The world ends when the spirits of the unforgotten dead grow so huge in number that there’s no room left for the living.

Nobody knows why.

The list of ghosts includes:

• The ghosts of everyone who ever lived, anywhere, at any time in the history of humanity, whether for a hundred years or just a few minutes – plus the ghosts of their children and parents and grandparents and everyone they ever knew or heard about or fell in love with or never even met
• The ghosts of pets and other domestic or wild animals – including fleas and sheep and killer whales, and ants and elephants and single-celled organisms in their billions and trillions
• The ghosts of objects, such as rocks and chairs and cursed toys, of which a subset is the spirits of place: sacred mountains, malevolent old houses, lonely stretches of water etc. as well as a range of meteorological and atmospheric conditions including winds, and sunsets, and haunted rain
• The ghosts of smells and sensations, half-forgotten perfumes and paint colours, snatches of scratchy songs from old tapes or vinyl records, piano chords coming from distant rooms you could never find your way back to, behind doors you closed a lifetime ago and so on
• The ghosts of the people that people once were, or could have been if things had turned out differently, or could never have been, no matter how hard they tried
• The ghosts of missed chances, missed opportunities, missed everythings

It turns out that the animists were right. Everything has a soul. And, consequently, an eternal afterlife. And, consequently, the need for somewhere to live it.

Continue reading “How the World Ends #53: Ghosts” →

The world ends because everyone gets autism.

There is debate over the exact mechanism.

Some people get it from vaccines. Some people get it from microplastics. Some people get it from pesticides or food additives or the medicines their mothers took when they were pregnant.

Some people catch it from other people who already have it – from friends or family members or lovers who diagnose it for them.

Some people get it from playing too many video games, from spending too much time staring at screens at crucial stages in their childhood development.

Some people get it from living too close to cell phone towers or electricity pylons or wind turbines, or from standing too close to microwave ovens.

Some people come down with it after head injuries or emotional trauma or from being too indulged – or not indulged enough – as children.

Some people get it from exposure to solar flares, or vapour trails, or badly policed gender boundaries, or as a result of allergic reactions to food or chemicals or insect bites or the general insanity of modern life.

Some people seem to get it for no reason at all, at random and out of the blue, from which it is impossible to draw any conclusion or moral message.

Continue reading “How the World Ends #92: Autism” →

The world ends when they are no more children left, the last of them having been murdered by their grandparents. Nobody is surprised.

The children are murdered by their grandparents as revenge for their obscene youth, and for reminding the elderly of their mortality and irrelevance, and for their awful weakness and need. They are murdered for their insolence and their unearned innocence. They are murdered out of envy, and fear, and cold hatred.

In public.

Everyone knows about it. It’s all over Facebook. People are initially shocked and appalled and then don’t do anything about it and then it just becomes another part of the ongoing horror. Just another thing to try to accommodate as you struggle to get through your day.

Because what can anybody really do about anything anymore, anyway?

Continue reading “How the World Ends #37: Infanticide” →

(A story that never quite found its place – but its 90% there)

-1-

Nick can’t sleep.

It’s been going on for months and it’s starting to affect his mental health. It’s starting to affect his business, too. And worrying about the effect that his lack of sleep is having on his mental health and his business is contributing to his sleeplessness.

“It’s a negative feedback loop,” Nick tells his girlfriend Anais.

“It’s one in the morning,” Anais tells Nick. Anais has to be up at five thirty to lead a yoga class. Nick’s lack of sleep is starting to affect her mental health and business too.

Continue reading “In Arcadia” →

(Being the opening bit of a potentially lost novel)

There is that Dog Again

My sister and I are sitting by the side of the road in the early morning and we are waiting to be given a ride into town. The sun is still orange but it has come out of the shadow of the mountains and the air is almost warm. It is springtime now and the birds in the pine trees in the valley are singing. Three carts going to the market have passed us by, but no one has picked us up yet. Somewhere among the pine trees or on the other side of them there is a river which I can hear but not see.

My sister lights her pipe, spits into the dust and considers that for a moment, and then squints down the road.

“There is that dog again,” she says.

“I see him,” I reply, and there he is, back along the road, sniffing around at things and walking about in his strange way.

“Or is it even the same dog?” My sister asks. “I thought it was but now I wonder.”

“It is the same one.”

“Can you be sure? Any dog might lose a foot to a trap, or by going under the wheel of a wagon, or something else. It is a dangerous world. And not just for dogs.”

“That is true.”

After we have watched the dog for a while longer my sister says, “it does look like him, though.”

I do not say anything to that. If I were to say something it would be that the dog looks like him because it is him.

“He gets up and down the country well for a three-legged creature, do you not think?”

“Three legs is still one more than a man has,” I say, and my sister looks at me strangely then, but she knows I am right.

Continue reading “Lives of the Miracle Children – first chapter” →

1. Because every story needs a hero

Because every story needs a hero, the hero of this story is going to be Robert Gaskins, the man who invented PowerPoint.

PowerPoint, as you will almost definitely know, is the presentation tool that comes bundled with the Microsoft Office suite of programs. PowerPoint lets you create slide shows which can feature text, images, graphics and videos. You can use these slides shows to present business reports, financial plans, sales pitches, scientific findings and just about anything else.

Robert Gaskins is going to be the hero of this story even though this story isn’t really about PowerPoint. Or not only about PowerPoint. This story is also about Keynote, which is Apple’s answer to PowerPoint, and Google Slides, which is Google’s answer to PowerPoint.

More broadly, this story is about the context in which these presentation tools exist, and the context that these presentation tools create.

Continue reading “Play from Current Slide” →

“Mark Haddon has chosen Owen Booth’s Frankenstein’s Monster is Drunk, and the Sheep Have All Jumped the Fences as the winner of The Moth Short Story Prize 2020, for which Booth will receive €3,000.

“This felt like a winner from the very first sentence – ‘They’d dug him out of the glacier in 1946, pulled him out of the crevasse where he’d crawled after his Hollywood career had given up the ghost.’ The language is confident. The idea is unexpected, eccentric and entertaining. And I could sense, already, the generosity which would underpin the whole story,” said Haddon…”

Read the story in The Irish Times

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