Plot Medics&nbsp;

I used the August picture prompts (small versions shown below) for this one, after a minor bout of blank-brained panic.

20 Minute Megan (417 words)

The power for the gateway went out for twenty minutes. It should never have been able to happen, there were backup systems in place but budget cuts and privatisation of the London gateway network and transitional difficulties and changes of management and blah. Someone in TransTech was reluctantly seen off with a golden boot up the arse.

All Megan remembered was the star buckles on her red shoes twinkling as she ran for the gateway, late for school as always, running as always, always wanting to be faster. Her mum waving, then shouting as the indicator lights on the gateway slid to zero. A blink of black, then she was outside her school in Tokyo as usual, running as usual. She was famous for a while, the girl who was lost in the portal system, nowhere for twenty minutes.

She still ran everywhere the gates could take her. But now sometimes she liked to stand still and look, to compose her view. She became an explorer and a talented imagist.

When she was awake, all she remembered of the twenty minutes was that blink of black. But in her dreams, her feet still twinkled in stardust.
#
Cambrax had settled long ago in a grassy spot with a big sky. The young ‘uns liked to trundle from place to place, but Cambrax reckoned standing still was the way to see things. He was so old that the stone was coming on him, but he didn’t mind. He breathed once a year, he drank a little rain and he sat firm in the ground. He was still enough that he could sense the magma sloshing about far below his feet, and hear the echoes between the stars. Everything he saw and heard was engraved on his quartz brain.

One day when he was stilled and his spark had gone back to the magma, they’d chip his brain out of his head and put it with the other Archives. And if you sang the right note, and looked the right way you’d see what he’d seen, the ordinary, the strange and the impossible. Like the comet that had blinked into the night sky, run a short arc, and blinked into blackness again. But you wouldn’t feel its love of speed like he had. It had blazed through Cambrax's veins. He still stayed on his grassy spot, but now sometimes he rumbled around on his axis. He liked to get some fresh scenery and a different angle on the sky.

"Ghostwritten" by Gaie Sebold 08/08/2008

Stories about writers are often seen as a little self-indulgent - stories about genre writers by genre writers, perhaps even more so. But having met more than one version of George, let's say I'm just...yeah. I'm being self-indulgent.

Sue me.

Ghostwritten (999 words)

At the launch party, gossip moved to Clarice Meadows, the author considered single-handedly responsible for reviving the moribund horror genre.

“She’s a hack,” George Fordyce said.

“I read one of her stories,” said the author whose party it was. “Not my sort of thing, but it definitely had something. She’s had some good reviews.”

“From grubby little populists desperate to look ‘down with the kids’.” George gulped his wine.

“ ‘Down with the kids?’ George, if you can’t keep up with the current slang, please don’t try.”

“I was trying to make a point.”

“Look, I need to talk to some people. I’ll see you later.”

George glared after her. Of course, she’d been published, now, hadn’t she? Soon she’d be like Meadows, churning out pap for the masses, while a writer like George, a serious literary writer, was left out in the cold.

He went home, stuffing a bottle of wine in his shoulder bag.

A parcel was jammed in his letterbox. George wrestled it out, and tore up the rejection letter. Hacks and grubbers, the lot of them. He didn’t pander, didn’t give readers nice little fictional lollipops, he took them by the scruff and forced them to stare into the blinding light of his unique vision.

At least he would, if he could get any readers.

He opened the bottle, and thumbed the remote.

“And next on Booklist, we’ll be talking to publishing phenomenon Clarice Meadows…”

George stared disbelievingly at the TV.

There she was. A slight woman with a nervous half-smile.

Oh, the faux-timidity of that smile, the calculated softness of that voice, forcing the interviewer to lean in, as though he were really interested! Perhaps he was, perhaps he had been taken in, but George wasn’t. George knew.

He threatened her with the remote, sneering. He could turn her off any time. But he wanted to hear what sort of rubbish she talked.

“You’re not what people expect of a horror writer. Why did you decide on this particular genre?”

She laughed. “You mean I should wear black and have really long fingernails?”

“Something like that,” the interviewer said, laughing too, how chummy they were. Bile rose in George’s throat.

“I look terrible in black and gardening wrecks my nails.” Oh, this was good, she was trying to look serious. “Horror was my first love. I think it’s a way of finding patterns in the terrible things that happen to us. But really, I feel as though the stories chose me.” She shrugged. “ ‘The tale, not he who tells it.’ Some stories have an energy of their own. They want to be told.”

George spat. Stories, indeed. It was about style, about impact. Stories were for kids.

“I’m not generally a horror fan, but I read Shadowfold, and I could not put it down. When’s the next in the series coming out?”

“Not for a while! I haven’t finished it yet.”

“But now,” the interviewer twinkled, “we’ve a special treat – an extract from the unpublished manuscript!”

She started reading, stuff about living eyes in a dead tree, and footsteps without feet.

“Bollocks!” George shrieked, leaping to his feet and aiming the remote at her. He accidentally hit the volume control, her words boomed out like the Voice of God, and his neighbour thumped the wall. He turned it up full, just to show them, then turned it off. Eyes in trees, and stories that wanted to be told, indeed.

Two days later, George was at another launch party for a Robert somebody. He’d never read the book but the editor was supposed to be there. He had already rejected George’s novel, but George wanted to talk to him face to face, convince him he could improve on the rubbish he was currently publishing. George’s temper hadn’t been improved by staring at an advert for one of the wretched Meadows woman’s books all the way on the tube.

The editor wasn’t there. Instead, there was a flurry at the door and no, it couldn’t be.

“Clarice!” Robert whoever said, “I can’t believe you made it.”

“Robert, I’m so pleased for you, you really deserve this.”

They hugged. George felt like vomiting.

He glared at Clarice Meadows’ back. She ought to be able to feel his contempt, burning a hole in her spine, but no, she was chatting away, oblivious.

Later, after the idiots had smarmed over her, he watched her leave.

He followed.

He only meant to tell her what he thought, but somehow, in the alley, thinking of the poster, the recognition, the money, that should be his…his temper got the better of him.

And he got away with it.

He didn’t think he had at first; there were footsteps behind him, and he’d waited, fear clogging his throat, for the shout, the hand on his shoulder, but when he turned, there was no-one there.

He waited for a guilt that never came. He watched the reports of her weeping fans with chilly derision. He’d rid the world of a creeping poison; and the experience would surely deepen and inform his own writing.

But now he was having problems with his work. Things were sneaking in, things that didn’t belong there.

Stupid, melodramatic things.

He found himself, in the middle of a scene where two people sat in a car park discussing the failure of their relationship, writing about footsteps. Footsteps with no feet.

He was tired, that’s all. Stressed. It wasn’t surprising, with rejections still piling up. She was dead, surely people should be turning back to real literature?

He went back to the scene. There were trees around the car park.

Some of them were dead.

They had eyes in them. Living eyes in dead, rotting wood.

George yelped and hit delete.

And started again.

***

Eventually his neighbour found him, rigid and whimpering at his computer, staring at his hands as they typed words he loathed, words that he could never even sell.

But words that insisted on being written.

"The Screaming Abdabs" by Sarah Ellender 08/01/2008

Um. No comment.

The Screaming Abdabs (996 words)

I don’t want to get up in the night. That’s when the screaming abdabs crawl around on the carpet. If you see one, you end up in here. But the drugs They give me mess up my body, make me sleepy in the day and wide-awake at night when the abdabs and the woofs and the lurkers are in the carpets and the curtains and the walls.

Most of the time They tell us there aren’t any. But every now and again, one of Them will take one of us aside to tell what will really happen if the abdabs get you. You have to be at least two inches above the carpet so they can’t. I lowered a piece of string over the edge of the bed to check, and their snatching claws couldn’t reach higher than that.

But tonight the back door is going to be open. The nurse with the pink lipstick and the fake-nice smile is on duty, and she leaves it unlocked every Friday so her boyfriend can sneak in with pizza. They think we’re stupider than wet paper bags, but Skippity Lou has ears like a bat, and when we can, we pass messages.

I’ve worked on this for weeks. I’ve taken the wooden trains from the playroom every day and made happy choo-choo noises and looked blank-eye doped until They accepted that the trains are mine. I’m short and skinny and I’ve only got little feet. I can balance, one foot on each train and skate over the carpet in my room to the safe lino of the hall.

Nurse Fake-nice comes into my room a little before sunset.

“Did you read your nice story?” she asks.

It’s not a story, it’s a guided meditation. There is one in the Book for every day of the year, after the list of Rules. We have to read one every night, and tomorrow they will shine lights and put wires on my head and ask what did you dream what did you see. But I just nod.

She picks up the trains from the windowsill. “You’re not a baby any more. I’ll tidy these away.”

I feel like screaming. Instead I smile. “But I like them.”

“We must learn not to be selfish,” she says. She turns the light off from the switch outside the door. The evening sun shines on the stupid bunnies in trousers smirking at me from the plastic-covered picture on the other side of the room. I think and I think and it gets dark.

I saw Big Eric throw a chair at a window last week and it bounced off. Everything in here is bolted and strapped down. I let my eyes get wide and I can see the rounded black shapes of the furniture. I can climb on it, but there is only a bed, a cabinet, and a chair. Not enough to get me to the door. Maybe if I stood on the bed, I could swing and jump from the light. But if I fell short, I’d land on the carpet.

There’s nothing else in here, except the Book. But the Book is very thick. I could tie it to my feet with a strip from my nightie. I can’t rip the material even with my teeth, and there are no sharp corners on the furniture to tear it on.

I crawl to the end of the bed, stand and jump. The bolted-down chair can’t teeter over or slide. It only makes a little whumpf as I land on it. I have to stretch on tiptoe and lean right over to tip the stupid smirking bunny picture off the wall. It thumps to the floor, and I wait, with my heart banging. After a few moments I take off my nightie, hook a bit on the nail head and pull and pull. Finally it rips, the sound zip-tearing the quiet. I put the nightie back on, jump to the bed, and tie the Book to my feet with the torn strip.

I am careful with my first jump, but still it makes noise. I must hurry. My second jump is awkward, and I have to windmill my arms to stay upright. The third takes me nearly to the door, and the light flicks on.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Fake-nice stands in the dorrway.

“I needed to pee.” We’re not allowed up at night, but if you wet the bed They bend over you to slap and pinch and punish, hiding it from the cameras. She’ll believe that I’d want to go.

“Get off the Book and back into bed. And calm down or you’ll make yourself sick.”

“I can’t get off it. The abdabs will get me.”

“You’re too old for all that nonsense.”

“I really need to pee!”

“If you won’t calm down, we’ll have to help you,” she says. But she doesn’t move to strap me in or jab me with a needle or slap me. She’s still on the very edge of the safe slippy lino. She hasn’t put one toe into my room, where I can see a forest of tiny grasping claws waving above the carpet.

She’s afraid. But she told me to get off the Book. And if one of us dies in here, there’s always an awful fuss, and people get the sack. And I suddenly see, she’s afraid of me. I slowly untie the Book from my feet, and step down onto the carpet. It’s like dropping a stone in a pond, ripples spread out as the ab-dabs make room and turn face out around me. The lurkers slide along the walls, the woofs boom from the curtains. When I move, they move with me.

Fake-nice’s face is all big round ‘O’s. She turns and runs. I suppose she’s going somewhere with no walls, or carpets or curtains. I have plenty of time to get the others. We skippity outside, hand in hand.

"Goodnight Moon" by Gaie Sebold 07/25/2008

Goodnight Moon (100 words, including title)

The path across the sea gleams gold, then red. Next should be silver – but the silver path never appears.
The sea once licked the cliffs twice a day; her magic rose with it. There were pools, where limpets with their delicate striated shells clung, where anemones tossed tendrilled hair, and shrunk with the retreating tide to fat shiny jewels. There, at low tide, magic hid.

Now the pools have dried, and she with them. Once she danced the moon’s path; now she is a husk, an empty shell washed up on the shoreline; now, there is no moon.

"Sunshine Underground" by Sarah Ellender 07/18/2008

Here's another one from the Scottish writing retreat. Each member of the group wrote a few song titles on separate pieces of folded paper. We each picked one and then had 20 minutes to write a story of exactly 100 words, including the title.

Sunshine Underground (100 words, including title)

It has taken generations. Tunnelling up to the surface cost a tenth of our number; crushed by falling rock, snatched by beasts that slide in the dark, sickened by the Grey Wasting if they stayed too long at the top. The expedition beyond the far caverns to fetch the crystal spent more lives, and we polished away days and months.

Finally all of the lenses and mirrors are in place. We wait for the sun to rise, for the touch of our god to reach us in exile. As we wait, we draw lots for the first sacrifice.

"A Storm is Coming" by Gaie Sebold 07/14/2008

This came out of a writing exercise while the Plot Medics were away enjoying themselves in the wilds of Scotland (thus the late posting of this week's flash - we were Beyond Broadband). The exercise involved taking three pictures at random from a stock of images and writing for 20 minutes, including all three images in the story. I got a woman in a red dress, a young man perched on a framework seeking something in the distance, and...well, you'll see.

A Storm is Coming (996 words)

“I keep expecting someone to shout, “Unmask, Unmask!” The woman in the red dress complained.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” Her companion, a chunky, middle aged man, danced quite well, but the woman in red, whose name was Gwynneth, was beginning to realise he was a bore, at least by her rather exacting standards. She didn’t want to be stuck with him all night. “Edgar Allen Poe? The Mask ofthe Red Death?” He looked blank.

"Is that something else we're supposed to be worried about?" He said. "The Red Death? I thought what with all this.." he waved at the shuttered windows, "we had enough problems."

"Never mind," Gwynneth said. "But you never know, do you? Everyone's been talking about climate change for years, but I don't think anyone expected this, either."

"I certainly didn't," he said, his tone indicating that his very lack of expectation should have prevented any of this from happening, if the world were properly organised.

Gwynneth excused herself to go find a drink.

The bar staff had obviously decided to go for broke – they’d just loaded a table with everything in the cellar and scarpered, God knew where to; it wouldn’t be outside, at any rate.

Gwynneth poured herself a generous glass of a fairly decent merlot that the scavenging hordes had missed, and looked around for anyone interesting. She had no idea how long she was goingto be stuck here, and with the television reception erratic verging on nonexistent, and consisting mostly of weather reports, there was no point sitting in her room.

She couldn’t see anyone she fancied talking to. It was just her luck, she thought, to be caught at a hotel largely given over to a conference of timeshare salespeople. Several had already tried to interest her in property in Greenland.

The only other people seemed to be a stag-night, one of whose guests had tried to grope her but had been so drunk he had missed, and a small, morose group of car-salesmen, who were huddled in a corner drinking away the last of their wages and hoping to avoid being spotted by any of the other trapped guests. She only knew they were car-salesmen because she had seen them arriving with another man, who in a moment of drunken fury, had jumped onto a table, told everyone what he did, and started ranting that it wasn’t his fault and why did everyone blame him, he was just trying to make a living?

The remaining hotel staff – there were still a few around at that point – had bundled him out, but she was pretty certain at least one of them had put the boot in, and she hadn’t seen the man since.

Gwynneth wandered out of the badly decorated and rather chilly ballroom and down a side corridor, pushed open an anonymous white-painted door and found a set of worn-carpeted stairs. For lack of anything better to do, she went up them.

The patchy paint and dull colours seemed to suggest that these were staff quarters. Further along, she could hear a much livelier party than the one downstairs.

No harm in trying, she thought. She still had the rest of the merlot, it might act as a party-passport. She glanced at a window as she passed; the flat middle-of-nowhere landscape was already darkening under its fuzzy orange haze of pollution.

The room was crammed with people in the hotel’s blue and lavender uniforms, and several in the white of porters, cleaning staff and cooks.   In the middle of the room, an iron staircase led up to a roof opening. Several people were clustered around it, looking up.

It was still open. Gwynneth raised her eyebrows, and pushed her way through the crowd. Despite the fact that it was obvious from her dress, no-one seemed to notice or care that she was a guest.

She drained her glass, paused for a moment, then shoved the corked bottle in her bag and climbed the narrow stairs onto the roof. The sky looked ill and bruised. Against it, she could see some kind of iron framework where a young man was perched, peering south. People were yelling at him to come down.

“We’re shutting the hatch if you don’t,” someone shouted.

“Just a minute,” he yelled back. “I want to see if I can spot them.”

But the wind must have changed. The first toad caught him on the back of the neck. The few people still on the roof screamed and scrambled down the stairs as he flailed and lost his balance, tipped forward, and held on with one hand, legs kicking. He just managed to catch a foothold when the rest of the stormfront came in, and toads began to pelt from the sky, splatting against the roof.

People were screaming to shut the hatch, shut the hatch. “Oh for Christ’s sake,” Gwynneth said. She pushed through the yelling, arguing mass and ran up to the top step, and held out her arms. “Jump! I’ll catch you!” He looked at her panic-stricken and his foot slid from the railing. She tried to catch his flailing legs but they were too high up. “Come on!”

He dropped, right onto her, knocking her back down the steps into the room below. A dozen people slammed the roof hatch shut, while more stamped on the few toads that had fallen through. The noise of them hitting the roof was like wet thunder.

Gwynneth, winded, dragged herself out from under the young man. A toad had landed in her cleavage. She picked it out, and looked at it. It looked back with bright, gold eyes. All around people were screaming and killing them. “Poor thing,” she said to the toad. “It’s not your fault, is it?”

She got up, took the wine out of her handbag, left it on a table, and carefully put the toad in instead. Then she left the party, shutting the door behind her.

"Demon Driven" by Sarah Ellender 07/04/2008

This one came from staring out a train window, listening to "Supermassive Black Hole" by Muse, and "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'" by the Scissor Sisters. I had to trim like mad to get it into 1000 words.

Demon Driven (998 words)

It’s carnival time in Dindrisk, has been for three days, will be for another ten. They know how to party here. I barge my way through a drunken crowd, a blur of masks, feathers and spangles, to the spaceliner’s dock. A young man fidgeting in an engineer’s uniform meets me at the top of the gangplank.

“Astromancer Pierce?”

“That’s me.”

He’s probably expecting a corset, a lot of eyeliner and black leather. I did all that. Now I’m older and a little bit wider, and I stick to comfortable and easy to clean.

“I’m Bradford,” he says. “The Portal Engineer.” We jog along a plush corridor, all oval windows and gold swirly bits, strung with carnival feathers and shiny beads.

“We picked up a new artist here two days ago,” he says. “The last one went, well, you know how they do, and we had to drop him off for, uh, a quiet rest. We can’t get another one until the carnival finishes, we’re supposed to take off tomorrow and it won’t work and...” Bradford swallows.

“You’ve got a Muse, right? With a sculpture kink?” I ask.

“Yes, but it doesn’t like the new artist.” He hustles me through a door into a more utilitarian space; industrial grey, tracked with cabling ducts. “It ignores him, and it’s moving around. A lot.”

I can hear what he’s screaming in his head. “What if it gets out?”

“Muses are tricky,” I say. “Not big on ripping out guts, but they’re the definition of changeable.”

Bradford cranks open another hatch and we’re in the portal drive room. Sage burns in the censers, the silver circle set into the floor is filled with the blue shimmer of magic, and with demon.

“The binding looks solid,” I say.

The place is littered with discarded beads and champagne corks. A skinny, clay-smeared bloke circles around a huge lump of a work, darting in to pinch on another piece.

The demon spins, stamps, points a talon at me. “I smell magic on you,” it says. It grins a zig-zag half-moon. “And Incubus. Ha!”

Talons are bad. A happy Muse usually takes human form, and is all big eyes and improbable breasts or chiselled cheekbones, whatever works. Unhappy demons won't bend space to move your ship.

“Greetings to you too,” I say in its language. “Don’t you like what they’re feeding you?”

“So stale. I feed. I hunger.” The demon rocks rhythmically, waving its skinny arms.

“What is it you want?” I ask, not expecting much. Demon and human concepts don’t relate too well. Everything is energy to them.

“I crave. New flavour in the air, and then gone. I starve.”

“Uh huh.” I wander over to the sculptor. The work looks familiar, and when he looks me in the eye my instincts scream “fake”. But there are formalities to observe.

“Tell me about this piece,” I say. It takes a moment for the bullshit to kick in, and it’s all the wrong kind. He spiels about light and angles and sublimity. He doesn’t talk about how he saw it in his head, and what the work demanded. And his aura stinks.

“This guy’s a forger,” I tell Bradford. “He’s just recycling somebody else’s work, even with the Muse there, so his energy is stale. You got any sculptors on the passenger list? One or two pieces should get you to Bratngash. You can hire a new artist there.”

“Do you think they’d want to do it?”

“For inspiration from a Muse? They’ll bite your hand off.”

The enthusiastic volunteer has hair dyed green and chews gum non-stop. She works with wire and discarded carnival feathers and beads. I can see her ride that rollercoaster of doubt and exaltation as the extraordinary piece takes shape. The Muse stamps and claps its hands as the sculptor pirouettes around her work. And it complains.

“Stale. So cruel to give delicousness and take it away. I starve. Give it back to me.”

“Give you back what?”

“This,” the demon stamps and waves its hands again. “What was here before.”

“What does it want?” asks Bradford. His eyes are red, and ringed with dark circles.

“I don’t think it knows. But I want a drink. And you need one.”

“I’m on duty.”

The bar is crowded. Drink is drunk, quite a lot of it. Bradford leans forward, leers, wobbles, rights himself and shouts over the music, “I heard your first job was with an Incubus.”

I look out over the dancefloor, where couples are doing their best to shag standing up and fully clothed, and I smile. My Incubus had been a – well - a demon on the dancefloor; all that eye contact, bodies almost touching, the pounding beat. He needed sex, but he loved to dance, and he taught me a thing or two.

“When exactly did your Muse start acting up?” I ask.

“First night of the carnival.”

A day before the forger came on board. “And you were partying in the portal room?”

“Look, I was off duty,” he says. “And all these passengers wanted to see the demon.”

“They danced around it, right?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So your Muse has changed its kink. It’s come over all terpsichorean.”

The demon perks up as soon as the bass beat kicks in. I clap my hands and twirl and suddenly there’s a man with angular cheekbones and snake hips in the circle. I undo the binding with a flick of my wrist, ignoring Bradford’s screams. Demons work better when they’re willing.

People use sex to describe the feeling of sharing with a demon, because it’s the closest common experience. But it’s a eureka moment, the flow, the surrender to spontaneous art. Your head and heart are wide open, you are relaxed and powerful and everything is just fine.

The demon might have to go back in its cage at Bratngash. But right now we’re dancing, and I could stand to lose a few pounds.

"Works of Art" by Gaie Sebold 06/27/2008

This was a remnant, rewritten and brought into the open.

I’m not sure it was a good idea, but I guess, as with many things, it’s a little too late to change that now.

Works of Art (964 words)

The first punters are coming in now. I won’t allow myself to look yet. I smell canapés and perfume, wine and chemicals.

They shriek greetings, but when they look at the walls, they are restrained, quiet, cool. Still, I smell their greed in the air. The first photographs are only the appetiser, after all. The main dish will be meat, rare and bloody, and only one, of all of them, will be able to taste it.

I know all their names.   They have to give them beforehand. Alicia, my publicist, loves this. Exclusivity is such a draw.

Adolescent voices wind through the galleries; the gritty windblown shouts of the playground, the echoing babble of the changing room. There are no actual words; those are for the audience to supply from the hidden attics of their own memories.

Attics, of course, are where madwomen are traditionally kept.

Alicia has the talk, she can roll it out like wallpaper. Transgressive Art, the Aesthetic of Excess, everything the critics purr over.   She drops it when we’re alone; a weird form of trust. I don’t think she does it with any of her other clients.. “Darling, you know what I think,” she says. “Self-indulgent crap, the lot of it. You’re all bloody mad. But you sell yourselves like nothing on earth; I love it. And you, you’re the most.” Sometimes, after the third glass, she leans in, fixes those conker-brown eyes on me like laser gunsights. “Except the bullshit doesn’t mean a thing to you either, does it? Tell me, sweetie, what are you really after?”

She tilts her head, with a sort of cynical hope. I just smile. I’ve never answered yet.

She doesn’t have to care what I really want, so long as I bring the punters in. Even for me it’s getting harder, though. Art meant to outrage has been around for so long, so many envelopes have been pushed, torn, shredded, and binned. And as Anthony Julius pointed out, you have to try pretty hard to be more shocking than what’s been done by real people, for real reasons.

But enough still come; hoping for that extreme experience. Hoping to be lucky. Hoping to be chosen to see the final part of the installation. And if they don’t manage that, well, at least their pictures will be in the glossies.

In the first room, among the mirrors, the photographs are crammed, half hidden. Some are blown up to blurring, others are clear, but fragmented. Sections of skin. Near the entrance, most of the skin is marred only by the faint chalkpits of adolescent acne.

As the audience move deeper, the pictures clarify. The white line left by a nail-file. The pallid ridge, punctuated either side by stitches, of a deeper slash made by a serrated kitchen knife. That picture has a bluish wash, the colour of ambulance lights.

In the next gallery, parts of the body.   Arms like railway junctions, tracked with ridged lines, running into each other. A breast, half the nipple excised.

The first murmurs of discomfort. If I were doing this for art, it would be my moment of triumph.

Come in little fishies. Little sharks.

The computer beeps. One of my special guests has signed in. Tonight, I have something in my net.

I look up at the monitor.

Francesca Lampeter.

It always surprises me, how much, how little, they change. She was glossy, streamlined as a thoroughbred. Now she’s plumped up, but it looks artificial, like a fat suit. Her hair is still expensively styled; she went to Vidal Sassoon, back then, at fourteen - and anyone who didn’t…well. But it’s thinner. Definitely thinner.
The man she’s with is much younger. Son? Toyboy? Gay arm candy?

It doesn’t matter. He won’t be allowed in. She will.

I don’t bother watching the rest. The monitor doesn’t beep again.

I’ve never had two in one evening. That would be interesting. Thinking back, there are only a handful left, now.

I taste iron, in the back of my throat; I manoeuvre the chair into position. It’s too soon; even if she barely looks at anything, it will take her at least twenty minutes to get through the last gallery.

I wait. It’s something I’ve perfected. Pain hums along my nerves like wind in telephone wires.

Alicia will be coming up to her now, informing her that she’s in luck. She’ll look surprised, delighted, maybe a little apprehensive. She might shriek, clap her hands, hug the toyboy. The rest will moan, sulk, pretend it doesn’t matter.

The Francesca I remember would just toss that head of glossy, perfectly cut hair; knowing that of course she’d been chosen. Because she was one of the special ones. Because she was entitled.

I wonder whether this Francesca tosses that thinning mop with the same assurance.

The doors open with the exact sound of the girls’ changing rooms, all that time ago. The echoes of laughter, the orange-painted walls; everything is the same.

Except me.

She looks at me, where I sit, naked. Her face jerks with a reflex of disgust I recognise: she used to look at me in a very similar way. But back then, I deserved it less: I was just a girl. Plump, a little spotty, with the wrong clothes, the wrong voice, the wrong interests.

Now, I’m a work of art.

She’s looking around, her eyes beginning to widen with something: recognition, panic. Nausea.

“Francesca,” I say. I always left my lips, my tongue alone, knowing one day I would be able to speak.

I reach out with the remains of my right hand. “So nice, to meet one of my collaborators.”

"Lefty Turquoise" by Sarah Ellender 06/19/2008

All I'm going to say about this one is that it's about the importance of an active socks life. (I'm making up for the bad pun I had to sacrifice last time.)

Lefty Turquoise (784 words)

My socks have wriggled off my feet in the night again. One has escaped all the way to the end of the bed, the toe poking out beyond the duvet, a vibrant turquoise against the dark red cotton.

"Where the hell is my other sock?" I throw back the duvet cover impatiently. The troublesome pair in question are thick and knee-length and going a bit slack in the elastic.

"Maybe it just hopped off on a little socky escapade," says David, knotting his tie. "Look for it later. You'd better get up or you'll be late for work again."

"Wouldn't that be a tragedy?"

David plants a kiss on my cheek and scoops up his bag on his way out. A few minutes later the front door slams.

Perhaps David is right. Perhaps the sock in the bed, I'll call it Righty, is happy slumbering in the second drawer down in the chest, or sometimes fulfilling its purpose by keeping my foot warm at night. Perhaps Lefty has become bored with the pointless routine, the days that trundle by, with only the occasional outing to the space under the duvet. Lefty is longing for adventure. They are ski socks, after all, and I haven't been skiing in years. I can see Righty reaching out of the bed after Lefty as he wriggled away, calling out, "Come back you fool!" Or maybe, "Take me with you!"

I join the ant file of commuters on the trail to the station, and I am nearly there when I escape from my thoughts and see that it is a beautiful day, even in suburbia. It's one of those free-gift April days, wrapped up in shiny green and blue and hot enough to make my jacket burdensome. It is a day for icecream, and sea breezes. As I step onto the London-bound platform, a flash of turquoise catches my eye, disappearing down the tunnel that leads to the south-bound trains.

I bolt after it, hope swelling up inside me. I can see nothing in the tunnel, so I run on, up the stairs to the other side, just as a train pulls up. The train is going to Brighton. After a second's hesitation, so am I. If I'm seeing blue flashes it means another migraine on the way, so no point in going to work anyway.

When the guard comes by, I tell him I jumped on the train on a whim.

"Good for you love," he says in a bored voice. But he sells me my ticket without a penalty.

I am right. It is a day for icecream. It is a day for buying a dress and changing in the shop, for taking my discarded suit to the pebble beach and jumping on it. For letting salt wind tangle my hair, for catching the sun across my nose and cheeks, for paddling in icy water. There is something turquoise floating out in the sea, but I am squinting into the sun, and it's too far out to wade and look. Instead I dig myself a comfortable hollow in the sun-warmed pebbles and watch the clouds float by and I wonder what the hell I've been doing with the rest of my days.

I don't go home until it's dark. I have to reluctantly reclaim my suit jacket because it's getting cold.

"Where've you been?" says David, hugging me. "Are you ok?"

"I had a day off. If my sock can have an adventure, I don't see why I can't."

"Cup of tea? You can tell me all about it."

I follow him into the kitchen. He puts the kettle on and rattles around with cups and spoons.

"I found your sock, by the way," says David. "It was outside the front door. It must have got tangled up with my bag."

"Was it wet? Sandy?"

"It was lying in a puddle. I've put it through the wash. Are you sure you're ok?"

"Just the same as usual. Unfortunately."

The next morning on the train to the office, I think over my day off. A little holiday from sanity, perhaps. It scares me how much I want to believe that Lefty was out there with me. I find myself thinking of buying teddy bear eyes and stitching them on, making him into a sock puppet. Or buying more wool, unravelling and reknitting him into a scarf so I could take him out and about. I finally decide that I'll leave Lefty exactly as he is. But I'll leave the sock drawer open, and the topmost window in the bedroom. And I'll keep my eyes peeled for what might happen next, for any free gift that comes my way.