fyoot

Miriam always looked worse in hotel mirrors.  There was something about the lighting in these places. Maybe it was the drying effect of the unfamiliar water or the biological washing powder on the sheets and towels.  Maybe it was the aging effect of a full English breakfast every morning, clogging her arteries and colon, writ large across her pores. Whatever the cause, a pallid, dry, wrinkle-faced hag with frizzy greying hair watched Miriam brush her teeth. It was 6am according to her elderly Nokia.  The wall clock in her room wasn’t working.  She wasn’t sure what year it had stopped at roughly quarter past three, but the hands

Connaught’s mum had always warned him about hanging out in low dives.  There was nowhere lower than this stool in this jagged-out old bar stuck out in the boonies at the arse end of the galaxy.  A prefab shack stuck on the barren dusty surface of the lamest planet in the universe. Correction, the floor was lower.  And sticky.  Also suddenly closer than he remembered. He re-ascended the stool with some difficulty.  He was on his seventh screwdriver. Well, they’d started as screwdrivers, but this one had what looked suspiciously like a decorative slice of eggplant wedged on the rim instead of, say, a bit of orange or a cherry or

It was another pea-souper. The airborne coal particulates tend to clog the daguerreotypes mounted afront the vehicle, so Abraxas Archon considered it prudent to leave the coach-and-horseless at home. Not that it stopped everyone. Indeed, on her way to Euston she saw more than one accident involving driverless coaches which had simply driven straight into the conveyance in front; in one case a brewer’s dray, which led to the unexpected acquisition, by a certain local element, of three of the barrels while the drayman remonstrated with the horseless’s passengers. Leaving behind the chaos, Abraxas trusted to Good Old British Vermway

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Tom O-the-Wisp’s axe whirls.  You don’t see it fall, but feel the thud; the frenzied air fills with splinters of chestnut and fairy-sweat. “When Mab tells you to build a coach, feller, you frigging find an axe – or gnaw a tree down with your teeth, if you must,” he comments.  The nut is cracked to shards (we’re prone to this; the least wedge of reality, the lightest mallet tap). I paint from life, when life doesn’t intrude (with rattling and moaning, jeers, howls &c.).   My brush can’t keep up.  It’s bedlam in here, Tom, I say, and sink into a reverie.  Away with the fairies, I’m te

I mean, God, like, school, you know? I’ll be so glad to get out too.  I’ll say this for the place, it’s done wonders for my, like, muscle tone?  I’ve got calves to literally die for and as for my ass… Stop looking at my ass Sarah.  God, are you, like, a lezzer or something? No, I’m only joking hun. Yeah, well I mean the male to female ratio was the thing that attracted me to the, like, course, to be honest.  Outnumbered by fit, rich guys.  What’s not to like?  Seven girls, two hundred-odd guys.  Those are my kind of odds. Still, sister, it’s just me and you left now.  The dropout rate has b

The mescaline was wearing off.  Jonny couldn’t face any overtime, so he clocked off for the morning, flipped the IV out of the cannula in his wrist and switched off the animated sheep which chewed apathetically on his cubicle wall.  He didn’t bother to review the files he’d created – not that he had any special knowledge about their content, just that he had long since ceased to care. On his way out of the unit Gunter handed Jonny a thick envelope containing his payslip and productivity stats for the last month.  Jonny stashed it in his back pocket, planning to ditch it in the first decomp he passed.  “You’

Detective Marc Wraker was patrolling the mean streets of Nether Ridgeon.  Anyone watching from within the dark and silent hovels (albeit with night-vision goggles) would have observed an upright man with greying stubble on his cheeks and a determined glint in his one eye1.  Wraker wore a black eyepatch, a prosthetic leg, and away at the suspects until he hammered out a result.  He always hunted alone and usually at night (in defiance of the Lone Worker Directive – that was the kind of guy he was).  He always got his man.  (The crime statistics would attest that in 74% of cases he hadn’t got his man, but as far as Wraker was concer

The moon rose huge above the city.  In an extension built above the garage of a perfectly nice suburban home, Sidney sat picking his nose ring and staring at a Bad Religion poster while his mother lectured him about his life choices. “You’re forty six,” she reminded him inaccurately.  “You have no job, no girlfriend.  You’re covered in tattoos.  Your hair is ridiculous.  You…” The boiling kettle turned itself off with a click.  Sidney rose from his chair, arse hanging out of too-tight ripped denim.  For a moment, Sidney’s mother disappeared behind the clouds of steam that filled the tiny self-