Cherrypicked stories

Performance piece. First draft. Unsure about the title... and pretty much everything else. god is dead as dungarees and dummies we've seen those kids in africa with weird distended tummies and the flood reports that end with orphans screaming for their mummies

I am lush, this morning, someone must have had a dream with loofers hanging from trees and a painting of me and a hologram of me and a woodcock with my face. The heel of my foot is pistachio-green;

Today the mallet struck, Gavel-to-gavel, dust to dust.

From the same story as Prologue. (Apologies for the lack of paragraph indents but I can't get my head round the submission formatting!)

I sleep as the Egyptians died, my hands abreast and folded in a way a mummy might have guessed her soul to leave for afterlife. But I don't travel far, as life still holds me back. The thread a-stretch I rise

So I always thought flash fiction was something you wrote very fast ('cos, you know, 'in a flash'), but it turns out it just means very short. Anyway, this is both.

Leave the money on the pillow - close the door before you go, it's freezing in this hell-hole and the meter's running low.

I asked Jonesy that night, what was it like, to know that you're dying. "It's great. He told me. Because every moment, from now on, will be cherished. Every laugh will be beautiful. Every kiss will be the sweetest. Every tear will be the hardest.

I remember when Carmel, my wife's pet pig, showed great ingenuity in digging a tunnel to break out of her pen. She had even found the house key that was hidden beneath the plant pot. I spotted her trying to snuffle past the bouncer at The Barony Pub. She'd ransacked our trot-in-wardrobe: got trussed up in an Ascot hat, two pairs of heels, smelling of Gaultier and swill.