Plot Medics 

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.

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.

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.”

This idea, or something like it, has been hanging around for a while – the worst thing about finally getting it on paper was the fact that I actually had to watch some Jerry Springer. Not sure I watched enough of it to get the feel quite right – but there are limits to what I will do for my art.

Show and Tell (982 words)

"Aand heere's your host!"

"Gunnar! Gunnar! Gunnar! Gunnar!"

Gunnar Bateman surfed onto the stage, cresting the roaring applause.

"Today we’re going to meet Darleen and Chet. They’ve been married some time, and Darleen claims that Chet has changed. That the same things that attracted him about her, he doesn’t like any more." Oooh, from the audience.

"Chet says Darleen isn’t acting like a proper wife, like a proper mother. Who’s right? Who’s at fault here? Let’s find out, shall we? Let’s hear it for Darleen Lubowski!"

Darleen was blonde, toned, tanned, pumped, glossed, and cantilevered. She swayed up to Gunnar on vertiginous heels for her air-kiss and slid into one of the chairs with catlike ease.

"So, Darleen. You and Chet have been married for how long?"

"Ten years, Gunnar." She had the voice of a gin-soaked angel.

"You told me that you were on the verge of a divorce. Why is that?"

"Well, I’ve always attracted men."

Woooo and a few, "You go, girl’s," from the audience.

"He said he liked that," Darleen said, pouting. "He said that I was the first sexy woman to go for him. But now, it’s all, ‘don’t wear that, Darleen. We’ve got children, Darleen. What will the PTA think, Darleen?’"

"Well, let’s hear Chet’s side of the story, shall we? Here he is, Chet Lubowski!"

Chet blinked his way onto the stage, leaning forward as though the applause were a high wind. Scrawny, with big hands and a bad combover, he looked at least twenty years older than his wife. Out in the distance, a bulb popped, and the tech crew hurried to deal with it.

Gunnar shook Chet’s hand, gestured him to his seat.

"Can you tell us a bit about your marriage?"

"We married pretty young. Darleen was always kinda wild. That’s was OK. But we’re older now. I just think she should, you know, stop trying to look like she’s sixteen. And stop flirting with other guys. We got three beautiful kids. It just isn’t right."

"Are you saying I don’t love our kids?" Darleen started up, eyes flaring.

Chet glared. "Do you?"

"Don’t you dare accuse me of being a bad mother!" She turned to the audience. "I just about brought them up by myself, they never see him!"

Oooh!

"I work hard!"

"OK calm down," Gunnar said. "Now, Darleen, you’ve got something to tell Chet, haven’t you? Something you think will help explain everything?"

"Yes, Brendan."

"Why don’t you go ahead."

Chet’s lower lip started to shake; he got that rabbit-in-headlights look. The audience leaned in, hungrily. Darleen stared straight ahead, glowing. "Chet, you always said you thought I was a sexy woman, now, you don’t like that about me any longer. But it ain’t gonna change. I’m a succubus."

Woooo, from the audience. Chet blinked, gasped. "You…you bitch! You never told me! All these years, and…no wonder I lost so much weight! No wonder I was tired all the time!"

Darleen crossed her legs, endangering several marriages out front, and shrugged. "You never had it better, Chet. Lots of men would be grateful."

Ooooh, the audience moaned.

"Besides, I never complained. Did I ever complain about your little secret? Hmm?"

"Oh don’t you dare," Chet said. "My friends watch this programme!"

"And you never had the guts to tell them," Darleen said. "I married a man with no guts. I married…" she drew the pause out like a pro, "a gremlin."

"You - bleep!" Chet launched himself out of his chair. One of the legs collapsed, and the stage crew whipped another chair into place, while security – a burly priest and even burlier ex-cop, both armed with water-pistols loaded with the show’s special mix of holy water, silver leaf, crushed garlic and obscure West African herbs – grabbed Chet. One of the water pistols exploded, drenching the front row of the audience, causing screams, howls, and a disturbing bubbling sound.

"Look at that!" Darleen shrieked, leaping up, pointing a trembling, perfectly manicured finger. "That’s what it’s like living with you! I never had a TV last more than a week! We pay more in insurance premiums than most people earn! And you complain because I look good? Well bleep you, Chet Lubowski! Bleep you and the kelpie you rode in on!"

Gunnar strode out front – stepping around the remains of one of the more drastically drenched members of the front row. "Let’s hear from our audience. You, sir?"

The sir in question was large, and hairy, and had a snout. "Seems to me she can’t help it. I mean, hell, I was coming home to that, I’d be grateful. In fact, I wouldn’t leave the house."

Chet lunged for him, and was restrained. Darleen smirked and waved her fingers. Another bulb exploded.

A large woman with a terrible perm and tusks said; "Once you’re a mom, you gotta change. You can’t act like a high-school kid no more. Lady, you need to get serious."

"Oh yeah?" Darleen said. "What’m I supposed to do? Pretend to be someone I’m not? Dress like you, maybe?"

Oooooh! Flecked with a few miao noises. The large woman headed thunderously for the stage, and was hauled back.

Gunnar got the nod from the wings. Time to wind up. He made a ‘quiet down’ gesture. "We all think we know somebody when we marry them. But do we ever really know them? And can the secrets at the heart of a marriage ever be something we should keep? Until next time; don’t you go changing." He’d used that line for years, and he wasn’t altering it now, however much the lycanthropy rights society complained.

In his dressing room, he found a message lying next to the mirror.

Great stuff. You bastard.
Odin.

Gunnar – aka Loki - grinned to himself. He’d found his niche. He was a god at peace with himself, if not with anyone else.

Little Red Hoodie (706 words)

"Now don't forget the bag for your Nan." The woman looks into the shopping bag, shudders, and closes it again.  “Sometimes I wonder what I married into.”

Red sighs and does an exaggerated, adolescent shrug.  She’s heard that before. 

"And don't go by the Whitman Estate.  And stay away from that old tramp by the off-licence."

"Mu-um."

"I don't want to be phoning the hospitals.  Or the police."

"I'll be late."

The woman looks out the window.  "Oh, blast.  Yes.  Hurry.  Wait, have you got your mobile?"

"Yes, Mum.  And yes, it's got credit, and yes, it's switched on."

"Don't you give me that voice, young lady.  If that plumber had turned up when he was supposed to..." she rolls her eyes towards the upstairs, where there is an ominous, constant dripping sound.  “But I have to keep emptying the bucket.”

Beyond the kitchen window, the moon is rising over the rooftops, fat as a cheese, smoky autumn yellow.

"Can I just go?"

"You ring me the second you get there.  Tell your Nan I said you're to stay overnight.  And if she gets out of hand..."

"I know.  Anyway she can't help it."

"Sometimes I wonder.  Just make sure her chain's on.  I know what she's like." 

She grasps the girl’s wrist as she’s about to leave.  “Red, be careful,” she says.  “You’re old enough…”

With one final, eye-rolling, “Mu-uum,” Red escapes, swinging the bag with Nan's supplies in one hand, tugging at the neck of her jacket with the other.  It's too small, really, but she likes it.  She pulls the hood up and pretends she's one of the lads from the estate, all droopy trousers and bravado, and giggles to herself as she walks. 

She’s still, mostly, a child.  She doesn’t hurry.  She wanders and looks in windows and makes up stories about the people behind them; but her musings are interrupted by the crash of glass, a straggle of drunken laughter.  She looks up; the moon’s lost its yellow.  Suddenly it’s a bone-white eye.  

She starts to walk faster. 

Red isn't very interested in cars, and doesn't notice the sleek black late-model Jag cruising like a shark; even when it comes past her the second time.  Slower.   

The streets are almost empty.  The car stops.  The window slides down, electrically silent.  

"Excuse me?" The voice is smooth.  "I'm looking for Laburnum Drive."

If she'd been watching, she would know the car has already been down Laburnum Drive; it turned out of it, just now. 

She pulls her hood further down, her voice comes out gruff.  "I don't know."

"I've got a map here...perhaps you could show me?  Come on, you can't see it from over there."  A pause.  "I'll give you some money, if you like...for your trouble." 

She shouldn't get too close.  But by the time she realises she shouldn't, it's already too late.

***

Nan's bungalow sits with three others at the far end of the estate; a last decrepit clutch at suburban respectability before the motorway.  Her garden is overgrown.  In the morning light, the girl's mother pushes frantically through the nettles, ignoring the stings.  "Nan!"  She hammers on the door.  "Nan!"

Eventually, slowly, it opens.  The old woman looks out, blinking.  "Oh, hello, dear."

"Where is she?"

"Inside.  She’s…” 

But the woman shoves past her, into the house, and sees Red curled in the old chair, tugging idly at the buckle of a studded dog-collar attached to a thick, heavy chain.

"What happened?  I phoned and phoned..."

"I'm sorry, Mum."

There is a streak of darkness on Red’s jacket; her face has changed, suddenly older, as though years happened to her last night.   Or centuries.  She is remarkably calm. 

"Honestly," the old woman says.  "Sending her out on full moon, and her all of twelve!  You should have known."  

"Who was it?"  Red’s mother says.

"Some perv.  Don't worry.”

“Don’t worry?  What do you mean don’t worry?”

“We disposed of it.  I’ve been dealing with this sort of thing a long time, dear.”

Nan grins.  Her teeth are long, and white, and sharp.  “If you’d been one of us, we’d have saved you a leg.” 

An Experiment (539 words)

The question before us, ladies and gentlemen, is: how much can the subject  take?  

Red and pink.  The colour of valentines, love-hearts, babies’ skin and little girls’ bedrooms.  The colour of blood and peeled nerves, sizzling in the raw air.

Earlier experiment has shown that this amount of trauma applied at once tends to result in massive shock and almost immediate termination.  As you will notice, gradually increasing the amount of trauma over a period of time permits the system to adjust.  Some nerves are destroyed.  Scar tissue is formed.  Note that the scarred areas lose their sensitivity not only to pain-stimuli, but to pleasure.  Note the lighter, rose-pink colouration of these areas. 

Increase the nutrients, please.  We do want to keep this going as long as possible.

Love hearts, lace, valentines.  You can’t love scar tissue, and scar tissue can’t love.  Yet who would want to go on feeling?  Surely, in the end, you must become numb.  

But what if that isn’t true? Sometimes you can’t stop feeling, even if you long to.  Even if that’s your greatest desire.  Instead, sometimes, perhaps what you feel…changes.  It mutates like a virus.  If you can’t find love in a laboratory, an end, a cessation, seems all that’s left to aim for.  But after enough of the essential nerves have been severed, enough scar tissue has formed, the desire for oblivion can transmute into - something else.  

Please note that the pattern in which the stimuli are applied is almost as significant as the intensity. If this is done correctly, the survival period can be extended far beyond what was originally considered possible.  The subject’s system continues to adapt. What one might term ‘the survivable level of trauma’ becomes greater than was originally considered possible.

We have experimented on a great many subjects in order to gather this information, but there is still more information to be gathered.  The question remains, ladies and gentlemen.  How much can the subject take?  At what point does survival become pointless?  At what point does the system simply give up? 

Old habits die hard and almost invisibly, draining away, leaving a hollow place.  What fills it?  The last fragments of the old self are seared away. Heat cauterises. Once you’ve learnt to take enough pain, perhaps you can learn to take…everything.  

The subject’s responses have altered.  This is interesting.  Note the increase in adrenalin levels, the bunched muscles.  I do believe our subject would be baring its teeth, if it still had lips. We have of course seen this before, if you look at your notes.  There is sometimes this last-minute surge of physiological activity before the inevitable end.   Gather round a little closer, please....  

It’s been a long time since I had vocal chords.  Now…I scream, not with the throat but with the entire body.  To feel stripped muscles snap their chains is like exploding into a new universe, like becoming another order of being.  I am transmuted, translated.  

There is nothing left of what I was. 

It doesn’t matter if the figure on the table was one of those that originally strapped me down.  All hands are shaped for scalpels, including mine.  The question remains, ladies and gentlemen...how much can the subject take?

Gaie says:

When I first heard of flash fiction, I was, I admit it, sniffy.  How could anyone possibly create something worthwhile within such a limited wordcount?  Of course, I was struggling to finish a novel at the time and was not in the mood to admit that maybe you could produce good fiction without taking two years and an inordinate number of words to do it.

But then there's poetry, my first love.  And poetry, with some epic exceptions, encapsulates an idea, a moment or a feeling within a very small space.  It struck me (slowly but with some force, like a doped grizzly) that flash fiction, like poetry, isn't about being lazy, but about being precise.

So I started reading some flash, liked some of it a great deal, and realised I wanted to have a go at writing it.

Folie a Deux might be considered cheating.  It was originally a 3,500 word story, and has been cut down to flash size.  But there was a great satisfaction to be had from trimming out everything that didn’t need to be there.  I may yet do this with other bits of the unpublished back-catalogue I have been keeping in the vague hope they might Come In Useful, like string.

But for those who would consider it cheating, I’ve also got some new ideas; in the same way that reading poetry makes me more inclined to write it, reading flash does the same.

I hope you enjoy the following.  And if you don’t, well, at least you won't have wasted a lot of time…

Folie A Deux (829 words)

“I’m getting  married,” Marty said.

“Married?  To Jeff?”

“Yes.  Full commitment.” 

I felt my insides clench.  Marty was always such a free spirit, it was the last thing I would have expected from her. 

“Let’s meet up!”  She was all bubbles.

“Great.  Um…”

“The Pig in Clover?  Tonight?” 

***

Too late I remembered the Pig in Clover was where I’d had my final never-darken-my-psyche -again row with Jane.  Of course, the only booth  left was the site of the row, and of course the place was wall to wall couples. 

Marty glowed, she really did.  “Jeff, darling, get Kate, oh you have, there you go.”

Jeff put our pints down, and sat, and smiled at me.  I wanted to hate him but it probably wasn’t even his idea.  Marty’s always had what you might call a whim of iron. 
“So,” I said.  “You two.  Eh?”

Yeah, I know.  Brilliant. 

“You look funny, Kate,” Marty tilted her head like a puppy.  “Oh, don’t say you disapprove, honestly, I’ve had that from my Dad.  He just doesn’t get it.  You’ve been in love.  This is the, like, ultimate.  You know?”

“Your Dad must have been in love once,” I said.  “And as for me…” 

Yes, I’d been in love.  In love enough to move in, though never quite in love enough to sign papers.  Enough to run along beaches at midnight, but not enough to move to Hawaii.   In love enough to do what they were contemplating?  Not on your life.  “You’re serious.”

“Of course we’re serious!”  And she turned to look at Jeff and just beamed at him and he beamed back, a full-on daffy in-love grin.

They really meant it. 

“It’s going to cost a fortune, Marty.”

“Oh, Kate.  Always the accountant.”

“It’s my job.  I mean, seriously, where are you going to get the money?”

“We’ll find it.”  She took Jeff’s hand.  “People are going back to this kind of commitment, Kate.  After all, how else are you supposed to prove how much you love someone?”

***

The months leading to the wedding were horrible.  It got so bad I even phoned my ex, Jane. 

“Uh, how are you?” I said.

“Over it.”

“Good!  I mean, Jesus.  Jane, I’m sorry.”

“Yes, well.  Oh, come on, you silly cow.  What’s up?”

So I told her.  I managed to keep the swearing and ranting to a minimum, pretty much.  But there was still this long silence at the end.

“They’re going to do it then,” she said.

“Seems like it, yeah.”

“OK.  Well, I can get why you’re upset.  I mean, I think it’s yuck.  But there’s…you know.  The other aspect.”

“What other aspect?”

“You know what I mean, Kate.”

“No, I don’t,” I said. 

“They want to do it. They’re…committed.  We were together three years and you wouldn’t put me on your car insurance.”

“Oh come on!”

It didn’t go well, on the whole. 

***

I went away, I told Marty I’d booked the holiday the previous year.  I couldn’t face the wedding.  I spent a lot of my savings.  I slept with a few people, including a pair of identical twins I met in a Cairo bar. 

That didn’t end well either.  There was this moment when I looked at them and thought, Jesus, they’re not really two separate people at all, and I threw up all over the bed.  

Some of that was probably the dope, which was another thing I wasn’t used to.  But it definitely put a damper on the evening. 

I’d only been back a few days when I got the phone call.  I was in that disembodied state you get after a lot of travelling,  and I picked up without thinking.

“Kate!  You’re back!”

I knew who it was, of course. 

“Yeah, I am.  How…how are you?”

“Great!  Still a bit…you know.  Let’s meet up!”

It was the Pig in Clover, of course. 

I got there too early.  Not early enough to be as drunk as I’d have liked, when the door finally opened and somehow I knew who it was.   I kept staring at my pint until I heard the chair being pulled out. 

“Hi Kate.”

I looked up.

It was tall, and smooth, and androgynous.  Good-looking, I suppose, objectively.  I recognised Marty’s mouth, and Jeff’s eyes.  But it was a bland, blunted face.

My own felt utterly frozen, I don’t know how I spoke at all.  “I don’t know what to call you,” I said. 

 “Well,” the thing said, “We decided on Jeffmar, in the end.”

I started laughing.  I couldn’t stop, until the paramedics hit me with the second syringeful. 

Jeffmar.  Jesus, Marty.  You never did have any taste.

***

I sit at home with the phone on my lap, and wonder who to call. 

Exes.  Friends.  People who might be more than that…or not.   So many possible combinations, so many possible conjunctions.  I wonder about calling Jane.

But in the end, I don’t.