ARMY

We’re following the directions from HQ.  There’s going to be lots of us there, each one full  of supplies, packed to the gunnels, ready to let go!

We’ve gathered our supplies from the sunny Atlantic and are travelling over water at speed, ready to hit land.  We’re cocooned in cold air, but we will come up against heat.  The colder we are and the hotter our destination, the fiercer this will be.

I’ve been assigned to the Church Fete of St John’s Upper Studley in Wrotbridge-on-the-Wold.  Others are on their way to Stowbridge Annual Village Barbecue.  The battallion heading for Solefield School Sports Day are running late.

We gather, circling over St John’s, trying not to make a sound, we mustn’t start rumbling and crashing yet, but with this much electricity in the air, it’s very difficult.  We must wait until we’re all in position.  I hear word that they’re ready at Stowbridge, we’re just waiting for Solefield ... Finally!  HQ send the signal in a blinding flash, we roar and crack back in unison.  It’s time to drop your payload boys and girls and watch the humans scatter.  I love British summers.  I come here every year.

FAECAL ATTRACTION

“Hi, my name is Shit.”

“And mine is Fan.  God you’re beautiful.”
“So are you.”
“I love you, Shit.”
“I love you too, Fan.”
“Well, this is as good a place as any ...”

WHIIRRRRR SPLATTTT!!!!

 “Oh shit!  Everyone around us is covered in ... in excrement.”

“Don’t take my name in vain, Fan, but yeah, we’ve made quite a mess.”
“I don’t think our friends like us anymore.”
“They’ll just have to accept it.”
“I’ll always love you, Shit.”
“We were destined to be, Fan.”

THIS HOUSE IS HAUNTED

In sleep you know this house well, it’s every quirk and corridor, its ancient furniture, the dust and mustiness.  It’s because you’ve been here before, every night since you made the decision and nights previously, from far in your past that you’ve blocked out.

You’re in the bedroom, a close personal friend has texted you to say that this house is haunted, that this place is cursed.  You text back; “Don’t be daft!  I don’t sense anything!”  But you are slightly unsettled and the feeling grows as the evening stretches on.  You’re starting to feel your aloneness and hear the creaks, bumps and footsteps along the corridor.  Somewhere nearby, a door slams.  You turn the key in the lock to shut out the ghost.  When the key falls to the floor, you grab it quickly before it can be dragged underneath.  You pull a chest of drawers against the door, struggling with the weight of it.  You gasp for breath.  Safe again?

Then the lights begin to flicker and suddenly you’re plunged into darkness.  You realise your error.  You haven’t barricaded the ghost out, ghosts can walk through walls.  You flick the switch desperate for light, but nothing happens, you can’t see anything, but you can sense that something in the room close to you wishes you ill.

Waking, you deny me, you bury yourself in work, relationships, parties.  You’ve kept yourself busy since the decision, haven’t you?  Since you pulled the rug out from under your own feet?  Is there a reason for that, I wonder?  Well, you can’t escape me in sleep.  I am the haunted house, the sense of menace, the ghost that creeps up on you.  I am your intuition and I’m trying to tell you something very important about a choice you’ve made.  Ignore me at your peril.

NUGGETS

It’s difficult to know who to blame – Hursley town planners for allowing the Family Feeder to be built or the company that owns the franchise.  They were responsible for the aggressive marketing campaign, telling children to nag their parents into submission and reassuring Mums and Dads that children are guaranteed to eat the tasty food.   There are also the parents who took their children to that ‘restaurant’. 

People should be taught about primordial tastes.  The ‘tasty’, high sugar, high fat food produces an intense reaction in a child’s brain – like crack cocaine.  Would you feed crack to your child?  Of course not, but you’ll take them to the Family Feeder and give them chicken nuggets surrounded by fatty batter, burgers dripping with grease and chips made with more sugar than potato, teamed with an over sweetened milkshake or cola.  Nice work!  In the absence of the drug, the user craves more.  Children’s insulin levels are raised so high by the sugar assault on their body that they are starving just an hour after their visit and guess where they want to go and eat again.

The good folk of Hursley realised what was going on and stopped taking their children there.  In response, the Family Feeder upped its marketing campaign, urging children to go on hunger strike and calling them to war.  Be as objectionable as possible – Pester Power, it’s a military campaign!  I’ve heard stories of parents compromising and taking children once a day, or caving in completely and going to the Family Feeder for breakfast, dinner and tea.

What the Family Feeder don’t know, is that this is the same food the military gives to their soldiers because they identify that it’ll make them more inclined to kill.  Food high in antioxidants creates cheerful, useful citizens (and children).  Food high in saturated fat and sugar turns people into angry, depressed risk takers full of self loathing and willing to do anything for their next fix.  The lack of fibre creates constipated kids with aching bellies and the caffeine in the soda will cause sleeplessness.  Well done, Mums and Dads of Hursley; your children have lost all sense of proportion in their desperation to obtain what is essentially crack to them and the physiological effects I’ve described have turned them into mini Incredible Hulks.

Now I, the Child Health Psychologist, must sort it out.  I’m standing outside the Family Feeder with a loudspeaker, absolutely fed up of being called to this sort of crisis.  At 2.30pm this afternoon, the junior schools of Hursley emptied.  The children marched, zombie-like, in a three hundred strong mob, to the Family Feeder.  They shut the doors behind them and barricaded them with tables.  They pulled the blinds down in the windows.  The fate of the restaurant staff and adult customers is as yet unknown, but I must act quickly before they run out of chicken nuggets and chips.

INTO THE OPEN

“It’s OK,” you told me, “I’ll take care of it.  You mustn’t worry about anything.”
I nodded in agreement, because you were the fastest runner, the better hunter and you stood a good chance of surviving outside our shelter alone.

The first time you returned, you wouldn’t let me look, you covered your face and arms, handed me the deer you’d caught and went and sat quietly in the corner.  I bled it, skinned it, cooked it, but you barely ate anything, just enough to keep you alive.  The deer could have lasted longer, but my appetite got the better of me.  I couldn’t stop eating.  Pretty soon, you had to go out again.  I muttered under my breath that perhaps it was my turn to take a chance, to go into the open, but you shook your head fiercely and I was somewhat weighed down with food.

You were gone a long time.  I thought maybe something had happened.  Your people weren’t particularly happy; you’d gone against their wishes when you’d taken up with me.  Perhaps they had become dissatisfied with just punishing you by isolation, by leaving you out of the hunting groups, depriving you of the protective gear that kept the vicious rays of the sun off you... Maybe they’d thought of something worse.  I hoped not.  I was getting so hungry.

I was relieved when I heard your footsteps, but I didn’t like the stagger in them.  This time you showed me how the sun had burned through your skin, that parts of your arms were bleeding and your once beautiful face was scarred.  You’d only managed to catch a rabbit this time, you apologised for failing me and cried.

I was determined I would go out next time, even though I'd eaten so much recently it made me puffed out to even stand.  I couldn’t imagine hunting, I was sure my growing belly would slow me down, but I was determined I’d do it for you.  However, when I woke from a long sleep, made deeper by eating all of the rabbit, you’d gone.  Somehow, I seem to recall being half asleep and you whispering to me that you weren’t sure if you had the strength, but you’d try, you’d really try.

THE BELL JAR HEART

The mind recalls events and the heart remembers the emotion.  A memory can wander into the brain unbidden and cause pain.  I had memories – the car accident I caused that killed my best friend, my lovely Becca leaving and my brother’s losing battle with leukaemia.  My heart hurt constantly.

I took a scalpel, removed my heart and replaced it with an efficient machine I’d built that circulated my blood and kept me alive.  It connected to my brain, but didn’t process emotions, allowing me to recall events without anguish.  My past couldn’t haunt me anymore.

I kept my organic heart in a safe, preserved in a bell jar and lived a carefree life.   Irritatingly, bad things still happened.  There was the fire in the study that destroyed the specifications of my artificial heart; it was now a unique thing I couldn’t patent or recreate.  Also I thought it was now safe to take women for their love and money, then leave, but each time I did so, organic matter grew round the artificial heart, like it was trying to become real and hold memories of guilt, the feeling I feared most.  I operated on the side of the machine, removing the matter and put it in the bell jar because I couldn’t destroy what was part of me.  Then I watched the stuff glue itself to my heart, forming a black ugly mass of scar tissue.  Was this what hearts normally looked like?  Was mine in terrible pain?  It still beat, so I assumed it was OK.

I thought Miranda was another wealthy woman with whom I could play, but there was hardness in her pale eyes.  Everything I said she found amusing, even when I told her I loved her.  Still, she gave me money, without seeking attention and I wanted more.

“If you love me, you’ll tell me what’s in that safe,” she said.

“My heart,” I replied, lips twisting sarcastically.

“How convenient,” she responded.

We went drinking and she taunted me, telling some bullshit story about her dad being a safe breaker.  I don’t remember staggering back from the pub and going to bed, but I remember waking.  She was sitting astride me grinning, in one hand a scalpel; in the other the machine that had replaced my heart.

“What have you done?” I panicked, thinking I was about to die, but then I felt the beating in my chest and saw the empty bell jar.

She smiled and drove the scalpel through the pump, breaking my irreplaceable machine forever.  As I watched her do this, the connections between my organic heart and brain rewired and the tide came in.  Overwhelming feelings of pain from my past were re-enforced, by the remorse I’d repressed regarding the women I’d left destitute and broken - that black organic matter.  I could feel the tears welling up and looked at her pleadingly; “Make it stop.”

 Miranda’s voice was soothing, “But I’ve made you all better, my darling.”