2006: The Eighties Future

New writing from 2006, the year that was supposed to be the future when I was eight. Just the look of it - 2006 - makes me think of jet packs and food in pill form.

The Glass Collector

She goes to bum-to-crotch with her shift manager. The bar is so narrow that the difference between assault and gallantry is a question of pressure.
Cherry

Anemones are coy

The night after I had been dreaming of tropical fish in eighties corporate fishtanks, I woke up with my skull as tight as a buoy. I spent the day bobbing between bed and toilet bowl, throwing up with tidal regularity.

Aurora Borealis, explained

Because of gravity’s appetite for physical affection and because solar wind is incomprehensible to the human mind and because each time a particle dies

Conk

I had a friend called Dan who asked me to punch him in the face.

Gland II. London

the sound of a parotid gland rupturing is somewhere between the sound of a chef tenderising a fillet steak and the noise a balloon makes when you let the air out.

Gland III. West Wales

Science cannot explain why and, in truth, science is not particularly interested.