White Smoke, New Pope

 White smoke – New pope.

Grey smoke – Oh no, the new pope’s on fire!

No smoke – It’s okay, we dragged him from the pyre

Intermittent smoke – The new pope keeps crawling back into the flames

Green smoke – The new pope’s… melting? His flesh is coming off in lumps.

Blue smoke – That’s not a human skeleton.

Red smoke – That’s definitely not a human skeleton.

Beige smoke – The segmented thing that, until recently, was lodged

just below the pope’s sternum has begun to scale the wall.

White smoke (faint) – Is… is that our new pope? I guess we did just appoint it.

Pink smoke – All hail the scuttling pope.

Taupe smoke – The scuttling pope has descended to address the committee.

Teal smoke – The scuttling pope has dislocated its jaw, and begun to eat

the committee.

Gold smoke – The remains of the committee are hiding under the table.

Lime smoke – Except for Father Benedict, who has stayed to man the

smoke signals.

Chartreuse smoke – Father Ferdinand is going for the papal harpoon gun.

Sepia smoke – Father Ferdinand is firing the papal harpoon gun.

Mauve smoke – Something large has fallen. It hit the floor with a thud.

Violet smoke – The committee are peeking their heads around the

table legs, craning to see if the new pope is dead.

Navy smoke – The body of the new pope is twitching. Father

Ferdinand is covered in green gore. He’s trembling like a leaf.

Cerulean smoke – The committee have exchanged meaningful glances.

They lift the papal robes from the twitching corpse, and drape them over Father Ferdinand's gooey shoulders. They don’t hang majestically, but cling to his shaking form.

White smoke - New pope.

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Short story: Shoreline of Infinity 24

The ever excellent Shoreline of Infinity have gone and published their 24th Issue. I can neither confirm nor deny that I may have a short story in it, but I can say that there's a brilliant story by Tim Major, an intriguing review of Aliya Whiteley's Skyward Inn, and the details of their upcoming flash fiction competition...

A Poem-Shaped Thing

Last Night

I dreamt that Tim Key

was in an advert for Grolsch

there was a Miliband in space

and you were in the back garden

retching up a kitchen.

 

You coughed up the spoons without a problem

tinkling into the flowerbed

where they bounced, for a moment,

like landed fish.

But the appliances caused you grief

and you braced and grunted

as you heaved a fridge-freezer onto the lawn.

 

I crossed my fingers that the oven would be electric.

‘Oh, how lovely,’ I said, as you coughed a rusted gas range onto the grass.

You could tell I was inauthentic -

reading from the litany of vague praise 

reserved

for other people’s hideous children -

and asked me to go inside.

‘I’ll finish up alone,’ you said

And you did.

And I woke with the feeling that you would hold this against me forever. 

Self-Storage

The minotaur in the self-storage depot was the wrong way round – the face of a man on the body of a cow. “Milk me, please,” he asked Jay, fluttering his eyelashes.

“Er, sorry – “ Jay replied, “I can’t.  I’m looking for the exit.”

“Please milk me,” he said.

“Sorry, I – My girlfriend’s waiting for me in the car. I have to get back. We just came to drop off a sofa. Don’t want it cluttering the place up.”

The minotaur raised an eyebrow.

‘Did she give you string?’

‘What?’

‘A roll of twine to find your way out’

‘No’

‘Then she dropped you off.  Didn’t want you cluttering the place up.’

Jay looked around – surveying the twisting corridors and identical doors. The minotaur snorted impatiently.

“Milk me, please.”

An Unironic Recommendation: Dream Corp LLC

Dream Corp LLC - an Adult Swim show currently available to stream via Channel 4. 

The conceit is similar to Matt Berry’s I Regress; the setting is a clinic of sorts, and every episode, a patient visits to have a psychological problem cured, only to gain a new – and worse - affliction. But the execution is disarmingly original. It’s set at some point in the not-too-distant future, and the dream-clinic is a dilapidated shell of its former self. Like the apartments in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil you get the impression that the building is alive – but where the flats in Brazil gasped and wheezed, the clinic in Dream Corp is a wounded beast, lacerated with scars that are not healing, and springing leaks that drip slowly down the walls before coagulating around the staff’s ankles. When a thick pink liquid begins to ooze from the gap between the walls and ceiling, the staff panic as if it were a haemophiliac with a chest wound.

While it’s billed as a comedy, there are many elements that might be described as horror – and parts of the universe are as grotesque as any Cronenberg. The ringleader of the clinic, Dr Roberts, has USB ports crudely rammed into the backs of his hands, the wounds still weeping after what must, presumably, be a number of years. Drips hang from the ceiling exuding a thin black oil, and patients are anaesthetised suddenly, and against their will. 

In terms of format, the show’s half live-action sitcom (in the clinic), half rotoscoped-psychedelic-nightmare (in the poor unfortunate soul’s subconscious).  The roto segments are visually and conceptually stunning – baroque in the level of detail, to the extent that it’s almost too much to take in in one viewing. Characters fall into gaping maw of an oven (complete with teeth and tongue), ride a tangled Escher-web of escalators, hot air balloons expand above the clouds, and funerals and birthday parties merge into one. It’s not so much a visual feast as a visual all-you-can-eat buffet – the choice of what to focus on can leave you feeling overwhelmed.

To say the tone is dark is like saying 2020 has been ‘not nice’ – this is a world in which staff members casually lose their hands to exposed laser-beams, robot assistants commit suicide with such calendar regularity that the Doctor backs up their servers the day before, and it’s routine for patients to become staff, as their newly-gained phobias (courtesy of Doctor Roberts) prevent them from leaving the building. It excels in the sort of aggressive surrealism that I think of as Adult Swim’s hallmark; my favourite vignette, which takes all of three seconds, featured a colleague asking another colleague for the time. The operative looks at his watch. The face has no hands. No numbers. It’s a small cylinder filled with sand. Two ants crawl in aimless loops.

“Ants!” He replies, cheerfully.

It is, I acknowledge, not for everyone. I tried getting my brother to watch it, and he had to switch it off after four minutes, saying it made him “feel physically sick”. But if you think you might be interested in a mixture of nightmarish psychedelia and relentlessly dark humour, GO FOR IT. It only takes an hour to watch the first series and somehow Daniel Stessen has managed to cram each 10 minute episode with a story arc for the staff, a patient of the day, and fifty images that will stay with you for the week.

Short Story: Aaaaaaahnthology

To my enduring surprise, I have a story in The Best of British Science Fiction 2019. Gulp.