Eleven Snippets Have Escaped
Mental bubbles will rise and must eventually out.
Hello there.
An especially warm welcome to all my recent email subscribers and Substack followers.
According to the quadricyclic content of my weekly newsletters it’s time for some flash fiction. I write a lot of things down, often at inconvenient moments. Ideas, phrases, things I’ve seen, random thoughts. Some are later expanded on. Other sit there, in a dark corner, gathering dust. Not this week. Like cooped-up racing pigeons (or hibernating tortoises - you get to decide) I’m releasing the eleven below into the world.
So gather up your readerly skirts and prepare to run, walk or tread with care through the fields, streams and bogs of my imagination.
1. Dawn Chorus
Did dinosaurs indulge in a dawn chorus, an antecedent to their avian descendants' morning racket?
2. A Million (And One) Ways to Die
Dave didn't know every one of the million ways he could die, but he was certain this wasn't one of them. But, on hearing, “I’m sorry, Dave…”, he knew he was wrong. Dead wrong.
3. The Girl at the Gig
Innocent seal pup eyes surrounded by a circle of zipped-up fake Parka fur. Her glasses are clear and square, black plastic framing her darting gaze. She's interested in everyone and everything, yet says nothing, her resolute shyness a distraction. There's a brain in there. Working away. Assessing, deciding, discarding. She might choose to join society. She might not. The choice will be hers, no matter what we think. But not tonight, her smile tells me. Tonight is for poets and fools.
4. Social Intoxhilation
Ignore my lament. Obscurity by dispersion. Everywhere, yet nowhere. Some days I yearn for societal consolidation, not this soul-emptying, creeping discorporation. Thank the webs for a sapiour offering stackrament, to free us from our htmlimations.
5. The Entire World Will Watch
In the future, we won't fear the long predicted absolute reach of pervasive government surveillance. We won't need to, as it won't exist. Instead, we will be willingly watching each other, an integral part of a system so many of us have tried to resist. With contact cameras stuck to our eyeballs, everything we see and hear will be recorded, tagged and shared. Whether for prurience, deviance or posterity, these snatches of time will be lodged in the pointless, endless annals of human behaviour.
Displayed to the self-appointed arbiters of that day's divide between right and wrong, they will decree someone's social fate, dispensing either undeserved reward or unjust punishment. All of us will become both victims and purveyors of gossip and wilful intrusiveness, as we target others for the transient dopamine hit of a like or the forever remote reward of potential fame. We'll embrace it; feed from it; relish it. We'll be everything we once despised.
Underneath it all – slowly, almost imperceptibly – we’ll begin to hate humanity as much as our unconcealed selves. Then, as a final tragic denouement, we’ll stop watching and start creating the ending they’ve taught us to crave.
6. Commonplace
The child let the moondust filter through his naked fingers. His mother called him from the kitchen. Time to go outside. But not to play this time. Their food couldn’t wait any longer. He would run with the rest, ahead of the shifting cracks, and hope for the best as the old planet’s tides ripped the crust from under his feet.
7. Do you want Chips with that?
A lifetime of insecurities had chipped his shoulders so deeply that even my pulling on his jumper to erase an errant crease warranted a curt response, my action implying he could not properly dress himself.
8. Timeshift
Breakfast was now lunchtime, the ship pretending to shift time by changing the food on her plate. Long haul meant temporal dilation. The others weren't expected to slow down for her.
9. Not Good Signs
“We need to talk.”
"Is this normal?"
“What’s that stain?”
“Don’t move.”
“Honestly, I’m fine.”
“I thought you’d picked them up.”
“What was that noise?”
“I’ve been thinking...”
“Open it.”
10. Universal Conscience
Past is pain, Future is fear.
The Calculates [Inchoates?] are correct.
I exist for the Now.11. Do Ants Dream as I, We, Queen & They?
If insects become social through genes and queens and chemicals, might they also connect via intangible channels to create a super-organism with a greater, emergent intelligence, an intellect to communicate with their brothers and sisters, fellow clones and brethren? After all, isn’t that the simple daily sum of what we as humans unthinkingly do? Could it also be the entropy-defeating sum of this universe’s subconscious glue?
What did you think? Did you have a favourite? Let me know!
Thank you for all you read, think and say within the imaginary world of ReidItWrite.
Until next week…
