Keep It Regular
Footprints on water-laden earth. He sees a duck. He’s dreaming. Test subject in a Read-bed. R.E.M ember, burning brightly amidst the water plants. Duckweed. Algae. There are minnows swimming. Stickleback floating. Trout washes of colour under the mirror surface. Sometimes the edges…
Out on the edge of something that only really has a notional edge – a fuzzy signal where matter becomes a theory about physics; becomes a physical phenomenon to be experienced; an undelineated territory. Sometimes the geography of a place maps the…
The sky isn’t working, and it hasn’t been for a while now. Mum remembers when it used to be better – when we didn’t have to run inside and shelter in the Lead Room. She says it ended when they dropped a…
The horse died suddenly. It had not looked good and they all knew they weren’t going to get any meat out of it. They were crossing the desert that had been Alabama before the airburst seared the land, and this was just…
TV channel collapse. The whitenoise babies are crying in the bowling alley gutters, while the drug-blanked kids suck down Hot Cats drenched in mustard. Outside the sentient sky-whale blimps are locking their signals onto journalists so that they can kill undercover reporters.…
He smiled. What was so fascinating about serial killers? Had it shifted through the years, or was it still the sensationalism? Was it still the lust for an insight into the mind of Saucy Jack? Was it the baser instinct they often…
He lays his palm flat against the glass and is surprised for some reason that it sticks there – he thinks of tongues velcroed to icy lamp-posts, and freezerburn. He has been living in a warm climate until recently so he is…
They say that it was the event that galvanised the war, but later analysis proved conclusively that it never happened. It was labelled as being the largest false flag operation ever mounted by the joint US and UK Fiction Departments. They were…
The Rattleheads have been mainlining Tooth Fairy again, skirting around the edge of a Sanctity Zone, kicking out localised EMP blasts. A Signal Cop unholsters his interrupt gun and fires a heavy dose of shutdown at them and you seem them fritz…
He watched the beach inside the egg timer slow to a trickle and then he watched the last grain halt. Every particle invested with a meaning not obvious from a surface read. They called him and his kind Screens, because they occupied…