Instalment One Hundred and Thirty Seven

She was not, nor had she ever been, extraordinary. She was, much to her own mild and never expressed disappointment, extra ordinary. Not so extra ordinary that she would catch your eye and force you to take notice, which would have meant that she was extraordinarily extra ordinary and worth paying attention to. She was extra ordinary in a way that willed your eyes to glide over her without registering a presence, your attention would slip from her like a child down a slide. You would never notice that you could never notice her.

The day she received a present from her aunt, something extraordinary, she thought her middling luck had turned. “It has been passed down through the women in our family,” her aunt told her, presenting the heirloom psychic gift.

She toyed with her new gift for years but her ingrained extra ordinariness was a tough force to be reckoned with. When the power of the paranormal butted heads with her propensity to the very normal, the result was a tie. She never turned a profit from her gift of prophet. Her clumsy clairvoyance made the psychic un-chic, the occult paled to common.

She was an average medium.

Instalment One Hundred and Thirty Six

You are born into the tunnel. You hear there’s a light at the end that can be reached if you are brave enough to do what you love. This is what the Stars say. What they don’t know is not every tunnel has a light. Some tunnels have dead ends and others continue deeper into darkness. A crack of light is more often a warning of cave-in than a way out.  The Stars will shout at you, “Keep going and have faith in yourself, I did!” As if that is an answer. They forget that they were frightened once and most of all they have forgotten they were lucky. They say those who live small lives die small deaths. They are wrong. There are no small lives, just big headed Stars looking down on you. Keep digging! They will yell this until you or the tunnel collapse. They will not pick you up or dig you out. The tunnel is where you will live and die, make it your home. Scrap out a space of your own, find someone to dig with. Someone who will dig you out from collapse. You will have found a light greater than the Stars.

Instalment One Hundred and Thirty Five

A Poisoned Life 
Tales of the high sea were the boy’s favourite escape. Pirate captains, he read, ingested small doses of poison each day to build up immunity should double-crossing crew members attempt a coward's mutiny. As he believed all pirates were double-crossing types, this seemed sound advice.

The boy did not fear poison, he sought inoculation against grief. To begin, his portions were small. A dram of anguish here, a tot of heartache there. He did not search for lost dogs, he found their owners. He quizzed teachers for childhood disappointments. He visited a sideshow alley and heard “The Saddest Woman in the World” moan. It was hard, not the sorrow but the supply. People did not want to answer his questions, they said it was for his own good but in truth, they could not confront their own fears.

He grew up to haunt corridors of nursing homes, becoming callused to misery. His answer lay in deathbeds. It’s with trust that poison is fed by spoon, and so it’s the love of family that feeds the venom of grief. Sitting close as his mother passed, the boy found a life spent wallowing in sorrow was a wasted one, grief found him.

Instalment One Hundred and Thirty Four

The huge pile of spoils was sitting there untouched. SPOILS! All a man really wants is to spoil his family and himself. Spoils can do that. The battle for spoils had been so fierce it left all comers dead. Except one. A coward.

Victor crawled from his hiding place, a kind of couch cushion fort raised from bodies of the fallen, which he had burrowed under in blind fear. He inspected the battlefield with the trepidation and wariness of a shorter than average dwarf trying to mount a particularly tall horse. After much prodding of bodies with boot heels to confirm they had indeed finished in their toleration of life, Victor collected the spoils.

A renowned poltroon, not a single soul in his village believed Victor could have triumphed in such a fierce battle. Merchants gladly pocketed his blood money but mocked him all the same. Even his family were disbelieving. His spoils were spoilt.

But the craven are crafty and time ages both fierce and frightened. Victor wrote down a story, a thrilling tale of derring-do and bravery, and recited his lie to anyone who would listen. Passed down through generations, Victor’s became the true history of that day.

Instalment One Hundred and Thirty Three

Continued from Instalment One Hundred and Thirty Two

Humans are impatient by nature. If there was a one person queue, a one-minute wait The Transporter could take you away. That’s what every single person did.

The world channel surfed one another’s lives.

There was always somewhere else you could be. Fear of missing out ruled every social interaction. As you welcomed a friend you could see in their eyes the cold, calculating assessment – to stay or transport somewhere better? Or just go skiing.

You could see everything but appreciate nothing. Visit the pyramids after work and still be on the couch before the football started.

There is no tyranny of distance, distance is a blessing. If someone phoned to see if you were home, they were at the door before you hung up. Always by yourself but never alone. There was no longer any excuse for being late, ever. Latecomers were exposed for what they are, poor friends putting their own wants before others. And that was the Transporter’s real failing, it stripped people to their core. You couldn’t Transport away from yourself. It showed the user what they were, what we all are. Selfish. And there’s no money in that truth… So spare a dollar? See! Selfish.

Instalment One Hundred and Thirty Two

Spare change mister?

Get a job? I did that… Give the people what they want and they’ll give you the world, that’s what my old man told me, well people don’t know a god damn thing. It was me that invented The Personal Transporter. Okay, I’m sorry. But remember Day One? I was a hero. No traffic, no morning commute. Fuel consumption plummeted, the environment was saved. There was no more A to B, life was no longer a journey, it was a destination.

Day Two.
Every automotive worker was redundant, as were drivers. Taxis, deliveries, shipping, public transport emptied, airlines grounded and airports deserted.

Mass unemployment.

Then things started to get worse.

Streets were empty, why walk? There was no need for convenience stores or bad lunch spots by offices, they all closed. Why go to a supermarket when you could Transport to a farm in Spain? Hotels shut, your bed was always just there. Real Estate became worthless.

When the whole world is local, if you’re not somewhere, you’re nowhere. And ninety nine percent of the world was nowhere.

But what it did to people was worse. There was a bug, The Personal Transporter made the world wait-less.

To be continued.

Instalment One Hundred and Thirty One

I could tell you where it is that socks go to but if you knew, you would never touch a sock again. It’d make you sick to your stomach. And don’t you dare blame the lost sock. It’s not what the lost sock did, your lost sock is not lost. It’s not ‘hiding’ from you as you grumble to yourself while you search for it. It left. Up and hopped out. It’s what the sock you still have did wrong. Yes, the sock still damp from the wash you're holding as you peer under the bed and rummage through the laundry basket looking for its partner. It’s an odd sock. You see socks, like lobsters and Biblical characters, mate for life. The sock left behind is odd, that’s why it’s single now, your odd sock. You will try and pair it up with a similar yet slightly different sock you’ve held onto but your forced marriage won't work. Every time your groping hand pulls the mismatched twosome from the draw you will recoil and dig for an original pairing. No, I said don’t ask what it did, never ask, just throw the odd sock out, its partner will never return.

Instalment One Hundred and Thirty

How to dance with Fear

You will try and choose the song for your dance with Fear but you not be that lucky. Fear is the kind of asshole who will sidle up when you least expect it and say “May I cut in?” Fear will grip you tight so that no escape will seem possible.

Fear will turn to bribe the bandleader, Fear prefers a tango but will go with what best suits the mood. A Lambada is not out of the question, Fear cares not about its forbidden nature. Fear has even been known to limbo, no one can go lower than Fear.

Fear, however is not a good dancer. Fear will tread on every toe on the dance floor, a whirling dervish with no concern for the wellbeing of others. You will smile through gritted teeth, your eyes watering as you dance with Fear.

You must remember that your time with Fear will only last as long Fear controls the dance. Once you take the lead and start pushing Fear round the floor, Fear’s grasp will slacken from your sweaty palms. Fear’s wondering eye will move on, looking to cut in on another unsuspecting dance partner.

You have now danced with Fear.

Instalment One Hundred and Twenty Nine

“Reload!” came the cry but we were already moving as fast as we could. Volley after volley had failed to noticeably dent their numbers, the ignorant bastards just kept coming at us. We had shot everything we had at them and we were down to the last few books in the Library. Big thick hardcover reference books, with real heft in them, dense with the weight of knowledge. Having worked our way through the fiction sections we had hit them with all the beauty that literature could offer and not scratched them. Facts had become the last line of defence. Encyclopaedias rammed into the barrel of the Cannon, on top of tamped down explosive ideas.

“”Prepare to fire!”

“FIRE!”

It was a stunning barrage, books impacting into the ignorant hordes, stunning them. Halting their assault, heads filled with new thoughts. They stopped to share, to listen and to talk amongst the loose pages that fluttered and fell around them like snowflakes. For a moment, it was beautiful. But it was too little too late. There were too many of them we missed, too many we could not reach. The Literary Cannon would fall and we would lose the Culture Wars.

Instalment One Hundred and Twenty Eight

It was one of those brief moments that can pass between strangers. Still sweaty from yoga, I’d stopped for a coffee on the way to the car. I was waiting for my name to be called, idly scanning the other customers in a thoughtless way as he look up from the paper he was reading. Our eyes met and neither of us looked away. He looked kind, friendly even, lived in but not worn out.

We exchanged smiles.

My name was called and with coffee in hand, I left without so much as a glance over my shoulder.

I was grinning ear to ear as I walked in the door. I never did that.

“You look different,” my husband said, scowling over the top of the paper.

I was still wearing the smile another man had given me, writ large across my face. The smile I had for my husband, the one he knew and fell in love with was gone, lost forever. I dropped the foreign smile from my face and searched for a new one as he laid the paper flat. He was wearing my pink dressing gown and the smile it gave me was just for him.  

Instalment One Hundred and Twenty Seven

There were three bulls that lived in our house. I never saw any of them but I heard plenty of stories. The bull I never saw the most was the InvisiBull. The children were always telling me I had just missed it, although how they saw it I don’t know. I would walk into a room to find a shattered lampshade or crying child, pretty much any time a bowl or a bone was broken was a sign the InvisiBull had been. “You just missed it mum,” they would say in unison, “it charged through the living room, bumping into everything, we tried to stop it but you know that bull. So that’s how the window got smashed.”

They loved the second bull a lot more but it was forever getting them into trouble. “Why haven’t you cleaned your room?” I would ask but I already knew the answer.

“Mum, the DistractaBull was just here and it was being sooooo funny, you shoulda seen it dancing around, it was very silly!”

And my husband, well he would says he believed somewhere in our house was an AccountaBull but despite all his snorting about it he could never make it appear.