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)

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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” →