Unfinished - potentially forever.

There’s always a tipping point. In the bright, familiar light of day you don’t always see it – but then, looking back amongst the wreckage of a situation you think, ‘ah yes, that’s where it all went wrong.’ That’s never been my problem. My problem is that I see the road dead-ending up ahead, and then careen recklessly towards it hoping for the worst. I crave disaster and anarchy in my life. My life is like a wound in my mouth, one that would heal if you stopped tonguing it – only I cant. In retrospect I suppose the moment where it all started to get a little out of hand was the night we drove out to the cliffs. It was dark, grey and inky and the night was cold enough that we should have been wearing jackets. Our windows were rolled down and we suckled frantically at cigarettes to keep our lungs warm if nothing else, and conversation turned bleak. He brought up the apocalypse and I tried to turn the conversation to anarchic collectives. Most of what we talked about isn’t important; most of it isn’t something I remember. But in a quiet, timid voice he mentioned something that shuddered me. And like Pandora’s box it all came tumbling out. The thing about making someone your confidante is that you put their life in your hands. He shouldn’t have chosen me, my hands were shaky at best, and it was only a matter of time until something would drop.

hungry

“I’m desperate for flesh. My teeth haven’t bitten down on skin, sweet muscle, flesh and bone, for weeks. Or minutes. Maybe centuries. Time means little to me at this point, seconds and instances seem to crawl past and yet centuries take less than moments to pass by me. I live sporadically you could say, what is up is down, right is wrong and love is hate. That last part is important. Or not. In my life nothing is constant – only the need to bite. Relationships, fashions and countries are all fleeting – transient at best, and I exist above them. In my conceit I am the closest thing to a god that any human will ever experience. Not immortal, but unmortal. The humans cannot seem to get even the simplest things right anymore, their words for my kind are not the only travesty they take as fact. I am lucky for that, the myths are so far down the wrong path that they could never recognize me as one of them. I am an unlikely candidate for a god I suppose, in their eyes. I am nothing sparkling or bright or beautiful. What I am is ordinary. Ordinary and invisible, I am the embodied equivalent of wallpaper. You thought my ordinary, didn’t you? Now you know better my Madonna. Normally you see me and then instantly forget me. But I never forget you. Although memory is not the word for it either. A catalogue of meals, faces jumbled into a single vernacular: you are my food.

Which brings me back to the hunger. The all consuming, maddening, dry scratching hunger that screams and pounds through my headlikeaviceeveryminuteofthedayscreamingscreamingforwethotsilkyredblood.

But I forget myself and grow excited, how unseemly.

May I take a minute?

The blood, yes. I crave it. Not just the blood itself but the wrenched screams, the flesh, rend from their bodies, soft and supple in my mouth as I chew it into meat. The bones too, I crack and feast on. I devour every part of the carcass, carnivorous and lusting for the flesh as I am. I eat their souls. I savour the thickening screams, gurgling through bloodied throats, and I relish their struggles to the end. The wild battle for life is the sweetest part and I can replay it over in my head again and again, like a warm blanket in the cold of forever.

Let no one tell you that forever is not cold. Forever is not a lover that will keep you warm and embrace you through the night, no, no. Forever will rip you to shreds, take everything from you day by day. But I would have forever over living. I remember living. Living every day was a blur of pain: hurting and emotions, feelings that ran rampant through your body, tearing you from the inside. Now I feel nothing. Except the hunger. I always feel the hunger. It is a monster that wears my body, and my life is centred on sating the beast beneath my skin.

I have developed affections to sate the hunger – a sick sort of puppetry, facade of humanity. I wear shirts that hide my over pronounced spine and emaciated frame. I blink, and shuffle and fidget like the humans – I have learned they find the still of death unsettling. And I have learned the languages of modern society, though they feel foreign on my tongue. But it is all a device so that I can eat. A deadly predator that will do anything to eat.

Nothing could describe the sweet, sultry flavour on your tongue of marrow and cracking bone grinding against your teeth. But I tease you. Your sweat is intoxicating, it smells like sick fear and certainty – you know what is coming then? Unfortunately for you, whores don’t get second chances. And you are a whore my Madonna, yes? But I will save you. You will most likely not care for it, but I will rend you limb from limb and devour you, and in the end it will be a gift to you. Because living is pain, and no matter what I am about to do to you, it couldn’t hurt as much as living. Although I will certainly give it my best shot.”



A sickening crunch, a muffled scream and horrid sound of a wild animal feasting, and it is over.

A sweet little something, to ring in the new year

I want to be the gilded bird inside your cage. The sweet, little golden bird that sings on command and whispers secrets in your ear when you pull down the sheets and put me on my back. I want you to ruffle my respectable, middle-class feathers that think they're made of something special and put your dirt all over me. And then when you're finished playing with me, I want you to put me away again so I can sleep until you're ready for the next song to start.

Or if not the song bird, then the spaniel. the adoring little cocker spaniel who gets tangled in your feet as you walk me about on a leash here and there. The one you sometimes feel a pressing urge to kick out of the way because it's so needy. The little spaniel dog who only wants your love, whose singular life goal is to attract and hold your attention so that I can feel some of the love you seem to lavish so freely over every other aspect of your life. Little spaniel running around mindlessly for her master.

If you don't want a lapdog then I could be your silk. The silk that you don't want to dirty with your callous hands, the ones you describe as filthy, bad and wrong. The bad old man with the filthy hands and the silk coat. The silk coat you'd never wear out in public for fear of public mockery, but that you stroke your hands over when you lock yourself in your home, burying your face in the folds of me. A cherry red silk coat that is the one bright spot in this dark and dirty existence you've carved for yourself.

Most of all though, I want to be your flower. You could put me in a little glass dome to protect me from the hard and scary creatures of our tiny world and then admire me from without. One should never listen to the flowers. One should simply look at them and breathe their fragrance. You could admire me and breath me in for fourty-four sunseats, until one of the fragile volcanos tore our tiny world apart. Or I could be your star that you lived on, and in all the world there would be only one of me.

Or like we said, I could play the red riding hood to your wolf. And when I strayed off of the path of needles and pins, like you knew that I would - you would be there to watch me from the bushes. The comparitively innocent flower that had miles to go before she slept and many more tricks to learn from her wolf. And when I finally found my way again you would seduce me off of my path again, and eat me. Out.

And then I would draw you a snake that had eaten an elephant, and you might tell me that you wanted a picture of a small sheep instead. And we could smile at the impossibility of it all - knowing no one else was privy to our world, that no one else understood that we were doing things of consequence.

Destroying shit

I want to get violent. I want to break things and burn them from the sinside and sin and fuck and live. What I want is to be a fucking cliché of everything that punk rock stands for. These kids get hard on’s for clichés. They want to destroy things, but burning furniture isn’t destroying anything. Fire looks like life to me, bright and red and bold, it’s everything I’m not.

Wanting to destroy shit is what got me into this trouble in the first place. That’s how I ended up sitting here, kicking my fucking heels against this goddamn concrete wall I’ve called home for the past two hours. There’s no way I can go backwards in this situation, but I cant bring myself to go forwards either. I should’ve left her on the street, ignored that light bulb switch in my head that tells me to ‘go!’ But I’ve done it now and I’ve slowly realised that maybe leaving her tied up in the trunk of my car like this is not a permanent solution.

It was the way she looked at me. She gave me a look that made me want to cut her legs off so that she could never leave me. One of those perfect little princess girls that is completely untouchable and plastic. I wanted her, I wanted to ruin her, to put it bluntly. I don’t know how she ended up on that street corner, but daddy must not have hugged her enough, or maybe maybe he just hugged her a little too much. These girls always have daddy issues these fucking princesses. Nothing so pure can stay untainted, they’re so perfect because on the inside they’re ruined. But I’m getting off topic. She slid into my car, and thanked me for the ride, like I wasn’t just some fucking stranger who’d picked her up on a street corner so that we could fake love for an hour or so.

I saw her every night for a week, even though I couldn’t afford it, but she was a necessity, my china doll girl. How she got into the boot of my car is another story, which I cant think about right now so I wont. It’s always been easy for me to push things into the back of my mind, hide problems and push them down into the ground so that I don’t have to look at them anymore. And then when the time is right I can pull them out and examine them from a distance.

My cigarette’s almost run out and I cant put this off forever, I know that. I finger my shiny new toy, the one I picked up no questions asked from a guy who knows someone who knows someone, and then with a sigh I push myself to the feet. Poor girl. If I’d bought a thirty pack she’d have ten cigarettes left until we came to the conclusion of our little date. But she isn’t so lucky, and if she wanted me to be kind to her she should’ve fucking kept her pussy in her pants. Whores are all the same, they’re all looking for someone to shatter them. So I’m going to shatter her.

I pull the boot open and smile down at my tattered little angel. Even covered in sweat, blood and come she still smiles up at me; through the gag it looks more like a grimace but I know better. I rub my finger along the length of the bullet, suddenly eager to put things into action. A small part of my mind is wondering if I should fuck her again now or if it’d be better to wait until I’ve shut her up. You could fuck the hole, a little voice in my mind whispered, but that was too vulgar even for me. I want to destroy things, but not to that extent. It’s important to have limits in life.

When it happens it’s not a bang or a shot ringing out, but a strangely satisfying pop and she flops like a little rag doll. I should drag her out, but I just stare down at her for a second. Soon she’ll join the others, but I have to stare at her for another few minutes. She looks like an angel again, a sweet little weeping angel, bloody tears tracking down her body and pooling in my trunk.

It feels good for now, like a sweet fucking bliss that washes through my entire body. It's a delicious release but I know it’ll build again. And then we’ll start this fucking charade over again, and I’ll find a girl. Because I want to destroy shit, and that never goes away.

Opening to the new book.

The day that I died, my life became infinitely more complicated. I remember vividly lying on a long metal table that was cold against my bare back thinking, 'really? Is this it?" I couldn't tell you how I died, one minute I was sitting with Jimmy and Kate in a coffee shop discussing the relative merits of getting a second muffin versus branching out into scones and then suddenly my eyes were opened by a man with a bright light that he shone into my eyes, blinding me.
"Don’t be alarmed." He told me as I tried to shrink away from his intimate, probing fingers at my neck. "You’re dead. But we’re going to take to you the orientation centre where they’ll explain it to you." I do remember that, I remember than vividly. I wanted to scream at him, make his fingers stop roving clinically over my body. I felt a sick nausea building in my stomach as I tried once more to move, but it was as if my body was thick, heavy and useless. Lifting my arms was like trying to move through a thick pool of treacle, impossible. And then suddenly I was being jostled, lifted and something was slipped over my body, my vision slowly blocked by twin curtains of black fabric that was zipped over my head. Which brings us back to the cold, metal table and the fact that I was inexplicably naked.

Sleep Deprived

I've been writing these little vignettes lately, and I like them just as much (if not more) than a proper short story.

"One day ants will rule the world."

I yawned slightly, eyes fighting sleep."No they wont Joel. Ants are tiny and you can crush about thirty of them at one time." Joel was always saying things like this.

"But they can carry about three hundred times their own weight. Imagine if they got organised." He rolled over onto his side and stared down at me, waiting for my response. I just sighed, and shut my eyes, trying to drift back to sleep. He always did this when I was trying to sleep, it was like he was trying to squeeze in every last ounce of conversation from me before I went to sleep.
Sometimes I'd wake up and he'd be watching me, eyes frantic with worry and fear. It was as though he never expected me to wake up, and every morning when I did it was the same shock.

It wasn't any use, I could feel his eyes on me. "Joel, go back to sleep. Please." After a few seconds of silence I heard the squeak of the bed as his body flopped back down onto it. We lay in the quiet, neither of us asleep. My pride refused to admit that my head was now consumed with thoughts of ants ruling the world.

"You dont love me anymore." His voice was quiet, not accusatory. A statement.

"No," I replied. "I don't think I do." It was true. We hadn't loved each other for months. We were comfortable in each other, that was all there was too it. I sighed softly, the distance between us growing by kilometers in seconds. And then, a hand reached out and touched mine, gentle in the darkness. It brushed my fingers tentatively, as if scared of being pushed away.

But our fingers clamped together, and through the blue light of the night, I smiled.

The first few days were just weird and annoying. You’d come out in the morning and find one of the damn things had chewed most of the way through your car’s antenna. A week later, people were crashing because the bugs had eaten through brake lines or the cars wouldn’t start at all ’cause the bugs had gone for all the copper wire. And remember, they just bud off another bug when they’ve eaten enough so their numbers increased geometrically. By the end of the first month they’d done for the entire car, finishing off the engine block and every last steel wire in the radial tires. By the end of the first week people were driving out of the southwest. By the end of the first month they were walking.

We didn’t realize they’d go for your fillings and crowns until they’d done for most of the infrastructure in Arizona and New Mexico. What? Yeah, that’s what caused the scarring. There was extensive reconstructive surgery too, or it would be worse. Would I go back? Huh. I’d have to have some of my dental work replaced but it’s not like I have a pacemaker or an artificial joint. But no. I don’t think so. It may be more crowded outside the territory, but who wants to live without metal?

Excerpt: When the Metal Eaters Came: First-Person Accounts