Finally... I have a working keyboard again. My laptop fell victim to an unfortunate accident involving a mug of tea a few weeks ago, leaving the keyboard fucked, with just the letters A, Z and L still functioning. Hence my absence from SG (like anyone had noticed!).
But now I'm back, and here's a short neo-pulp story I wrote a while back for anyone who cares to read it.
Satellite Town
Street-lights cast their sodium reflections in puddles. The night is hot and heavy. A purple sky, thick with storm-clouds, lays low over the breathless town. It's been that kind of summer: warm and stormy.
[Clothes hang on washing lines in gardens and are never taken in. They dry in the torpid heat of the mornings, until the daily afternoon deluge leaves them rain-streaked, wet again.]
I barely look where I'm going. I don't need to. I may hate this town, but I know every square inch of it. It's given up its mystery to me, like a cheap one-night stand.
Was I born here? You know, I can't even remember any more and it no longer seems to matter. This is a town where people pass the time until they die. It makes no difference where their lives began: this is where they will end.
In this untidy suburban sprawl of concrete and apathy, built around a station that most trains pass through without stopping.
The noise rattles windows in the frames of low-cost housing as the trains speed by, bound for places you'll probably never see. Living near the railway lines, the sound is so ceaseless that it becomes no sound at all, a background to life. With time, its absence comes to seem unnatural.
This is nowhere: a satellite town. It has no life of its own, no means to support itself. It hangs in its frozen orbit around the City that sustains it, feeds off it like a benign sort of tumour. City jobs, commuted to on the rust-red connecting buses, make life possible here. City money puts food on simulated wood tables, gets in rounds of drinks on Friday night, pays the TV licence fee. The handful of spare change at the end of the working week is fed into slot-machines, buys something special for the weekend: an upper, a downer, a discreet ten-minute blow job in a parked-up car.
The City is quite a different kind of place to this. In the City, the gleaming high-rise office blocks of multi-billion pound corporations interfere with the flight paths of aeroplanes. The buildings are designed to flex with the wind, so in a good-sized gale, the upper storeys sway by up to twelve feet in each direction. The queasy, imbalanced sensation experienced by workers on the topmost floors has been dubbed "blue-chip vertigo". In the City, expensive looking people step out of expensive hotels to eat tiny amounts of food off huge plates in expensive restaurants. Clever satires are acted out in fashionable theatres. Controversial instillations draw crowds to stately galleries. Highly-skilled cosmetic surgeons in lavish suites make rich people's faces and bodies as beautiful and perfect as their bank statements.
Seventeen miles away and a different world.
Here, houses huddle close together agoraphobically. Drunk fights break out on littered, late-night pavements. Here, there are pubs where you can still smoke, housing you can afford.
Housing estates spring up like inorganic mushrooms. The developers name their creations optimistically: Brook Meadows, Wisteria Heights, Willowy Bank. A narrow stream of slurry running through Brook Meadows, strewn with tyres and plastic bags, is the nearest it has to a brook, and there isn't a meadow in sight. Small wars break out almost daily in Wisteria Heights as rivals vie for control of the estate's drug labs. Police try to avoid Willowy Bank whenever possible and, if they do have to enter, will only go in heavily armed and with back-up.
The City is an entirely smoke-free zone now. The Anti-Smoking Act passed six years ago banned smoking [a dangerous, habit-forming and antisocial activity] from all public places within the City confines. Failure to comply results in hefty fines for those who can afford to pay them, prison sentences for those who can't. Out here on the fringes, in the satellite towns, such laws are not enforced. We are expendable. We were antisocial from birth. Our lot in life is low-income jobs and lung cancer. We don't complain.
The bars here throb with noise, are thick with smoke.
In the pub toilets, the cubicles are empty, but there's a queue for the Easi-Purge machine. One girl, a little older and a little less drunk, is trying to push the hose down the throat of another girl. The older girl sways and giggles as her companion gags around the tubing and vomits in the direction of the sinks. A third girl, leaning against a tiled wall and looking worse for wear, groans and swears at them intermittently and tells them to hurry up.
[Easi-Purge Self-Stomach-Pump Units ~ Helping You Avoid The Morning After, The Night Before!]: the most successful franchise operation of the last couple of decades, with Prozac dispensers a close second .
Religion may have once been the opiate of the masses, but the masses have since moved on in search of new and better highs.
Outside in the car park, people have lonely sex. Bodies press desperately together in the hope that the total may somehow be greater than the sum of its parts.
We were the casualties of a social war. Where veterans of previous conflicts had returned from the frontlines with limbs blown off, the only thing amputated from us was our pride.
No more middle class. The parameters have shifted. There are no more rags to riches stories. Education has become a commodity only an elite few can afford. There's nothing to strive for, no chance of beating the odds. No hopes of self-betterment. I have given up waiting for some glorious revolution that will never happen. There won't be any restoration of balance. This is a cycle that cannot be escaped or broken, only ended.
We have no future to speak of. Now I'm going to make sure that we have no future at all.
Across the town, ninety-nine small but vastly powerful bombs are waiting for my signal. Concealed behind the pipes of pub toilets, in the skip out the back of the chemist/abortion clinic, in the stairwells of tenements, under the seats of the bus station, scattered in scores of other spots I can no longer remember, there are enough explosives to raze this place to the ground.
We will not be mourned. There will be no memorial services, nor plaques of remembrance. But for a brief moment, the rest of the world will see that we once existed, even if we never really lived. For one night, people in the cities will look to our town and notice. For just one night, this satellite town will burn brighter than anything else on the horizon.
As I hold the detonator in my hand, feeling the weight of the one hundredth bomb in my coat pocket, I almost regret that I won't be here to watch it.
-- Stevie Gray [Kamikaze Poet] --
x x x
But now I'm back, and here's a short neo-pulp story I wrote a while back for anyone who cares to read it.
Satellite Town
Street-lights cast their sodium reflections in puddles. The night is hot and heavy. A purple sky, thick with storm-clouds, lays low over the breathless town. It's been that kind of summer: warm and stormy.
[Clothes hang on washing lines in gardens and are never taken in. They dry in the torpid heat of the mornings, until the daily afternoon deluge leaves them rain-streaked, wet again.]
I barely look where I'm going. I don't need to. I may hate this town, but I know every square inch of it. It's given up its mystery to me, like a cheap one-night stand.
Was I born here? You know, I can't even remember any more and it no longer seems to matter. This is a town where people pass the time until they die. It makes no difference where their lives began: this is where they will end.
In this untidy suburban sprawl of concrete and apathy, built around a station that most trains pass through without stopping.
The noise rattles windows in the frames of low-cost housing as the trains speed by, bound for places you'll probably never see. Living near the railway lines, the sound is so ceaseless that it becomes no sound at all, a background to life. With time, its absence comes to seem unnatural.
This is nowhere: a satellite town. It has no life of its own, no means to support itself. It hangs in its frozen orbit around the City that sustains it, feeds off it like a benign sort of tumour. City jobs, commuted to on the rust-red connecting buses, make life possible here. City money puts food on simulated wood tables, gets in rounds of drinks on Friday night, pays the TV licence fee. The handful of spare change at the end of the working week is fed into slot-machines, buys something special for the weekend: an upper, a downer, a discreet ten-minute blow job in a parked-up car.
The City is quite a different kind of place to this. In the City, the gleaming high-rise office blocks of multi-billion pound corporations interfere with the flight paths of aeroplanes. The buildings are designed to flex with the wind, so in a good-sized gale, the upper storeys sway by up to twelve feet in each direction. The queasy, imbalanced sensation experienced by workers on the topmost floors has been dubbed "blue-chip vertigo". In the City, expensive looking people step out of expensive hotels to eat tiny amounts of food off huge plates in expensive restaurants. Clever satires are acted out in fashionable theatres. Controversial instillations draw crowds to stately galleries. Highly-skilled cosmetic surgeons in lavish suites make rich people's faces and bodies as beautiful and perfect as their bank statements.
Seventeen miles away and a different world.
Here, houses huddle close together agoraphobically. Drunk fights break out on littered, late-night pavements. Here, there are pubs where you can still smoke, housing you can afford.
Housing estates spring up like inorganic mushrooms. The developers name their creations optimistically: Brook Meadows, Wisteria Heights, Willowy Bank. A narrow stream of slurry running through Brook Meadows, strewn with tyres and plastic bags, is the nearest it has to a brook, and there isn't a meadow in sight. Small wars break out almost daily in Wisteria Heights as rivals vie for control of the estate's drug labs. Police try to avoid Willowy Bank whenever possible and, if they do have to enter, will only go in heavily armed and with back-up.
The City is an entirely smoke-free zone now. The Anti-Smoking Act passed six years ago banned smoking [a dangerous, habit-forming and antisocial activity] from all public places within the City confines. Failure to comply results in hefty fines for those who can afford to pay them, prison sentences for those who can't. Out here on the fringes, in the satellite towns, such laws are not enforced. We are expendable. We were antisocial from birth. Our lot in life is low-income jobs and lung cancer. We don't complain.
The bars here throb with noise, are thick with smoke.
In the pub toilets, the cubicles are empty, but there's a queue for the Easi-Purge machine. One girl, a little older and a little less drunk, is trying to push the hose down the throat of another girl. The older girl sways and giggles as her companion gags around the tubing and vomits in the direction of the sinks. A third girl, leaning against a tiled wall and looking worse for wear, groans and swears at them intermittently and tells them to hurry up.
[Easi-Purge Self-Stomach-Pump Units ~ Helping You Avoid The Morning After, The Night Before!]: the most successful franchise operation of the last couple of decades, with Prozac dispensers a close second .
Religion may have once been the opiate of the masses, but the masses have since moved on in search of new and better highs.
Outside in the car park, people have lonely sex. Bodies press desperately together in the hope that the total may somehow be greater than the sum of its parts.
We were the casualties of a social war. Where veterans of previous conflicts had returned from the frontlines with limbs blown off, the only thing amputated from us was our pride.
No more middle class. The parameters have shifted. There are no more rags to riches stories. Education has become a commodity only an elite few can afford. There's nothing to strive for, no chance of beating the odds. No hopes of self-betterment. I have given up waiting for some glorious revolution that will never happen. There won't be any restoration of balance. This is a cycle that cannot be escaped or broken, only ended.
We have no future to speak of. Now I'm going to make sure that we have no future at all.
Across the town, ninety-nine small but vastly powerful bombs are waiting for my signal. Concealed behind the pipes of pub toilets, in the skip out the back of the chemist/abortion clinic, in the stairwells of tenements, under the seats of the bus station, scattered in scores of other spots I can no longer remember, there are enough explosives to raze this place to the ground.
We will not be mourned. There will be no memorial services, nor plaques of remembrance. But for a brief moment, the rest of the world will see that we once existed, even if we never really lived. For one night, people in the cities will look to our town and notice. For just one night, this satellite town will burn brighter than anything else on the horizon.
As I hold the detonator in my hand, feeling the weight of the one hundredth bomb in my coat pocket, I almost regret that I won't be here to watch it.
-- Stevie Gray [Kamikaze Poet] --
x x x
VIEW 10 of 10 COMMENTS
meatpieboy:
I'm glad you're back. Your posts are always interesting.
user101822327:
aaa! zzzll azzla zzzzlllla a azz lzzal - or something like that i imagine!