Contributor: LA Sykes
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I’d slashed my leg with my blade and patched it up nicely in the staff toilets. I went back to my station in A and E and it was two o’clock in the morning on a Saturday night and I sat wondering about a lot of abstract concepts us humans wrestle with. Love, hate, economic enslavement. Life, death, the finite period in between.
A man comes in my triage cubicle with half his fingers missing. I say, ‘What the fuck happened to you, sunshine?’
He laughs and whistles and pulls a miniature Bells whiskey from his shirt pocket and he shrugs and says, ‘Well if you really want to know, I’ll tell you. I hired a whore. Got to fucking, sixty nine et al and I really fancied the jackhammer, you know, where she’s got her legs over your shoulders and her head’s on the floor and it’s the prime position to slip in the arsehole. I should have used lubricant, or even spit or maybe even warned her. Fuck me man, I should have used lubricant’.
‘What happened? She shoot you? Bite your fingers off?’
‘No. She bucked and twisted. I heard a weird as fuck pop, a crick – amplified. Horrible. She was dead. The Old Lady comes home early from work as I’m stuffing the corpse in the broom cupboard – last place she’d look for anything is the place we store cleaning products, right? I try play it cool but she seems freaked. Suspicious. I decide to tell her I’ll do some gardening, to get out the way and give me time to think, but she goes nutso when I go to the shed for the lawn mower. I wonder why, until I get there there’s a dead man staring at me – wearing nothing but a yellow thong. A yellow fucking thong? Christ. We lock eyes for a second. She runs and I follow her with the knife. Anyway little do I know the hooker’s agency send the cops round cos she ain’t checked in. They shoot a taser – it misses and wraps round my fingers and rips them off at the joint. She flies past on a crosser, sees they’ve hurt me and lets me climb on board and we escape. All the way through the fields on that little fucking crosser we promise to renew our vows. Man, surrounded by the beautiful flowers and nothing but the rushing wind, now that was as real romance as there is, I’m telling you. And that’s loyalty. She hates police more than me and to see they’d hurt me stoked that poker into the embers, man, rekindling the fires of love. And here we are. We forgave each other and the agreed the future is about faith, trust and loyalty. Seems we only need a little reminder like this to set us back on our path of matrimony’.
It had to be the truth, there was no other explanation for it. I’d heard some wild arsed stories as to how weird phallic objects end up in the most inconvenient places in my time, but this, well this took the heavyweight title. ‘Well I appreciate the truth, yet I can’t help thinking you could have come up with a more plausible, and less incriminating, explanation. I’ve a duty to report this kind of stuff to the Law’.
‘Oh come off it with that shit. It was a domestic dispute that got out of hand. Anyway, it turned out well in the end for everyone’. He let out a laugh and took out a cigarette from his packet with his stained teeth. His missing digits automatically tried to grip the smoke and he raised his hand to his mouth, smearing his chin in blood as the smoke dropped to the floor.
‘Apart from the dead bodies in the house. Give me one good reason I shouldn’t report you for murder?’
‘Because she’d be done for aiding and abetting – and of course she killed the yellow thong guy, not to mention she’s no license to ride a motorcycle, especially one with no insurance. You can get in deep shit with penalty points for antics like that. She’s your mother for fucks sake, what about loyalty’.
He made a fair point. I pushed my index finger in wound on my thigh and took a long look at the fucker. In the artificial lighting he didn’t look as bad as some of the others I’d met over the years. ‘Well, keep the story to yourself when you go through to the surgical people, they won’t think twice of getting you arrested’.
He laughed again and said, ‘I ain’t here for treatment kid. Your mother told me to tell you goodbye and good luck for the future. She said to get your haircut so people stop saying you’re gay. And not to worry about us. We’re going to live off the land, travel this great country of ours. Well, wish us luck. I’d shake your hand, but with my fingers missing it’d feel insincere.’
I nodded. ‘Why did she kill the guy in the yellow thong?’
He shrugged and said, ‘The Jackhammer move, maybe?’
I wish I’d never asked. He got up to leave, turned and asked, ‘Where do you get yellow thongs? For men I mean, I ain’t pushing it to cross dressing’.
I shook my head and gave him a heavy shrug. It took a lot of effort even for such miniscule gestures given the numbness sweeping through my veins. I got up and watched the fat bastard stride out into the darkness and looked at the chattering faces milling around, preoccupied and tension filled.
Abstract concepts that us humans create. Strange fucking species. My therapist was saying only the other day that the self inflicted violence was a way of reconnecting from being depersonalised – from perceived isolation. It hit me that sometimes a disconnection ain’t always too bad a thing and I promised myself from now on to enjoy it more often.
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LA Sykes grew up in small town Greater Manchester, England. He studied psychology and criminology at University of Central Lancashire before working in psychiatry. His flash fiction is up at and due to appear in the likes of Shotgun Honey, Powder burn Flash and Blink Ink amongst others. He can be contacted at sykesfiction@live.co.uk
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I’d slashed my leg with my blade and patched it up nicely in the staff toilets. I went back to my station in A and E and it was two o’clock in the morning on a Saturday night and I sat wondering about a lot of abstract concepts us humans wrestle with. Love, hate, economic enslavement. Life, death, the finite period in between.
A man comes in my triage cubicle with half his fingers missing. I say, ‘What the fuck happened to you, sunshine?’
He laughs and whistles and pulls a miniature Bells whiskey from his shirt pocket and he shrugs and says, ‘Well if you really want to know, I’ll tell you. I hired a whore. Got to fucking, sixty nine et al and I really fancied the jackhammer, you know, where she’s got her legs over your shoulders and her head’s on the floor and it’s the prime position to slip in the arsehole. I should have used lubricant, or even spit or maybe even warned her. Fuck me man, I should have used lubricant’.
‘What happened? She shoot you? Bite your fingers off?’
‘No. She bucked and twisted. I heard a weird as fuck pop, a crick – amplified. Horrible. She was dead. The Old Lady comes home early from work as I’m stuffing the corpse in the broom cupboard – last place she’d look for anything is the place we store cleaning products, right? I try play it cool but she seems freaked. Suspicious. I decide to tell her I’ll do some gardening, to get out the way and give me time to think, but she goes nutso when I go to the shed for the lawn mower. I wonder why, until I get there there’s a dead man staring at me – wearing nothing but a yellow thong. A yellow fucking thong? Christ. We lock eyes for a second. She runs and I follow her with the knife. Anyway little do I know the hooker’s agency send the cops round cos she ain’t checked in. They shoot a taser – it misses and wraps round my fingers and rips them off at the joint. She flies past on a crosser, sees they’ve hurt me and lets me climb on board and we escape. All the way through the fields on that little fucking crosser we promise to renew our vows. Man, surrounded by the beautiful flowers and nothing but the rushing wind, now that was as real romance as there is, I’m telling you. And that’s loyalty. She hates police more than me and to see they’d hurt me stoked that poker into the embers, man, rekindling the fires of love. And here we are. We forgave each other and the agreed the future is about faith, trust and loyalty. Seems we only need a little reminder like this to set us back on our path of matrimony’.
It had to be the truth, there was no other explanation for it. I’d heard some wild arsed stories as to how weird phallic objects end up in the most inconvenient places in my time, but this, well this took the heavyweight title. ‘Well I appreciate the truth, yet I can’t help thinking you could have come up with a more plausible, and less incriminating, explanation. I’ve a duty to report this kind of stuff to the Law’.
‘Oh come off it with that shit. It was a domestic dispute that got out of hand. Anyway, it turned out well in the end for everyone’. He let out a laugh and took out a cigarette from his packet with his stained teeth. His missing digits automatically tried to grip the smoke and he raised his hand to his mouth, smearing his chin in blood as the smoke dropped to the floor.
‘Apart from the dead bodies in the house. Give me one good reason I shouldn’t report you for murder?’
‘Because she’d be done for aiding and abetting – and of course she killed the yellow thong guy, not to mention she’s no license to ride a motorcycle, especially one with no insurance. You can get in deep shit with penalty points for antics like that. She’s your mother for fucks sake, what about loyalty’.
He made a fair point. I pushed my index finger in wound on my thigh and took a long look at the fucker. In the artificial lighting he didn’t look as bad as some of the others I’d met over the years. ‘Well, keep the story to yourself when you go through to the surgical people, they won’t think twice of getting you arrested’.
He laughed again and said, ‘I ain’t here for treatment kid. Your mother told me to tell you goodbye and good luck for the future. She said to get your haircut so people stop saying you’re gay. And not to worry about us. We’re going to live off the land, travel this great country of ours. Well, wish us luck. I’d shake your hand, but with my fingers missing it’d feel insincere.’
I nodded. ‘Why did she kill the guy in the yellow thong?’
He shrugged and said, ‘The Jackhammer move, maybe?’
I wish I’d never asked. He got up to leave, turned and asked, ‘Where do you get yellow thongs? For men I mean, I ain’t pushing it to cross dressing’.
I shook my head and gave him a heavy shrug. It took a lot of effort even for such miniscule gestures given the numbness sweeping through my veins. I got up and watched the fat bastard stride out into the darkness and looked at the chattering faces milling around, preoccupied and tension filled.
Abstract concepts that us humans create. Strange fucking species. My therapist was saying only the other day that the self inflicted violence was a way of reconnecting from being depersonalised – from perceived isolation. It hit me that sometimes a disconnection ain’t always too bad a thing and I promised myself from now on to enjoy it more often.
- - -
LA Sykes grew up in small town Greater Manchester, England. He studied psychology and criminology at University of Central Lancashire before working in psychiatry. His flash fiction is up at and due to appear in the likes of Shotgun Honey, Powder burn Flash and Blink Ink amongst others. He can be contacted at sykesfiction@live.co.uk
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Author:
LA Sykes
