Victorian Girl

"it must have been hard to win the presedensy what with all the reasoned dibate you had to do on television"

New story Victorian Girl, as performed at Sadcore Dadwave in November 2012, now up on the video page of this site.

My pockets are for tissues #3

Dear Frances,

Aside finding in my pockets the butchered corpse of Philip Schofield, a bloodied axe, a badly-penned sketch of the butchered corpse of Philip Schofield, and a chainsaw bearing your name smeared in blood, Coleen Nolan's been sick in the pool.

Words cannot express how furious I am with you, Frances. Shop receipts, packets of sweets: no room for anything.

You left me no choice and that’s why I did what I did.

I skinned your dog. I filled your dog’s skin with bits of Philip and now Dog Skin Phil carries my keys and my housing forms and my tissues and my coins. I don’t need pockets now because of Dog Skin Phil.

You should see him swim.

Sometimes I look at my family and wonder what life would be like if they were all dead. I have nowhere to put that thought, Frances. Nowhere at all.

Yours sincerely,

Elizabeth Tent

My pockets are for tissues #2

Dear Frances,

And my hands. My pockets are somewhere to put my hands. I put my hands in my pockets because, Frances, sometimes I like to put my hands in my pockets.

Thanks for your help with the Tuesday class this morning, but it wasn’t necessary. Attendance was poor and one of the children was sick in the pool.

When I went to get a long-handled net, you put a severed finger in my pocket. If this is Philip Schofield’s finger, I’m going to be furious. Numbers are down, Frances, and the numbers we do have spill their stomachs or stick photographs of Coleen Nolan in the lockers.

There are many things I keep in my pockets that I haven’t mentioned yet: coins, travel cards, hastily-scrawled unattributed telephone numbers.

Coleen Nolan in the lockers, Frances.

I don’t want to have to write to you again.

Yours sincerely,

Elizabeth Tent

My pockets are for tissues #1

Dear Frances,

I am writing this letter of complaint because you keep leaving things in my pockets.

At first it was a joke like the time I lost my swimming costume and you hung it from the diving board, or the time I was doing practice swims and you replaced the chlorine with iodine, or the time you made your dog a costume using the skin of my cat.

But now you are putting things in my pockets. I need my pockets for important things like keys and housing forms and tissues and I know tissues are not important but this whole thing raises crucial hygiene issues.

This morning I found in my pockets a bad biro drawing of Philip Schofield with the old black hair he doesn’t have any more.

Please consider this as a cease and desist.

Yours sincerely,

Elizabeth Tent

Eh? (aka Richard Hirst Will Not Co-Operate Even When You Offer Him Puppies)

Note: This could be about anyone. It just so happens I've used the name of Richard Hirst, who did rather well in the 2011 Manchester Fiction Prize. Except, well, despite a reference to his wonderful drawings of cats, it's not him really. I read this story to Richard Hirst on the Bad Language stage in August 2012.

A tidy cul-de-sac lined on both sides with driveways so regular, you could slide a tab along the road and zip it right up. Shorn lawns bordered by paving scrubbed magnolia.

Suburbia.

Lost cat signs in Helvetica; lunching on bruschetta; elbow patches in leather.

Here, said Richard Hirst.

The first house had colourful window boxes. The doorbell chimed Casio Big Ben. The woman who answered was all pearls and pleats highlighted with cerise eye shadow. She was Lucinda Cooper, retired nurse, not bad at whist. Richard Hirst knew everything.

I’ve been expecting you, she whispered. Her cheek was the colour of bruised apple. She angled her face away.

Peppa Pig in the belly of Peppa Pig

1

Peppa Pig crouches in the shadowed damp of an underpass. This time, she tells the knife. This time.

2

Peppa Pig exhumes the remains of her grandmother. The demons will dance tonight, she thinks.

3

A sun explodes. A solar system is annihilated. Peppa Pig strokes the curved universe in ecstacy.

4

Peppa Pig cures Porky Pig of his stutter then suffocates him, saying "it wasn't meant to be like this".

5

When Christopher Robin yells "Piglet!" during coitus, Peppa Pig weeps and weeps until the camera's memory card is full.

6

Peppa Pig throws some grain onto the bedroom floor. It lands in the shape of a unicorn. She hides under her duvet, shivering with fear. 

7

Peppa Pig looks at George's toy dinosaur, keeps looking at it, does nothing but look. Whispered incantations form solid blocks in her mind.

8

Millions of Peppa Pigs cascading into the mouth of Zoe Ball, their little limbs snapping on her yabbering tongue. 

9

Richard Madeley pins Peppa Pig to the wall. "You snorting at my missus?" Thirty years of hate form clouds of blistering halitosis. 

10

Peppa Pig draws chalk curly tails on alleyway walls to prepare us for Batpig's arrival. He doesn't come. The rain falls long and hard. 

11

Peppa Pig gathers toys for playtime. A bouncy ball, a wooden yoyo, a coal-fired incinerator.

12

Peppa Pig at a job interview, crawling on the desk. Her laughter is violent. She is thanked for her time.

13

Peppa Pig bursts into a thousand colours, translucent, flowing, a pulsating memory of herself.

14

Rastamouse has a Peppa Pig dream. When he wakes, his mouth is dry. He says nothing. Goes about his day. 

15

Balloons drift over trees. Bunting snaps in strong breezes. The party is over. Peppa Pig is dead. 

16

Her brother George tries to think of a eulogy, a regret, anything. He's distracted by a fly in a spider's web. He never thinks of her again. 

17

A stuttering pig of some repute. In the drawing room. With a butcher's knife.

A Facial Sonata (50 Shades of Grey remix)

Friction

Creepy Geoff came round, rubbing the teacups and wiping his legs on the door frames again.

We hid the best china in the stair cupboard, but it wasn't long before he was in there, rattling his elbow along the corrugated plastic of the hoover tube.

[read the rest of this in Adropiean Galactic Lego Set Blues]

Eyeball scrawls: Invisible Animal Man

 

I have a new story called Invisible Animal Man.

Here is an excerpt:

I never knew loneliness until the animals stopped looking at me. 

You know how you can be at a party and still feel lonely? Imagine the same but with an ocelot snubbing you at the buffet. 

I tried lying in their troughs. Coming at them from unusual angles. I waved my arms as if my shoulder sockets were magic eightballs. Hey animals. Hey.

[read the rest of this in Adropiean Galactic Lego Set Blues]

I remember when this was all fjords

(Click pictures for bigger.)

Dog weight?

Read the full list at Top Ten.

A capacity for a better life

Simon rubbed his hip on the rough stone of the hotel building.

This used to be bigger, he said. I'm certain this used to be bigger.

The hotel entrance led to a lobby flattened by strip lighting. The receptionist was a hefty woman with a cigar between her fingers.

This used to be bigger, he said. She looked at him as if he was a scab she had just picked off her elbow.
Simon stood in the lobby listening to footsteps come and go. He brought up a contact on his mobile phone then dialled.

It rang out. He left the hotel.

Simon stood on the street. This used to be bigger, he said as he pressed his body into the side of an ice cream van. This used to be a bigger van.

He stood on the beach .He lay face down in wet sand, the tide lapping into his ears. The sea, he said in a muffled voice. It used to be bigger.

  Simon had a long phone conversation with his girlfriend. You didn't answer when I called before, he said. All he heard back was the sound of her typing, the sound of her shuffling papers and the sound of her eating a tangerine.

Simon stood on a pavement. He pushed his tongue against the glass door of a Waterstone’s. He pushed until it hurt.

Have you got any height charts, he asked the twitching bookseller behind the counter. What's a height chart, said the bookseller. You know, like you have for children.

The bookseller looked sad, as if he was unsure of where he was.

Simon dialled again. He pressed the phone into the side of his head until it became an oblong extension of his skin.

This isn't working anymore, he told the phone. We used to be something else. Something bigger. He looked at the sky, wondered what it felt like. We used to be bigger, he said.

All he could hear was the sound of sucked citric juices and the tap tap tap of a Samsung laptop. She hummed absent agreement. Vague platitudinous vocal shrugs.

(Text updated: August 2012.)

Ronan Borllax: an obituary

He was born in Clam, on the hill, near the railway cables. His first film was 90 minutes of ripples from his local pond in which he had drowned Mr Miller's cat. Top Ranking Films ranked him as the top ranked director of his generation, although they ranked everyone in films equally top film ranked.

[read the rest of this in Adropiean Galactic Lego Set Blues]

Everything and everything beyond

Adriene papered the kitchen surface with recipe print-outs. She placed the bowl in the middle and ran her hands along its rim, just the once, just to feel satisfied. In the bowl, she put:

- sixteen eggs;
- a yard of flour;
- a jumbo bag of Maltesers;
- mascarpone to season;
- Jeremy Handley’s Guide to Modern Sermons;
- most of her string.
- bacon;

It was too much. The plastic bowl melted on the hob. A brown mess bubbled onto her floor and into electrical sockets. A fire reduced the house to a stinking pile of ash. Into the ash, she put:

- her neighbour's house;
- a secondary school;
- 14 lengths of railway line;
- a local petition;
- children's football kit;
- four books from the A-B section of her library;
- the A47;
- spit.

It was too much. The weight of the rubble knocked the earth out of its orbit. A church full of people in Milan felt a giddy stomach lift as the planet lurched beyond the moon. The earth vanished into a black hole at end of the universe.. Into the universe, she put:

- everything;
- and everything beyond.

Adriene held the entirety of existence in her hands, held it against her beating heart. She enjoyed the dual streams of darkness and light flowing through her bones. Tomorrow, she would make pasta.

(Text updated: August 2012)

Libraries that no longer exist

Hayle Library: wheeled down the road by monkeys

Brigg Technical Library: lack of interest

Dawlish Library: confusion

Romsey Library: annexed in putsch

Saint Barry Norman Library: fear by paper cut

Newton-Le-Willows Library: offensive stained glass

Filton Library: now sells tanks
Continue reading somewhere on the Paraxis Library Wall »

sandra sue

i hate sandra sue. she used to pull my legs off in college and I never forgave her for it.

when i was sitting next to her in mr morton’s class, i used her pen to write my essay about minerals. i thought she hadn’t noticed, but then she grabbed the pen off of me and broke my fingers on my right hand. i swear she deliberately chose a pen that looked like mine so i’d make that mistake.

[read the rest of this in Adropiean Galactic Lego Set Blues]

The bird catcher

Alexander said guard the church. I guard the church.

Next to the church stands a thicket of wintery trees, petrified, trunks silvered with what looks like ash from the war.

The church is half built. Until Alexander told me to guard the church, kids with spindly legs climbed the stonework in dirty school shoes, bed sheets bundled under arms...

Continue reading at 330 Words »

Michael is a beautiful horse, a dangerous horse

Michael is a beautiful horse, a dangerous horse.

He will smash in your jockey face. Michael will not be beaten.

You lean into his field, lifting your cardiganed arm clear of the fencing, and hold out a sugar lump with a trembling hand. You make shushy cat sounds because you could never do a clicking noise when all the other kids could. It's the only noise you know.

Briefcase lament

A man with a glass eye stands at a trestle table in the middle of a fish market in Dakar. On the table, open briefcases display pieces of cheshire cheese shaped with his hands. A donkey. A football. A bicycle. A punter smoking a pipe buys a set of cheese dominoes. When the man sells out, he will climb into his briefcase and bake slowly in the heat.

[read the rest of this in Adropiean Galactic Lego Set Blues]

The yarning of good whum

When I grab your body in my eye sockets, in my mind I french my fallals until my groobs burst.

I'd like to lish all over your gizzles, dangle you good and proper. We'd waltz a smooshing croon-song and mouth-slide each other heavenward. Upstairs to beddies, light down, trousers akim.