Reach

(Flash fiction)

Time thawed and the ageing process gained pace making it harder for me to catch up. From my mothers flimsy pedestal, looking back at the thirty-six years of failure, each failure a footprint leading directly to where I now stand. Things were better when I was still numb. Or before I'd tried. Before the chronic insomnia and all of its friends: the anxiety; the lockjaw and its two cracked molars; the perpetual sores on my feet which, in protest, have refused to heal; the physical weakness and the inability to harbour a still thought. All this in slow motion. Everything, two-dimensional. All so silent that the world doesn't notice. Nor will it. Time wont blink an eye. The tide wont flinch. No faith or fight left in me. So the world does end in 2012. Ready to dance the jig. Never was much of a dancer. One last move. One last step. Probably the most courageous of my life. My life: a failed career; a failed marriage, if you could even call it that, having it constantly flaunted before me, right in my face. Right around the corner and I'm supposed to just smile. Patronised by a firm handshake. Even something as simple as eating food then later shitting it out completely underlines how pointless everything is. It's fine. No one will notice. Tug the rope hard. Make sure it's tight, strong, don't fuck this up. Not this. Even you can do this right. Do it. Just kick the stool away...
Fuck! God! No! Help! Grab the rope! Help! This cant be..! Isn't right..! The rope... No... The radiator... Get your foot to it... Reach for it... Reach... Fuck... Please... Reach... God... Cant reach... Cant... Reach... Reach... Reach.

The End.


Copyright Roddy Smith 2015.

Hard Knock Life

(Flash fiction)   

    Smothered between stale, moist thighs, an afflicted, idiotic penis and an unclean fold of haemorrhoids, Neil's bollock suffered in existence, hanging in his sad sack alone and impoverished. His twin had been the lucky one. He'd been removed after an adolescent Neil had attempted some acrobatic manoeuvre which was intended to involve a skateboard and a hand-railing, but had in fact only involved a hand-railing and a previous brush with the law alongside the privileged son of the Doctor whose responsibility it would become to decide whether or not the offending bollock - which had receded to the much sunnier setting of Neil's stomach - should or should not be dethroned.

     He spent his days suffocating, numbed by soiled, mossy pants, soaking in the overdeveloped, reanimated refuse of Neil's rotting innards and various putrefactive stages of his own product. His surrounding scrotum was fortified by layer upon layer of the festering bodily discharges of strangers, as well as a residuum left by the unidentified seepage that sometimes bubbled from the all-but sealed-shut cavity that was Neil's buckled anus, staining its rear a filthy burnt-orange and punctuated only by a surgical scar. Indeed, it had for a time seemed that the only auspicious element of Neil's bollock's entire region was the once thriving population of parasitical organisms, but they, too, were stricken with plague and only a sluggish, mutated few remained.
     The Pluto abandoned on the outskirts of the circulatory system, Neil's bollock was depressed. Thankfully, however, he usually found himself knackered to a witless docility, blind to self awareness.

     Low vibrations ushered him towards a state of vague consciousness - Neil was in conversation. He had actual, real-life company. The muffled reverberating continued for some time at varying frequencies until, quite suddenly, it stopped. Neil's bollock sensed that Neil's retarded penis had perked up. Shortly thereafter he felt something caress his surrounding sack, gently ushering him about it, signifying that Neil was almost certainly about to partake in all manner of sexual atrocities. Then, as if out of nowhere... Serenity. He found himself aired, enlivened by the relief of nudity - an unwelcome quickening, for here, Neil's bollock knew, opened the gates of Hell. Wide awake and smashing against an unknown provocateur's swollen, outwardly hung prolapsed rectum, he began to charge all of his new found vigour to the conjuring of fictions and prayer; that Neil might not be too intoxicated, that this hell might not last too long. 

     Suicidal despair was partially doused by determined delusion - bathing in beautiful blue lagoons, swimming with dolphins, basking in meadows of unequivocal splendour - all of this took undiluted focus. The whole while it hammered at the wall of his figment - unyielding reality. He was squashed, bitten, chewed, stretched, kicked, clamped, stabbed, burnt and trampled on throughout this most hideous stop-start exchange of pathogens, until, finally, he got the order. Neil's gullible penis had been hard at work. Concentrating with clarity, purpose and accuracy was easy to him as he only had one thought - go - which he was either thinking or not thinking.
     It was time. One last agonising push. It was, after all, up to him to finish the job, to put this horrible affair behind him. He forced, squeezed, crushed, imploded himself as blood vessels burst all around leaving him shrivelled, utterly unable to reflate, and producing nothing more than a drip. Then it was over. He watched Neil's moronic penis wilt as his own cognisance dissolved, freeing him from the excruciating, acute distress of absoluteness.

The End

Copyright Roddy Smith 2015.

Half Man Half Debauchery - Daydreaming

Produced by Terra.