the modern

fiction

CONTENTS

The Paper Baby:

	A Paper Baby was born in a town not far from here. In 1643, Abiezer Coppe 
was ranting. Having served time in prison and had his pamphlets burned, A. 
Coppe looked for communion. Finding naught but a near-standing tree, he 
did loose himself into it, finding a suitable pocket that resembled a 
"nether eye". Unbeknownst to Coppe, who walked away satiated, a fine 
sliver of wood had become lodged in his manhood. Only microns thick, Coppe 
never knew to seek it out. He was, after all, a ranter, not a seeker. 
Coppe went on to cop with a fair maiden, with whom he settled, burying his 
new wife's gentleness with outpourings of apocalyptic prophecy. Needing no 
tree no more, Coppe fathered a number of children, one of whom (his son, 
Lodowick) carried the sliver into the next generation. 
	
	Generations passed in this fashion, each carrier unaware of the migration 
that occurred from penis to testicles. Eventually, this sliver (let's call 
it "Pog") fused to the sperm-generating portion of one of Coppe's long 
distant relations. This man, Mercedes Not-So-Young, went about his life 
like many others, soliciting easy sex when it passed his nose. One such 
encounter produced a baby. This baby, as you may have guessed by this 
point, was not an ordinary baby. This baby was a Paper Baby. Like the 
semi-mythic Sun-Dog's that chased the western skies in the Middle Ages, 
confusing star-gazers and laymen alike, a Paper Baby carries with it the 
illusion of an other: a living ghost, born to live but one or two days.
	
	The baby was born on the 3rd of June. Transparent, a tiny heart showed 
through on its sleeve. Mercedes and Newgate named him (for it was a 
boy-child) 'Hammer' in the hopes of solidifying him and keeping him whole 
and new and warm. Paper Babies do not last, however. By June 7th, Hammer 
was gone; an origami homage to the human form. Before he left, he told his 
Mother and Father the tale of his birth, the narrative having grown like 
rings in his wooden consciousness with each passing generation. He spoke 
with Coppe's voice, play-acting the carnal act, down to details of the 
smell of resin that would not leave his crotch for days after. As dawn 
broke on the 7th, his reed-like voice rasping from telling this most 
ingrained family history, his toes started to fold. Looking deep into 
Mercedes' eyes, Hammer started to chuckle, the folding being akin to 
tickling a Flesh Baby. Within minutes, a small boat sat on the table, 
rocking gently in the breeze slipping in from the back door Newgate had 
left open in the midsummer heat.

Outside a Cigarette Walking [excerpt / ongoing]:

	

If everything is an object, manipulation represents the height of power 
and becomes a matter or course; the more callous, brutal and aggressive 
such manipulation is, the closer it comes to fulfilling its mission. 

(Vitezslav Gardavsky)


Love is a hiding place for falsehood. I (have to) love you. I (should) 
love you (by now). I (and many others) love(d) you. I (used to) love you. 
I love you. I love me. I love them. I love you.


I love light, and the walking of. I love the narrator about to introduce 
himself, and the crossed focus of his glassine eyes. I love the cancer 
that gambols like a spring lamb through his blood. I love him for his 
unwise warmth and tired allusions. I love him for his dexterity. I love 
him for the food stuck in his teeth and under his fingernails. He writes 
in red ink:


all the lights popped and jumped into the fragments of a frozen leather 
satchel


i am in need of flossing my piano. it will suffer less should it be clean 
and in love. i love to smoke. i love HIM but do not get all jiggly when 
one of them walks past. any more. any more?


he has been selling fake cigarettes in indone-easy-a and to-go. he has 
been taking on their governments for fun and giggles and a spoon or two of 
filthy bleak coins. he likes to fuck them with a lawyer's cock and wait 
around to see what else leaks out. 


G. D. P.


i couldn't keep up with the surgeon general when he started replacing milk 
with cigarettes. i am a two-pack a day man, not five. five alive. smoke. 
smike. smuke. smake. smeke.


this is always a piece of control. it comes down to bodies in a pit 
somewhere or somewhen. train tracks leading through big big pretty iron 
railings. smoking makes me free. i looked it up. online. 


three mouths on one face started saying the same thing sometimes and 
everyone got confused. i love the faces that say what they think. i love 
the faces that lie unconditionally. i cry when i listen to them coz my 
little old dad was a martyr for the cause. i forget which one. he died 
with a finger up his nose. like a good citizen should. i love you. 


there were just too too many of us all. walking and talking and setting 
fires and dragging each other along behind cars and spitting into each 
others winds. the ground kept getting hotter and we all took our shoes off 
for a while, until it got too hot to bear and we had to start putting 
shoes back on, but only gingerly. 


a foundation sinks off the coast of east angular and some 3000 memories 
start purpling and pinking in and out of the French (Spanish?) doors.


I first met i in London. Some of this story takes place in his house. Some 
of it happens in the street. Some of it happens in his head. Some of it is 
in love with another part of it. 


Aye, I am i. Aye, i am I.


i watched the point of a lit cigarette wander through the night 
unchaperoned. more than once. i can't stand the rain against the window of 
my face. i have sensitive ayes. from all the smoke and expectorants. 


Coff coff coff.


there is no green screen, only the feet and hands and mouths of other 
people moving in and out of what sounds like alien poetry and looks like 
nightdark physical melodies.


LET'S BEGIN






	
 SHARK:

So we're leaving.


No more rowing to Boffin drunk.

No more 60-strong Mass of a Sunday.

Leaving en masse having gone round in wet circles

all of a Saturday night trying to find a disappearing shark

in the bitch Atlantic.


Old John had lost his two sons on the same day two years 

before. We all knew John and John-Joe and Pa-Jo and a few

saw them leave that time they went to feed the sea their bones.


The surf rose up to meet them. Only Pa-Jo's body was ever found.


So we're leaving.


I've packed Shark dirt onto the edges of my head,

square that it is. This dirt and I will fuse and my tears at 

leaving will travel a few miles around my circumference 

before the sea takes them too.


Come leaving with me, land.

Come leaving with me, sea.

Let's leave and leave and leave and leave.


So we're leaving.


And John Sr. is still at his door - the one of us all to stay behind

needing, as he does, to shepherd the restless spirits of his two 

dead boys.


I feel the dirt fuse with my skin - my border - and step into the boat.


I turn back to see John Sr. fall back, dead, into the shore.

***

download this piece as a SCRIPT





	

 Train Toilet:

The trains were deserted, so the technical mishap had a much smaller 
audience than it otherwise would have had. 


Paul had rushed a reduced sandwich from the only shop still open in the 
concourse of Euston station. Smoked salmon and creme fraiche on 
flaccid-looking wholewheat gluten-free bread. Not his first choice 
normally, but "normal" had become an even more crushingly relative term in 
the space of the last two weeks. 


He had made his way onto the train, all the time feeling a rumble in his 
lower gut. It was a feeling as old as the disc of time. He began his 
voyage by sanitising his seat and table with what he had been able to 
muster from the price-gouged corner shop near what had been, until very 
recently, his flat. Rented, obviously. 


Seat dusted and hands pseudo-sanitised by a concoction he had found a 
recipe for online, Paul darted from carriage to carriage looking for a 
throne on which to relieve the gut pressure building inside him in 
parallel to the pandemic panic that had taken up a comfy residence in his 
face as a perpetual eyebrow headache. 


All options looked unsavoury: one toilet was so blasted that to walk near 
it seemed like a hazard; another was out of order and a third was 
non-existent, its space having been filled with a bike rack. The ghost 
town on wheels crept out of the station, trying not to arouse the 
suspicion of the other trains, who lay in stacks in the yards to the left 
and right. Our train averted its headlamps, fiddling with its pollen 
filters in a futile attempt to keep out the toxins that had made the globe 
look over its star-laden shoulder. 


With time running out, Paul tore down the 'CAUTION' tape across the door 
of toilet 2. Rushing to deal with belt and undergarments, he felt the 
all-too-familiar sphincter twinge. His buttocks kissed the seat just in 
time to catch the first jet escaping him. 


Paul relaxed.


Deeply.


Half of one moment later, a mechanical whirring announced the start of a 
process by which the door of the toilet recedes into a pocket in the 
semi-circular wall. 


Paul panicked, yet his hole kept on singing a dropping song.


He watched in horror as the slow reveal happened in front of him. 
Suddenly, he was transported to the set of a mid-80s TV game show: he was 
the washer-dryer combo revolving into the view of an expectant and varied 
audience. This prize, however, would be met with nothing more than 
revulsion and pity by whichever poor soul happened to win. 


Relief washed over Paul like a bidet plumbed with gin and tonic, as he 
remembered that there were only another couple of souls travelling on his 
ghost-train. He was thankful for the pandemic. Imagine if there had been a 
row of sweaty, hate-filled commuters crammed into the aisle in front of 
his throne? He would have never been able to live down the shameful, 
reproachful stares of these strangers. No matter that none of it was his 
fault. Except, maybe, his choice of sandwich.


Love for the pandemic surged through Paul.


He could feel the hot rain starting to dry up down south, and his heart 
swelled once more. He looked around the pod for toilet paper. It had all 
been stolen. The thought of washing his bum in the sink of a train toilet 
with the door open to the world posed no threat to him now. He was 
concerned about the sterility of the situation, but needs must. He 
crab-walked to the sink, remaining in a squat position in order to save 
his trousers the embarrassment of befoulment.


He concentrated wholly on the task at hand, loving the pandemic for its 
Karmic hall-pass.


His clean revelry was dirtily interrupted by the shouts of an errand 
child, who had thrust a smartphone up to eye-level as soon as stumbling 
upon the open toilet door.


'Irrefutable video evidence'.


'Intentional indecent exposure'.


'Innocent child traumatised'.


The headlines spurted through Paul's moist head one by one by one, the 
sound of the wheels over the tracks punctuating the hot type like 
clattering spacebars. 


The child screamed a knowing scream.


"COME LOOK UPON THIS HORROR!" the scream called. 


"I HAVE FOUND THE MOUTH OF HELL!" the scream lamented.


"THERE'S A MAN WITH HIS COCK OUT AND SHIT ON HIS HANDS!" the scream yelled.


Black velvet curtains closed across Paul's vision. He was shaken back to 
his senses by an irate father.


'Two meters', whimpered Paul.