Cherrypicked stories

200 words.

So confident. So full of Joy Division. He'd had a number of fixations about his appearance in those days. We laughed about how he would become hysterical if I even touched his hair. He'd sliced the edges of his ears off in Borstal - talk about a short sharp shock - before taking the razor to the length of his arms. His skin was so white. DIY plastic surgery. I don't think we'd heard of compulsive disorders then. He used to be on Mogadon. It was quite unusual then. I hardly know anyone who isn't on some sort of anti-depressant now. I enquired about his manic depression. Bloated, beery and burpy with unkind eyes that he's always complained of. I'd had to constantly reassure him about - suddenly bacame starkly visible. The bulb on the end of his nose. His too curvy lips. His too big feet and strangely immobile hair.

Insa I would say Andaw's hiding something, but the man's a walking goldfish bowl. Every line on his face, every blemish, the suspect swelling of one pectoral muscle slash breast, it's all a kind of confession. That or a zoo he is cursed to carry with him, each of the exhibits screeching his misdoings. He'll only say he can't talk about it for my sake. I for my part tell him most things about myself, stopping just short of where I like to be nibbled.

200 words.

'One, two, three, down!' And down went the baton of the police officer onto the sleeping figure of Edward Irving, startling him awake and, although yet unbeknownst to him, setting in process the destruction of his identity. Another officer, younger although of senior rank, stood in the doorway, smiling wryly at his partner's antics. Edward Irving struggled to catch his breath between blows, barely taking in the fact that two State officers had just broken into his apartment, entered his newspaper-strewn bedroom. Much less so did it occur to him that after delivering to him the standard preliminary beating, the officers would then proceed to take him to a station, place him in a brightly-lit cell, administer further beatings, put him through a perfunctory interrogation (in which further beatings might or might not be involved), before returning him to his luminous cell: repeat from step one. Edward Irving could only guess that this would happen, or something to that extent, because he did not have the ability to see beyond the curtain hiding the forward direction of a linear narrative.

For, so he told us later over lager and nuts, despair was soon snapping thankfully at those bruised new bandaged heels of his.

The author recalls a college instructor's savaging of Joyce Kilmer in the light of his own experiences.

The first sign is when she takes her mobile to bed with her The second is when she denies that she does The third sign is when you find her pubes in the plug hole When she knows you prefer her natural

A 200 word break from nanowrimo.