Look back

Why did I not put shoes on? He said to himself as he inspected the bottom of his foot. I mean I walked past the shoes to get outside, I looked at them, ignored them and knew that it was a mistake, but still I didn’t stop.

He pulled the spike out of the flesh inspected it and threw it aside. The blood ooozed out. He was already calculating how much pain he was going to suffer over the next few days, how many pairs of socks he was going to waste because he didn’t put his shoes on. He started to sweat, heart beating quicker, it wasn’t the pain that made his sweat just the annoyance with himself, the worst kind of frustration, his forehead squeezed together and his eyes dimmed. He leant back against the pallet and breathed.

Think

‘You know what your problem is don’t you?’

‘What?’ Jay replied

‘Well you think you are original, but you’re not.’

Jay laughed, a smile growing on the left side of his face and his chest bouncing up and down.

‘Why thank you’ he mocked in a classic British accent. ‘It’s so reassuring to know that your best friends believe in you.’

‘Listen’ James replied ‘it’s not that your ideas are bad, in fact a few years ago I did think what you were talking about was a little niche, you know on the edge of fashionable, but it’s true that now people are asking for all that interactive content.’

Jay butted in ‘so I am original then.’

‘Wait let me finish, even though you thought about monetising it before anyone else, doesn’t mean it was original’

‘Before anyone else’ he teased ‘sounds like o…rig…in…al…’ he sounded out like a school child learning to read.

‘But it’s advertising that makes you think of an idea first. We own your mind without you even knowing it.’

‘What are you talking about, you don’t own my mind. 100% original my brain.’

‘That’s what I mean, you are not, we seed your ideas into you mind without you even knowing and then let you think you made them all up yourself.’

‘Shut up James’

‘No I’m serious, we are everywhere, on your phone, first thing you look at in the morning, on the radio, tv, breakfast cereal, newspaper…’

Jay interrupted, ‘no one buys a newspaper’

‘Whatever… we are everywhere, you can’t deny it.’

‘But it doesn’t effect me, I just ignore it’

‘No you rebel against it, which makes you think another way we want you to think. You know classic love it, hate it, still talk about it.’

Jay was quiet and the two gazed across the park from the bench.

‘So how do you have an original thought?’

James waited, then started to answer and stopped himself paused a little longer and answered. ‘Hmmm… dunno’

Watered down

In front of me I have three glasses, one full of beer, the middle one empty and the third full of water.

Let’s take the beer to start with. I like to think of beer as a representation of the essence of the experience. It represents the bodies physiological response to the moment you enjoy and that moment can be anything, sex, laughter, sport, fear, enlightenment. Whatever, whatever moment that makes your body shake, form goose bumps, chicken skin, arousal, sweat. Anything that makes the heart beat faster.

The empty glass, that’s you and for the moment that’s empty.

And the third glass, well that’s water, that’s comfort that’s the easy path those are things that make your life easier, that’s things that help you pass difficult problems. That’s the internet, that’s a hover, those are things that ease the arousal, slow the heart beat.

We pour a little beer in the empty glass, it feels good, if you haven’t had it in a while it’s even better, we pour a little more in, but then we are shaky the body overloads, so we add water, we balance the beer.

But then we start to learn, there are tricks to get more beer with out the fear, there are ways to get more beer inside without the overload, so we fill up we add the water, the clip stick the panic draw, the ai, the insurance, the Burberry wallet. We now have all the ways to cope with more beer, but then we take a sip and we realise we are just drinking water, our beer has been diluted.

Goose bumps come from feeling, whatever thought inspires those bumps has to have an element of jeopardy it has to be beer and the more we learn to use water to fill up on beer the more we forget the taste.

Instant

It’s strange, sometimes you just know, you pick your head up and see it. The picture is clear it says something to you straight away. You look them in the eyes and instantly there is a connexion. But then, all the shit gets muddled, the perception of them, the self perception of you and the ‘what’s the right’ just gets in the way, so you stop. You reach the end of the road and that’s that. The eyes don’t look the same, the feeling in the heart is different and there is just a little sadness in the mind. What might have been, what could have been done differently, it all moves away.

I wish I would really seize the moment, capture it, act on it, stretch out that first flash when you saw the picture, when you felt the bite, like the tickle on your teeth when you bite down on a perfectly ripe nectarine. Or maybe if I did it would be awkward and bitter and the reality would be much worse than the thought in the imagination. Maybe the teeth would just find the stone.

Thief

‘Right we got seven minutes.’ Sean said as they walked purposefully through the maze of shelves, using the light from their phones to illuminate their path to the counter. They jumped over and entered the office closing the door behind them. On a wooden desk they saw the safe perched precariously on top, a large dial and lock on the front. Sean handed Biola the scrap of paper and put the key in the lock.

‘read out the numbers’

Biola responded.

‘clockwise – 18’

Sean twisted the dial so the number 18 was in line with the red marker at the top of the dial where 12 would be on a clock.

‘Anti-clockwise – 33’
Again Sean twisted the dial, but this time in the opposite direction. ‘clockwise – 46’

The dial make a click as if something had released behind the door, they looked at each other and then Sean turned the key with the red tag in the lock. It ran smoothly, and there was a louder click as the heavy door swung open with its own weight and the angle of the desk the safe was sitting upon.

‘Boooom’ Biola cried as he peered into the safe, there were wads and wads of cash, it seemed like more than they had anticipated, it looked like something out of Ocean’s Eleven, it felt like Ocean’s Eleven, maybe they had more than they were expecting? Maybe they could all go home with 5K Biola thought.

‘Shhhhh’ Sean interrupted. ‘Pass me the bag’ Biola paused
‘The bag’ Sean demanded raising his voice a little.

Biola looked around as if he had dropped the bag, but he knew straight away that he had forgotten it, it wasn’t even in the car, he knew exactly where it was, he knew it was back at the flat on the sofa in Sean’s living room.

‘Sh*t man, sorry..’
Sean looked up at him, ‘you kidding me? You chump. F**k man’

But this was no time to despair, The clock was ticking and they needed a solution. Sean was thinking quickly.

‘Get some X-change bags’
‘From where?’ Biola replied
‘F**k knows, behind the counter.’ Sean guessed

Biola quickly responded walking out of the office to the area behind the counter. He started looking through the cupboards, nothing in the first, then he looked into the second, just a load of random stationary and plastic figures from cartoons and computer games that mostly came as freebees when new games came into the shop to help promote the new releases. Biola opened the third door and there was a stack of plastic bags neatly folded.

‘Yees bruv’ he called out to Sean, ‘How many do we want?’ ‘Bring two’ Sean estimated.

They stuffed all the notes into the plastic bags, the wads mainly in tens, a few twenties and some blocks of fives. The denominations low to reflect the value of the sales that the shop made to its customers.

‘Pikeys’ Sean murmured under his breath as if he was justifying the robbery to himself by creating a Robin Hood type of persona.

‘Right, lets go, check Tyrell is cool.’ Sean indicated as he pushed the safe door shut turned the key and picked up his bag.

Melissa

Melissa hurried to the back of the shop, picked up a scrap of paper and placed it in the front pocket of her bag. From the safe door she turned the small key with a red tag three times to the right, withdrew the key and placed it in the same pocket of her bag as the scrap of paper. Her nightly lock-up complete, she then walked out from behind the counter and in-between the rows and rows of DVD’s to the light switch. She looked back into the shop her heart rate increasing, she paused with her hand hovering over the switch looking in and out of the maze. Had she forgotten something? Had her colleague definitely left earlier or was he hiding behind one of the sets of shelves? She dismissed the thought, flicked the switches and the room immediately fell into darkness. She opened the door, stepped outside, out from the warm island created by the heating system above the door and into the cold damp air of winter.

She pulled the door shut and out of her bag took a large set of keys flicking through the set to find the one that fitted the lock. Her hands were stiff and her heart was beating quickly, she found the correct key, raised it to the lock and as she did her fingers faltered and the set dropped to the floor. She looked around to see if anyone had noticed, but there was no-one who cared, so she bent down and picked them up.

Ugly

They were breathing heavily as they crossed the motorway. It had been a long walk along the side of the fence until they had found a way up and over. They crossed the lanes quickly as the traffic was thin and now with fatigue setting in they needed somewhere to sleep. Slipping and sliding across the loose earth on the banks below the metal barriers, they slowly forced their way through the thick brambles towards the silhouette of a building in the distance.

After 40 minutes or so they arrived, the windows and doors boarded up but the building looked solid. A concrete masterpiece. After a few minutes they found a gap in the fence and had climbed the sharp edges of the spiral staircase, when they reached the top Billy pushed forcefully against the old door and it caved in.

Laughter

Her laugh, that’s what did it, she would start talking in a kind of mumble, struggling to make her point, then punctuate the words with laughter making her sentence incomprehensible. The laughter would start light but deepen and as it did, she became more and more desperate to make her point. Unfortunately more often than not she failed, hamstrung by her own happiness. After a moment or so her laughter would be so deep that no air could pass into her body, she would end up silencing herself. But it was sooo contagious, all I ever wanted to do was to hear that silence.