When Debbie left I ate nothing but potato smiles with no-frills ketchup. One day I looked at the fluffy orange discs grinning up at me and decided to save one. I stuck it to the wall next to my bed and it cheered me up. The next day I saved another, but I’d had one of my funny days, so I stuck this one upside down, to make a frown. I did this for years and the pattern reminded me how well I was doing.

The man from environmental health had a big oblong body built for blocking doorways. ‘The neighbours are talking about a smell,’ he said.

I locked the door and made him sit whilst I removed the smiles and heaped them on a plate in front of him. The sauce bottle was rimmed with decaying ketchup scabs. I squeezed, squeezed hard till his plate was full.

Happy Place

 He hated grocery shopping, hated the time it took. But he came up with a method. People bought the same things, more or less. So he would look for someone of his type, sneak up behind them and roll their fully-laden trolley off to the checkout.

It made life interesting. Often there were things he would never have bought; once there was a fat orange pumpkin.

But today he was in trouble. He had been stealing mostly from women because he liked the sense of order to their selections, but his victim had spied him and was stomping over. There were women's products in the cart, so it was going to be difficult. He decided to pretend he knew her.
'Darling, I'll just get eggs'
'We’ve got eggs' The woman chirped. 'Listen, do you want to go out to the car? You look stressed. You can listen to your tape'.

Server Farmer

It was the three AM walk round and I had finished checking the data feeds when I looked back at the servers squatting in the dim aquarium light. They seemed to be mocking me with their beady glittering eyes. These Daleks belonged to all kinds of companies - a nuclear plant, the Benefit Agency, a vehicle breakdown company. I imagined them swapping stories when I’d gone - about caesium spills, dodgy claims, flat batteries in howling gales. I knew for certain that they talked about me.

A spangled map showed the live server connections and when I flipped the switches a thousand winking stars went out. I sensed a body go limp, thought I heard a sigh as the last breath of data escaped. Sirens howled, lights flashed, Doc Marten’d feet pounded down the corridor.

 I knew what it was like to kill and I had to have more.

Special Interest

‘Excuse me’ he said. It was the bloke who‘d been creeping around behind me in Woolworths. He had haunted muddy eyes and his breath reeked of curry and tic-tacs.

 ‘I was wondering, did you pay for those seeds?’

 He was right of course. Assorted Summer Blooms, palmed deftly into my secret pocket. But this guy didn’t look like security.

‘What seeds?’

His eyes darted about. ‘Can we go for coffee?’

 His thumb stroked my finger where it rested against my Latte. I didn’t move it away.

‘I have a thing,’ he said. ‘For people like you.’

I felt myself redden. ‘Like me?’

He gripped my finger in his hand. ‘Women who steal.’

I pulled my hand away. ‘So I’m just another?’

‘You’re special. I bet you don’t even have a garden for those seeds.’

  ‘One O’clock, B & Q.’ I called after him. ‘Nails and fixings.’

The Kids Are Alright

When I heard about the boy whose parents dressed him as a girl till the age of 12 I thought, lucky kid. My parents dressed me till I was 13 as popular crooner Perry Como. They even encouraged me to carry, but not smoke, a beautiful briarwood pipe and I would stab the air with its stem to emphasis a point and suck on it when deep in thought. Yet I wasn’t unhappy; it was normal. My cousin had it much worse, as Max Bygraves.

One day I was house-training the dog. The sleeve to Swing Out Perry was on the floor and before I could stop him Engelbert squatted and squeezed a neat little turd right in the middle of Perry’s polished inane features.

The next day my mother let me have my fringe cut like Dave Hill out of Slade. Kids have to be allowed to express themselves.

The Way You Say Park

 He had been listening to her voice for years; the percussive, slightly guttural approach to Newton-le-Willows, the gorgeous ripe burr in the vowels of Hazel Grove, the absolute absence of sarcasm when she apologised for cancellations. Today he was singing along in his head as usual when he heard her inject a new enunciation into Eccelston Park, giving the word ‘park’ greater emphasis and putting a little suppressed laugh at the end of it.

This was significant because it was his name. Parker. And each time she said park she made the same little flourish.

He decided not to go in to work and instead stayed at the station, listening to the way she said park. The staff wouldn’t tell him where her office was, but tomorrow he would discover her name and shout it on all the platforms. That way she would know that he loved her in return.

Uchafu

I watched her face, listening closely, just like it said in the book. But loud laughter from the kitchen made it difficult to concentrate. 

‘Your bill,’ the waiter said through a leery grin, ‘Mr dirty bastard’

I looked at him.

‘The word on your T-shirt.’

The T-Shirt was from a trendy city centre shop - be casual, be modern, the book said. I’d assumed the inscription on the back was just a random collection of letters.

‘Uchafu. It’s Swahili. Means dirty bastard,’ the waiter chuckled, ‘or literally, he who pimps for a slave owner.’

 On the way back I made light of it. ‘Somewhere in Africa, there’s a T-shirt with knobhead on the back.’ But she didn’t laugh. Do not enter the next phase unless the mood is right, the book said, so I took her straight home. She would talk to the agency about me, I knew it.

We Are The Robots

She was the third girlfriend to ditch me this year. ‘We went to this club,’ I told Gary, ‘and at the end of the night she’d completely changed. She was distant, hostile.’

He looked at me over the rim of his spectacles ‘Did you dance?’

‘Well,’ I poked at a beer mat. ‘At one point I did throw a few shapes.’

He tilted his head towards me.  ‘Did you do the robotics?’

‘Definitely not.’

‘What was the music?’

‘Eighties retro’

Gary removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. ‘How many times have we been through this – you hear the music, you do the robotics.’ He picked up his coat. ‘No woman will stand for it.’

 Later I was on the floor. A moog bass line squelched, a metallic snare ripped the air, I was part of a machine, a valve in the heart of a bleeping gnashing metal beast.

You Know, Quiet.

The room he was given had seven wardrobes. Seven. At night the wardrobes oppressed him. Dark brooding figures shuffling closer to his bed, faces glowering out from the whorls of polished grain. The landlord wouldn’t let him get rid of them. They were classic. Solid. So he had to think of a way to use them. The TV fitted into one, Hi Fi in another, cooking equipment in a third, and various bits and bobs in the rest. But he couldn’t think of anything to do with the last one. Then one night he dragged his duvet into it and had the best night’s sleep ever.

He decided to stay in the wardrobe. He would move in a radio, and would eat there too. Eventually he would get six more people to live in the other wardrobes. Because he was the last person to keep himself to himself.

David Gaffney has been published in Ambit, Modart, The Illustrated Ape, Bored Mag, Ephemera, Rant, thephonebook.com, The Stand (2006) Index, Skive Mag, Somewhat, Blowback Mag, Transmission, Cautionary Tale, FACT Mag, Papercut, Word Riot, Stand Off, The Quiet Feather, Mooch Mag, Revolve, Defenestration, The Ugly Tree, Cent, and in the states Modernfix and Juked.

Email: David Gaffney

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