Skinhead

His flesh was so thin it was almost non-flesh. It hung, or rather, was suspended, loosely from his skull like a deflated balloon taped to a mail box, rendered virulent in the sorry wake of someone or others festivities.

The City Circle

They were busy in the mornings, those armies of gray.

They departed concrete houses. They nodded at their neighbours. They got into automobiles. They drove places. They got out of automobiles. They went to train stations and bus stops (various). They bought tickets. They listened to sensible songs on their ipods. They were important people, people in grey. Sometimes they wore a tie with a pattern. That was usually a joke. They were jokesters. They were pranksters. They sometimes sent a humorous email. They had a special email folder titled 'humorous', for those. They arrived at offices and had desks with little plastic containers in the top right hand corners. They called out to their secretaries and asked for the business cards to be reordered. They put the cards in the containers. They held their pens importantly at big desks with leather chairs. They nodded sincerely. Sometimes they nodded insincerely.

Then, in the latest afternoons, their brains fell apart, like bits of cake left out in the rain. They went to the train station, or bus stop, and sat next to someone with a crayola face and a bag of tricks. They thought about this person. This person probably rides a scooter on weekends and designs web pages, they thought. This person probably wears green hi-top converse shoes on Casual Fridays. This person probably is very lazy every morning.

If I was there, I would have felt the burning sensation on my shoulders.

Periodically, I search for short clips of gasoline explosions. I like to watch (with volume muted) the results of the leak; the thick red smoke as it propels forcefully upward and outward, and the flames which lay beneath the surface, waiting to puncture it and seep quickly out. The sky is slowly eaten up.

I don't think that this habit stems from some sort of carnal lust for destruction. I think it's more about the finality of things.

Every Thursday

There was something dark and cruel and cold and wholly terrifying about the way Peter loved Andrew. When they had coffee together, in a small, clinical chain cafe, he could feel the twisted emotion rise above the cracked porcelain and place itself, slowly at first, but with increasing strength and dexterity, around his neck. The threat of asphyxiation hung thickly over the ground black beans. Andrew felt dead already, and it was only just past midday.

Terminations

At the beginning of Autumn
Timothy Proctor hated everything about his wife. From the offensive upper curvilinear of her tired mint spectacles, to the fact that slowly and surely, the cancer was spreading, like a voracious beast, through her brittle bones.

At Autumn's close
He wept bitterly when she died amongst the stiff grey sheets of a public hospital bed.

On the same afternoon, his blurry eyes watched re-runs of Burgo's Catchphrase on a sleepy small screen television, whilst he tried to recall the acrimonious leer in the dead woman's voice every time she guessed a phrase before the shiny-faced contestant.

What happens when the weather wrecks your plans

Owen T liked to see that things were always in their proper place. There was most certainly a proper place for everything, even things that did not initially appear tangible enough to manifest themselves in a concrete physical location. Whilst he walked through Bristol’s streets (in the St Pauls vicinity) - on a date most likely just before the 18th of January, but just after the 16th - he noted that the communal bins introduced for household waste were not quite evenly spaced and made a mental note of it. Later that day, he placed all the people that passed him in a coherent and logical order, according to the hue of their woolen jumpers. The problem occurred, of course, when it began to rain, and everyone’s laniferous garments, which were tied up to their necks, wept deeply down their bodies, until the pavement was a multicoloured frenzy. Everyone was left standing gray. Then Owen T sighed and began the whole business again. This time he ordered people by height, which he thought was much more sensible.