Goodbye To Wah-Wah by Richard Godwin

GOODBYE TO WAH-WAH - RICHARD GODWIN

‘We’ll have to remove his teeth,’ Al said.

Ed nodded.

‘You mean for DNA. Yeah, ever since Don Flacker set up Fuzzbox Baby some weird shit’s been happening round here.’

‘You’re fucking telling me some weird shit’s been happening,’ Al said, smacking his bottle of Becks down on the counter so it fizzed and frothed up over the side.

‘A Slice Of Ice used to be the magazine, we covered everything, heavy metal, rock.’

‘I know. Hey, do you think that’s what’s going on here?’ Al said, pointing at the frothing bottle, leaning and extending his tongue to lick a few drops of beer from the glass knob.

‘What?’

‘He’s fucking the editor.’

‘Nah.’

‘So how do you explain it that they fill their magazine with his articles and maybe one by another journalist?’ Al said.

‘I don’t know, but something funny’s going on, they don’t seem to like what anyone else writes, that ain’t the way to run a magazine. I mean look at this fucking front cover, Do You Feel Like We Do. What kind of a shit headline is that? They’re obsessed by Peter Frampton.’

‘Champagne for breakfast and a Sherman in my hand, Peached Up, Peached Ale, never fails,’ Al said.

Ed stared again at the offensive cover.

‘And a picture of him on it in his shades,’ he said.

‘He’s hiding something, he’s never seen without them.’

That was when it occurred to them. Al looked at Ed and in Ed’s eyes he saw the same thought take shape. They were talking about Micky Wah-Wah, and a more apt Christian name had never existed. His voice sounded like a Wah-Wah pedal. Al and Ed were confounded by the fact that Fuzzbox Baby only ever seemed to publish Micky Wah-Wah.

‘Besides,’ Al said, ‘how come he can interview all these rock stars in a week?’

‘He’s a clone,’ Ed said.

‘Exactly.’

‘Removing his teeth won’t prove anything, he may have doppelgangers.’

Al scraped his chin and sipped his beer, casting a long glace into the distance.

‘Then we hire a lab and experiment on him,’ he said.

‘Yeah. I’m sick of seeing him standing there trying to look hip in his sunglasses.’

And so Al and Ed of A Slice Of Ice fame set off that afternoon and hired a lab.

*

Micky Wah-Wah was leaving a gig by the Concrete Bollocks, a neo punk band. He was covered in phlegm and removed his shades in a darkened alley when he was jumped by Al as Ed punched him in the face. And as he hit him he stopped short.

‘Shit, Al, look.’

Micky had fallen to the ground and stared up at them with steel eyes.

‘He’s an android,’ Al said.

‘So, Don Flacker has created this machine to write articles and boost his magazine.’

They bundled him into the back of their black Jeep and drove way.

In the lab, they strapped him into a chair and Ed jammed a scalpel in his ear.

‘Tell us who you are,’ he said.

‘Shit, man, are you fucking nuts?’ Micky said.

‘No, we know you’re an android, we want to know who made you’, Al said, leaning over him and peering into his steel eyes.

‘Get me out of his chair,’ Micky said, wrestling with the leather binds.

‘Your eyes are made of metal,’ Ed said.

‘They’re contact lenses,’ Micky said.

Ed prodded him with a finger.

‘Ah, look at his little face.’

‘It’s pliers time,’ Al said.

He forced his mouth open and removed a tooth. He held it up to the light and examined it.

‘This may just tell us everything we need to know,’ he said.

Micky sat there with disbelief fighting anger on his face, blood pouring from his mouth.

‘Now what is this between you and Don Flacker?’

‘I work for him.’

‘There’s more to it than that.’

‘You guys are fucking insane, I work hard, that’s all.’

Al looked at Ed and they nodded.

‘Subterfuge,’ Al said.

‘We have a cure for that,’ Ed said.

‘Is this about money?’ Micky said.

‘No, it’s about stopping an alien invasion,’ Ed said, as Al reached for the pliers and removed another tooth.

Micky started screaming and he kicked out at them but it was too late. Ed stuck the scalpel so deep into his ear that he punctured his brain.

They stood and watched Micky bleed to death.

The next morning, Don Flacker engaged in the redundant exercise of leaving a large sum of money to his illegitimate son.

Many years ago, wearing a pink Miami shirt, he’d impregnated Sasha Hogg, his co-editor and concubine, as Peter Frampton sang Do You Feel Like We Do.

GOODBYE TO WAH-WAH - RICHARD GODWIN

‘We’ll have to remove his teeth,’ Al said.

Ed nodded.

‘You mean for DNA. Yeah, ever since Don Flacker set up Fuzzbox Baby some weird shit’s been happening round here.’

‘You’re fucking telling me some weird shit’s been happening,’ Al said, smacking his bottle of Becks down on the counter so it fizzed and frothed up over the side.

‘A Slice Of Ice used to be the magazine, we covered everything, heavy metal, rock.’

‘I know. Hey, do you think that’s what’s going on here?’ Al said pointing at the frothing bottle, leaning and extending his tongue to lick a few drops of beer from the glass knob.

‘What?’

‘He’s fucking the editor.’

‘Nah.’

‘So how do you explain it that they fill their magazine with his articles and maybe one by another journalist?’ Al said.

‘I don’t know, but something funny’s going on, they don’t seem to like what anyone else writes, that ain’t the way to run a magazine. I mean look at this fucking front cover, Do You Feel Like We Do. What kind of a shit headline is that? They’re obsessed by Peter Frampton.’

Ed stared again at the offensive cover.

‘And a picture of him on it in his shades.’

‘He’s hiding something, he’s never seen without them.’

That was when it occurred to them. Al looked at Ed and in Ed’s eyes he saw the same thought take shape.

They were talking about Micky Wah-Wah, and a more apt Christian name had never existed. His voice sounded like a Wah-Wah pedal. Al and Ed were confounded by the fact that Fuzzbox Baby only ever seemed to publish Micky Wah-Wah.

‘Besides,’ Al said, ‘how come he can interview all these rock stars in a week?’

‘He’s a clone,’ Ed said.

‘Exactly.’

‘Removing his teeth won’t prove anything, he may have doppelgangers.’

Al scraped his chin and sipped his beer, casting a long glace into the distance.

‘Then we hire a lab and experiment on him,’ he said.

‘Yeah. I’m sick of seeing him standing there trying to look hip in his sunglasses.’

And so Al and Ed of A Slice Of Ice fame set off that afternoon and hired a lab.

*

Micky Wah-Wah was leaving a gig by the Concrete Bollocks, a neo punk band. He was covered in phlegm and removed his shades in a darkened alley when he was jumped by Al as Ed punched him in the face. And as he hit him he stopped short.

‘Shit, Al, look.’

Micky had fallen to the ground and stared up at them with steel eyes.

‘He’s an android,’ Al said.

‘So, Don Flacker has created this machine to write articles and boost his magazine.’

They bundled him into the back of their black Jeep and drove way.

In the lab, they strapped him into a chair and Ed jammed a scalpel in his ear.

‘Tell us who you are,’ he said.

‘Shit, man, are you fucking nuts?’ Micky said.

‘No, we know you’re an android, we want to know who made you,’ Al said, leaning over him and peering into his steel eyes.

‘Get me out of his chair,’ Micky said, wrestling with the leather binds.

‘Your eyes are made of metal,’ Ed said.

‘They’re contact lenses,’ Micky said.

Ed prodded him with a finger.

‘Ah, look at his little face.’

‘It’s pliers time,’ Al said.

He forced his mouth open and removed a tooth. He held it up to the light and examined it.

‘This may just tell us everything we need to know,’ he said.

Micky sat there with disbelief fighting anger on his face.

‘Now what is this between you and Don Flacker?’

‘I work for him.’

‘There’s more to it than that.’

‘You guys are fucking insane. I work hard, that’s all.’

Al looked at Ed and they nodded.

‘Subterfuge,’ Al said.

‘We have a cure for that,’ Ed said.

‘Is this about money?’ Micky said.

‘No, it’s about stopping an alien invasion’, Ed said, as Al reached for the pliers and removed another tooth.

Micky started screaming and he kicked out at them as Ed stuck the scalpel in his ear.

As he did, Micky’s mouth opened and a series of strange syllables came out.

‘What’s he saying?’ Ed said.

‘Sounds like New Alberta bubble me.’

‘No, it’s New Alberta double me.’

‘It must be his planet,’ Al said, ‘he’s calling for back up.’

Just then the door swung open and Micky Wah-Wah walked in. Al tipped Becks all over Micky’s head and the man in the seat began to hiss and dissolve as his double walked towards them with mischief in his sunglasses.

‘Hey, he’s allergic to Becks,’ Al said.

As Peter Frampton’s Do You Feel Like We Do blasted out, a parade of cloned Micky Wah-Wah’s stumbled through the door. Ed reached for a bottle of Becks and together he and Al doused the alien invaders and spurious usurpers of music magazines as they fought their revulsion at hearing ‘Champagne for breakfast and a Sherman in my hand, Peached Up, Peached Ale, never fails’ sung at them in a strange intonation.

The next morning, Fuzzbox Baby did not exist.

‘Not even a mention of it in Wikipedia,’ Al said.

‘Never trust a man with a name that sounds like a musical instrument,’ Ed said.

They celebrated by kicking Mickey’s Wah-Wah’s teeth around what once had been the headquarters of the alien magazine.

Unusual Weapons by Richard Godwin

UNUSUAL WEAPONS - RICHARD GODWIN

Casey Marcs met Trudi Scram at a New Year’s Eve party. After he’d got out of the can he’d sworn he’d never marry again. His first wife had taken all he had and killing her didn’t get it back. The prison psychologist, a lenient man who encouraged self-expression in the prisoners, said he had unresolved issues and suggested he continue therapy on the outside.

Casey said: ‘What kind of issues? I’m done with killing, it never did pay good.’

The psychiatrist leaned forward, knitted his fingers together and lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, looked down at the half eaten doughnut in Casey’s hand and said: ‘You certainly have food issues.’

‘What the fuck does that mean? Ain’t a man allowed to eat? It’s my lunch break. I bought it, I ain’t stolen this here doughnut.’

‘I’m not suggesting you have. But take a look at the shape.’

Casey glanced down and began laughing.

‘Why, it looks like a pussy.’

‘You create as large a hole as possible then pause before you insert your tongue inside it as you continue eating, then you leave it before it is finished, so that it looks like labia.’

Therapy wasn’t part of Casey’s parole conditions and he figured it was all bullshit anyway since the world had changed since he went inside and he did it in another State. He decided he’d enjoy his freedom with hookers and the occasional one night stand. He didn’t want to get involved. He wanted pussy not a person, people were trouble, they had baggage.

But Trudi was different. For a start she had the clearest green eyes he’d ever seen, just perfect.

‘They look like a couple of emeralds,’ he said that first night as he handed her a Martini.

‘What do?’

‘Your eyes.’

‘You’re making me blush,’ she said, giggling into her glass.

There in a smoke filled noisy room as Trudi fiddled with her Versace jeans Casey experienced that smitten feeling he knew meant trouble.  She was wriggling her hips about, pulling the jeans up and he wanted her. In fact he wanted her more than doughnuts.

‘What do you do?’ he said.

‘I work in animal rescue,’ Trudi said.

‘Must be interesting.’

‘It is,’ she said, leaning into him and whispering, ‘unless it involves bears.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘I’m so frightened of them, I had to leave my last address because I saw one outside on the lawn.’

That night Casey fucked her at his apartment. He loved the way she leant back and went ‘ooh ooh’ as a few beads of sweat broke out on her brow. He lay and watched her wander round his doughnut filled apartment naked, opening the fridge, fixing them drinks. A few weeks later they headed down to Vegas and he proposed to her. Elvis married them as a Mariachi band played Aimee Mann’s The Moth and they honeymooned there, hanging out at casinos and night clubs.

‘I always wanted to do this,’ Casey said, ‘have an Elvis wedding.’

They spent a few months together, in which they never argued, and Casey even gave up doughnuts. Trudi was on a strict diet and didn’t want any fattening foods around the apartment.

‘You don’t need to lose no weight,’ Casey said.

‘I want to tighten up my butt,’ Trudi said.

She was naked and leaning over to pick up some panties and as Casey looked admiringly at her butt his eyes wandered between her parted legs and he thought of doughnuts.

But he refrained from indulging himself with his favourite food.

Then one day Casey got the credit card bill.

He stormed into the bathroom where Trudi was lying in a bubble bath.

‘There’s two thousand bucks here,’ he said.

‘Honey, I bought some underwear,’ Trudi said.

‘Hah?’

‘You know I want to look sexy for you.’

She raised her hips so her snatch stood above the water.

That evening, as they ate an avocado salad, she said, ‘There’s a reason I bought the underwear, a woman has to feel a certain way. We ain’t so good in bed no more, Casey, but I found a solution.’

‘What are you talking about?’

She took him by the hand and walked him to the bedroom where she opened a drawer in the night table. Inside was a dildo.  She winked.

‘My little helper,’ she said.

Over the following months Trudi’s obsession with spending money began to grate on Casey. She was half way through his funds and the memory of his dead wife used to rise at dawn and hover in the morning air before he rose to shower and go to work.

He’d taken a job at the local warehouse packing boxes and would return home drunk and angry at having to support Trudi.

The buzzing of her dildo aggravated him and he felt resentful every time she used it. And he began to smell doughnuts. The aroma would follow him all day.

One night he became enraged when he found the latest credit card bill and he hit Trudi. She called the police. They arrested Casey and he lay in the cell promising himself he wouldn’t do it again. They let him go and he went home with a plan. He pondered on unusual weapons.

That weekend he called his buddy Tom, who was a trapper.

‘I need a little favour,’ Casey said.

He went out a few hours before Tom let a Grizzly bear loose on the lawn at the back of their apartment. He’d shot it full of tranquilliser and at first the bear wandered about in a daze. When he saw Trudi sunbathing he headed towards her. Trudi went inside and got Casey’s shotgun and blew the bear’s head off.

When Casey got home he saw the dead bear on the lawn and found Trudi masturbating with her dildo on their bed. She lay there and looked at him and said, ‘I feel so much better I shot it, I’m not frightened anymore.’

He stood there and watched the vein throb in her neck as she came, feeling like a spectator in his own life.

In the ensuing days Casey gave up work and proceeded to fill the apartment with doughnuts. Apple Crumb, Bavarian Kreme, Blueberry Cake, Boston Kreme, Bow Tie, Caramel Chocolate, Strawberry Frosted, Strawberry Shortcake, and many other varieties of doughnut lay strewn around like half-eaten sugared vulvas.

‘That’s disgusting,’ Trudi said one evening as Casey lay on the sofa eating.

‘What?’

‘You is shaping them to look like pussies.’

‘You got a sick mind.’

Later that night, Casey was half-way through a bottle of Jim Beam when he heard the fluttering of moths’ wings and it came to him. He had to get rid of Trudi and he knew how to do it. He’d seen the Monarch butterflies in the garden and he caught two of them. He ground them up and smeared them on Trudi’s little helper. She liked masturbating in the dark.

Casey poured her some beer that evening and watched her get drunk.

‘I want you to give up the doughnuts,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘Cause they’s fattening and what you do with them doesn’t bear description.’

‘What about you and your dildo?’

‘That’s different, I ain’t giving that up.’

She wandered off to the bedroom.

Her last self-fuck session ended with her having a massive heart attack.

UNUSUAL WEAPONS - RICHARD GODWIN

Casey Marcs met Trudi Scram at a New Year’s Eve party. After he’d got out of the can he’d sworn he’d never marry again. His first wife had taken all he had and killing her didn’t get it back. The prison psychologist, a lenient man who encouraged self-expression in the prisoners, said he had unresolved issues and suggested he continue therapy on the outside.

Casey said: ‘What kind of issues? I’m done with killing, it never did pay good.’

The psychiatrist leaned forward, knitted his fingers together and lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, looked down at the half eaten doughnut in Casey’s hand and said: ‘You certainly have food issues.’

‘What the fuck does that mean? Ain’t a man allowed to eat? It’s my lunch break. I bought it, I ain’t stolen this here doughnut.’

‘I’m not suggesting you have. But take a look at the shape.’

Casey glanced down and began laughing.

‘Why, it looks like a pussy.’

‘You create as large a hole as possible then pause before you insert your tongue inside it as you continue eating, then you leave it before it is finished, so that it looks like labia.’

Therapy wasn’t part of Casey’s parole conditions and he figured it was all bullshit anyway since the world had changed since he went inside and he did it in another State. He decided he’d enjoy his freedom with hookers and the occasional one night stand. He didn’t want to get involved. He wanted pussy not a person, people were trouble, they had baggage.

But Trudi was different. For a start she had the clearest green eyes he’d ever seen, just perfect.

‘They look like a couple of emeralds,’ he said that first night as he handed her a Martini.

‘What do?’

‘Your eyes.’

‘You’re making me blush,’ she said, giggling into her glass.

There in a smoke filled noisy room as Trudi fiddled with her Versace jeans Casey experienced that smitten feeling he knew meant trouble.  She was wriggling her hips about, pulling the jeans up and he wanted her. In fact he wanted her more than doughnuts.

‘What do you do?’ he said.

‘I work in animal rescue,’ Trudi said.

‘Must be interesting.’

‘It is,’ she said, leaning into him and whispering, ‘unless it involves bears.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘I’m so frightened of them, I had to leave my last address because I saw one outside on the lawn.’

That night Casey fucked her at his apartment. He loved the way she leant back and went ‘ooh ooh’ as a few beads of sweat broke out on her brow. He lay and watched her wander round his doughnut filled apartment naked, opening the fridge, fixing them drinks. A few weeks later they headed down to Vegas and he proposed to her. Elvis married them as a Mariachi band played Aimee Mann’s The Moth and they honeymooned there, hanging out at casinos and night clubs.

‘I always wanted to do this,’ Casey said, ‘have an Elvis wedding.’

They spent a few months together, in which they never argued, and Casey even gave up doughnuts. Trudi was on a strict diet and didn’t want any fattening foods around the apartment.

‘You don’t need to lose no weight,’ Casey said.

‘I want to tighten up my butt,’ Trudi said.

She was naked and leaning over to pick up some panties and as Casey looked admiringly at her butt his eyes wandered between her parted legs and he thought of doughnuts.

But he refrained from indulging himself with his favourite food.

Then one day Casey got the credit card bill.

He stormed into the bathroom where Trudi was lying in a bubble bath.

‘There’s two thousand bucks here,’ he said.

‘Honey, I bought some underwear,’ Trudi said.

‘Hah?’

‘You know I want to look sexy for you.’

She raised her hips so her snatch stood above the water.

That evening as they ate an avocado salad she said, ‘There’s a reason I bought the underwear, a woman has to feel a certain way. We ain’t so good in bed no more, Casey, but I found a solution.’

‘What are you talking about?’

She took him by the hand and walked him to the bedroom where she opened a drawer in the night table. Inside was a dildo.  She winked.

‘My little helper,’ she said.

Over the following months, Trudi’s obsession with spending money began to grate on Casey. She was half way through his funds and the memory of his dead wife used to rise at dawn and hover in the morning air before he rose to shower and go to work.

He’d taken a job at the local warehouse packing boxes and would return home drunk and angry at having to support Trudi.

The buzzing of her dildo aggravated him and he felt resentful every time she used it. And he began to smell doughnuts. The aroma would follow him all day.

One night, he became enraged when he found the latest credit card bill and he hit Trudi. She called the police. They arrested Casey and he lay in the cell promising himself he wouldn’t do it again. They let him go and he went home with a plan. He pondered on unusual weapons.

That weekend, he called his buddy Tom, who was a trapper.

‘I need a little favour,’ Casey said.

He went out a few hours before Tom let a Grizzly bear loose on the lawn at the back of their apartment. He’d shot it full of tranquilliser and, at first, the bear wandered about in a daze. When he saw Trudi sunbathing, he headed towards her. Trudi went inside and got Casey’s shotgun and blew the bear’s head off.

When Casey got home, he saw the dead bear on the lawn and found Trudi masturbating with her dildo on their bed. She lay there and looked at him and said, ‘I feel so much better I shot it, I’m not frightened anymore.’

He stood there and watched the vein throb in her neck as she came, feeling like a spectator in his own life.

In the ensuing days, Casey gave up work and proceeded to fill the apartment with doughnuts. Apple Crumb, Bavarian Kreme, Blueberry Cake, Boston Kreme, Bow Tie, Caramel Chocolate, Strawberry Frosted, Strawberry Shortcake, and many other varieties of doughnut lay strewn around like half-eaten sugared vulvas.

‘That’s disgusting,’ Trudi said one evening as Casey lay on the sofa eating.

‘What?’

‘You is shaping them to look like pussies.’

‘You got a sick mind.’

Trudi picked one up and seemed to study it intently before going to bed.

When Casey staggered drunk into the darkened bedroom Trudi said: ‘You can lick it.’

She parted her legs and led Casey’s head down between her legs. As she came, she wrapped her legs so tightly around his neck Casey wondered if she was trying to strangle him. He knew then he wanted to die with his face full of doughnut rather than muff.

As Casey slept that night, Trudi heard the fluttering of moths’ wings and it came to her. She had to get rid of Casey and she knew how to do it. She’d seen the Monarch butterflies in the garden. She caught two of them and ground them up.

The next day she bought a prosthetic vagina from an adult toy store. At the apartment she smeared the ground butterflies onto the outside of the plastic vagina.

When Casey came in from work she put it on and lay on the bed waiting for him.

He appeared at the doorways and she said: ‘Fancy going down on me?’

‘Sure, beats watching you with that dildo.’

Casey barely tasted it before he passed out, his lips pressed to his favourite shape.

Andy And Bobby by Christopher Grant

ANDY AND BOBBY - CHRISTOPHER GRANT

They were crime fiction writers that thought it would be cool to be career criminals. They were good friends, both on the internet and off.

One night, Andy and Bobby’s fictional worlds exploded out into reality.

It was Andy that had the plan.

Gas stations, from Los Angeles all the way to the border.

The first dozen or so went smoothly, no resistance, no heroes.

The media tracked their every move, starting out as a local interest story, gaining steam as they knocked over one gas station after another.

By the time they got to San Diego, they were national news.

And the FBI and California Highway Patrol were all over their trail.

Both Andy and Bobby agreed that their timetable had to be sped up.

“Last one,” Bobby said.

“I don’t like it,” Andy said.

“Last one, promise,” Bobby said. “We gotta get gas besides. Never make it to the border if we don’t.”

Andy relented and, twenty miles later, they pulled into what would be their last gas station. While Andy pumped the gas, Bobby went inside. He browsed through the store until the patrons cleared out.

And then he pulled his piece.

Bobby had done this dozens of times in a dozen other gas stations, and hundreds of times in the mirror ala Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (Bobby didn’t do a half-bad impression of DeNiro).

He kept his eyes focused on the clerk behind the counter. As a result, he didn’t see the bag of Ruffles Potato Chips and ended up slipping on them on his way to getting paid. The gun went off, sending a round into the ceiling tile.

Outside the store, Andy heard the gunshot and panicked. Gunshots were never in the plan. For a moment, he wondered if Bobby had gotten unlucky, getting a hero clerk bent on protecting the till, and had lost his temper. Quickly, he removed the nozzle from the tank of the car and put it back on the rack on the pump. He screwed the cap back on the tank and slammed the little door shut.

When Bobby came bursting through the gas station door, Andy hopped in behind the wheel of the car and didn’t bother waiting for Bobby to shut his door before pealing out of the lot.

They were five minutes down the road when Andy looked down and noticed that they had only gotten a half tank of gas.

“Shit,” he said and Bobby looked where he was.

“Shit,” Bobby echoed Andy’s sentiments.

Looking back up, he saw the roadblock and the heavily-armed FBI agents.

“It was fun while it lasted,” Andy said.

“Yeah,” Bobby said before tossing the gun out the window.

ANDY AND BOBBY - CHRISTOPHER GRANT

They were fictional characters who always wanted to be real-life fiction writers. They just had no idea how to go about doing that.

One night, reality exploded into Andy and Bobby’s fictional world.

It was Bobby that had the plan.

Guns.

Lots of them.

Lots of death.

Lots of just plain old cold-blooded murder.

Until they wormed their way out of fiction and into the real world.

It may have been Bobby’s plan but it was Andy that initiated the whole thing.

His first target was his father.

What’s that they say about wanting to kill your father and fuck your mother?

Andy wasn’t all that interested in fucking his mother and he couldn’t if he had wanted to anyway. His mom had been dead for the past twelve years, the victim of a writer’s pen. No one had ever explained it to him beyond that. He thought that his father would help him understand and grieve. He thought wrong.

So his old man had to go.

Surprisingly, though he’d never fired a shot before, he scored immediately with a headshot, almost perfectly between his old man’s eyes while he slept on the sofa.

Unfortunately, someone had a flight of fancy because Andy’s father didn’t die with what, in the real world, would have been a killshot.

“Gonna have to do better than that, son,” his father said, his eyes slamming open. He got off the couch and grabbed Andy’s wrist, twisting it roughly to the side. A fist to the gut winded Andy but he didn’t go down and the sweep of his father’s legs finally felled him. Andy was quickly on top of the old man and had the gun in his father’s mouth. Two shots, just to make sure that he’d killed the bastard. A check of his pulse confirmed it.

Andy picked up the phone and dialed Bobby’s number. On the third ring, Bobby answered.

“I did it, man,” Andy said.

“Did what?” Bobby asked.

“Killed my old man.”

Heavy silence on the other end and then, “Cool.”

Andy hung up, sat down on the sofa and had a beer.

Three hours later, the phone on the coffee table rang. Andy was so wasted that he couldn’t find the receiver until the sixteenth ring.

“Hellso?” Andy said, slurring his speech.

“The entire neighborhood is gone,” Bobby said, sober as fuck. “I just kept firing. Even when the guns should have run out of ammo, they were still blazing, man. It was fucking...cool. What about you?”

“Ainch got offch the couch,” Andy said.

“Well, fucking do it already,” Bobby said. “How the fuck are we going to get to the real world if you don’t do your part?”

Because he lived in a fictional world, all it took for Andy to sober up was his willpower. The pep talk that Bobby just gave him did half the job. Standing up went the rest of the way.

Andy grabbed his gun and said, “Let’s rock.”

*

Two million, three hundred and seventy-four thousand, eight-hundred and eighty-six corpses later, Andy and Bobby stood on the edge of reality.

Reality wasn’t quite what they had imagined it to be. The veil separating the fictional world and the real world was a Jell-O-shimmering membrane.

“So all we do is just step through, huh?” Andy said.

“Guess so,” Bobby said.

“Think we should leave the guns?”

“Probably can get guns on the other side.”

“Ready?” Andy said.

“Think so,” Bobby said.

Andy stepped forward, put his hand against the Jell-O membrane and pushed through. It was like swimming in lard but eventually his hand broke out on the other side.

Andy smiled back at Bobby and kept going through the membrane, his entire body pushing through as he held his breath.

Bobby quickly followed.

On the other side, Andy turned to cinder in front of Bobby's eyes. Bobby tried to scream but couldn’t for fear of getting Jell-O in his lungs. He couldn’t turn around and go back to his fictional world, either. The tide already had hold of him.

Before he reached the other side, he figured that if he was going to die, he might as well go out screaming and he opened his mouth. The Jell-O was lime.

He heard a voice in his head.

“Relax,” it said. It was a soothing voice and Bobby felt calm.

The tide took him to the reality side of the Jell-O membrane and through to the real world.

Standing next to Andy’s ashes, Bobby braced himself for the same fate. When it didn’t come, he opened his eyes and looked at the real world.

It was very similar to his fictional world.

“Now what?” Bobby called out to the voice that he’d heard in his head.

No answer came.

Interview With Richard Godwin

Yours truly was interviewed by Richard Godwin (who, for my money, asks the most thought-provoking questions that one could hope to be asked) in a Quick Fire At The Slaughterhouse.

Topics include Alternate Endings, parallel universes, doppelgangers, Twin Peaks and David Lynch, and much more.

The Circle by Christopher Grant

THE CIRCLE - CHRISTOPHER GRANT

 

There’s a gigantic circle, with jagged edges, carved out in the stairs leading from the main floor up to the apartments. The staircase is curved and has probably a good thirty to forty steps. The jagged circle is no more than six stairs up from the main floor. It looks like blood has been spilled into this circle and then someone attempted to wash it out with mixed results. On the back of the front door, there are bloodstains.

 

Legend has it that a woman who caught her husband cheating on hung him in the front doorway and people could see him struggling to free himself. They just stood and watched, apparently. Ultimately, however, he succumbed to the to the strangulation. His body is rumored to hung there for days before anyone did anything about it.

 

There is also the matter of the phrase that’s said to hang in the air, “With these words, I hung him.” The words, as tenants have discovered are Fuck You, which is carved into the doors and walls of all of the apartments, as well as the wall leading down the staircase until it reaches the front door. Some tenants say they have seen the hanging man after uttering the words Fuck You in genuine anger.

 

Some people believe that the curse of the building can be lifted if two people, who love each other, have sex in the jagged circle in the stairs.

 

THE CIRCLE - CHRISTOPHER GRANT

 

There’s a gigantic circle, with jagged edges, carved out in the stairs leading from the main floor up to the apartments. There is blood splashed in the center of the circle and skin around the edges. No one has ever been brave enough to determine if the skin belongs to an animal or a human.

 

On the back of the front door, there are bloodstained handprints.

 

Legend has it that a cult used to inhabit the apartments up the curved staircase. Legend even says that a young Charles Manson drifted through here on his way to California and infamy.

 

At night, people that used to live in this neighborhood but long gone now say that you could hear screams and chanting coming from behind the closed doors. On the lawn, they say, there were hordes of copulating men and women. Cars would pull up to the tenement and sometimes one person would get out and sometimes it would be a half dozen.

 

For days, these cars would sit on the street while their owners were inside the apartment house.

 

Sometimes, those owners didn’t come out at all, their cars driven away by other, previously unseen people.

 

When the police were finally brought into the matter, they found the bloody handprints on the back door and the jagged circle with blood in the center and skin on the edges and, carved into the walls leading up the staircase, the words Fuck You.

 

Oddly, they never found the inhabitants of the apartment house, even though many of their cars were still parked out on the street.

 

The police investigated but, ultimately, the file was buried and the case never discussed again.

Deviant Star by Richard Godwin

DEVIANT STAR - RICHARD GODWIN

The man who dreamed of deviation’s exaltation was born in a puddle in a small damp room in South London. Max Dregs climbed clear of his mother’s oversized placenta and rose to his name with alacrity in his spoiled tired teenage years when he idly perused the websites that filled the internet with trash and false information. And it was this he liked about it, the distortions it allowed. It catered to the possibility of serious subversion.

He was a skinny pale boy who stared mannerlessly at passing strangers and kept a cache of porn beneath his urinous rotting mattress. His mother doted on him and he would yell at the postman if he was late. For Max hated anything he deemed inefficient. He liked the sense of control the internet gave him and the illusory notion of virtual relationships, for real people were boring. He wanted to rebel, he wanted to do something different. He knew one day he would make a name for himself.

When he was eighteen he burned his school uniform and sent it to 10 Downing Street with a note that read ‘I am the King of the Future. Max.’ The sender information was not securely attached and fell off the parcel in transit.

As he returned from mailing it he opened a cupboard to get some cake, which he consumed by the cartload, only to rise and concuss his fragile head on the open door.

While Max lay in a coma at the local hospital with his wan hand squeezed by his sobbing mother, he dreamed of cake, endless galleries of cup cakes, chocolate gateaux, éclairs and Victoria sponges spurting cream into his sunken jaws as he salivated in his comatose virtual realm at the images paraded before him like some sick twisted little sadistic film.

He dreamed of Mirabelle Floss, a devotee of the guru Sri Baswati, curer of all ills. Mirabelle was a seeker of truth, an ardent believer in higher things, who gave up knitting when she became disillusioned with Sri Baswati after a major press exposé of his abuse of children. She received the sign that Max was God from a message inside a muffin. She ditched the anti psychotic drugs, kneeling on the floor of her tired room until her knees bled for two whole weeks while she conjured Max from the darkness. She would wash his feet with her lank and greasy hair.

Max dreamed he woke up in the future to discover Mirabelle had started a website in his name called Flutter.

And it had soared.

Flutter encouraged members to expose political lies and it had grown into something of a monster, outdoing all other social networking sites.

The Prime Minister was outraged, but he could do little to stop the kinetic energy that had been set in motion.

In his dream Max walked from the hospital to find himself surrounded by an army of devoted followers, men and women with pictures of him tattooed to their foreheads. They wore robes and reached out to touch him with hungry hands.

He returned home and found they had camped outside his house. And so, he went among them, raising his arms and touching them, as they asked him to do.

He screwed a few women, talked to some of the men, and quickly became bored, finding he only had a craving for cake.

He also became increasingly annoyed by the efforts of politicians to shut down his empire and would lie awake at night making rude posts about them.

One day Max decided he had had enough. He ordered 1,000 cream puffs and injected them with poison. Then he fed his followers death. He had decided death resided in the hidden crevices of networking sites and that salvation was to be found in the fondant centre of a sleeping meringue. Max sat and watched his followers cough their lungs out.

His dream ended with the smell of burning. He was standing in Pudding Lane as the fires raged.

He opened his eyes to see his mother hopping about with her blouse alight. She’d started smoking again and set fire to herself.

Two days after mailing his letter Max sat up in bed and said: ‘Cake, I want some fucking cake.’

He had the vague sensation he had lost a hand, so strong was his devoted mother’s grip.

After the hospital staff put out the alarms, his mother fetched him some Genoa slices from the meagre hospital shop and popped them in Max’s pale mouth piece by piece as he spilled crumbs down the open front of his sweaty pyjamas.

‘More,’ he said.

She went and got every piece of cake in the shop and fed her hungry son, feeling virginal in her devotion.

Finally Max staggered to his feet and said, ‘Mum, I want out of here.’

He didn’t see the papers that littered his hospital room. His mother hadn’t left his side but had read with interest of the threat of nuclear war. The danger from the Middle East had been escalating.

The Prime Minister had been notified by special services that he would receive a coded message when it was time to let the missiles fly. Emails were no longer safe since there was so much hacking. The code was ‘I am the King Of The Future.’

That day the Prime Minster called a cabinet meeting.

‘I received a package today that spells out clearly what I have to do. It contains ash, which designates annihilation. The accompanying letter uses the emergency code. It reads Max, I think you all know what this means’, he said with trembling hands.

As Max left hospital he heard a screaming overhead. To him the burning buildings looked like Baked Alaskas.

Deviant Star by Richard Godwin

DEVIANT STAR - RICHARD GODWIN

The man who dreamed of deviation’s exaltation was born in a puddle in a small damp room in South London. Max Dregs climbed clear of his mother’s oversized placenta and rose to his name with alacrity in his spoiled tired teenage years when he idly perused the websites that filled the internet with trash and false information. And it was this he liked about it, the distortions it allowed. It catered to the possibility of serious subversion.

He was a skinny pale boy who stared mannerlessly at passing strangers and kept a cache of porn beneath his urinous rotting mattress. His mother doted on him and he would yell at the postman if he was late. For Max hated anything he deemed inefficient. He liked the sense of control the internet gave him and the illusory notion of virtual relationships, for real people were boring. He wanted to rebel, he wanted to do something different. He knew one day he would make a name for himself.

When he was eighteen he burned his school uniform and sent it to 10 Downing Street with a note that read ‘I am the King of the Future. Max.’

Max was semi literate and had spelled the address Drowning Street and got the postcode wrong. He also filled in his address under sender information on the parcel.

As he returned from mailing it he opened a cupboard to get some cake, which he consumed by the cartload, only to rise and concuss his fragile head on the open door.

While Max lay in a coma at the local hospital with his wan hand squeezed by his sobbing mother, he dreamed of cake, endless galleries of cup cakes, chocolate gateaux, éclairs and Victoria sponges spurting cream into his sunken jaws as he salivated in his comatose virtual realm at the images paraded before him like some sick twisted little sadistic film.

His letter was opened my Mirabelle Floss, a devotee of the guru Sri Baswati, curer of all ills. Mirabelle was a seeker of truth, an ardent believer in higher things, who gave up knitting when she became disillusioned with Sri Baswati after a major press exposé of his abuse of children. The grey morning she opened Max’s missive she needed a sign.

She had ditched the anti psychotic drugs and had been kneeling on the floor of her tired room until her knees bled and now she had a direction for the future. The contents of the parcel looked like a series of burn marks on an old rag. Mirabelle decided these were images of the face of her saviour.

God’s name was Max Dregs and she would wash his feet with her lank and greasy hair.

Some months later Max woke up in the future with the vague sensation he had lost a hand, so strong was his devoted mother’s grip.

He opened his eyes, tasted sugar, stared at the white walls of the hospital and said: ‘Cake, I want some fucking cake.’

His mother fetched him some Genoa slices from the meagre hospital shop and popped them in his pale mouth piece by piece as Max spilled crumbs down the open front of his sweaty pyjamas.

‘More,’ he said.

She went and got every piece of cake in the shop and fed her hungry son, feeling virginal in her devotion.

Finally Max staggered to his feet and said ‘Mum, I want out of here.’

And so the new era was born.

Unbeknown to Max, Mirabelle had started a website in his name called Flutter.

And it had soared. She’d gone to Max’s house and met with his mother, who gave her pictures of her son.

Flutter encouraged members to expose political lies and it had grown into something of a monster, outdoing all other social networking sites.

The Prime Minister was outraged, but he could do little to stop the kinetic energy that had been set in motion by Max’s blundered effort at sending a letter.

As he walked from the hospital Max found himself surrounded by an army of devoted followers, men and women with pictures of him tattooed to their foreheads. They wore robes and reached out to touch him with hungry hands.

He returned home and found they had camped outside his house. And so, he went among them, raising his arms and touching them, as they asked him to do.

He screwed a few women, talked to some of the men, and quickly became bored, finding he only had a craving for cake.

He also became increasingly annoyed by the efforts of politicians to shut down his empire and would lie awake at night making rude posts about them.

One day Max decided he had had enough. He ordered 1,000 cream puffs and injected them with poison. Then he fed his followers death. He had decided death resided in the hidden crevices of networking sites and that salvation was to be found in the fondant centre of a sleeping meringue. Max sat and watched his followers cough their lungs out, with their screams ringing in his ears.