‘Such heat!’ said the Commander, fanning himself with his hat. The two uniformed men at the front of the bus made a panicked show of fiddling with the air-conditioning levels and redirecting the fan grills. ‘I’d forgotten how searing the heart of this country is. Positively Hadean. What can we do about this heat, Dickie?’
Dickie put down his pen, twisted the top off a bottle of sparkling water, and handed it to the Commander.
‘No, no. I mean this,’ the Commander said, and tapped on the window. ‘The dying trees, if you can call them trees. The red dirt. I say, it is little wonder that so few of our citizens care to venture this far inland when the whole place burns like a kiln. They say they used to come in droves, by the millions, to tramp around an unadorned slab of rock, and eat flies by the dozen. Spend their own monies to do so! And now the railway line we built from the capital lays dormant and warping under the sun. How much did it cost to build?’ Dickie opened his mouth but the Commander held up his hand. ‘Never mind. Don’t remind me.’
/*
I've been toying with the idea of cataclysmic annihilation for some time now, but never got around to completing it. Something always got in the way - famines, floods, planting dinosaur bones around the place - and I was only able to make the most modest of adjustments.
So much for spare time!
But I'm finally proud to announce the release of a beta candidate. After several thousands of years, we're ready to test Armageddon, people!
The code probably needs a tidy up here and there, but then so does the Universe. Ha ha!
I considered pair-programming with Allah, but he's a terrible coder, and would have probably just copied and pasted some awful snippet straight from Stack Overflow.
(Note to the wise: running this code will only affect your current reality. This system doesn't yet support parallel universe programming, if you believe in that sort of thing anyway.)
Thanks to everyone who believed in me, and kept rooting for the final destruction of time, space and all matter, dark or otherwise.
Yours in theoretical eternity,
God.✝
*//**
* @description: This class, when instantiated,
* will trigger the end of the known Universe.
* @version: 1.0.0
* @author God
*/
class EndOfUniverse extends BeginningOfUniverse{
constructor(super) {
// first pause the
// ongoing universe
super.pause();
// assign the current universe
// to this instance
this.universe = super.universe;
// let's save the
// date so we know
// exactly when
// Armageddon took place.
this.endTime = new Date();
this.forgiveAllSins();
this.startTheRapture();
this.bigReverseBang();
}
forgiveAllSins() {
console.warn('Hi! You are all forgiven!');
}
startTheRapture() {
this.universe.filter(atom => {
// filter out Christians from
// the universe
// before destroying it.
// Sorry in advance to all
// other faiths, but
// after the Jesus() update
// there was no going back!
return atom.contains('Christian') === false;
});
}
bigReverseBang() {
// this is the method
// that basically
// reduces everything to
// nothing
this.universe = this.universe.reduce(
(reducedUniverse, atom) => {
if (atom === undefined) {
return atom;
}
},
[]);
}
reset() {
// Sorry, I haven't found a way
// to build a reset function
// that doesn't take 14 billion years
// of CPU time, let alone seven days! :)
}
}
Once a month the universe tosses him a get out of jail card; allows him a ruffle and a blow dry from the sopping subaqueous saga, and shines a torchlight on the shores of hope.
He was never overly dramatic, but he can’t help but chortle and whistle as he sloshes from the waves onto the wet rocks, pinches his cold cheeks, and shakes his gills in anticipation. Continue reading “The ocean’s hourglass”
When the tyre blew, there was no explosion of rubber. No extended hiss.
No sudden slump in the cab, or grinding of rim on rock. Nothing to indicate that the wheel had put up a fight. Only an unsatisfying and noiseless wobble, an deflationary apology for having left me perched perpendicular to the descending mud track, and enveloped tip to toe in mountain forest.
The accountant’s wife has seen ghosts before—Bhut they are called in her home country—and she remembers the very mischievous one who would come crawling down from the mango tree, her bangles clanging in the night, and slip through the crevice in the wall at the foot of her bed; the one her mother insisted brought luck, though it often caused the young girl to wet the sheets. At times the apparition resembled her father, featureless and bloated. On other occasions it was a witch with black teeth and a pulsating, red bindi. No more than pedestrians passing through the nightly imaginations of a child, her mother had said. But to the wife, they were real.
The meeting took place in the lower dining room of Dario’s. Plastic lemons, fake aspidistras, clogged toilets… an infelicitous atmosphere for anything other than privacy.
But the Bufula was good. We liked Bufula.
I’d arrived first to arrange tables, pre-order nibbles, and setup the temporal displacement cube.
The others began wamping one at a time into the WC. The pilot, the failed rocker, the one-eyed politician, the medieval librarian, the knife-throwing accountant. They stumbled out of the cubicle, arms and heads gyrating as though wrestling invisible octopodes, and hung their jumpsuits on the wall, over the yellowed paintings of Naples. We were as different as we were the same—lined faces, crooked legs, clipped fingernails—our universes had left their signature marks, but still we shared the same misanthropic grin, the same, simple acknowledgement that life will not only take capricious and inconvenient twists, but will do so at every opportunity. Continue reading “Pizza: the transdimensional constant”
Short chapters inspired by my new, coming of age novel, Sandbanker, available at no bookstores near you (yet)
The bell at St Christopher’s was not a real bell, made of brass or anything, but electric — it droned, like the torpedos in River Raid. (I didn’t actually have an Atari 2600 to test the theory, and didn’t really know anyone who did, at least someone who I could ask, but that’s what I’d heard.) Whoever they’d gotten to ring the school bell on that Friday afternoon had morsed-coded ‘S-O-S S-O-S’, and everyone had a good laugh about it, but I would’ve bet a case of chocolate frogs they had no clue what it meant. Continue reading “Tales from Shelley Beach – The Bus Ride home”
Many had taken refuge on the roofs of the buildings which still stood—the bus depot, the medical clinic—others had clamoured up trees, straddling branches and waving helplessly to the heads and head-shaped objects floating by.
From the ridge, Kobe looked down into the valley at the spume of life and death as if in a trance. Just three hours ago he’d been tying a load of cane to the back of his motorbike, whistling that tune that had been going around, and watching Jora belt the life out of a woollen rug with a piece of driftwood. “Am I so useless to you?” she raged, punctuating each word with a blow of the stick, “Useless! Useless! Useless!”, as clouds of dust exploded from the rug’s woollen flanks. Continue reading “Milk and thunder”
The Bubble is frothing at the edge of cataclysm. Debt-starved zombies roam the streets of London, desperate to feast on the fresh credit ratings of the financially unburdened.
Sam and Laney are planning their getaway. Will they manage to avoid the malevolent plague and escape the city before it’s too late?
Transitory, on ice and breath, a sweeping movement of a coffee-stained Frankfurter Allgemeine. The check-in announcement screams at me as I exit arrivals, stone faces, no signs. Where is my welcoming party?
Thirty hours of cracking your bones in seat 32F and this is what you get, though it might be what you deserve. Nobody’s going to come to get you in GMT+1 except the stipple dreams that you coloured for yourself when you thought it was OK to exchange everything that defined you for a one-way ticket.
@germanforayear Taxi smells like pretzels. How do u say ‘I need a f**king smoke’ auf Deutsch? #jetlagged
Illustrated Shorts 