Friday Flash - 7 Seconds

I haven't run a #fridayflash story for some time, but I found this in my old writing files and thought it'd fit the bill. It was originally written for a competition; the challenge being to write a short story that would fit on the back of a postcard. That doesn't give you a whole lot of time... so that's exactly what the story ended up being about. Not having a whole lot of time...

They say that after decapitation, the head remains conscious for up to 7 seconds. Never thought I’d get the chance to find out. Stuck behind a lorry full of gobstoppers, in a rush to get back to Jo’s, had to risk overtaking on that blind bend. Audi coming the other way. Of course it was an Audi…

They also say that before you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes. Waiting for that now, but all I can think is damn, I’ll never get to watch series 6 of House. The DVD arrived in the post this morning. I don't even feel sad, more frustrated – like when you can’t find the end of the sellotape. Expected a bit more drama somehow...

Plenty of drama, that last row with Jo. The things we fight about! The 5 second rule… I picked that toast up in three, it was perfectly good to eat. A few cat hairs weren’t going to kill me. But I hate that the last word I said to her was “off”.

Is 4 roses cheap? All I could afford. Where are they? Over there, past the bike… past the body. Legs still twitching – so it’s not just the head. Glad I can’t see the neck, think I’d puke if I did… wonder how that’d work?

Mum says accidents happen in 3s. Banged my knee on the coffee table this morning - I can still feel the bruise - then sliced my finger, cutting rind off the bacon. I’m all about proving people right today…

That kid in a hoody, stooping to pick up Jo’s flowers! Little git, gonna give ‘em to his girlfriend… least he won’t have to pay 2 quid a rose! Me, I’m waiting on another hoody now – the world’s first. Carrying a scythe, not stealing roses…

Wonder if she’ll remember to put my ashes in a firework like we discussed? ‘Purple Rain’ at the funeral? Give my comic collection to Barnardo’s? Come on… where’s my life-flash? This can’t be all there is. Thirty-three years, there’s got to be… wait, wait – it’s coming. I can see it now… I remember! Yes! My 1st ever--

Seeing Stars

Renaissance man and (as I'm obliged to point out every time I write about him) bloke who lives just over the hill from me, Simon Armitage is a poet, novelist, radio star, lecturer, and songwriter of my favourite album of 2009. His latest collection bridges the gap between poetry and short story with aplomb.

(When I was a kid, I used to wonder what a plomb was. I even looked it up in the dictionary but got no joy. Was it a kind of plum? A bomb made by plumbers? A Mercedes driven by the Palestine Liberation Organisation? I never found out. But I've grown up to be the sort of cocky git who uses words without really knowing what they mean. Hence...)

Never more than three pages in length, these stoems or pories will appeal both to readers who enjoy short stories but never got into poetry and those who admire the wordplay and creativity in your average stanza but don't have the attention span for most tall tales. Which is a very longwinded way of saying: they're ace.

Sample opening line: "I hadn't meant to go grave-robbing with Richard Dawkins, but he can be very persuasive."

How could you not want to read on?

My favourite is 'The Cuckoo', which feeds into my recently-mentioned solipsist paranoia when a young man finds out that his parents and friends are all government employed actors - that their work is done now that he's turned 18, and that they're all moving on to other roles.

Special mention must also go to the wonderfully self-deprecating 'Bringing It All Back Home' in which the author finds himself being commemorated in his native village of Marsden with a "Simon Armitage Trail", a guided tour based on his spurious life story...

With Bob spouting his stuff at every lamppost, we walked to a dilapidated cowshed where I was gored by a bull when I was nine, supposedly, then to the escarpment where I'd seen my father bring down a fieldfare with a single stone. Then to Bunny Wood where I'd found Gossip John hanging by the neck, then to a meadow where I'd fallen asleep and woken up with a grass snake curled on my chest, then behind the undertaker's parlour, where, Bob confidently announced, I'd lost my virginity to a girl named Keith.

Sum: Tales From The Afterlives

Sum features 40 short stories that attempt to answer the ultimate question of human existence: what happens when we die?

Do we finally discover the secrets of the universe? Is heaven all we've ever dreamed of? Are we just such huge cosmic science experiment? Do good girls go to heaven and bad girls go everywhere, as Jim Steinman always promised us? David Eagleman has the answers.

Keeping his tales pithy in the extreme (the longest being 4 pages, many are just 2), the author presents a series of astounding and amusing possibilities, from an afterlife prism where you exist at every single age of your life (and end up arguing with younger and older versions of yourself) to one where you become a supporting character in other people's dreams to one where your life rewinds and you discover it wasn't quite the way you remembered it.

My favourite is the quantum afterlife wherein everything exists in all possible states at once. As human beings we find it extremely confusing, until it's presented to us in terms of a romantic relationship... and then everything makes perfect sense.

Not every one of these possible afterlives will be for you. Occasionally Eagleman (who's a neuroscientist in his day job) comes across as the bastard lovechild of Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins, but hey, that might be just your thing. It doesn't matter, there's so many great ideas here that if one doesn't quite take your fancy, just move onto the next and start thinking about that one instead. There's a lot to think about...

Friday Flash - Highway Hypnosis

I went seriously over-budget on this week's #fridayflash short story, for which I can only apologise. But a self-imposed limit of 1000 words only takes you so far, and rules are there for breaking. This one's for anyone who doesn't remember their journey home from tonight... I hope you enjoy it.

Highway Hypnosis


They call it ‘highway hypnosis’. You’ve probably experienced it yourself. You set off driving on a route you’ve taken dozens if not hundreds of times before and before you know it you’ve arrived. Except you don’t remember a single thing about the journey. Not the people you’ve passed nor the landmarks, none of the shops, offices, parks, animals, billboard advertisements, not even the other motorists who make driving so unpleasant. Maybe one of the songs you heard on the radio is still tickling your mind, but you don’t recall listening to it or singing along, you certainly don’t remember hearing the DJ introduce it. It’s all just a blank.

You don’t even remember the people you killed along the way.

My journey home takes 45 minutes in rush hour. It’d be an hour if I took the main road, but I’ve learnt the back routes now. Rat runs, Rachel calls them. Rachel works five minutes from home, she isn’t trapped in her car surrounded by morons for two hours every day. Up past the scrap yard, left into the housing estate with the speed bumps, cut through the traffic lights at the supermarket, up the hill past the cemetery, left round the back of the Fox & Hound, then… you don’t need to know all this. All you need to know is where the bodies were found.



The first was last Tuesday. By the gasworks. Happened round ten to six, they said on the news. Hit and run. The police were appealing for witnesses because nobody‘d seen a thing. Some teenager in a hoodie and a baseball cap. Why would you wear both?

“They didn’t say anything about what he was wearing,” said Rachel. She was taking off her face in the mirror. “How did you…?”

“I must have seen him,” I said, scratching the back of my head. “Ten to six…? I probably passed him just before it happened.”

“Maybe you should call the police. If you saw something…”

“What? I don’t even remember. I mean, I have an idea what he was wearing – but I don’t know where I saw him or even if… it might have been somebody else entirely. It probably was. I certainly didn’t see him run over…”

What I did remember was that same kid throwing a snowball at my car three weeks earlier. Nearly smashed the windscreen. But how did I know it was the same kid? How was I so sure?



The following evening I snapped out of my trance long enough to register the portable POLICE: ACCIDENT sign standing on the pavement. I started thinking back, trying to remember something besides the hoodie and the baseball cap, and the next thing I knew I was pulling up outside the house.

“There’s been another one,” Rachel shouted down from the bedroom later. She was watching the portable telly while she worked out.

“Another what?” I shouted back. I was playing Halo on the X-box. I could have done without the interruption.

“Hit and run. Just round the corner, by the offie – ten past six. Some old bloke walking his dog. The dog was alright, but…” She came downstairs in her exercise gear, sweat shining her forehead. When I saw the look she gave me, I almost lost a life. “Just before you got home…”

“What?” I paused the game. “You think I did it? I’ve turned into some kill-crazy lunatic who’s cutting down pedestrians in my rush to get home and have my fish fingers? Really?”

“No,” she said, squeezing into the lazy boy and folding her legs over mine. “What I think is, maybe you ought to be careful – that’s all. If there’s some nutter out there…”

I didn’t hear the rest. I’d just remembered what sort of dog it was. A Red Setter. My old physics teacher, Mr. Beaumont, he’d had that dog since he retired. I hoped he treated it better than he did his pupils.



By Monday, I was starting to panic. I’d tried staying alert on Thursday and Friday, but it was impossible. You’ll know what I mean if you do the same journey every night. It was partly boredom, partly all the work shit swimming round in my head, partly the fact that I hadn’t got a wink of sleep. I kept thinking about the Audi driver who’d been forced off the bridge onto the railway tracks, and the traffic warden who’d been run down then reversed over repeatedly to finish the job. I could see their faces in my mind. I recognised them both from my past, but beyond that: nothing. Still no witnesses either – even though the traffic warden died on a crowded high street, right outside the chemists. Nobody saw or remembered a thing. That night, it happened again. Eddie Gibson walked out of The Red Lion and under a car that never even slowed. A gaggle of smokers outside the pub, yet none of them saw anything. Eddie Gibson was Rachel’s ex-husband. She was shocked when she heard, but couldn’t pretend she was sorry. The bruises might have faded, the memories never would.



So now it’s Tuesday, and while I’m topping up my wiper fluid after work, I notice the dents in my bumper. The cracks in my number plate. The scrapes of black and spots of crimson. I try rubbing them off with my sleeve. There’s a sticky patch with hair and little white chips… pebbles? They must be pebbles.

“Still here, Robert? Scared of driving home in case the Rat Run Exterminator gets you? Wooo!” Darren Armitage: works in accounts, biggest knob in the building, proud of it. “Follow me if you like – I’ll protect you!”

Normally I’d tell him exactly where to get off, but not tonight. Tonight I don’t even acknowledge him. I'm not aware of getting in my car. I'm not aware of starting the engine or screeching out of the car park. The next thing I know for sure is the roadblock. Four incidents in as many days, the police aren’t taking any more chances. They’re stopping every car. Questioning every driver. I see Darren pulled over up ahead, and I wind down my window to listen.

“Do you drive this route every night, sir? Have you noticed anything suspicious? Anyone driving erratically or even dangerously…? Think hard now, people’s lives are at stake.”

It was the questions they didn’t ask that worried me more. While one officer questioned Darren, another inspected his car. I knew exactly what they were looking for. Exactly what they’d find, soon as they got to me. Why hadn’t I turned round and gone back the other way while I still had the chance?

“Sir?” Suddenly I’m at the front of the queue and I don’t know how I got here. I’m waiting for the policeman to start with the questions when I realise he’s already finished. His colleague gives him another nod. It’s all over. “You can drive on now, sir.”

“Th… thank you, officer.” How could they be letting me go? How could they not have seen…?

I don’t stick around for answers. I floor the accelerator and I’m home before I know it. I get out of the car and dash into the house to fill a bucket in the sink. Wash the evidence away. I got lucky one time, there’s no way I’ll get away with it again. I run back out, slopping soapy water down my trouser leg, and that’s when I notice the damage. The front of the car's all smashed up. Radiator concertinaed into the engine block. Far worse than the scratches I'd seen earlier – amazing it would still drive. I try to think back, but all I remember is the roadblock. The police letting me go. After that… nothing till I arrived home. Not a thing…

“What’s wrong with you?” It’s Rachel. I hadn’t heard her. She’s parked in front of me. She stares down at where I’m sitting in the road.

“The car…” I try to say, “the car…”

“What’s wrong with it?”

I stare back. I can feel the tears running down my cheeks. Can’t she see?

“Well, I suppose it could use a wash, but it’s hardly worth getting upset about…”

And that’s when I finally twig. My highway hypnosis – it doesn’t just affect me. It affects everyone.

We hear about Darren later that night. Flattened into a brick wall in his Merc while an off-duty policeman stood watching. A professional eye witness who neither remembers what he saw nor can possibly explain how it happened.

Friday Flash - The Cleaner

I've managed another #FridayFlash short story this week... but don't start taking them for granted. I won't be able to do one every week!

The Cleaner

Me and Lisa, we both worked hard. Long hours, late nights – we were earning decent money, but never had any free time to enjoy it. The last thing we wanted was to spend our weekends scrubbing the bath or mopping the kitchen floor. So at risk of being mocked as middle class by all our right-on friends, we hired a cleaner. From a card in the newsagents window. Eight pounds an hour, three hours a week. Twenty-four quid wasn’t bad if it bought us back our Saturdays.

Joanne called round one night after work and Lisa told her exactly what we wanted. We’re not perfectionists or clean freaks or anything like that - a bit of light dusting and hoovering, a once-over in the kitchen and bathroom, that’ll be fine. As long as we’re not choking on dustballs or getting out of the bath dirtier than we got in, we’re happy.

“Oh, I think we can do a little better than that,” said Joanne. She was a slight woman in her early 30s with a bleached perm and a bright silver stud in her left nostril. Normally when I see those things they make me think I’m talking to someone with a huge zit on the side of her nose, but Joanne’s was so shiny no one could mistake it for acne.

“She seems nice enough,” said Lisa once Joanne had gone for the bus. We’d been concerned about giving someone we’d never met a key to our front door, but there seemed little to worry about. Joanne would work Friday mornings, 10 till 1, so it’d all be sorted by the time we finished work for the weekend. No problems.


Week One.

The first thing I noticed was the oven. I didn’t even get inside – I could see it shining at me as I passed the kitchen window. I thought for a moment Lisa must have bought a new one and not told me. Then I remembered the cleaner.

“It’s amazing,” said Lisa, when she got home, “it must have taken her hours.”

“It did,” I said, handing her the note.

Sorry I didn’t have time to do the whole house this week, kinda got caught up cleaning the oven – what a state! Don’t worry, now that I’ve blitzed that it’ll be a lot easier in future. Get to the rest next time – Jo.

“So we have a nice sparkly oven, but we’re still going to have to clean the rest of the house ourselves?” Lisa asked.

“Just this week. Like she says, now she’s blitzed that…”

“Was the oven really that bad?”

“I guess it must have been.”


Week Two.

This time, the first thing I noticed was the coffee ring on the kitchen table. How could Joanne miss that, I wondered, as I carried my bags through to the living room where the cat hairs on the carpet made the same patterns they had when I left for work.

“So she spent three hours on the bathroom floor?” said Lisa, reading the second note a third time.

“It must have been filthy.”

“Yeah – but we’re still going to have to do everything else ourselves.”

“Next week – she promises next week she’ll have time to do the full clean.”

“She better – or you’re having words.”

“Me? Why me?”


Week Three.

The perfume bottles on Lisa’s dressing table were arranged in order of descending height. The cut glass bottle with the elegant stopper and the crystal pendant round its neck was cleaner than when Lisa’s grandmother bought it 60 years earlier. The rest of the house was untouched.

“Right – that’s it,” said Lisa, “I’m having words.”

“I thought you wanted me to—“

“You? What would you say? You’re bloody hopeless. I’m working from home next Friday anyway so I’ll tell her straight. We don’t want her spending all her time on just one thing if it means nothing else is getting done. I’ll talk to her. It’ll be fine.”


Week Four.

I phoned home during my lunch hour. “So? How did it go?”

“She’s doing my nut in!”

“She took it the wrong way?”

“No, it was fine. I told her soon as she got here how we wanted things doing and she said no problem. She told me she was a little bit OCD, but at the end of the day she’d do it however we wanted. Then she went up to clean the bathroom… I’ve not seen her since. I knocked on the door about half an hour ago and she just said the toilet – she really needed to spend more time on the toilet. I’m dying for a pee – but she won’t let me in till she’s done!”

“We’re going to have to let her go – get someone else…”

“Too right we are! As soon as she comes out of that bloody bathroom – she’s gone!”


Week Five.

I’ve been tied to the bed now since Monday. Sometimes I can hear Lisa crying from the bathroom, but I don’t know what’s happening in there. Every few hours I see Joanne walk past the bedroom door. Sometimes she’s pushing the hoover, sometimes she’d dusting, other times she’s just looking for dirt she might have missed earlier. She’s got a huge magnifying glass, some kind of strange beeping device that measures air quality, and all the time in the world.

She brings me food twice a day. Unties my hands just enough so I can eat. Tells me not to make a mess. I know better than to get crumbs on the bedclothes. I’ve got sores on my back and my legs and I’m worried what’ll happen when they burst. Will she try and bleach the whole bed again, with me in it? She never stays to chat, there’s too much to be done.

“This house is filthy…”

Friday Flash - He's Just A Lickle Kid

After taking time out to write a new play (There's More Where That Came From), a few short stories for competition entry and a couple of new strips for PJANG, I've gone back to my latest novel, which is cheerfully titled I Wish, Wish, Wish You Were Dead, Dead, Dead. It's a love story. I'm about three quarters of the way through, but it's a long, soul-destroying process full of dread, self-doubt and disillusionment ("it's all SHIT!"), and apart from my weekly Thoughtballoons script I've not got anything else to keep the evil thoughts at bay.

So I thought I'd try my hand at some Flash Fiction. My old mate Dan Powell is always banging on about #fridayflash, a meme wherein writers post a short story of 1000 words or less on a Friday then promote the hell out of it via Twitter and sundry other locales on what Vicus calls the electric interweb. So I set myself a challenge - and challenge it is, because word limits are always a problem - to start writing my own #fridayflash stories, the first of which can be read below. I'm worried that in doing so I might have channelled my inner fascist, middle-class, Daily Mail reading, scumbag Hyde-self... but I prefer to think there's more going on in this story than just reactionary zeal. See what you think...






He's Just A Lickle Kid

In the summer of 1949, a farmer by the name of Hedgemoor caught seven year old Tommy Marshall running through his fields, stamping and trampling his crop to the ground. Hedgemoor grabbed Tommy by the wrist, lifted him up so his feet were swinging over the broken corn, then whipped him to within an inch of his life with a riding crop he wore clipped to his belt.

When Tommy returned home for tea his mother asked him why he’d been crying. He told her the full story, because he knew never to lie to his mum, then took a second beating for his trouble with a carpet slipper. He never trampled corn again, but he carried a lingering resentment against all farmers for the rest of his days.



In the autumn of 1977, 35 year old Thomas Marshall caught a kid from his local estate, Carl Shutterman, pulling the petals off the prize roses in his garden. He chased the little bastard with a garden hoe, screaming how he’d report him to the police for vandalism and destruction of private property. Carl escaped, but not without running through a patch of nettles that left him itching painfully.

“So how did this happen then?” his mum asked when he got home, and though Carl tried his best to tell the story without getting into trouble, she soon wheedled the truth out of him. “Sounds like it serves you right, young man. You should count yourself lucky you got away with just a few nettle stings – now go to your room and think on. No TV for you tonight.”



In the winter of 2009, Carl Shutterman, now in his 42nd year, was walking home from work in the snow. He stopped to admire a snowman in a neighbour’s garden - a carrot for its nose, pebbles for a smile and cool dude sunglasses. That’s when a hard-packed iceball hit him straight in the eye. Blinking, holding a palm to his swollen face, Carl spotted the culprit, Danny Harris, a kid he recognised from three doors down, laughing on the corner. “You little fucker,” Carl screamed, “when I get my hands on you, I’ll rip your fucking head off and shit down your neck!” Danny ran away, ha-has echoing between the frozen terraces.

That night, Carl opened his front door to a furious Michael and Fiona Harris. They told him in no uncertain terms that if he ever threatened their son again, or came anywhere near the boy, they’d report Carl to the police, the social services, and the Child Offenders’ Registry. When Carl explained that he wasn’t the sort of man to ever hurt a child, but that he felt perfectly within his rights to at least give Danny a blasting, considering the black eye he was now sporting, Fiona Harris told Carl to grow up. “He’s just a lickle kid – didn’t you ever do nothing wrong when you were a lickle kid?”



In the spring of 2050, Danny Harris, 49 and not long out of prison for GBH and assaulting a policewoman with a Becks bottle, was attacked on his way home from an appointment with his parole officer. Eight year old Ewan Turner tripped him up then set about beating him repeatedly on the back of his head with a golf club he’d stolen from his great uncle Eddie. When Danny finally managed to wrestle the weapon away from the boy, a passing pensioner who’d only seen the tail end of the altercation pulled over to the side of the road and shot Danny with a 5000 volt taser. “You all right, lad?” 83 year old Carl Shutterman asked the boy. “Did he hurt you?”

“Fuck you, grampa,” said Ewan Turner, knocking the taser out of Carl’s liver-spotted hand and making off with it down the road. When he finally arrived home after midnight, Ewan’s parents didn’t ask where he’d been. They were too busy playing Hostile-WOW-3D and acting out cyber-rape fantasies with a 16 year-old in Brazil. Not yet ready for bed, Ewan went into the kitchen and started testing his new toy out on the dog.