ran away. The newcomer was overjoyed, and the rest of Nathaniel were happy as well. They told the newcomer he was welcome to stay in Nathaniel for as long as he wanted, and he thanked them for their hospitality.

Something to think about before buying a knife.

2009-05-19T03:05:00.000-07:00

   I looked into the fridge to see what I could have for dinner, but the fridge was empty. It looked different without food. It reminded me of a room devoid of furniture, a sight I'd often seen before. I hoped I wouldn't have to start eating the furniture again.
   I closed the fridge door. I tried opening it again a few minutes later, but the fridge was just as empty as it had been the last time I checked. I must have eaten the food that was in it, though I couldn't remember doing so. This wouldn't be unusual. The food I cook is as lacking in taste as the air. I often forget the air I've been breathing as well.
   I decided to go to the shop. Fortunately, my wallet wasn't as empty as the fridge. I had recently acquired some money when I sold my wheelbarrow. It had done fifty-thousand miles and it needed a new exhaust, but I still got a good price for it. I put on my raincoat and I walked down the narrow road towards the town. There were many potholes in the road, and these had filled with rain water. The water in the holes was brown. I enjoyed looking at the brown polka dot potholes on the grey road, but I've been told that I have the fashion sense of someone who's only ever seen a bog.
   When I got to the shop I asked the shop keeper if I could buy some food. He said, "Some food, you say?"
   "Yes, some food," I replied.
   He looked at me as if I was mad. To get a closer look at me he put his monocle over his right eye. But this was all for show because his right eye was made of glass and his monocle was obscured by a black eye patch. He asked me what I wanted to do with the food. I told him I hoped to eat it, and this seemed to confirm his suspicions that I was mad.
   "To 'eat' it?" he said.
   "Yes, to eat it," I replied. "With my mouth."
   It all seemed clear to him then. "Oh right, food," he said. "You're looking for food. I might be able to help you find some food."
   He gave me a tour of the shop and he pointed out all the different types of food you could put into your mouth. A lot of it seemed too big to put into my mouth. When I highlighted this problem he showed me the vast selection of knives he had on sale. He explained that a knife could be used to cut the food into smaller pieces.
   I had never owned a knife before, but I could see the benefits of buying one. I didn't have enough money to afford both the food and the knife, so I went home to see if I had any more wheelbarrows to sell.
   Unfortunately, I didn't have any left. I've never had more than one. I wondered how else I could make some money. I thought of Maureen, who lives down the road. I had often done odd jobs for her before and she had always paid me, despite my protestations. This time my protestations might well be lacklustre.
   Maureen was always breaking things. She broke every cloud she used. When I called to see her she told me she'd broken her garage door again. The door was very temperamental, she said. It would break every time she went near it. She had to tiptoe around the garage. I fixed the door for her and she insisted on paying me for the job, even though I said there was really no need. I was going to go to the shop to buy the food and the knife, but she was cooking the breeze for dinner and she asked me if I'd like to join her. It looked very appetising, so I said I would. The breeze was strong, but I enjoyed it. We didn't need knives or forks to eat it.
   It was starting to get dark outside, and I thought it was time I went home. I was in the middle of thanking Maureen for the lovely meal when an enormous rat ran across the table and left the kitchen through an open door. If there had been cutlery on the table I might well have attacked the creature as it ran across my plate. Maureen said that the rat had been around for weeks, but she hadn't taken much notice of it because she was more concerned about the ghost who appeared after dark every evening.
   We didn't have to wait long for the ghost to arrive. If this had been my house I'd have been more concerned about the rat because the ghost had impeccable manners. He'd be the last person you'd expect to find running across your plate.
   I asked him how he'd met his end and he said, "I got into a fight with the wrong people. Actually, it's not so much that they were the wrong people -- it's more to do with the quantity of them. There were seven of them and only one of me. We said the rosary before they killed me. My hair survived and it's been impersonating me ever since."
   His hair arrived in the kitchen a few minutes later. It seemed slightly dishevelled, like a man whose wig is on backwards. Its impersonation of the ghost wasn't very good, but I didn't pay much attention to it. I realised that the 'rat' I had seen was actually the ghost's hair. If I had been within reach of a knife earlier I would have stabbed the hair. This is what convinced me that I was better off without a knife. Ever since then I've only eaten food that doesn't need to be cut. Maureen has given me some very good recipes for the breeze.

Footsteps

2009-05-12T02:26:00.000-07:00

   The morning sun illuminated the kitchen in Olivia's apartment. This was going to be a good day, she told herself. She was going to spend the day with Darragh and Caroline, and she was determined not to spend most of it listening to Darragh talking about the blood he found on his feet. She had already spent too long listening to Darragh talking about the blood on his feet.
   She was also determined to forget about the footsteps she often heard on the spiral stairs outside the door of her apartment. It sounded like a group of people running up the stairs, and she never saw them because they moved too quickly. Darragh told her about models who get bored with being looked at all the time. They become depressed, and they start moving very quickly so that all you'll see is a blur. She couldn't find out any more about the models because Darragh started talking about the blood on his feet again.
   One day she ran up the stairs after them. She could hear their footsteps on the bare wooden floorboards above her as she went up the steps, but the sound of the footsteps stopped just before she got to the top of the stairs. She climbed up into a huge empty room. There was an open window at the other end. She went to it and she looked out. She saw a concrete path three storeys beneath the window. If something with feet had jumped out of a window three storeys up and landed on a concrete path, it wouldn't be using those feet to walk away in a hurry, but there was nothing on the path, not even any blood. She didn't mention this to Darragh because she knew what he'd start talking about.
   She didn't hear the footsteps over the following week and she thought that the feet and their owners might be gone for good, but then one Saturday evening she heard them again. She knew there was little point in trying to see who or what was making the sound, so instead she just listened. She tried to make out how many sets of feet there were. After weeks of listening she came to the conclusion that there were at least eight feet -- four sets if each owner had two.
   She got Darragh and Caroline to listen as well. They didn't think it mattered how many of them there were. Caroline suggested trying to remember the first time she heard the footsteps. Olivia said it was a Saturday evening in May when she first heard the sound. She had just come back from a boat trip with Darragh and Caroline. She hadn't taken much notice of the footsteps at the time because if she took note of everything she'd have very little time left to remember the afternoon she had just spent on the lake. In retrospect she realised she had paid too much attention to the boat trip and not enough to the footsteps, but Caroline disagreed. She believed that the footsteps required much less attention and the boat trip much more, so on this fine July morning she was ready to go out on the lake with Caroline and Darragh again. She was determined to forget about the footsteps and to ignore Darragh. All of her attention would be devoted to her surroundings.
   After an hour on the lake the plan started to work. The clear blue sky and the still waters of the lake emptied her mind of all but the clear blue sky and the still waters of the lake. Even Darragh seemed to have succumbed to his surroundings. He hadn't said a word about his feet since they left the car.
   She might not have thought about the footsteps or Darragh's feet until they got back to the car if she hadn't felt a breeze on her face. She got the impression that something was there, something that had reduced itself to nothing but its own breath, but in that breath she could sense what it once was. She had a sense of a being who was more powerful than anything else on the earth, someone capable of seeing and knowing much more than any human ever could. Of course, it might just have been the breeze.
   As they drove home she tried to convince herself that it was just the breeze, but she failed. She started to wonder if the footsteps were like the breath, the last remaining manifestations of beings who had once been much more than footsteps. She listened to the sound of the footsteps again that evening and she got the impression of a group of people who loved a good party. This impression was reinforced the next time she heard the sound.
   She took a small table up to the empty room, and on it she put a bottle of wine and some glasses. The next time she heard the footsteps she went outside. She stood at the bottom of the stairs. She could hear the footsteps moving across the floor above, but they stopped when they got to the table. When she went up later, the wine was gone.
   Her impression of these beings became more complete every time she heard the sound. She thought they'd like listening to jazz, so she left a record player and some jazz records in the room, along with another bottle of wine. The next time she heard the footsteps she went outside and shortly afterwards she heard the sound of jazz coming from upstairs. She looked up towards the top of the stairs, and she got a very brief glimpse of a face looking down at her. She found it very difficult to describe this face later. It seemed as if the features were blurred.
   She started to think that by filling in the details in her mental picture of these people she was returning them to the fullness of their being. This is a project she's still working on. She discovered that they also like strawberries and the music of Erich Korngold. Just last week she got a glimpse of a white dress and brown shoes at the top of the stairs, and she thought she heard one of them say the word 'orange'.

Something Missing

2009-05-05T03:23:00.000-07:00

   I saw a swarm of bees fly in formation towards me. The formation was shaped like an arrow. It passed right through me, and the bees took something from me on the way. I had a feeling that something was missing, but I didn't know what it was. At first I wondered if they'd taken an organ like a heart or a liver. After an hour I felt no physical side-effects, but I still had the sense that something was missing. The bees had left a spiritual hole inside me.
   I tried to fill the hole by listening to music. I went for a walk in the hills where I was surrounded by the beauty of nature. I watched a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat and then pull some cheese out of the rabbit. But none of these things filled the hole.
   I told my neighbour, Melanie, about what had happened. She gave me a chicken to fill the hole. I brought the chicken home with me, but it didn't fill the empty space inside me. I started to suspect that she had given me the chicken because she wanted someone to baby-sit it. She gave me a bag full of the chicken's favourite toys as well.
   I remembered my cousin Hilda trying to eat a whole chicken. She managed to fit the head into her mouth, but the other end was sticking out. The other end laid an egg. She boiled the egg and she ate that instead. These thoughts made me wonder if my subconscious was trying to tell me that the hole could be filled with food. The chicken didn't look very appetising, so we went to the shop and I bought all of my favourite food. I bought something for the chicken as well. On the way home I stopped at the off-licence to get a bottle of whiskey. I spent the rest of the evening eating and drinking, but the hole was as big as ever.
   I returned the chicken to Melanie on the following day. I told her that I still had this sense that something was missing. She suggested going to see a musical called 'The Apple of my Egg'. In response to her suggestion I shook my head so vigorously that the skin around my skull came loose and covered my eyes. I tried to put my skin back in its correct place, but I couldn't find the eye-holes. I needed her assistance to put it back. She enjoyed holding my head, and I enjoyed the experience as well. I asked her if she'd be interested in having an affair. She checked her diary and she said she'd be able to fit one in on the following evening.
   Our affair went very well, even though it fizzled out after an hour. After a long silence I asked her if she'd like to go to a nearby restaurant. She said no because the last time she was there a waiter got sick on her monkey. Or her monkey got sick on a waiter -- she couldn't remember which. She had to leave to meet a man called Kevin. He used to be afraid of his erratic spring-mounted eyeballs. He could easily poke someone in the eye with his eye while he was talking to them. His eyeballs could pop out at any time. She had given him a make-over. His new look allowed him to wear sunglasses all day long. The sunglasses were tied on so they'd block his eyes if they popped out. He was expecting her to have an affair with him. I can imagine how he'd expect this.
   My affair with Melanie was the perfect filler for the empty space inside me. This made me wonder what the bees were doing with whatever they took from me. Sometimes I feel a need to have an affair with Mrs. Memplonk next door, but she loves her husbands so much she married one of them. She keeps the rest of them in her shed. An affair with her would fill the hole with guilt. I've found that drink is a much better filler for the hole on the rare occasions when it opens up again. A bottle of whiskey will put me off the idea of an affair, and it puts the women off as well.

Nodding

2009-04-28T03:18:00.000-07:00

   Half days are good days. Leaning to one side is a good thing to do on a good day. I used to nod to emphasise statements like these. I spent years practising my nodding. I've nodded at bishops and at politicians, but none of them were able to out-nod me. I had never lost a debate until I came up against Mrs. Maguire. Architecture was the subject of our debate. I made a point about how some houses were bigger than other houses and then I launched a ferocious nod. She was clearly taken aback, and I thought this would be the end of the debate, but she regained her composure and she unleashed a shake of her head of such magnitude that its accompanying wind blew me over. I said I had been leaning to one side when the wind arrived, but no one believed me. The debate was lost. The audience gave Mrs. Maguire a standing ovation.
   This defeat left me disillusioned with nodding. I considered giving it up for good. The only other option open to me was to ask Mrs. Maguire for her help. I could have asked her to teach me how to shake my head because I needed a defensive manoeuvre in my repertoire. Relying solely on attack had proven to be insufficient.
   I went to my caravan for a week to consider my future. I thought about taking up blinking after meeting a man in a nearby caravan. His eyes got bigger every time he blinked, as if he was inflating them with a pump. But my eyes did nothing when I blinked, and this wasn't as dramatic as nodding or shaking my head. I also tried raising my eyebrows, but this wasn't much better than the blinking.
   I tried to forget about all these things. I spent most of my time leaning to one side on the beach. This is where I met a woman who had a natural slant. She told me she had a shed and a shovel that she used to keep in the shed. Sometimes she'd take the shovel out and she'd use it to dig holes. She'd get her grandmother to inspect the holes to make sure they'd been dug correctly. Her grandmother was two men who wore ill-fitting brown suits. They agreed on most things, but they always argued about holes, and these arguments often became violent. She loved watching her grandmother fighting. She'd gladly spend an evening looking on, and her grandmother could fight amongst herself for hours without any sign of a winner emerging. Only when they got hold of shovels did the fight end quickly. She always tried to keep the shovels from them because she wanted the fights to go on for as long as possible.
   When she told me this I realised that I might find more fulfilment in arguments that lasted a long time. I practised with her. She'd emphasise her points by leaning more to one side and I'd use one or both of my eyebrows to emphasise my points. She could lean for hours without falling over. These debates proved to be much more satisfying than the short debates that ended suddenly with an emphatic nod or a shake of the head. I haven't nodded since my defeat to Mrs. Maguire.

The Saint

2009-04-21T03:42:00.000-07:00

   I saw a staple on the ground. When I picked it up to examine it I heard someone say, "Ah, you've found my staple." I turned around and I saw a man who looked like one of the saints in the stained glass windows in the church. "I'm a saint, you know," he added.
   I couldn't come between a saint and his staple, so I gave it to him. He said, "I'll give it to my friend Stan for safe-keeping." Stan was standing behind the saint. He was bouncing a tiny kangaroo as if it was a basketball. He stopped bouncing the kangaroo when the saint gave him the staple. The kangaroo took its chance and hopped away.
   I asked the saint if I'd done a good deed by finding the staple because this indirectly led to kangaroo escaping his roll as a ball. The saint said, "It all depends on what the kangaroo does next. If he does something bad, you'd be partly responsible for that."
   We followed the kangaroo to see what he'd do. He led us to a graveyard, where he started jumping up and down on a grave.
   "Is that a good or a bad thing?" I said to the saint.
   He said, "I suppose it would depend on the grave's tenant. If he was evil when he was alive then the kangaroo is doing good. I think. He wouldn't be achieving anything good, but... I used to discuss issues of morality and theology with a wise man who was like a mentor to me. I only realised he was made out of porridge when I punched him in the face."
   The saint suggested going to the pub to discuss the matter further, but when we got there he started telling a story about a fight in another pub. He said, "I got into an argument over how much it would cost to get a tattoo of the word 'brush' on a shoulder. This argument turned violent. I stood my ground, but I found that I was up against countless people who took the opposing point of view. How many of me were there in the fight? People say there were ten of me, but I have a doctor's letter confirming that there couldn't have been any more than one of me. I emerged from the fight victorious, and I spent the rest of the night signing autographs on the bodies of the female fans I'd acquired because of the fight. I went home to bed after dawn, but as I was drifting off to sleep I smelled smoke. My house had been set on fire by an enemy, someone who disagreed with me about the price of the 'brush' tattoo or the husband of a woman who'd recently received a temporary tattoo of my name. I had to jump out of an upstairs window to escape from the fire, but luckily I turned into a football in mid-air, so I bounced away down the road until someone kicked me back into myself. The joy I felt at being myself fought the anger I felt at being kicked. The joy won."
   The saint saw a beautiful woman leaving the pub. He quickly finished his pint and went out after her. Myself and Stan followed him. As the woman was walking away down the road the saint whispered something into her ear. She ran away with such determination that she broke the air. It shattered into pieces, and these fell to the ground. The surrounding air rushed into the vacuum. A whirlwind was created and it carried us all away.
   Myself, Stan and the saint landed on top of a brass band who were playing in the park. Some of the musicians beneath us were unconscious. Some were just dazed and they played on. We picked up instruments and we tried to play along, but after a few minutes the others began to realise that we were interlopers. We dropped the instruments and ran away. The conscious musicians gave chase, but they tried to play their instruments as they ran, and this slowed them down.
   The saint and Stan kept following me because they believed that everything I did led to adventure, even though the only thing I'd done was give a staple to a saint. I wanted to get away from them, so I told them I needed to go to the library. They thought I'd cause mayhem in the library, so they went with me.
   While they were looking at books about horse racing, I looked through an encycoplaedia of saints, but I couldn't find an entry on my new friend. I found a short biography of him in a book about people who had applied to be saints. I read the following passage:

His sneezes have been the subject of much discussion. It takes over an hour for the effects of a sneeze to subside. Observers have identified thirty-five different areas of his face moving independently of each other in the immediate aftermath of a sneeze.

   This gave me an idea. I found an old Latin book that hadn't been read in years. It was covered in dust. I told the saint he might find it interesting, and as I held it up in front of him I blew the dust into his face.
   I could see that a sneeze had been initiated, but it took over a minute for that sneeze to arrive. This gave me plenty of time to run for cover. After the sneeze he couldn't do anything while all the different parts of his face moved, and Stan was busy counting those parts. I was able to get away from them without being noticed.

Elinor's Father

2009-04-14T03:57:00.000-07:00

   He used the sharpest shark he could lay his hands on to open the envelope. The shark was upset at having Elinor's hands upon him. Elinor hoped that the letter from his father would explain how he came to have a girl's name, but it was a faint hope. He didn't know what to expect from his father. He hadn't seen the man since he was four-years-old. That was twenty years ago. His father had left under a cloud. He remained under the cloud and he went wherever it went. Elinor had made an attempt to find his father once before, when he tried to track down the cloud. If he could find it, locating his father would simply be a matter of looking underneath the cloud. He spent months looking at satellite photos, but he couldn't find what he was looking for. He considered the possibility that his father's cloud was hiding beneath another cloud. Elinor saw no way around this difficulty.
   He had given up hope of ever seeing his father again, until the letter arrived. He knew it was from his father because of the image of the cloud on the envelope. It was unmistakably his father's cloud. After opening the envelope he absent-mindedly thanked the shark and put it to one side, failing to notice how upset his make-shift letter opener was. He read the letter. It said: "Dear Elinor, I don't know if your mother told you, but I've been away for some time now. I can't say how long because I've been too busy to keep track of time. In the past, keeping track of time was a hobby I'd gladly engage in for hours on end, but I haven't had a chance to do it in... I don't know how many hours or days have passed since I last had a chance. It could even be as long as months. Sometimes when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror I wonder if I've been away from my family for years. I've travelled many miles under my cloud. It has come to rest over a golf course, where I now work as a green-keeper. Looking after the grass gives me great satisfaction. I get little satisfaction from watching people trying to putt birds on the greens. The birds will only roll into the holes if they want to. The golfers want the birds to roll into the holes. Hitting a bird with a metal object isn't an effective means of getting that bird to do what you want it to do. You've got to nudge it as gently as possible. Talking to the bird in advance might help your chances.
   "Sometimes my cloud doesn't provide adequate protection from the rain. I've found that a ceiling is more effective than a cloud when it comes to keeping the rain off my head. With this in mind, I moved into a cottage on land adjoining the golf course. I've recently discovered that there are spare bedrooms in the cottage. I can't say how many there are because I haven't had time to count them yet, but I'm sure there are more than zero. This should be enough to accommodate you, should you decide to visit. I have sent a similar invitation to your mother. There is more than enough room beneath my cloud for both of you. I look forward to seeing you again,
Your Loving Father,
Elisabeth."
   Elinor's mother, Harry, would have to wait a few months before visiting her husband because she was busy trying to get down from her shoes, but Elinor went to the golf course as soon as he could. Elisabeth was delighted to see his son again. He couldn't believe it had been twenty years since they last met.
   He showed his son around the golf course. On the twelfth green they saw a bird stop to lay an egg when it was ten feet short of the hole. When they got back to the cottage, Elisabeth made some tea and Elinor brought up the subject of his name.
   "Your grandfather was called Elinor," Elisabeth said, "and so was his grandfather, and his grandfather before him. The original Elinor got his name because his father, who was called Elisabeth, got drunk one night and foolishly accepted a challenge to jump over a horse. He had little trouble reaching the height needed to clear the horse. In fact, he would have been better off not jumping so high. When his head became embedded in the ceiling he questioned the wisdom of undertaking such a challenge indoors. He saw a woman in the room upstairs. She had every right to be offended by his intrusion, but she was very sympathetic to his plight. She rescued him, and he was very grateful for her assistance. Alcohol always increased the strength of his emotions. He promised to name his first-born son after her. He was shocked when she told him her name was Elinor. He thought she'd be called Paddy because most of the women he knew had that name. Almost everyone was called Paddy back then. Nevertheless, he kept his promise and he called his first son Elinor. The name was passed down through the generations until it arrived at you."
   Elinor was a changed man after he heard this story. For years he had been ashamed of his name, but from then on he took great pride in it. No longer would he fear appearing effeminate because of his name. He could tell people that his name originated in a propensity for drunken dares and being rescued by women, and these were masculine characteristics.

The Honeymooners

2009-04-07T02:55:00.000-07:00

   When Sean was eighteen he left his homeland on a boat, hoping to find a better life on foreign shores. He wore a hat that his grandfather gave him. His grandfather had found the hat in a bath. He took it from the bath, and he was going to return it later, but there was a small horse in the bath when he went back. It was a lucky hat.
   The first person Sean met on the boat was a woman who offered him some worms. He thought it was going to be a long voyage. Many weeks later they arrived at a port where the people spoke a foreign language. Sean stayed in a hostel that night. He listened to the local radio stations, hoping to hear a word or two he understood. The sound of bells from a church was a language he could understand, and this provided some reassurance.
   On the following day he started looking for a job and it didn't take long to find one, despite the language barrier. He worked as a gardener on an estate owned by a local businessman. When he wasn't gardening he trained the dog not to fall over when looking at birds in the sky, and not to laugh at the people playing lawn tennis.
   He fell in love with one of the maids in the house. Her name was Vera. He thought she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, and she was even more beautiful when she sang. The lady of the house often got her to sing at parties. Butterflies were attracted to her when she performed. Worms were repulsed. Moths were indifferent.
   Sean and Vera got married. They got a lot of candles and a lot of cakes as wedding presents. Some of the cakes were flammable. None of the candles were edible (Sean checked each one of them). On their honeymoon they travelled to a lake. Near the lake there was an old castle that had been converted into a hotel, so they booked rooms there. Inside it looked exactly like an old castle and nothing like a hotel. Sean wasn't worried because he was wearing his lucky boots. He had decided they were lucky because he found them in a bath. There was also a chicken in the bath, but he only took the boots.
   At dinner they realised they were the only guests. They sat at a long table with the owner of the hotel, who was stroking his beard. The beard seemed to like being stroked (they could hear it purring). They started to suspect that their host was a vampire when they noticed that he was wearing a badge that said 'Give Blood', and there was dried blood on his beard. When he looked at a mirror on the wall there was no reflection, so he looked at a portrait of himself instead. He coughed to attract the attention of the painted version of himself. The painted version hurriedly tried to arrange himself in a pose that mirrored the original version.
   Sean and Vera decided to leave. After they went to bed, they made their getaway through a window. They ran away, but they soon realised that the vampire was chasing them. They had to steal two horses to get away from him. He tried to steal a cow, but he couldn't get it to work.
   After riding for hours they had to stop to get some sleep. They slept amongst the heather at the foot of a mountain. When they woke in the morning the two horses were gone. The horses had left a note saying they had to go home. Sean and Vera saw a black cloud approaching them. They sensed that the vampire was concealed within it. They ran up the mountainside. They came to a cottage that had a 'No Vampires' sign on the front door. This seemed like a good place to hide. They knocked on the door and a middle-aged man opened it. He took them inside when he saw the cloud behind them. His name was Harry.
   The vampire paid no heed to the sign. Shortly after Sean and Vera arrived they heard him pounding on the front door. Harry led them out the back, and they went further up the mountain. He said to them, "If you're in a fight with someone who has a knife, what you really need is a bigger knife. If you're up against a vampire, you need a bigger vampire, and I know where to find one."
   He took them to a castle that was hidden amongst the trees on the mountainside He rang a doorbell, and the huge oak door was opened by the biggest vampire Sean or Vera had ever seen. He was wearing slippers and pyjamas that were covered in images of smiling fish.
   "Hello Harry," the vampire said. "How are things?"
   "Hello Frank. It's these 'things' that have brought us here. I was wondering if you could do us a favour."
   "I owe you a favour after you gave me a loan of your lawn mower."
   "There's this chap we want to frighten off. He's been bothering these good people. I'd imagine he'll be coming along any minute now."
   "No problem."
   "Perhaps you could change into something a bit more intimidating than the pyjamas and the slippers."
   "Yeah. Good thinking."
   When the smaller vampire knocked at Frank's door a few minutes later, a broad smile revealed his fangs. The smile and the fangs disappeared when the door opened. Frank was dressed in black, and he seemed to have grown a few feet since Sean and Vera saw him in his pyjamas. He was so big, he would have struggled to get through the front door, but he didn't need to go out to chase his foe away. The smaller vampire ran back down the mountain path, and as he did so he became a black cloud. He flew away across the sky, and he was out of sight within minutes.
   Sean and Vera spent the rest of their honeymoon at Frank's castle. They tried to pay him, but he refused to take any money. He said he was glad to have the company.

Not There Radio

2009-03-31T02:49:00.000-07:00

   Irene needs to be sitting down during Robert's recitation of all the facts he's accumulated during the day. She sat on her sofa one evening while he read from his list. As he approached the end of the list he read this fact: "You want me to tell you the address of the man who built a recording studio in his garage."
   She was furious. She said she wanted nothing of the sort. She swore at him for ten minutes until she remembered that he can take offence very easily when he's subjected to abuse. This might result in his refusal to tell her the address, and she really did want to hear it. So she stopped swearing and she let him continue. He read out the address and she remembered it. Over the years she'd developed an ability to remember everything he said. She did this by constructing a story around the details he read out.
   She feared there was a 'best before' date on her mind. She wanted to do as much as possible before her mind started to decay. She'd seen this happen to a detective she'd hired, although alcohol probably hastened that decay. He believed it would preserve his mind. She wanted to record her album at the earliest possible opportunity, while her mind was still functioning at its full capacity.
   She'd already written her memoirs, as well as many other works of fiction and non-fiction. She had a list of all the books she had written, and she was ready to tick them off as they were published. She had written many predictions of how people would react to her works, and she had written reviews of each book. She turned her attention to how people would react to her music, but it was difficult to make accurate predictions until after she'd recorded the album.
   She went to see the man who owned the studio. He added her name to the list of people who had booked studio time to record albums. She looked at the list when he went to his kitchen to get a pen. Her ability to remember names and addresses meant that she only needed thirty seconds to remember all of them.
   Most of the people on the list were his neighbours. She called around to each one of them and she convinced them that it would be a bad idea to record an album. Gangs of thugs were roaming the streets, looking for people who had recorded albums. Some singer-songwriters were tortured into confessing that they were responsible for committing music to CDs, crimes of unimaginable horror to these righteous gangs. This scare mongering didn't work on most people, so she ended up paying them to put off the recording of their albums.
   As the commencement of the recording approached, she found that she was devoting most of her time to the weather. Something strange was going on in the sky, she believed, but she couldn't put her finger on it. She wanted to stop thinking of the weather and start thinking about her songs, but she was unable to focus her mind. She used her mind's index finger to press all the buttons with flashing lights, and to flick the switches, but still her mind refused to operate as she wanted it to.
   On the night before her first recording session she couldn't sleep. She turned on the radio and she moved the dial through the medium wave frequencies. She came across a radio station called Not There Radio. The DJ would read out the names of towns from a map, and occasionally he'd say, "We're not broadcasting to any of these places." He'd take a break for the weather forecast. This was sung by a woman with an ethereal voice. Some of her weather songs lasted over twenty minutes.
   When Irene went into the recording studio on the following day she started singing like the weather forecaster on the radio. She felt as if she was releasing something that had been hidden inside her. Everything she sang was improvised.
   The session in the recording studio lasted four hours, and at the end of it she had four hours worth of material. She decided to break it up into four albums. Not There Radio had given a post office box number for any correspondences, so she sent copies of her four albums to them. Three days after she sent the albums, they started playing her songs during breaks for the weather forecast. At the end of the break the DJ would continue reading from the list of places where people couldn't hear him.
   They kept playing her songs over the following weeks. During this time, Irene told everyone she knew about the radio station, but no one was able to find it on their radios. No one had ever heard of it before. Sometimes she found this disheartening, but as she listened to her songs on the radio at night she thought that at least she'd found her audience.

Judith's Husbands

2009-03-24T04:14:00.000-07:00

   Judith woke up one morning and she noticed a strange man in her bedroom. She pointed at him, but she couldn't think of anything to say. They went outside to get married. She hailed a priest who was passing by on a moped. He married them without even turning off the engine, and ever since then Judith has associated the smell of moped fumes with her wedding day.
   They went upstairs so she could put on the wedding dress she'd used at her last wedding on the previous week. The strange man put on her former husband's suit.
   Later that day her former husband returned from the dry cleaners with a suit, the one he'd been buried in. He gave this suit to the strange man, who sighed and hailed a priest who'd bury him. They dug a hole in the garden, and the strange man went to sleep in it. When he woke up in the morning he took the suit to the dry cleaners and he married the woman there.
   This marriage went on for months and there was no end in sight. When he went downstairs on Christmas morning, all the little Rambos were running around his feet. Her former husband used to farm Rambos. A Rambo is for life, not just for Christmas. And your life won't last long if you get on the wrong side of the Rambos.
   The strange man felt a need to get out of this marriage. He went to the house next door and he looked in the window. He saw that the armchair by the fire was empty. He went around to the back of the house, and he found that the back door was open. He went inside, and he took his place on the armchair. His new wife poured him a glass of mulled wine. When her former husband came downstairs he saw that his place had been taken. His name was Thompson. The strange man suggested going next door to the place he'd just vacated. Thompson said he didn't like the idea of living with the Rambos. The strange man thought this was wise, and he suggested going to Judith's house because her husband was often away.
   When Thompson went to Judith's house her husband had gone to the shop. After ten minutes he hadn't returned, so they assumed he was dead. They couldn't have a funeral because there was no body, so they organised a memorial service in the church instead. As soon as this was finished, Judith married Thompson. She was glad when she found out his name because she'd never been married to a Thompson before.
   They had left a note back in Judith's house. It was for her former husband, in case he came back from the shop. When Judith and Thompson returned to the house they found a note from her former husband. It said he had seen the note about his memorial service and he had decided to start a new life in Jamaica.
   Judith sat in the living room with her new husband that evening. They had run out of things to talk about. After twenty minutes of listening to the ticking of the clock, she thought of something. She said, "Do you want to watch me jumping up and down?"
   He said he'd love to watch her jumping up and down. So she jumped up and down, and he found it entertaining, but she had to stop when she got tired. After another long period of silence he smiled and said, "Of course! I nearly forgot. I have two tickets for the bus."
   He took the tickets out of his pocket. "I love the bus," Judith said.
   They got dressed to go out and they went to the bus stop. The bus arrived ten minutes later. They got on, and it turned out to be a very entertaining show that night. One of the drunks on the bus gave a very good performance, and there were plenty of great performances on the streets as well. They both had an interest in the bus and Judith was sure that this marriage would last, at least until the weekend.

The Magic Machine

2009-03-17T04:05:00.000-07:00

   Eugene was an inventor. He built machines that would come to his aid in the most unlikely of events. He feared being rendered so mind-numbingly bored by life that he wouldn't be able to move. He built a machine that would detect his immobility and would start playing music to revive his mind. One evening he fell asleep in front of the fire after a few glasses of whiskey, and the machine played the music. When he woke he was convinced it was 1983 and that he'd recently won an award for building a machine that automatically performed magic tricks. Magicians didn't like it because it put them out of a job. The machine was much more cost-effective than the magicians. Eugene got a lecturing job in a university because of the award.
   He moved to the city to take up his post. This was the first time in his life he'd lived in a city. He was amazed at the number of newspapers he could buy. He counted thirty-seven of them at one news stand. They all promised amazing revelations inside. One of the newspapers was published by a group of former magicians. It contained slanderous articles about Eugene, but no one was interested in these. This paper also contained reports about magicians who could do tricks that the machine was incapable of. One magician had started doing tricks with words. He could make the word 'and' come out of his ear.
   There was a practical element to the course Eugene was teaching. His students were required to build automated poker players. Grades would be awarded according to how these machines performed in a poker tournament at the end of the second semester.
   The machines that caught fire in the first round earned an F for their creators. One machine took over half an hour just to pick up its cards. But it didn't catch fire so it got a D. The five machines who made it to the final would all get an A, but only the winner would get an A+.
   After an hour, two machines were left in the game. One of them was dealt three aces, and it bet all of its remaining chips. But it lost because the other machine had four kings. As the creator of the winning machine was taking the applause of her classmates, a small metal panel on the machine fell open and hundreds of cards fell out. Its creator said she had no idea her creation was cheating. Eugene didn't believe her. He would have given her the A+ anyway, but her opponent's machine took a dim view of the way it had been defeated. A door opened on the front of this machine. A pipe emerged, and flames emerged from the pipe.
   The machine that had cheated was left blackened but unbowed. Wheels emerged from underneath it and a chainsaw emerged from the top. As it charged towards its opponent, people fled from the building. All of the machines stayed behind, and most of them participated in the fight.
   Millions of pounds worth of damage was done to the university buildings. There were holes in walls, and rooms were gutted by fires. Only the walls remained of the building where the poker tournament took place. Despite a spirited defence of his actions in a lengthy court battle, Eugene was held responsible for the destruction. The press turned on him, especially the paper owned by the magicians. The poker players were a very powerful lobby group, and they feared being made redundant if poker-playing machines were manufactured. Through one of their newspapers they convinced the public that only the criminally insane would conceive of such a machine.
   Eugene became a social outcast and he suffered financial ruin. He started drinking heavily. He lived in squalid conditions in a house that had been abandoned by everyone and everything apart from the rats.

   These were the memories on his mind when the music woke him up. He sat on his couch and he tried to figure out where the memories came from. They seemed too vivid to be a dream. In 1982 he had drawn up plans for a machine that did magic tricks, but he abandoned it when he started working on a machine that threw potatoes at other potatoes. He wondered if the memory was a glimpse into an alternate reality, one in which he decided to build the machine that performed magic tricks rather than the potato-throwing machine.
   There was also the possibility that the memories were real, and that the potato-throwing machine and everything that followed was all just a dream. He looked around the room. There was an empty whiskey bottle on the ground, but there were no obvious signs of squalor. He went out into the hall, and on the wall he found evidence that proved he wasn't a penniless drunk. He saw a framed photo of a dinner-dance at a golf club in 1997. He was shaking hands with the club's president after he had donated a machine that kept stray dogs off the golf course. So he never invented the magic machine that brought about his ruin. He couldn't help feeling disappointed.

Jack

2009-03-10T04:46:00.000-07:00

   When Jack was young his parents told him he'd grow up to be a Belgian. He thought this was some sort of a parrot, and he was looking forward to being one of them. But when he was eighteen he realised the truth. He was walking down the street one day and he looked around him instead of staying inside with his daydreams. The realisation suddenly dawned on him. "I'm living in Belgium!" he said to himself.
   He regretted not paying more attention in school. He thought his life might have taken a different course if he'd realised much sooner that he was from Belgium. He asked his friends about it. Some of them had realised they were from Belgium when they were only ten. He felt as if they had a head start in life.
   When he was thirty he realised that all of his friends were married and he was still single. He tried many different methods of finding a wife. He took up golf. It turned out to be an effective way of breaking windows, but the number of wives he had remained at zero. He tried growing potatoes. His number of wives remained unchanged, and he couldn't tell if the potato-growing was more or less effective than the golf.
   He got lost in the fog one night. He had heard stories about people who got lost in the fog at night and came out of it engaged to a person who was twice as heavy as them. This was the one wife-finding method he wanted to avoid.
   When he emerged from the fog he was attached to a woman who might well have been nearly twice as heavy as him, but she didn't look overweight because she was so tall. She was at least a foot taller than him. Marriage to her wouldn't be so bad, he thought. He might strain his neck from looking up at her all the time, but he was expecting to be at least ten inches taller by the time he was forty, so he'd nearly have caught up with her by then.
   There was tension before the wedding. He didn't like some of her friends, especially the one who had the fangs, and the one who had the fangs was going to be a bridesmaid. As the big day drew nearer he realised that the bridesmaid with fangs was distracting him from the fact that his fiancee bought her wedding dress from a corpse.
   He nearly broke off their engagement on the night before the wedding when he found out she was Belgian. But he spent some time thinking about it and he realised that he would have been more shocked if she said she wasn't Belgian. So the wedding went ahead. They've been happily married for four years now, but he still hasn't bridged the gap in height.

My Leaks

2009-03-03T02:00:00.000-08:00

My name is Peter. My car is relentlessly a Bentley. My neighbour's car is fitfully a Fiat, frequently a turnip. The spiders that exit my head go on to perform mighty deeds in the world, building awe-inspiring webs, catching master criminals and becoming master criminals, becoming salmon with minor surgery. I struggle to walk because of all the tree-huggers who've been hugging my legs since their trees were cut down. My legs are like surrogate mothers to the tree-huggers. I cut down their trees.
Despite being exceptional in almost every respect, soup keeps leaking out of me. I plugged all of the holes in my back, and my leg-huggers are covering the holes in my legs, but when I consume soup it always manages to find an exit. I'll block whatever hole it comes out of, but the next spoonful will invariably find another hole. I find this disconcerting. It could potentially damage my standing in society, and this would damage society. People need to look up to me. If knowledge of my leaks became widespread, it could lead to widespread disillusionment. This is why I'm willing to try almost any cure. Someone suggested acupuncture, but this is a last resort. Creating more holes in my body has the potential to make the problem much worse.

A Story About a Pig

2009-02-24T03:18:00.000-08:00

   This is a story about a pig called Earl. He always wore a blue sweater. This was a useful way of identifying him if you weren't good at spotting the distinguishing features of pigs. When Earl played the part of an astronaut in a play he wore a glass bowl over his head, and this enhanced his standing in the community. Piglets listened attentively when he told stories about his trips to space. He said he first went into space to get his red football. He kicked it into the air and it didn't come back down again, so he went into space to get it.
   While he was there he met a cat called Oscar who said he had gone into space to find his pet snail (someone had kicked the snail into space and, just like the football, he hadn't come back down again). The snail's name was Jack. They found Jack on the moon. He was angry about being kicked into space because it could have broken his shell, but on the other hand, he was glad to be on the moon. It was even more fun than the time the seven-foot-tall basketball player picked him up (the basketball player picked him up with the intention of kicking him, but he missed).
   Earl, Oscar and Jack thought they might as well make the most of their trip to the moon. They visited some of the tourist attractions. They went to where the moon's biggest wedding cake was being built. It was already over eight storeys high and people were living in the lower floors (they had eaten their way in). They watched moon cows jump over fences in a show-jumping competition.
   When they were on their way to a football match, Earl noticed that Oscar had red spots on his face, and then Oscar noticed that Earl had the red spots as well. Oscar got out a magnifying glass to look at Jack's face. The snail also had tiny red spots on his face. They must have contracted a moon disease, and if they went back to earth like that they'd be quarantined.
   They went to see a moon doctor. She looked at the spots on their faces, and she told them they had a disease called Steve Gertigum. It was called after the man who invented it. Steve had also invented a machine to measure the distance between pigs, but it only worked on the moon (this is why Earl had never heard of it). The doctor told them they'd have to go to Steve to find a cure.
   Steve's cure was a week of rest and relaxation at his moon resort. They spent a lot of time relaxing by the pool or fishing at a pond, but Steve was always nearby to make sure that Earl didn't get too close to any of the other pigs on the resort. He believed that when pigs got together they'd cause trouble. Waiters were always close at hand with drinks, and Earl believed that this was much more likely to cause trouble.
   By the end of the week the spots had cleared from the faces of Earl, Oscar and Jack. They were delighted with the results of their treatment. They told Steve it was worth getting the disease just for the cure, and they'd recommend the disease to all of their friends. But their goodwill evaporated when they got the bill. They couldn't possibly afford to pay it. "This is outrageous," Earl said to Steve.
   "Have you been talking to other pigs?" Steve said. "I always get trouble from pigs when they start talking to each other."
   "We don't have this sort of money."
   "If ye don't give me the money, ye get kicked out by Jeffrey."
   "We'll go for the latter payment option," Oscar said. Even if they had the money, he'd have chosen to be kicked out by Jeffrey.
   Jeffrey loved kicking things, but he preferred kicking things that didn't like being kicked. Oscar's eagerness to be kicked made Jeffrey angry, and his anger made him kick them as hard as he possibly could. He kicked them off the moon. The earth's gravity brought them home, and all three of them landed on something soft. Earl landed in a bath full of jelly, Oscar landed on Earl and Jack landed on Oscar.

My Eye Test

2009-02-17T02:55:00.000-08:00

I went to an optician to get my eyes tested. She told me to read the first line on the card. The first line was 'You are'. The second line was more difficult to read, but I managed it. It was 'going to die'. I asked the optician if she knew when I was going to die. She told me I'd find out in the third line, but I couldn't read that. I decided that I didn't need glasses after all. Sometimes you can see too much. Less is more. I just hope my bad eyesight won't affect my mountain climbing.

My Trout

2009-02-10T06:45:00.000-08:00

   "Time goes by so quickly," people often say to me. I often say 'my trout'. There's a need to make a quick getaway every time I say it. The last time I said it I bumped into Deirdre while I was making my getaway. That's when I realised that she was made out of flowers. I helped put her back together again. I prayed for a speedy completion of Deirdre while passers-by re-assembled the flowers. If I'm being honest, I was really praying that I wouldn't be caught. You'd be surprised by how many people chase me every time I say 'my trout'.
   When Deirdre was completed she looked at her reflection in a shop window and she re-arranged some of the flowers. I think her mind must have been affected by what had just happened to her, because she seemed to think that we were on our honeymoon. I played along because a wife was as good a disguise as a fake beard. To prevent myself from inadvertently saying the words 'my trout' to her I kept talking about my blisters. "It was a fine summer day and the countryside was buzzing with life," stories about my blisters would begin. "My blisters were beginning to get some attention from the local press..."
   We walked through city streets. She listened to me for hours, until it was evening in the city and the streets were quiet. I ran out of stories about my blisters. We walked in silence, in the shadows of buildings. It was a lonely feeling. I started to wish that I was being chased. Just to break the silence I said, "Do you mind if I scratch my head?"
   "Not at all," she said.
   I'd never have asked that question if I'd suspected that I'd end up having to scratch my head. I put a lot of thought into where I'd scratch. I've always enjoyed scratching the back of my head, but I do that every night as I have my cup of tea before I go to bed. If I had done it when I was with Deirdre it would have ruined my cup of tea. After a lot of consideration I decided to scratch the centre of my forehead. I had never scratched there before, and it was surprisingly pleasant. I became engrossed in the scratching. I was vaguely aware that Deirdre was speaking, but I didn't pay any attention to what she was saying. I don't know how long this went on for. When she stopped talking I realised that her final words were 'when they start lobbing penguins at you'.
   I stopped scratching. I tried to figure out what she could have said before these words. As I was engrossed in this I was vaguely aware that she was talking again. When she stopped I realised that her final words were 'heavy, heavy horse'. I found this surprisingly pleasant, every bit as enjoyable as scratching my forehead. I scratched my forehead again, just to see if it would add to my enjoyment, and it did. Ever since then I've spent a lot of time scratching my forehead while not listening to most of what Deirdre says. I think we're still on our honeymoon, but I haven't asked her about this in case it makes her stop talking to me.

Questions

2009-02-03T04:18:00.000-08:00

What is right today? Is that right? What is wrong? Is that wrong? What is good? Are triangles good? Is it safe to step outside? Are triangles safe? When Claudia ran into the back of a polar bear did the two become one? Am I safe from the polar bear? Am I in more danger now that Claudia and the polar bear are one? Did I call Claudia a toad? What's red and what's blue? Is that blue? Is blue red? What did I read about colours? Where did I read it? What did I read about Kant? If Kant had run into the back of a polar bear and they became one before Kant had written his major philosophical works, would he have gone on to write his major philosophical works? If Claudia emerged from the polar bear with Kant and they were holding hands, and they announced their decision to get married, would I punch Kant in the face? Would I congratulate them, then go home and cry? Would they already have achieved a union more fundamental than marriage, having both become one with the same polar bear? Would the polar bear be a fundamental part of their marriage? Would Kant be able to produce his major philosophical works if he was married to a polar bear? Or would a marriage to Claudia be an even greater impediment? This is a question I urgently need to answer.

The Pond

2009-01-27T03:32:00.000-08:00

   The pond where I went fishing served many purposes when I was young. I'd build rafts with my friends, Seamus and Ronan, and we'd watch them sink. We used to go ice-skating there in winter. There was never any ice, but there wasn't any water either. Our ice-skating was basically just sliding in the mud. We found this hugely enjoyable when we were young, but we reached an age when it started to lose its appeal, and only then did we wonder what had happened to the water.
   There was a cave in a hill overlooking the pond. When we explored the cave we found a dragon. He looked as if his mouth was full. I said to him, "Are you holding the pond water in your mouth?"
   He nodded. He had been keeping the water in his mouth for years because he was always burning his tongue. We thought we could release the water by poking him in the stomach, but we were afraid of getting too close to him. We tried tying broom sticks together to poke him, but they got stuck up his nose.
   We decided to throw stones at his stomach instead. Myself, Seamus and Ronan stood in a line, about ten yards away from the dragon. We agreed to throw our stones on the count of three. On the count of one, myself and Seamus turned and ran, but Ronan counted all the way to three and he threw his stone.
   He hit the dragon in the stomach, and a torrent of water came out of the dragon's mouth. Ronan didn't have to turn and run because he was swept along by the water. Fire followed soon after. It singed the back of Ronan's hat. He had to put his head into the water to save the rest of his hat, and his head.
   We were glad to have our pond back, although the water tasted funny after spending so long in the dragon's mouth. It had a strange smell as well, but this didn't stop us from building rafts that sank.

My Right Hand

2009-01-20T03:07:00.000-08:00

   I've always had very quick hands. There wasn't much demand for gun-slingers, so I started using my talent to catch fish instead. I'd stand in the shallow water at the edge of a pond. I'd wait for a fish to come near me, and then I'd reach in and catch it.
   On one fine day in June, I'd been standing in the water for over twenty minutes before I saw a fish. I reached in to catch it, but when I pulled it out the fish was stuck to the end of my arm and my hand was swimming away. The fish looked worried, and I probably had a similar expression on my face. I put my arm back into the water because I didn't want the fish to die, just in case I couldn't get my hand back and I was stuck with the fish. I'd already had a lot of trouble with smelly hands. Having a dead fish for a hand would be a nightmare at a wedding on a hot summer day.
   I needed bait, something that would tempt my right hand. There were some obvious things, but I couldn't think of any woman who'd put those things in the water just to do a favour for me.
   I had recently taken a pottery class to impress a woman who was also in that class. Both of my hands enjoyed shaping the clay. When I'd completed my first vase my hands liked to feel the smooth surface of the glaze. Ever since then they'd been feeling vases.
   I phoned my brother and I explained the situation to him. He arrived twenty minutes later with a fishing rod. He had attached a vase to the end of the line. He lowered the vase into the water, and I held a net in my left hand.
   It didn't take long for my right hand to approach the vase. My left hand was just as quick as the right. As soon as my right hand was near enough I caught it in the net. It was clutching the vase when it emerged from the water. I made a quick switch, returning the fish to the pond and re-attaching my hand.
   That was four months ago and my hand is still holding onto the vase. I think this is its way of getting back at me for out-smarting it. I had to go to a wedding with the vase. But it wasn't really a problem -- certainly nowhere near as problematic as having a dead fish on the end of my arm. I just put some flowers in the vase.