Flash (Ah!)

The hedgehog looked down at his feet. He was upset that he had ripped his judo uniform, but more upset that the flamingo and the otter were laughing. His whole family had clubbed together to buy him the kit, and Uncle Albert had been eaten by a hawk on the way back from the shop.

--

The shoe fitted like a glove (that fitted like a shoe). Unfortunately for Emily, there was only one of them. She wasn’t sure that she could justify buying it, since she had two feet, but it fitted so perfectly she just couldn’t walk away. She resolved to wear it only at home, and on weekends.

--

Michael Jones remortgaged his house to fund a production of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. His wife was furious, and threw the rights to the play out of the window. Over the next few days, the paper mixed with the heavy October rain to form a sort of grey mulch next to the roses. Nothing grew.

Library

Dear library users,

You may have noticed that the shelves are looking slightly sparser than usual. This is due to our ongoing improvement works, and the installation of a new, online cataloguing system.

This is an online system of unparalleled sophistication. By feeding it all of the borrowing records of the last twenty one years (when we installed our first digital cataloguing system), we have taught the catalogue to recognise user preferences. The new system is capable of predicting, with depressing accuracy, the books that you will want to borrow in the future.

To our surprise, the system told us that the only book that will be borrowed in the next two years will be Gregg Wallace’s autobiography, ‘Life on a Plate’. When we saw the readout, we were incredulous. But we have checked the calculations. We have re-checked the calculations. We have checked and re-checked our checking. And the computer is right. So we are taking the other books away,

You have only yourselves to blame.

Acorn wall-mounted old ladies

Two dogs of equal strength walking in opposite directions

Two men sit on a park bench. One stares straight ahead, one looks to the side, into the wings of the stage.

LESS
How’s Ollie?

WORSE
Good thanks. Starting school in September.

LESS
And the twins?

WORSE
Still dead.

LESS
Mmm.

WORSE
What’re you looking at?

LESS
I know you’re going to find this hard to believe, but there’s a man standing in the middle of the road. It looks like he wants to move, but he can’t, because he’s holding the leads of two dogs of equal strength, walking in opposite directions.

The worse cranes his neck to look offstage as well.

WORSE
So he is.

Pause.

LESS
I’ve never seen such evenly-matched dogs.


MORE
And both with exactly the same desire to walk in opposite directions

LESS
This almost seems like a thought experiment.

Pause.

LESS
Do you think they’re his dogs?

WORSE
They must be.

LESS
But if they’re his, wouldn’t he just let one go? It’d come back

WORSE
Well, they seem quite independent

LESS
Or maybe he tied them to his wrists -

WORSE
Exactly. They can’t be his dogs, otherwise he’d know about their independence, and avoid tying them to his wrist to prevent exactly this.

Pause.

MORE
Do you think they’ll rip him apart?

LESS
Well, he doesn’t look comfortable.
Actually, it looks like he’s got an itch.

WORSE
It’s going to be hard for him to scratch that, what with him being pulled by two dogs of equal strength walking in different directions.

LESS
Do you think we should help him? Go over there and scratch it for him?

WORSE
Someone else’ll do it. See, there’s a guy going over there now... No, wait, he’s just taken his wallet. And there’s nothing the man can do about it because both his hands are occupied by two dogs of equal strength walking in opposite directions.

LESS
Oh, and now his vulnerability’s been established, someone else’s taken his phone as well. Pity he’s stuck by the bus-stop; there’s a whole crowd of people with some time to kill.

Pause.

WORSE
In his position, I think I’d want one of my arms ripped off. That way, I’d just be a one-armed man taking my dog for a walk, not a two-armed man trapped in the middle of a road, at the mercy of the general public.

LESS
Yeah, the public are awful.

WORSE
Especially those two teenage lovers carving their initials into his chest.

LESS
Surprising amount of blood, there

WORSE
And yet the dogs don’t seem to be tiring. Or perhaps they are tiring, but at exactly the same rate.

LESS
Quite a pool of blood now, over there. More than a pool. A puddle. No, a puddle sounds smaller than a pool. A lagoon? Sounds too geographical. A pool. Yes, a pool.
Do you think we should do something?

WORSE (shrugging)
Well, what can we two men do?

LESS
We could call an ambulance.

WORSE
Someone else probably has

LESS
No, I think they’re just filming it on their phones.
So should we?

WORSE
Nah, their lenses are better.

LESS
No, call an ambulance, I mean.

WORSE
We could, but what would that really achieve?

LESS
They’d help him.

WORSE
Sure they’ll help him today, but this’ll just happen again tomorrow.

LESS
It seems unlikely. If I were him, I’d never take the two dogs out at the same time ever again

WORSE
No, the real problem is a system that allows things like this to happen.
And what can we two men do about a system that allows things like this to happen?

LESS
Well, we could smash the system

WORSE
Well, we could. But then there’d be bits of broken system everywhere.
Who’s going to clear them up? It’s not going to be me.

LESS
I’d never thought about it like that.

WORSE
What if someone stood on a bit of broken system? They could get Tetanus. I could get tetanus. When’s the last time you had a tetanus shot?

LESS
I can’t remember

WORSE
We should get tetanus shots.
I’m off to A and E, you coming?

LESS
Sure. Do you think we should take him with us?
If we’re going to A and E anyway?

WORSE
No, he’ll just slow us down.
We could have Tetanus.

A Cover Letter

Dear Sir or Madam (but statistically Sir),

I am writing to apply for the position of “apprentice pest-controller”, as seen advertised on the Warwick County Council website. Please find enclosed my CV, and a fly I killed on the way to the post-office.

I feel I should be honest from the outset; I am probably not the candidate you are expecting to apply for the job. I am currently employed. I have a PhD in Aeronautical Engineering. I am a vegetarian. But, you see, I found the advert for the job – an image of a middle aged-man standing by a van full of rat poison – strangely compelling. His arm was resting on the roof of the van, and he was smiling, as if to say “one day, all this could be yours”. He looked genuinely happy.

I want to be genuinely happy. Please, can I be happy?

I understand that the position involves killing animals. What am I supposed to say here? That from a young age, I’ve always loved killing animals? No, that gives the impression that I’m psychopathic, or a member of the landed gentry. And I’m not. I’m just a man who’s intrigued by the look of absolute serenity on your employee’s face.

Thank you for taking the time to consider this application, and I look forward to hearing from you in the near future.

Yours Sincerely,
Martin Wilson

MDF

[SFX: An answerphone beep]

I thought about you this morning, as I nailed my hand to a piece of MDF. To clarify, the nailing of the hand to the piece of MDF wasn’t a statement about how I feel towards you – If I’m honest, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t be - I hadn’t wanted, or, indeed, intended, to nail my hand to the piece of MDF at all. I had wanted (and intended) to nail the piece of MDF to another piece of MDF. And then to the wall, to make a nice set of shelves.

But as I stood there, with the hammer poised, a blur of movement outside the window caught my attention. It was an enormous plane, descending slowly to the ground in the distance (or a tiny plane, landing in my garden; but time has taught me that the latter option is significantly less likely). And this plane, this fusion of steel and engineering and optimism, it reminded me – reminded me that I was supposed to pick you up from the airport last Tuesday.

So, I guess I’m ringing you to apologise. The last time I checked, it was considered bad manners not to follow through on a promise to pick someone up from the airport. But, then, the last time I checked was probably about seven years ago. It wasn’t something that I saw as being particularly liable to change, and in many ways, the fact that I once checked is more remarkable than the fact that I haven’t checked recently.

When you get this message, can you please ring me back? I’d love to hear about your holiday, and would also welcome any distraction from the fact that my hand is currently nailed to a piece of MDF.

Cheers.

Jellyfish

Sorry to keep you waiting.
But, obviously, not sorry enough not to keep you waiting…

You probably think it was another patient that kept me busy. Actually, I was at a stag-do last night. They had one of those strippers which burst open to reveal a cake. It was horrific, actually – blood everywhere. Spent the entire night just trying to get the carpet clean, and in the end no-one felt like eating the cake. But that’s the great thing about being a doctor. You can walk into work covered in blood, and no-one bats an eyelid. They’re all too busy wondering whether anyone will notice whether they’re covered in blood, and wondering where they left the eyelids.

So, let me just take a quick look at your chart.

Ah. An appendectomy. Have you ever had your appendix removed before? Silly question. But, I don’t know, it might have crawled back in. The appendix has quite a strong homing instinct, and most people’s first thoughts upon seeing an appendix crawling towards them - like a fat, pink slug - is to scream, affording it an entrance.

Now looking at your chart, it says that your date of birth is 1993. Is that correct? Okay, so you’re young enough to believe that the world is still full of opportunities, old enough to realise that they probably won’t won’t be offered to you.

Now, I trust that you received the release form. And you signed that, yes? Good.

Now, I don’t want to scare you – because that would be an emotion, and I know your generation isn’t used to them - but as with any procedure, there is a chance of complications. Now, obviously, this will involve sedation, and as with any use of general anaesthetic, there is a risk that you won’t stay under for the length of time intended. You know, there’s a one in five or six million chance that you may stay under for three, maybe four, hundred years. And you’ll stumble out into the street, feeling over-exposed in just your surgical gown as the breeze dances over your shoulders, and the streets will be empty but for cockroaches and posters of Boris Johnson the sixth, and it’ll be like one of those films where Cilian Murphy runs away from things (only there aren’t any credits, and you look nothing like Cilian Murphy. Actually, I find it quite insulting that you would think to besmirch his name with such a comparison.)

Now, me and the guys were talking, and we reckon that your best bet is actually to sedate yourself again, and cross your fingers that by the time you wake up again, the fall-out from the nuclear war between Tesco and Ecuador will have died down to a sort of tolerable level.

Of course, there’s only a very remote possibility of that happening.

What’s more likely is that the operation might be disrupted at some point. A group of alien ambassadors might burst in here and take me captive before I can finish the operation. In the event of that happening, you’d probably just bleed to death here on the operating table, while I’m marched in front of their leader, and asked to speak on behalf of the human race.

But as I say, there’s only a very remote possibility of that happening. The last time I checked, weren’t any alien craft hovering in a geostationary orbit above earth. But, then, the last time I checked was seven years ago. It wasn’t something I’d foreseen as a pressing probability, and, in many ways, I think the fact that I did actually once check is more remarkable than the fact I haven’t checked recently.

Oh, come on now, there’s no need to look so panicked. You’re not the first person to ever have an operation! I’ve put hundreds of people to sleep – some of them patients – and if I’d taken a medical exam, I’m sure I would have done very well.

So you have nothing to fear.
Except jellyfish.
Jellyfish are terrifying.