Time of day was irrelevant. The allure, clearly too much. He couldn’t keep his hands off. Grubby, unwashed, nicotine stained fingers. The thought of them knocked me sick. And I was sure he didn’t wash his hands after the urinary act, or worse.
He was practically an addict, in more ways than one.

A magpie, diving for the shiny foil.
You could sense the impending lunge. A quick look around him, followed by an abrupt, purposeful throat clearing. Almost like his throat was collapsing under the constant strain of drags and tar.
Once he started, there was no stopping him. Grab after grab, more than is humanly possible. It was obscene. All you could do was sit, watch and listen.
I tried to blindside it at first and as weeks went by, I started to leave the room. On occasion, I actually ran out of the office, once I had casually walked by his desk.
The others thought I was overreacting. I wasn’t.
I wasn’t sure how they were dealing with it.
Offices can be a terrible place.

At first it started out as twice each day and that was too much. It soon became three and also obvious that I was avoiding the issue.
The others started to notice. Initially, they smiled and shook their heads as I left the room. Over time, they began to realise I had a point.
Some would join me I the kitchen to let the episode pass. Those that could stand to witness it, over and over, either laughed at me or had no idea what was going on.

I hated him.
Just for that, at first.
After a while, irrationally, I hated him for everything. Everything he did. Everything he was. Everything I imagined he did.
I pictured him alone, at home, sat in his underwear, covered in the filth of his obsession.
His pleasure became my disease.
He consumed my world.
How could anyone eat so many packets of crisps?

Words: 329

‘Ludo,! You made a mess in your nappy again. Never mind, Mummy will clean you up. Soon you’ll use the toilet like a big boy. When Wolfy was your age, he already used the toilet. You’ll practice until you can do it like him, then Father will be happy.’

Ludo made a Churchillian expression.

‘daa daa’

His mother grimaced as she inhaled the fetid stench of his yellow mess. Hopefully this child will live, she thought.

‘One day, Ludo, you will create something perfect.’ She promised. ‘You will be the greatest.’

Ludo knew Father would shout. He toddled into his own world and looked at the trees while his mother drank. There were other children but he didn’t join them. They made funny noises. He knew he was not like them.

***

The old man’s eyes are locked on eternity as he settles his fat naked buttocks onto the porcelain throne and readies himself. Then it comes; not in parts, but whole and perfect as though cast as a single piece. He doesn’t hear the splosh – he is profoundly deaf, but he knows that he has, at last, completed his masterwork. There is no-one to share the moment. He thinks of his mother, his immortal beloved.

His work is so perfect that he discards the paper in his hand as he has discarded all earthly things.

Not even a glory wipe is called for. His output is so perfect that nothing could be added or taken away.

‘Not even you, Wolfgang, could have created this,’ he bellows. ‘I have made something unlike anything before. Centuries from now they will talk of my creation. I have produced the perfect expression of humanity.’

He rises to his feet and lifts his arms wide as though conducting an orchestra.

‘Oh Joy! Oh Joy! This kiss to the entire world! Can you sense the creator?’

“da da da da, da da da da , da da da da daaa dadaa”

Words: 326

ESCA’s Geoponic Intelligence Low Earth Satellite (GILES) lifted off from the former RAF Bentwaters site aboard the Ransomes X rocket on December 8, 2013 at 3 o’clock, give or take. Separation took place at roughly quarter past, the twin Villiers mower engines splashing down safely in the Deben. Before the hour was up, telemetry from GILES was received by volunteers at the Bawdsey Radar museum.

“We’re over the moon to have finally met the December launch target set by my father,” said Ted Leadbetter, GILES mission controller at ESCA’s Propulsion Labs in Oulton Broad. “Dad’s initial aim, some 40 years ago, had been to rendezvous with Apollo 17. That groundbreaking plan, like so many others, was thwarted by the Local Government Act of 1972 and the enforced unification with West Suffolk.”

Tens of spectators watched as Gemma Sadler, 9-year-old winner of our county-wide colouring competition, repeatedly yanked the Ransomes pull cord to ignite the rocket. Her classmates – and, indeed, all East Suffolk schoolchildren – have been asked to watch the skies over the next few weeks for a hi-tech parachute. Said package will, as per the original ’70s ESCA design, contain an Agfamatic 126 full colour camera. Up to 24 images will be available on our website as soon as the film has been processed. Branches of Boots The Chemist from Beccles to Bungay have been put on alert.

By Thursday, GILES will cruise at an altitude of 258 miles and provide a comprehensive agricultural survey of our glorious non-metropolitan county. ESCA’s crack team of COBOL coders promises that the satellite will fly in from the North Sea and directly over East Suffolk several times a day. Then, as GILES approaches the border with West Suffolk, it has been programmed to rotate all sensory devices by 180 degrees. The team also guarantees that GILES will not come within 25 miles of Norfolk airspace.

Mr Leadbetter added: “Not for the first time in the space race is the East leading the West.”

Words: 330

I’d moved in about 2 weeks ago. I settled in quite quickly and felt reasonably happy on my own. I had my laptop, plenty of films and it was a busy street. People were coming and going all the time. People watching was one of my favourite hobbies. Most evenings I would sit in the living room and escape through the lives of others on my big telly, or Google my life away. At the same time, I’d gaze through the window, the net curtain allowing me to stare without being openly creepy.

It didn’t take long until I saw her. The first time was unreal. She walked by my house, both morning and night.
Wondering what we might have in common, I dreamt up things from the shopping bags she carried or the outfit she had chosen to wear.
I started to finish work early so I could watch her walk by.
I became so obsessed that I took a week off work to see what she did each day. Where she worked and shopped. What her friends looked like. If she was ‘seeing’ anyone or had children. I justified this to myself as research and getting to know the area.

None of this really mattered though.

I’d convinced myself this was what I wanted.

Spending so much time studying her was not helping me.
I became confused and anxious. I wasn’t sure how to approach anything related to her. Not to mention approaching her.
Would she acknowledge me?
Did I exist in her version of the world?
I dreamt of days filled with infantile romance – her cutting my hair or singing to me. Picture book stuff.
A plausible reality?
I’m 32. She’s 58.
To me, at the moment, she’s a woman that lives on my street.
To her, I was still that boy, smiling back at her from the safety of her purse.
Mum left when I was nine.
Could I go through it all again?

Words: 326

For me, learning to walk was no problem – left, right, left, right. Some guys just can’t get it though.

They’re still crawling by the time they start nursery – yeah, I know – all fours.

For those of us that get it – we’re away – endlessly planning escape routes. I almost got out once – hmph! Mummy’s can run fast when they need to. Still, you can always race across the lounge floor while their watching TV. Ha! Make them sorry they ever decided to have you. That’s philosophy!

It’s not all about the ‘dash’ though. Through walking you learn to balance – and from there, it’s a hop, skip and a jump away from riding a bike.

***

So, here I am, pushing along my bicycle. Oh, I can balance, but one puncture later I’m the free-wheelin’ Bob Dylan, heading over to Khan’s Stop ‘n’ Shop to buy a Fast Wheelz tyre-fixit kit – a rubber seal, some glue, and I’ll be good to go.

Of course, there’s always the bus – but I believe in leg-power. I mean, if there were no more bicycles, or repair kits; if the scooters had become extinct; and if the petroleum reserves were finished, well – then I could still use these hairy legs right?

***

Yeah, these days my legs are still quite hairy but also very wiry. Now I have to wear long-johns and woollen trousers. My bones ache, and I shuffle along with a stick. The electric cars and scooters zoom past. You call that progress? They told us we’d be living on the moon by 2001 and we were supposed to have robot butlers and nurses for every household. But has that happened?

Hmmm, that old Sphinx-of-Thebes was right – four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon and three legs in the evening. That just about sums us up, right? Technology comes and goes, but in the end we all get achy legs.

Words: 326

Mrs Otley sold posters, greetings cards, mugs, mouse mats and coasters with animals on from her market stall. The animals were all doing things that usually only human beings did. The bespectacled penguin reading Barbados on a Budget on the back seat of the bus was very popular. There was an elephant hoovering, while music – notes floating around its flapping ears – was obviously making it dance.

‘They’re clever, aren’t they, Simon?’
Simon gave his wife a look of derision ‘Computer generated.’
‘Good though. Shall we get this card for Lou’s birthday?’
Simon glanced at the bow-tied giraffe in front of the full-length mirror. It was stooping to pluck a bowler hat from a hat stand. Opening his wallet, Simon pulled out a fiver. Mrs. Otley didn’t have change so he was obliged to wave his hand and walk away.

A little girl picked up a paparazzi panda mug. She’d obviously made up her mind this was the one she wanted and looked doubtfully at her handful of coins.
‘It’s for my granddad. He always has his camera round his neck like this panda.’
At the word ‘granddad’, Mrs. Otley felt the familiar tightness in her cheeks and prickle behind the eyes. It had been forty-nine years.
‘All mugs half price today.’
The girl flashed Mrs.Otley a smile and handed her two-pounds-fifty.

Mrs. Otley closed the stall up and dashed off early. Her nephew was looking after things for a fortnight while she was away. Her suitcase was packed with suitable clothes and the old fashioned picnic set in the wicker basket stood beside it in the hallway. She checked her camera was in her handbag and waited by the door for the taxi.

Mrs. Otley relished this moment of calm before the journey. Africa! It was all very exciting. She hoped the hippos would behave themselves. She’d had such trouble with the hyenas last year. She’d been sure they were laughing at her from under their hand-knitted balaclavas.

Words: 330

Aalok and Siraj sit on the church steps, admiring early evening’s deep amber glow.

‘They say the new light is that colour – that bright, even’, Siraj says.

‘They say a lot of things”, Aalok replies, taking four clear glass bottles from his bag.

‘Have you heard much about it?’

‘Talk of cables and wires, but no sign of anything. Try not to worry. What does the evening have in store for you?’,

‘Full moon tonight, I’ll be out for a while’, Siraj says, filling the bottles with moonlight from his barrel before handing them back.

‘Then I will say goodnight, let you get on, head back before this lot fades’.

The day’s final light sinks into the white walls of the church. ‘I’m sorry. There’ll be brighter stuff in the morning – it’s always duller at the bottom of the barrel’.

‘Maybe the cable light won’t be so bad, eh?. And at least you’ll be done pushing that barrel around.’

‘What if I like pushing this barrel around?’, Siraj says, shoving it into Aalok’s legs, spilling a bottle from the bag in his arms. The two old men watch as it clinks and tumbles, coming to rest in old red dust – a pool of light and broken glass.

Words: 207

No-one knows why, they just know that it’s true. There will be no more food. A world seduced by overindulgence means there’s a huge amount left; but there is a larger mass of people who will now go unfed.

And no-one could have predicted this reaction. The president stepped down immediately, but just as quickly they reached a consensus on how we should react: don’t eat. It was a simple plan for desperate times.

Theoretically the maxim only applied to those living in richer countries, those who had been drowning in their excess. It would ensure there was more left for those who really needed it to survive. It was sacrifice on a global scale, and people simply agreed to it. There was unanimous consent which placed the act of eating higher than murder on the scale of sin. For them eating was murder; not for the animals that campaigners used to fight to protect, but for the rest of the population.

Logically, it didn’t hold up. But people facing the biggest crisis of their time are not apt to act reasonably, and clinging to one rule that everyone could understand provided some comfort.

Food was policed with evangelical zeal, and those few who tried to get to it were publicly punished and shamed. It was the most selfish, unforgivable thing you could do, and that became our truth. There was no room for debate, for an alternative approach. We would not eat.

Nobody questioned the rhetoric, even as piles of leftover food began to go bad, waves of stench floating up and out as people continued to live, starving.

It might sound strange, but even though I was one of the renegades – one who saw only the pursuit of food, hiding from watchful eyes too large for their sockets, and snatching scraps when backs were turned – I cannot remember feeling hungry.

I must have done. It was the driving force of my existence, in a strange right angle to the accepted view.

Words: 330