Contributor: Sam Bernhofer

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Dieter fucked his hand while his girlfriend Andrea was in class.
Three years ago, Dieter and Stephanie broke up.
Two weeks after that, Dieter was in a relationship with Andrea.
“It’s not official until you change your relationship status on Facebook.” Andrea told Dieter.
He used shaving cream.
He rushed.
He thought of nothing really.
Maybe it was the memory of Stephanie, five months earlier, changing in front of him so confidently only minutes after seeing him for the first time in two years that got it done.
Six months earlier while Dieter was still with Andrea, he had sent Stephanie an anagrammed poem about her and she said
“Keep telling me.”
Stephanie was the catalyst Dieter needed to leave Andrea, “For good this time.”
“When are you coming to see me…” she said.
He went.
He ruined Andrea.
He drove to her apartment one hour away.
When Dieter came, he hardly released anything out.
It stung.
That night he went over hers, Stephanie moved Dieter’s fingers to the cuts on her legs that she gave herself.
“Did I put those there?” Dieter asked, arrogantly,
and not sure
if genuinely.
Stephanie fell asleep.
Dieter stayed up all night and kept everyone’s fluids in their bodies.
“How many times do I have to tell you I need you in my life before you believe me? Need I record it to a cassette tape so you can rewind it and play it for yourself until it’s true to you?” she said to him later that summer.
“I’m pretty easy to keep around.”
Caveman.
He wiped off onto Andrea’s bedsheets – their bedsheets.
It was the end of winter.
Dieter was attempting to occupy his mind with Andrea.
Dieter is Andrea’s Stephanie.
Dieter was Andrea’s first.
Andrea and Dieter have sex once every week for 25 minutes including foreplay.
The very first time Dieter and Andrea hung out, it was early March and she said, “I can’t remember the last time I shaved my legs!”
Andrea always talked in friendly exclamation points.
Making out with morning breath for 1 minute.
“Let me shave them for you.”
Andrea gave an innocent head nod which was her entire being, and went to the bathroom to get shaving equipment.
“I’m out of shaving cream. Use this lotion!” she said.
“I forgot you could use that.”
Fingers shoved in and out of her dry vagina for 1 minute.
“Go ahead” she said in a very un-Stephanie way.
“I hope I don’t make you bleed” Dieter said.
Rubbing her legs, he felt that he should have been more aroused.
He started to stroke delicately against the grain.
Long stalks of hair got caught in the blade.
Painful dick tugging for 15 seconds.
A few more strokes, the razor broke.
“I have another, hold on.”
Insertion.
Missionary for about 10 minutes.
All on the floor of her bedroom with a towel under them.
He wiped lotion on his hand and went to work with his new razor.
Hair was flying everywhere.
Both of their minds started to wander.
Dieter stabbed her with the razor and felt it all start to come out.
Everyone’s losing interest.
“It’s ok, keep going.”
Dieter’s razor went completely through her flesh.
Legs over shoulders for 3 minutes.
Andrea’s blood was flowing all over the floor.
Dieter was amazed.
Andrea grinned and said, “It’s ok, this usually happens.”
“I know, sorry.”
She grabbed the exploded razor and started stabbing her legs all over to make Dieter feel better.
Dieter laughed whole-heartedly.
“Am I doing a good job?” He asked Andrea.
Missionary for around 9 minutes.
“You’re doing a good job, I’m just better at doing this myself.”
“I figured as much.” He said.
“Don’t feel bad, It’s not like I could shave your beard the way you’d like!” Andrea said.
“Yeah, that’s definitely true. I don’t like shaving anyway, though.”
“Good, I like your scruff!” she said, and started mopping up her blood.
Dieter ripped his beard off.
Failing at emotional favors.
Happier than can be.
Everyone finishes each other off, eventually.


- - -
I'm Sam Bernhofer, 23, counselor of the developmentally disabled, obsessive hair-puller, midwesterner.

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Author: Sam Bernhofer

Contributor: Paul Tristram

- -
Pretty paper parcels
All wrapped up tight.
Containing powder wings
To set my mind in flight.
Releasing all the stress
I’m not invisible tonight.
Take a lick, take a dip
There’s plenty, it’s alright.

Sleep is for the straight
Tonight I’m on a different ride.
Sorted by an hippy
In the pub outside.
Rushes come like waves
Sensational mental tides.
Speech racing like a roller coaster
Consciousness ninety miles wide.

I’m surfin’ mirrors
Once again, here I go.
I’m surfin’ mirrors
Smiling, shovelling snow.
I’m surfin’ mirrors
Got that white line fever.
I’m surfin’ mirrors
With a razorblade thin cleaver.

Rolling up banknotes
White luminous dust.
Line ‘em up, line ‘em up
Fuel this junkie lust.


- - -
Paul Tristram is a Welsh writer who has poems, short stories and sketches published in many publications around the world, he yearns to tattoo porcelain bridesmaids instead of digging empty graves for innocence at midnight, this too may pass, yet.

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Author: Paul Tristram

Contributor: Bint Arab

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He took her to the basement and stood aside at the entrance, wringing his hands.

She walked into a cavernous space surrounded by open-faced brick walls but with no interior dividers. Although the air was dry, the place smelled like a barbecue grill and unwashed laundry; the combination of the two killed her appetite. She walked up to the bed-sized table in the center which caught her eye first, but the X-shaped wooden cross he’d erected just beyond it grabbed her attention. Wrist and ankle bindings dotted each arm of the cross. Candles about 3 feet long leaned in a corner next to a brazier filled with grey coals and a set of tongs. The adjoining wall to her right displayed every torture instrument imaginable: whips, meat hooks, paddles, and…a peacock feather? Restraints of all kinds hung on the left wall, and she eyed the studded-leather bridles and eyeless masks with distaste. She turned to the wall behind her, where the old man still hovered by the door. Shelves on either side of him presented neon-colored vibrators and dildos, one as large around as her biceps. She grimaced.

Sicko, she thought. This guy is some freak. . .

She turned away from him and rapped on the table, but the hard wood absorbed the thuds. She had no doubt the whole basement was soundproof. A rope coiled on the table’s surface like a bored asp, a ball-gag rested next to it, and an ankle bar stretched across the foot of the wooden surface. A heavy chain linked the ankle bar with the ceiling, and she looked up. Give me a break. The full-length mirror was beyond tacky! But the pulley that dripped chains could be useful…

"Well? Do you like it?"

She turned to him. "Standard rates apply."

His beady eyes darted as he protested, "You’ll find no better! This is the best S&M dungeon in–"

"Look–" she made a show of checking her wrist. "–I have to be at my next appointment in an hour. Take it or leave it."

He licked his lips, considered her a moment. "Okay. But I get to watch."

She shrugged. "Whatever. My crew will be here first thing in the morning to get rid of all this crap and make the set ready…"


- - -
Born in Baghdad, raised in Brooklyn, living in Texas, Bint Arab is perpetually out of place and comfortable with that. She is an emerging writer, and she administers the writers' forum at www.bibliophilia.org/forum/index.php

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Author: Bint Arab

Contributor: Paul Tristram

- -
It used to be thought very immoral,
years ago it was considered a sin.
But when the conversation begins
people now merely answer with a grin.
Masturbation is such a nice thing
perfect for the release of stress.
Remembering someone you saw earlier
and mentally taking off her dress.
There’s now no need for a partner
to shoot yourself onto the floor.
Imagination is a changing place
where everyone becomes a whore.
Knuckle-shuffles and bean-flicking
are a craze throughout the nation.
Just peace, quiet and a tissue box
for some sensual, solitary gyration.
Don’t worry you will not go blind
for it is healthy and not a crime.
I am just so glad that I am a poet
it takes but one hand to write a line.


- - -
Paul Tristram is a Welsh writer who has poems, short stories and sketches published in many
publications around the world, he yearns to tattoo porcelain bridesmaids instead of digging
empty graves for innocence at midnight, this too may pass, yet.

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Author: Paul Tristram

Contributor: Em Ramser

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He pats her head
like she’s a well trained
golden Labrador.

She licks her lips, pretending
her saliva is turpentine
and bleach.

She picks the crumbs of dirt
from her knees. It’s her
OCD, her need
to clean.
She got it from the stepmother
who forced her on her knees
to clean doorways
and baseboards.

He slides his thumb across her bottom lip.
She forces a smile and a swallow,
all the time
tracing lines
of graffiti on the wall
behind him.

She used to paint
like that
with spray cans,
once even brushes.

He buckles his belt,
tucks his button up into his jeans
and asks her if she wants to go to Hardee’s
for lunch. He says

he’ll buy her a turkey burger.


- - -
Emily Ramser lives in Winston-Salem, NC, though you're more likely to find her online at chickadeesweetie.wordpress.com.

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Author: Em Ramser

Contributor: Paul Tristram

- -
It was our third day together as boyfriend and girlfriend and we had decided to try and do it sober.
We were very quiet that morning, quite shy and awkward with each other yet very smiley all the same.
She cooked us up a lovely breakfast of scrambled eggs with mushrooms, bell peppers, fried potatoes and bacon, with some real coffee, man I absolutely love her cooking, she sure knows her pots and pans.
After we had broke our fast, we had decided that since it was a beautiful day and I needed to
get some more Kio food that we would take a walk up to the garden centre a couple of miles
north of the town and enjoy the weather and our sober gentle day together.
Before setting off on our trek we went to the corner Spar shop to replenish my cigarette paper supply and whilst in the afore mentioned shop we happened by the bargain section, where I spied a quantity of cold just out of date bottles of banana milkshake for 50 pence each.
“Just the ticket on a day like this!” I declared aloud, my new girlfriend agreed whole heartedly and I picked up two from the herd and we made our way to the checkouts.
Outside we lit up a smoke each, me a roll-up made with ‘Golden Virginia tobacco and green Rizla papers’ whilst she ignited a ‘Marlboro Lights 100’ and opening up our banana milkshakes we set out on our walk.
After we had finished our drinks and cigarettes we held hands and talked of nice things, in between her continually squealing in excitement and running a few feet away to take a photo of something new that had caught her eye. She was really into taking photos back then and recording practically everything that we saw to keep a record of our courting days.
She even took a photo of a monkey on a giant banana statue, which was actually quite creepy but after cringing slightly I did eventually smile at the picture and then tried to banish it from memory forever.
When we arrived at the garden centre I went to get the Kio food and she went to buy some ribs, she‘s American and can never to this day get over the fact that a whole side of ribs are only one pound and twenty five pence, it’s just one of those little miracles that she shares all to herself, while I just shake my head and smile at her, bewildered.
We had a pleasant walk home until we got three streets away, I could feel something suddenly moving in my stomach, I started walking faster and she quickened her pace with me. “Aw” I thought to myself, she’s such a sweetheart!
Then it happened in my stomach again, there was something very wrong going on downstairs, so to speak, I thought that I might need to fart but I couldn’t take that chance being three streets away from home, sober and holding on to my new girlfriends hand.
The smiles had vanished, she looked concerned, I was sweating like a pig, we made it to the house, I ripped my backpack and coat off and turned to head upstairs clenching my arse cheeks together like a vice when she suddenly disappeared through the door in front of me with a,
“I’m just going to the bathroom quickly, baby!”
“O-o-o-k-a-a-y!” I stammered after her, wincing.
“She’s only going for a quick pee” I thought to myself.
I paced up and down the living room then out into the kitchen and back, it was now painful, I was cramping and it felt like my guts were going through a mangle, it felt like she had been upstairs for ten minutes.
“I am going to explode” I thought to myself, the pain now being unbearable, I was actually doubled up in pain, I was about to get a carpet burn on my forehead and I was standing up, well kind of.
I felt like screaming, then I felt like crying, then I just wanted to vanish!
One movement, just a fraction of a shift and I would be in deep shit, I clenched tighter.
“Come on boy, you’re a warrior, focus, fight it, God Damned you, fight it!” I screamed inside my head.
I walked sideways to the bottom of the stairs and called up,
“H-h-honey, will you be much longer, I really need to go?” in a voice that I swear sounded like a whinging fox.
“Ok baby, I won’t be long, put the kettle on will you?” came her reply.
“Put the kettle on? she had better not be brushing her hair or cleaning her teeth or I swear I’ll kill her!” I thought to myself.
I was now past the point of agony and something had to give, I was literally about to shit myself and my clean clothes were upstairs, if this happened she would exit the bathroom and see me in the bedroom covered in shit trying to change, the shower was in the bathroom hidden from me, I would not be able to clean myself.
I thought about going in the cupboard under the stairs and shitting in a carrier-bag, but the carrier-bags have holes in them and what about the smell?
I thought about going out the back and shitting in the garden and blaming the dog but what if she looked out of the window and saw me bent over like an animal?
“But I’ve got to do something!” screamed the voice inside my cranium.
I was about to strip from the waist down and to leap up onto the kitchen worktop and squat over the sink when finally I heard the bathroom door opening and her walking into the bedroom.
I was clutching at my sides and felt like I was about to give birth to the Devil’s twins through my poor arsehole when I took off at a gallop, taking four stairs at a time, I rushed past my girlfriend standing in the bedroom doorway so fast that she actually spun around.
I had my strides and shorts down to my knees with one hand and was slamming the bathroom door with the other when the muscles in my arsehole started giving to the impossible strain, I
long jumped through the air, half the length of the bathroom, spinning in mid air and landing on the toilet just as the molten waterfall exploded.
“Arghhhhh, Oh My God, Save Me, Please!” I begged and yelled in a voice filled with pain and terror yet strangely orgasmic sounding?
Some spit run down my chin, as it came out spurt after spurt, my legs were shaking like I was about to be hanged, I thought I was going to have a fit.
“I’ll be here for weeks, will this ever end?” I thought wretchedly.
I sat there for a good ten minutes after the last trickle had left me, just shaking and sighing and slightly suicidal.
When I had cleaned myself up, I gingerly walked out of the bathroom and there was my girlfriend on the landing, she was looking white too.
“I think it was a mistake buying those banana milkshakes from the Spar shop?” she said.
I just wanted to die.
“Let’s go to bed and lay down?” I suggested.
So we did, on top of the bed covers, she cuddled into me from behind and we rocked back and fore like two mental hospital patients, gently, gently, gently.
As I fell asleep the last thing I saw in my mind’s eye was that monkey on that giant banana.


- - -
Paul Tristram is a Welsh writer who has poems, short stories and sketches published in many publications around the world, he yearns to tattoo porcelain bridesmaids instead of digging empty graves for innocence at midnight, this too may pass, yet.

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Author: Paul Tristram

Contributor: Lance Manion

- -
His views on the fairer sex made him a bit of a dinosaur. Well, that and the armored plates that ran down his back. Luckily for him they weren't visible.

He was strictly in the 'survival of the fittest camp', but this typically didn't present many problems as the girls he typically ran into were firmly ensconced in the 'take anyone with a heartbeat and a decent job' camp.

That was about to change due to his job.

He was the ugly physicist who became the sexual swan.

He was the guy who, while playing around with uncurling the dimensions curled up inside each other, found the hole that wasn't there.

Or wasn't there until he proved it was.

Although the paper he presented was a little short on sizzle it didn't take long for the implications of the discovery to take root.

Females had another tiny hole between their vagina and anus. Not visible with our eyes or even with any technology that currently exists it was there nonetheless. There in the fifth dimension.

Also in the fifth dimension was a tiny little penis tucked under the ball sack of males. And little armored spikes that run down the male spine.

It was all there in the math.

Give him a cocktail napkin, a pencil and twenty minutes and he could show you.

Assuming, of course, you had a strong background in Bosonic string theory. For those who didn't, they relied on the celebrity scientists to explain it all to them. The public couldn't get enough.

Suddenly the ugly physicist was in play.

He went from speaking engagements to talk shows to putting his fifth dimensional penis to work on some of the hottest females on the planet. It became quite fashionable to have your fifth dimension cherry broken by the man who discovered it in the first place.

If you're trying to imagine what went on during one of these sessions let me congratulate you on your enthusiasm for the topic. Not an easy thing to dive into. Before you reach the conclusion that any pleasure derived from this rather odd intercourse was completely in the mind of the deluded partners let me remind you of a certain quantum principle wherein the act of watching matter can affect the observed reality. Or, in this case, recognizing the matter is there in the first place.

i.e. believe that you have a tainthole/taint-gina/tunt and it shall be so.

In fact, reports began to circulate that sex with these new extra-dimensional organs was even better than with the standard 3-D equipment.

Lost in all of the enthusiasm for the quantum fucking fad was the question of why we had these extra holes and penes. Nobody much cared, there had yet to be a case of a girl getting knocked up and delivering a five dimensional baby, no quantum STDs and clean-up was a breeze.

For a few years the physicist was a rock star. The taint was a rock star. Interest in math and science was off the charts.

So much so that eventually they found other holes and other appendages in higher dimensions, including a male hole and a corresponding female member in the nastiest of all dimensions ... the thirteenth.

By the time the big brains started peaking into dimensions in the twenties the human body was little more than Velcro. It was hard to find a square inch of the body that wouldn't hook onto or into another person if they both believed enough. Old people smiled to themselves and said "That explains a lot."

Interest in typical pornography disappeared. It was looked at the same way we think of hula hoops and Pet Rocks now. In fact, three dimensional sex itself was viewed as passé. Boring. Sticky. Smelly.

A chore endured only for procreation.

Birthrates plummeted.

In the third dimension anyway.

Before you go and feel sorry for all the newly created baby beings residing in higher dimensions just know most of them stayed curled up in both parents and every other person in the universe.

Until someone with a napkin and a pencil decided to take a look anyway ...


- - -
I am the author of four humorous short story collections; Merciful Flush, Results May Vary, The Ball Washer and my latest one Homo sayswhaticus. I blog daily on my website www.lancemanion.com and frequently contribute to many online fiction sites.

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Author: Lance Manion

Contributor: Marc Nocerino

- -
“Goddamnit Greta,I growled at the dark beauty sitting in front of me, "stick that fucking knife in my gut or so help me God I will chew your eyes out." For a second I might have actually meant it.

“You’re sooooo melodramatic, Rick. If it weren’t so cute, it would almost be pathetic.” Rather than gut me, Greta used the supremely sharp knife to finish chopping the cocaine into two tidy little lines; perfectly parallel, perfectly spaced, and of identical length. She tossed the knife in my general direction; playfully, not at me. It landed softly on one of the dozens of faux-Moroccan throw pillows that littered the floor.

“You’re such an evil bitch.” My hands were clammy. She drove me crazy and she knew it. She had been leading me on for months now. I wanted nothing more than to snort that rail and fuck her until we both exploded. I was so amped it felt like I’d already done a line. I could almost taste the postnasal drip.

“Charming.” She rolled her eyes, glass-blue all covered in thick black lashes and Egyptian mascara; then batted them and licked the corner of her lip. “But you know you love me.”

Greta smiled with just a quarter of her mouth and her eyes glittered like blood diamonds. I wondered, not for the first time, if her insides were as beautiful as her outsides. I doubted it.

“Now stop being a retard and do your line like a good little boy.” She held out a small mirror for me and I leaned in close. I thought of how pale her hand looked against the tattered black fishnet sleeves she wore, of how her skin was the same dull powdery white of the line she had just chopped for me. Her veins showed through the back of her hand, dark spider legs crawling toward me. I closed my eyes, tingling with the anticipation, and thought of Greta being the cocaine as I sucked it up into my nose, not even bothering with a straw.


Greta. Such an ugly name for such a pretty girl.


The drug slammed into my brain. I could feel my frontal lobe dance with sheer euphoria, happy little neurons firing dopamine back and forth like a hundred thousand cocks shooting their loads. I heard Greta inhale her own line and a small moan shuddered through her like orgasm.

This was not cocaine.

I opened my eyes and everything in the small room seemed to glow under its own luminescence. The dark tapestries draped along the walls shone an incandescent velvet black, the dozens of little candle flames were kaleidoscopes spinning and gyrating in the cool dry air. But Greta… she was a marble statue, an alabaster figurine. Her white skin shone like the moon. She was a goddess. I tossed my head back and howled. I was feral.

I tried to ask what is this stuff, but it came out all garbled; more of a long ululation than a sentence. Words weren’t allowed in this headspace.

I could see she was just as enraptured as I was. Her semi-permanent smirk became an actual smile, the first one I’d ever seen on her. Her mouth kept spreading wider and wider. It looked like it was going to split her face in half.

That’s when her eyes rolled back into her head like she was sneaking a peek at her brain. And she mustn’t have liked what she saw there, because blood started pouring out of her nose. It took a minute for me to realize that I should be concerned about it. All I could think about was how pretty those rivulets of dark looked against her paleness, how they accentuated the contour of her lips. She fell backwards, her fall gently broken by one of the gaudy cushions.

When my brain finally did connect the dots, Greta had toppled over and was flopping around like a marionette in the hands of an epileptic puppeteer. Somehow, one of her breasts had shunted its way out of her top in the commotion. Blood started coming out of her mouth, and I thought she might bite her tongue off.

I tried really hard to think of some way to help her but I just couldn’t stop staring at that tit wiggling around.

That is, until I spotted the knife she’d thrown to me earlier. Watching her distorted reflection writhe in the blade, I couldn’t help but wonder again if her insides were as pretty as the rest of her.


It was messy, but it didn't take long to find out. They weren’t. They never are.


- - -
Writer, musician, poet, armchair philosopher, libertine, mystic, and most recently; father. His work has previously been published at Penumbra Magazine, The Original Van Gogh’s Ear, and The Horror 'Zine.

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Author: Marc Nocerino

Contributor: Paul Tristram

- -
We fought out in the car park
we wrestled down onto the ground.
I grabbed him by the throat
with my head I began to pound.
His nose rose up like a balloon
blood and snot circled his head.
He kneed me in the bollocks
my face was green, his was red.
We struggled on for ten minutes
until both our strength was gone.
We were both barred from the pub
it didn’t matter who was wrong.
I left him wiping at his face
came home to drink more beer.
I then awoke this sore morning
covered in my septic souvenirs.


- - -
Paul Tristram is a Welsh writer who has poems, short stories and sketches published in many publications around the world, he yearns to tattoo porcelain bridesmaids instead of digging empty graves for innocence at midnight, this too may pass, yet.

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Author: Paul Tristram

Contributor: LA Sykes

- -
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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Author: LA Sykes