Love in a Helicopter

thethemeis: Let Down

theauthoris: Aaron Twentythree

   The sun beat down on the pair of them with little mercy, as they stood on the tarmac at Browning Airport waiting for the helicopter pilot to emerge from the outhouse. They hadn't spoken for hours, this young couple, so wrapped up were they in a petty argument they'd had about his mother, and the way she behaves at social gatherings. It's unacceptable, the girl had said, that you let her say those things to me. He'd replied, If you cared for me as much as you say you do, you'd understand that she's old and ill and I don't want to wake up one day and find out that she died the night after I argued with her about you. Like all youngsters, they had both been too stubborn to get it resolved. 

   And now, they were set to embark on an early evening helicopter ride over Gagarin Falls. What was set to be the highlight of their holiday, the most romantic trip they had planned, was marred by bickering that had spilled over to times it should not have wetted. And the boy regretted that.  

   He wanted to make it better. To make things okay again. To brush over the cracks and pretend, together, that everything was perfect. But he needed to know one thing before he could let go of the niggling irritation: did she really love him? Unconditionally? More than anyone else she'd ever met? It had always been a question that haunted him as he tried to get to sleep, what with her occasional musing about ex boyfriends, her incessant chatting about men at work, and her unbelievable stories about her circle of friends. And with the mood so low, he thought he might as well throw it out there, and see what she did with it.  

   When he opened his mouth to ask, the helicopter pilot waddled along to interrupt, awkwardly pulling his trousers up around his corpulent waist. Come on then guys, he said. Let's get you trained on safety.  

   The pilot didn't sense the awkwardness between them as he gave them their mandatory talk on helicopter safety. He showed them how to fasten their belts, how to activate their microphones if they needed to ask him something, what to do in the event of an engine failure; and they listened in stone cold silence. When he told them about the Jesus Bolt that holds the propellers on the roof, so named because if it snaps out Jesus is the only one that can save you, the girl laughed and the boy didn't. 

   The pilot turned the roaring engine on, and the girl climbed in. She seemed to be in higher spirits now, but the boy was still lost in thought. He stood outside the helicopter, deciding to get an answer to his question before he boarded.

   Georgina, he said. I need to know if you love me.

   What? She shouted, patting the seat next to her and struggling to place her headset on her head.

   I said, do you love me?

   What? I can't hear you.

   Do you love me?

   I can't hear you, Darren. You'll have to use your microphone. Get in.

   Do you love me?

   The girl loved him. Of course she did. But she had no idea what was coming out of his mouth, so she shook her head.

California

thethemeis: Stranger than Fiction

theauthoris: Aaron Twentythree

   I landed in San Francisco on the Tuesday, suitcase trailing behind me and a hand-drawn and crumpled map to my friend's house gripped in my hand, and I found the book on the Thursday. After that, my trip as I knew it was over, and a whole new one began.

   I was sat in Starbucks, one of the two million Starbucks surrounding Union Square, when I noticed a leather-bound diary under a stool by the window. I'd seen no one sitting in that stool since I arrived and no one was sat in any of the seats around it; so I only had the staff to turn to, to identify its owner. I left my coffee and newspaper on the table, and bent to pick up the diary from its hiding place. Before I could open my mouth to alert the sickly-sweet teenager behind the counter about the lost property I had discovered, I noticed the engraving on the front cover: HAND ME ON, DON’T HAND ME IN. 

   Intrigued, I opened the book. 

   From flicking through the first few pages, I found the leaves to be filled with dated entries, each of which seemed to be a mix of instructions and accounts of experiences lived. Just as often as and then I... and then I... was written, a command like now walk to Sutter would appear. By now, I was too engrossed in the scrawl on the pages and the engraving on the front cover to hand the book in, so when the braces behind the counter noticed me standing nowhere near my own drink, reading a leather book I'd picked up from the floor, and asked me if I was okay, I just said yes and walked out.

   When I arrived back at my friend's apartment, I had a chance to read the first few pages more attentively. Apart from the diary entries, there was a page with a block capital scribble:

THIS IS NOT FICTION. 

IT'S STRANGER THAN THAT. 

   And sure enough, some of the entries were. They featured ideas and experiences I never imagined I'd have in my lifetime. Places I never knew existed. Activities I never thought plausible. My mind was made up - the next day, I would read one entry every morning, and live it out that day. Follow those instructions to the letter. I knew so little back then.

*

   I'd wake up in the Grand Hyatt. I'd wake up in the Clift or the Huntington, and have the taste of clam chowder and nicotine and sex in my dry mouth as I stared at a ceiling I'd never seen before. Not sober, anyway. This is where the book took me first: seducing the financial elite of the fourth richest city in the world. It's surprisingly easy, it said, for a good-looking twenty-something to find a spinster with millions of bucks in the bank just begging for some company for the night, if one waits around in a five-star hotel bar for long enough. My first few weeks in San Francisco were spent nursing a water at the bar of the InterContinental or the Palace, waiting for lonely fifty-somethings with money to burn and desires to satisfy to come and drag me away. And they always came. 

   I never had to buy dinner those days. They'd wine me, dine me, take me to shows, drown me in attention, and then swallow me whole back in their bedrooms. The next day, they'd invariably hate the sight of me and want me gone before they'd reapplied their makeup; but by then, I'd had my fill anyway.

   And as for having sex with middle-aged women, I won't hear a word said against it. I don't know if I'll ever experience anything as pleasurable as those nights again. 

   To detoxify after that near-month of debauchery, I was directed to cycle the Golden Gate bridge. Hire a bicycle, read an entry dated in mid-summer, and cross the bridge at midday. So with cheap brand-imitation sunglasses covering my eyes, my knees still weak from the copulation and a thin brown cigar hanging lazily from between my lips, I hired a bicycle and cycled to the bridge. Taking it slow to avoid a heart attack, I took in every metre of that damn bridge like my eyes were hungry sponges. I drank it in, recording it all in a brain that had never known such an experience. The cool air rushed past my pockmarked face and wound the smoke that trailed behind me into the sky in dancing ribbons, and I was revitalised. For a bridge with such a high suicide rate, it has the potential to make one happier than you could ever imagine.

   By the time I reached Sam's bar in Tiburon, I was apt to die from thirst. My legs wobbled with every step, and my arms were stiff from gripping the handlebars, and my veins cried out for their alcohol fix. I ate an entire crab and downed two pints of water before I met my first whiskey and swallowed the tongue of a Spanish girl who was passing through San Francisco Bay, having just won a campervan in Vegas. We spent the night in the back of said campervan exploring each other's anatomy, against the advice of the little leather book that told me to catch the last ferry back across the water before sundown.

   The next morning, I read the next page: Catch the first ferry back from Tiburon. Thank the locals for their hospitality.

   I could picture the grin on the author's face. It looked just like my own as I read it.

   The next month was spent in Chinatown. The biggest Chinatown outside of China. You could spend a year there, and not see it all. From all the nodding head toys in the shop windows to the delicious fishmongers, from Chinese Six Companies to the Japanese Tea Garden (where the fortune cookie was born), I ate and drank until my stomach inflated to twice its size. And never before had, and never again have, I eaten Chop Suey that tasted as good as that which I ate there, in the city of its invention. 

   Wearing jeans that were invented in SF by Levi Strauss, to supply gold miners with just the durability they required from their clothes.

   To nurse my hangovers every morning, I was directed to one of San Fran's three hundred coffee shops. Sometimes I'd boost myself with three espressos, and sometimes I'd go all out and have an Irish coffee. I don't want to go on about the inventions of this amazing Californian city, but Irish coffee is another one. This is what the diary told me, and I believe every word. Anyway, I'd sit every morning in the window of Peet's or Caffe Trieste (where it's said that Francis Ford Coppola wrote most of the Godfather trilogy), and watch the trendy and beautiful California girls strut past in the stunning morning sun. The diary informed me that I would be blown away by this view, and my eyes confirmed it.

   More rum and whiskey and sambuca and cheesecake later, my leather-bound advisor ordered me to ride a Segway down the second crookedest street in San Francisco. It instructed me to watch a film in one of the city's many old theatres. It had me eating seafood on Fisherman's Wharf, and riding those nightmarish cable cars up the steep hills.  It said I should eat at Tony's in North Beach (so named because it was once a beach, but now lies a long distance inland due to landfill), perhaps the best pizzeria in the world. It told me to bet ten dollars on the Giants, and hand the winnings over to one of the hundreds of homeless people wandering the streets. I did just that. 

   Did you know that AT&T Park is the windiest stadium in the world? It has a Giant fan in every seat!

   I can't claim that one. My beautiful tour guide told me that.

*

   And as the pages I had left to read thinned, I began to wish that there was space to add my own experiences. The things I'd done that didn't appear in my guide. Like when I visited the Castro district looking for fun-loving boys and girls (and regretted it, having feared for my life in the streets on the journey there); or the time I emptied the contents of my wallet into a homeless man's collection tin because he was hiding behind a handful of branches on Fisherman's Wharf and jumping out at unsuspecting passersby, much to my endless amusement; or when I ate Ghirardelli ice cream; or when I received a demonstration of the mechanical working of jail cell doors from a stunning drama student and watched the sun go down from Alcatraz island; or when I visited the sea lions at pier 39; or when I took a free dancing lesson in Union Square to a live brass band; or when I ate a breakfast burrito at the Cheesecake Factory that was the size of my leg...

   But there wasn't space. Right to the end, the entries took me to places I'd never even dreamed I would end up. And the book was right - if not that they were stranger than fiction, at the very least that they were better. Who needed imagination or falseness when the reality was this good? I took so much enjoyment in their contents, in fact, that it was only by chance that I noticed that the last of them was dated just a few weeks before I'd arrived in San Francisco. Just a month or so before I had stepped into this city where I now felt like I was born to live, someone else was living the life that I had been living over the past year and was writing the words that would allow me to start. 

   I felt like I had to meet them.

   I scoured the book looking for clues as to the identity of my own personal saviour. I scanned and scraped for an address, a website, anything. I even tore part of the leather binding off before I found it, written in the tiniest writing imaginable:

IF FOUND UNFINISHED, 

PLEASE RETURN TO M. TWAIN, 

CITY LIGHTS BOOKSTORE

*

   So I entered the shop, book in hand, holding it out in front of me as if to pass it to the lady behind the counter. I gazed from shelf to shelf, mystified by all the American cover art for my favourite books and puzzled by the absence of Mr Twain behind the counter, as if I expected him to be waiting for me to enter the bookstore, my tail wagging as it was. I must have looked like a child, lost in a supermarket. 

   'Can I help you, sir?' asked the assistant, looking up from her writing and smiling sweetly.

   'Erm, yes,' I replied, looking down at the book, 'is Mr M Twain here?'

   'M Twain?'

   'Yes.'

   'Mark Twain?'

   'I suppose. Quite possibly, yes.' I grinned foolishly at her, excited to hear that she knew him. 

   'Yes, we have Mark Twain. We sort our authors alphabetically by surname, so you'll find him under T.'

   I followed her pointing biro with my eye and reached a bookshelf, my heart sinking further with each heartbeat. 

   Of course. Mark Twain, the author. I should have realised. He was the one that said The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. And how wrong he was.

   I hadn’t found the author of my diary. I’d just found the next step he wanted me to take.

   'Can I do anything else for you?' the assistant asked, as I stood agape in the doorway of her shop. 

   Grabbing a Twain book, along with a Salinger and a couple of good Bukowskis, I placed the little black book in my pocket, and retrieved my wallet. 'I'll just take these,' I replied, before paying and shuffling out in a near-run.

   I went to The Daily Grill, ate the best New York Pepper I’d ever eaten, and left the little leather book behind. 

Miles and Miles

thethemeis: What Happened Next?
theauthoris: LiamD

    As he walked through the heavy fire doors into Heathrow Departure Lounge 81, Miles Henderson glanced timidly toward the smooth, steel machine that towered above all else on the opposite side of the room. At approximately two and a half metres high, the device was admittedly not a great deal taller than himself, yet this particular object held certain ominous connotations in Mr Henderson’s mind. The room itself was barely as large as his lounge at home; it wouldn’t take him long to reach his destination. Briefly suspending his slow, deliberate walk toward the Instagrater Terminal, he stopped in the centre of the room and took a deep breath.

  ‘Take all the time you need, sir.’ the smiling attendant in the blood red uniform suggested. ‘And remember, it’s perfectly natural to have second thoughts. If at any point you decide that you no longer wish to go through with it, you only have to say.’ She flashed him a smile with her full red lips that Miles was sure had given many men before him the courage to walk through the terminal without a single look back and surely, if Miles wasn’t fifty years her elder, he may have felt the need to prove his own manhood. But while there were many downsides to growing old, one of the few aspects he enjoyed was a seemingly unconditional kindness and sympathy from young ladies, regardless of how he acted toward them.

   He thanked her, and as she moved back toward the lounge entrance to greet her next customer, Miles nearly jumped at the low drawl which addressed him from beside the terminal. In his pensive state, he had momentarily forgotten about the most important member of staff in the building.

   ‘Good afternoon Mr Henderson, my name is Jack Eastleigh and I’ll be your pilot today.’ He held out a hand and Miles shook it firmly. ‘I’m afraid we’ve been so busy that I didn’t get a chance to read your customer records. Have you Instagrated before?’

   ‘Not exactly…’ Miles murmured, mostly to himself. In a sense he had done it before. In his mind he had run through the Instagration process thousands of times. The short walk to the local terminal, the quick I.D. scan and baggage check-in, the ever-so-brief wait in the now frankly redundant waiting room, the chaperone to the terminal and the brief chat with the pilot before stepping into the Instagrater and being on his merry way. There was but one detail about the process he didn’t know, a question that had plagued him for the forty years that this technology had been around and had made him walk away from his current location time and time again: What Happened Next?

   What bugged Miles the most about this question was that nobody knew the answer for sure. It was impossible to prove. To describe the process as teleportation, to simply say that the Instagrater zapped you from A to B would be the epitome of over-simplification. Despite the commercial attempts at a friendly name for the service, it was the science behind the transport that Miles had come to half-understand and half-fear. An Instagratee, once ready, would be sealed inside the device and literally disintegrated. At the exact same moment of being disintegrated the ‘passenger’ would be reintegrated inside an identical Instagrater at their chosen destination.

   It wasn’t even these technicalities that Miles feared exactly; billions used the service every day and he had not once even heard a whisper of the reintegration process going wrong. Miles’s fear was a more philosophical one. As a man who had been raised by well-meaning Christian parents (an ideology he later rejected entirely), Miles found it incredibly difficult to reject the notion of the human soul. That is not to say he believed in an afterlife and an all-loving God (as mentioned, he rejected the ideologies - later came to loathe them), yet he struggled to accept his conscious mind and sense of self as by-products of his physical body, molecules that could be destroyed and recreated without him noticing. As far as he was concerned, the walk to the Instagrater could well be his last. Sure, an exact copy of himself would walk out the other side believing the whole process went swimmingly and go on living his life, but what consolation was the continued existence of an (admittedly perfect) clone to an original who had ceased to exist?

   When all was said and done, Miles was afraid to die and for that he could not reasonably be blamed.

So he had never gone through with it. Once he had even entered the Instagrater itself (surprisingly bare on the inside, he noted at the time) before the fear had once again become too much and he had turned tail, fleeing home. That had been the winter of ‘56, nearly twenty years ago now. Then it was thoughts of Kate, his dear companion who he couldn’t bare to part with, that had stopped him from taking the trip.  Now she was gone, peacefully at least, but gone all the same, and with her, the last of his family and true friends.

   Yep, he thought to himself. No one left now, I wouldn’t be anywhere near this thing if they weren’t.

   ‘Let’s just be done with it.’ grunted Miles and without a further word he walked inside the terminal,  prepared for the worst. The steel doors closed smoothly behind him.

---

   Inside Arrival Pod 81 of the LAX Instagration Port, Miles Henderson was recovering from a brief tickling sensation. Slowly the pod doors opened to reveal a room not entirely dissimilar from the one he had recently left. If the man now standing in front of him smiling hadn't been there, he would have sworn that he hadn't been transported at all.

   'Congratulations Mr Henderson!' the stranger in the casual blue jeans and smart white shirt jubilantly exclaimed. 'You've just successfully Instagrated. How do you feel?'

   Miles looked at him blankly. This perhaps was the one eventuality of the trip he had failed to prepare for. 'I feel like a stubborn old fool!' he exclaimed, though not without a smile on his lips, and promptly left the building.

   

Life Just Went On

thethemeis: What Happened Next

theauthoris: Aaron Twentythree

   What happened next is that life just... went on. Despite everyone's flapping, despite all those so highly strung, despite everything that was intended to go so catastrophically wrong and all the contingency plans that had been conceived to mitigate it all, an eternity more of mundaneness just happened.

   The weather got worse, and then it got better. It got hotter, then it got colder, then it started again. Global warming didn't cook us all, nor did global cooling turn us to tormented stalagmites, forever frozen in an expression of terrified bewilderment. Aliens never visited, animals never grew intelligent enough to take over, and Jurassic Park never became a prophetic masterpiece. Religion didn't die out, but nor did it grow. Everything just hobbled along as it had done before.

   Gay marriage was legalised. And after that, no one who was heterosexual before suddenly became gay. No kids suddenly switched, and nor were "family values" eroded. People just lived, and they lived happily. People who were oppressed were not so oppressed anymore, and on the whole everyone went on with their lives just the same. Some people continued to be phobic, but that was mainly those too unintelligent to even be worth listening to.

   Microsoft didn't go out of business when the next version of Windows came out. All those predictions of public disgust and destruction of a behemoth technology company turned out to be just the ravings of obsessive lunatics. In actuality, critics hailed it as the best operating system ever installed onto tablet computers. It never beat the iPad in terms of commercial success, but by then nothing could. PlayStation kept grappling with XBox, Google kept on wrestling Bing, Coke stayed better than Pepsi, the East and the West continued to bicker, capitalism and communism each held on to their delusional followers, history continued to rewrite itself onto the future. 

   Tax loopholes were never closed. The rich continued to pay the same amounts as the poor, sometimes even less. The poor continued to wish they were rich, so that they could avoid tax too. Questionable expenses continued to be put through and approved by everyone with any authority working for any organisation with spendable budget, and no rules against any of it were ever paid any attention. Money became valuable, then it became worthless, then the next day it happened again. 

   The unintelligent continued to buy terrible literature, as did the intelligent. The smart bought as much printed slush as the stupid, and the thick bought as many masterpieces as did the clever. The best sellers continued to be only those novels that had started out as terrible fanfiction and ended up as terrible books, or else those novels that had just been released as major motion pictures or HBO TV series. The same old artists exhibited their paintings year after year, the same old critics complained that art wasn't art anymore, and the same old punters handed over their money to be in the middle of it all. Exactly the same could be said of any creative industry - nothing ever changed in the world of film, music or advertising to bring the human race to its knees, despite the warnings that it would. 

   Planes continued to take off and land, cars continued to pull off and park, and trains carried on stopping at stations and choo-choo-chooing between them. When they went wrong, nothing really changed. Problems were dealt with. People managed.

   The same scientific discoveries were made every year. Cancer and AIDS were never cured, but nor did they wipe out the human race. We learnt just as much about our universe as we forgot about ourselves; then we studied ourselves and forgot the universe, until it all balanced out. Some people forever cared more about hair gel than they did about DNA, and others eternally concerned themselves with dark matter, rather than KY Jelly.

   Football teams went up, and football teams went down. Basketball teams won, and basketball teams lost. Athletes rose, set world records, and then fell. Fans followed sport more obsessively than they loved their spouses, even though it still made no tangible impact on their day-to-day lives. For every team that fell from grace, another stepped up to take its place. 

   No teenage boy's life ended because he split up with his girlfriend. No female died of loneliness. The most romantic man never walked the earth, and nor did the swooningest woman. People lived, people died, people loved, people laughed, people danced and ran and cried and hated each other and created and destroyed, and none of them was any better or worse than any other.

   And so it continued.

   What happened next is that the everything stayed exactly the same. Forever more, planet Earth silently strived to convince the human race that the devastating endings they dreamed up for themselves were just make believe. It continued to turn, and they continued to ignore it. So fixated were they on panicking themselves with fictions of terrible pandemics and monopolies and injustices that they missed the lasting, glaring, obvious fact: life always has, and always will, go on; and the best way to endure it will forever be to enjoy it. 

Erm...

thethemeis: Shame
theauthoris: Deadbeat

I just stood there starring at the floor.

“What the fuck man!”

The only bare section of carpet in which a complete version of it’s pattern could be seen was between the chair and the wall. Five and a half pattern lengths by eight and a bit the room was.

“Are you actually going to say anything?”

My fingers were dancing. It wasn’t their usual measured & co-ordinated jig. They skittered and tripped, frantically trying to work out the pressure growing in my pounding head. It was a futile effort.

“Do you even remember what you did last night?”

It was something to do with the kitchen. I’m sure there were many things, but the really bad one involved the kitchen. I couldn’t see it from where I was standing. I’d been confronted before I had the opportunity to check on the results of my previous night's actions. Perhaps i'm wrong. Domestic issues can be easily forgiven, he looks far angry than that. How long has that newspaper been under the sofa.

"You do this all the fucking time! You get so pissed up that you don't know what you're doing and you fuck it up for the rest of us."

This is definitely about more than the kitchen (unless i've broken his Jura Impressa 27, chrome). I must've done something to damage our reputation. That's always the problem when I get on the charlie. Nine times out of ten i'm the bomb. My wits are sharp, the girls love me and the guys hate me. But every now and then it goes horribly wrong and I come off as an absolute cock. Perhaps that's it, maybe I went rogue and fucked it up for the other guys who were onto a sure thing.

I switch my view from the floor to the new Sony 65" LED backlight TV, HD & 3D. The news is on, something about atrocities in some North African country. I know it's important to stay on top of current affairs, but I struggle to motivate myself to do so. Personal i've never found it that useful, my conversation is always built more around the moment. I wonder if always carrying things on your head like that has some sort of long term effects on the brain.

"So what was she like than, was it worth it?"

She? Who's he talking about. There was no one in my bed this morning. I say morning, it is nearly noon. Maybe she's already gone. Why would he be angry though? Unless... Marisa, she was there last night. I wouldn't though, would I? I mean, I definitely would! Who wouldn't? But I wouldn't actually. We have always got along though and she wouldn't have any problem doing it, not the way it ended between them. If it was Marisa then it's a cruel shame that I can't remember the night's events but still face the repercussions.

The Warehouse

thethemeis: Shame
theauthoris: LiamD

   ‘It’s a real shame y’know,’ a ridiculously stereotyped Brooklyn accent tells me as I awaken. Like most voices I hear for the first time, this one sounds familiar, yet I can’t quite place my finger on where I have heard it before. Perhaps I never will. Much of my body aches and a connection between my physical state and the passive aggressive tone of my acquaintance becomes apparent. I cautiously open my eyes and try to stop them widening in shock when they see the gun pointed toward my face, close enough for me to read the embossed ‘COLT’ and patent information that runs across the steel barrel. The hand inside the leather glove that holds the pistol steady belongs to a well-dressed young man with clean, slicked-back hair. If he wasn’t pointing a gun at a man bound to a chair who had been asleep not two minutes ago, I might have thought him respectable.

   ‘A guy with your… skills… could make a lot of money working for the boss.’ he tempts. In spite of myself, I have to disguise a suicidal snigger at his pronunciation of the last word, and how it could almost rhyme with paws. He pauses for a moment, perhaps awaiting a response. If so, I don’t give him one. Instead I think about the connotations of what he is saying. If someone has found out what I do, I can sure see the potential benefits of having me as a ‘friend’. The problem is, my little trick is far from reliable, and if these people are as shady as this gentleman implies, I doubt they would have much sympathy or patience on my ‘off’ days. My best hope at this stage is escape.

   ‘What’s going on? Who are you?’ I ask in what I hope is a confused tone. I scan the room in front of me, trying not to move my head too much. The last thing I want to do is excite his trigger finger.

   The room we’re in is some sort of warehouse, I’ve gathered that much. Behind my captor is a large, green-coated machine with a jagged metal feed tray that disappears into its belly and presumably connects to the long conveyor belt emerging from it’s rear end. It’s neighboured at either side by identical machines in a row which spans the entire width of the room – about one hundred metres give or take. There must be at least thirty of these beasts in total. From the messy spats of ink on and around each unit I guess them to be industrial printers. Whatever they are they clearly haven’t been used in a while, and that thought above all others scares me; I can’t think of many reasons to bring someone to a place like this.

   ‘If you don’t quit with that “Where am I?” shit, you get a bullet in your skull, capisce?’ This time I don’t dream of laughing, all the faux-humour from his face has faded and I’m left eyeballing an angry man with a gun. I nod slowly. His voice, that which was earlier so deceptively good-natured and breathy, is now harsh and nasal.

   ‘I’m trying to help you here, pal. Not many people get a second chance after crossing the boss.’ He sighs, as if genuinely distressed at my predicament, or perhaps at himself for losing patience, before continuing in his previous warmer tone. ‘Killing you… that would be a real shame.’ I feel my aching muscles tighten as he speaks the worst aloud. Is murder his priority? I’m not convinced, but the thought of it still frightens me. His eyes have something about them. They are the cold blue eyes of a killer.

   This may just be the worst case scenario playing out before my eyes. Even if I can loosen this rope that binds my hands together there’s no cover nearby, no getting away from a jerk of his index finger and the bullet that would follow.

   ‘Last chance, bub. Whaddya say…’ he is cut off mid-sentence by a shrill ringing coming from a nearby desk. After racking my brains I recognise it as the sound of an old-fashioned phone. The phone he answers is in fact ancient by todays standards, not that I have any idea what day it is…

   ‘Y’ello?’ he pauses after answering and makes subtle improvements to his mannerisms, some visual. ‘…Yeah I’m here with him now boss…’

   While he’s distracted I frantically examine my immediate area, there must be something around here that can help me escape a bullet in the head. I realise I’m panicking and force myself to calm down. Closing my eyes, I count to five slowly, then open them and take a fresh look around. Nothing too far away can help me, I’ve established that. What is there nearby? I come close to giving up hope when my head droops and I finally see it. There, on the floor no more than thirty centimetres to the right of my chair, is the solution to my problem.

   ‘…Are you sure? Think of the things he could do for y… …yes boss, I’m sorry, whatever you say… no boss, you won’t have to do that at all, I’ll get right on it…’ He turns back to me sporting a grim smile, apparently not noticing the serene expression that has replaced the flood of anxiety I had previously felt. His telephone conversation and morbid grin should leave me unnerved, but instead I’m feeling the enchanting pulse of excitement, maybe even with a hint of confidence.

   ‘Sorry, kid.’ He says. ‘Looks like you should’ve taken the lifeline while you had the chance.’ He raises the colt so it’s once again pointed towards my face, tells me one last time:

   ‘It’s such a shame,’

   then fires his weapon.

An Unusual Love

thethemeis: Shame

theauthoris: Aaron Twentythree

   A lot of people I talk to about this ask me if I've ever had sex with women, and if I think I'd enjoy it. Of course I have. Hasn't everyone? It was ok, but it's not what I want. It's not what my body needs. I heard someone say once, 'the heart just wants what the heart wants,' and that's exactly true. I can't change the way I am just to suit the warped perceptions of others. If they have a problem with what I enjoy in my private life, then that's their issue to deal with, not mine. They should mind their own business. I don't go barging into their houses telling them how to chop their onions.

   But still, the shame eats me up. I can't reveal to anyone new what I'm into. I'm sure a lot of people would be fine with it, but there's a heartless few who would scoff and judge and treat me like a freak, an animal that should be caged up. Only a few close friends know just how deep this goes. I certainly can't tell my parents, they'd disown me for sure. They're so hung up on what the neighbours think of them that I'd be excommunicated before I could even say, 'I'm sorry, but...'

   So instead, I'm writing it down. Once and for all, I'm admitting that the love that I've found in life is less usual than you'd expect from someone who is in every other respect as everyday and normal as I am. I'm telling the world, and if the world doesn't want to deal with it then that's the world's problem. I'm shedding the shame, so that others just like me can follow suit without fear or delay.

   Here it is, for you to get over:

   I am in love with my car.