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Purveyors 2007-05-18 05:29:39 They just really didn’t get it at all.
How could they? The connection between their brains and their hearts had been closed off. They were adults.
Not information-overloaded, time-wasting, attitude-absorbing, world-hating, group-hugging psychos with a taste for the thrills of easy sex, unreal violence and a lack of interest in repercussions.
They wouldn’t know a really bad thing if it bit their faces off and sucked the brain out of an exposed eye-socket. They were not prepared; they just didn’t have a clue. Which was exactly how the average teenager liked it.
It was how the average anti-social, trouble-making teenager loved it actually.
They called themselves Purveyors of Cerebral Mayhem.
Pretentious, too-clever-by-far and bizarrely productive, it was a shape-shifting, ranks-morphing organization that relied on anything but organization to get things done.
In truth, it was a call to arms for the largest terrorist demographic in all the world.
Though it was difficult to pinpoint
Different Rules 2007-05-17 05:18:19 The curls of cigarette smoke rose between them like really thin barriers; as genuinely pointless as lightning-proofing a person. She was sitting back, he was hunched forward and anybody who cared to look over would have known that all was not well. Nobody cared. People were not concerned with the problems of beautiful people. They were just glad beautiful people had problems.
She was beautiful in a way that nobody disagreed when someone called her beautiful. Women oscillated between wistfulness and envy when they looked at her. She knew how to enter a room and she knew how to leave it. She was the kind of arm candy men would give the other arm to acquire. Most people suspected she wasn’t real. Others thought she was an alien.
He was successful in a way that nobody doubted it when someone said, ‘there goes a successful man.’ Nobody argued even if the king of hyperbole dropped this old chestnut into a conversation about him, ‘if you look up success in the encyclopedia you’ll pr Read more:Rules
Life Skids To A Halt 2007-05-16 06:42:39 It all began with a phone call.
She stepped out onto the street to try and get a clear signal, to understand what he was saying because she knew how much he hated it if he had to repeat himself when he was yelling at someone. This was neither new nor unusual and she silently cursed every single Indian mobile operator for their shitty service every time she had to duck, bob, weave and squint to understand the words attempting to skewer her over her cellphone.
The guy in the car was grinning at something his girlfriend was saying. He was using a hands-free kit to avoid a fine by some overzealous traffic cop. It was proving hard for him (in more ways than one) to maintain a neutral driving expression when the woman on the other end of that conversation was going into elaborate detail about what she would do to him when she saw him next. Her breasts were involved. His tongue was involved. Assorted foods and three different types of alcohol were involved. She promised action involving her l
Apples and Lozenges 2007-05-21 08:04:52 He wasn’t quite what she expected.
It was a fact of life she had learnt to live with. Like the time she switched from the PC to the Mac.
It was a sexy machine. All silvery and slim with little pieces of attractive minutiae like the keyboard that lit up and the magnetic power cord plug. It had looked sexy enough in all those ads she watched online that exhorted her to switch simply by extolling the disadvantages of the PC. She knew she would look cool puttering about in a café or restaurant with that glowing Apple on the lid letting everyone know they had a cool person in their midst. She had planned to go into public places and leave her Bluetooth on to see what happened. Maybe a cute guy would send her his picture. Maybe she would get propositioned by Nokia 6260. She liked the idea of flirting by Bluetooth.
That was the promise. The reality had been a little different. The computer was easy to use but also a bit frustrating for a girl who had spent a fair bit of time memorizing PC Read more:Apples
Creative Solution 2007-05-20 06:06:18 “What’s it going to take?”
She was at that stage in the process where answering was not immediately essential.
He was keeping his distance, leaning against the wall, his fingers gripping the window sill.
It looked like a casual image to the cursory eye.
In truth he was hanging on with all he had. His fingers were already going numb as the blood raged through him. His fingertips were white. The numbness was starting to spread but he knew that there would be aggression if he let go.
He would eventually have to let go when he couldn’t feel his hands anymore.
He tried again, “What. Is. It. Going. To. Take?”
She was not looking at him. Her palms were on her knees under the table and her right leg was twitching, going fifty times a minute like the needle in a sewing machine. Her hair was hanging forward, obscuring her face. He knew her eyes would be downcast. She had held the pose before though both of them knew it was futile.
He was tired of the game, the same old game, again an Read more:Solution
Uprooted 2007-05-19 07:01:46 The sun was up; the air was hot, sticky and humid. It wasn’t yet nine in the morning and already it was threatening to be the kind of day during which clothes stuck to a person’s back.
The thing he hated most was when his pants stuck to the back of his thighs. Or his boxers hugged his ass like cling film with abandonment issues.
This was going to be one of those days.
‘Remember not to sit,” he told himself. Not that it did him any good. His lower back hurt if he didn’t. After long periods of on-his-feet activity he woke up the following morning with a stiffness that felt like all his insides south of his lungs and north of his pelvis had turned to solid rock. ‘I bet this is how The Thing feels,’ he thought one morning as he rolled out of bed and tried to touch his toes, ‘I wish my pain was as fictitious as cartoon characters…’
He scanned the view. There really wasn’t much to see beyond the slum that seemed to stretch unto infinity from where he was standing. Littl
Retribution by Committee 2007-05-24 00:43:53 He was a pot-bellied man, middle class in every respect, with the characteristic diffidence that is the aura such a man bears when a television camera is pointed at him. He would probably gather family and friends to sit around the colour television that held pride of place in the family living to room to watch his fifteen seconds of fame. That he wasn’t completely cowed by the prospect of communicating with the unblinking eye of the camera was because of the adrenaline that was still rushing through him, making his heart beat faster and requiring him to speak up so that could hear himself over the roar in his head.
The roar in his head was only slightly louder than the roar on the street behind him. The place looked like it would in the aftermath of Diwali festivities. Papers strewn around, smoke beginning to thin like a lifting fog and lots of people milling about, looking proud of themselves.
When the microphone was thrust in his face the man looked unsure of himself for just one Read more:Committee
Travel Dilemma 2007-05-22 23:38:15 It was always the same before a trip. A certain fear that gripped him. It was difficult to clearly articulate the source or the reason for the fear. It hung over him like a sickly aura or the static electricity that sometimes sticks clothes to skin in a not entirely unpleasant manner. If he tired to analyse it, it made his head hurt. Because ‘over there’ was really better than ‘right here’, anywhere was better than where he was, in his life and in his mind. Yet there was that nagging feeling that it was only a trip, and if he survived it, he would have to return to the same old life he already knew.
If he had to stick a pin in something to identify it as the source of the pain, he would have credited the returning with the dismay he felt.
He enjoyed watching the kids. They were the only ones who had the enthusiasm. He loved that they could get excited about anything, from going to church to flying to another continent. They met most opportunities with enthusiasm, something he r Read more:Travel
Threshold 2007-05-21 23:51:49 “You’re making me angry, please stop.”
“Or what? You’re going to go all green and big and hairy and smash the shit out of the city? I don’t think so.”
“I’m serious man. Don’t make me angry. It’s not a good thing to do.”
“First of all, all I did was ask you how it feels to have turned thirty, to be riding the rollercoaster downhill all the way. That’s not such a bad thing. It’s only the truth. So what’s with all the drama?”
“Okay fine. Ha ha. Funny. I got it the first time. Now let’s move on.”
“What? Why? I don’t know too many thirty-year-olds, I need to know what happens. Do your balls start to sag? Do you see smoking hot chicks and feel nothing at all? Down there I mean. I’ll bet you already have wrinkles and grey hair. Your pubes graying too?”
He went quiet and very, very still. If his insensitive mate was paying any attention at all, he would have noticed. He would have seen the clenched fists, the closed eyes and the shaking. The judd Read more:Threshold
Art World Hook-Up 2007-05-26 22:52:56 “Does it ever feel like life as we once knew it and the things we held so dear are now merely memories? And faulty ones at that? For I am no longer my brother’s keeper or my father’s son though that relationship still exists and so does the other one. I’m too far gone now, there’s no way back and time has opened up a rift so wide I think I’ll fall in. Or maybe I’ll just drown myself in spirits undistilled…”
The poet on stage went on like that for an hour, at least it seemed like an hour, maybe it was no more than five minutes. It became difficult to tell how long a second could stretch when every space between performer and audience was filled with a delicate drone denouncing life’s many improprieties.
He wasn’t there for the art, he didn’t even consider it art. He was there for the wine, which was free and the women, who could be. He liked the situation; it filled him with great satisfaction to be doing very bad things while people wailed about how other peop Read more:World
Art World Hook-Up 2007-05-26 22:52:55 “Does it ever feel like life as we once knew it and the things we held so dear are now merely memories? And faulty ones at that? For I am no longer my brother’s keeper or my father’s son though that relationship still exists and so does the other one. I’m too far gone now, there’s no way back and time has opened up a rift so wide I think I’ll fall in. Or maybe I’ll just drown myself in spirits undistilled…”
The poet on stage went on like that for an hour, at least it seemed like an hour, maybe it was no more than five minutes. It became difficult to tell how long a second could stretch when every space between performer and audience was filled with a delicate drone denouncing life’s many improprieties.
He wasn’t there for the art, he didn’t even consider it art. He was there for the wine, which was free and the women, who could be. He liked the situation; it filled him with great satisfaction to be doing very bad things while people wailed about how other peop Read more:World
Art World Hook-Up 2007-05-26 22:52:54 “Does it ever feel like life as we once knew it and the things we held so dear are now merely memories? And faulty ones at that? For I am no longer my brother’s keeper or my father’s son though that relationship still exists and so does the other one. I’m too far gone now, there’s no way back and time has opened up a rift so wide I think I’ll fall in. Or maybe I’ll just drown myself in spirits undistilled…”
The poet on stage went on like that for an hour, at least it seemed like an hour, maybe it was no more than five minutes. It became difficult to tell how long a second could stretch when every space between performer and audience was filled with a delicate drone denouncing life’s many improprieties.
He wasn’t there for the art, he didn’t even consider it art. He was there for the wine, which was free and the women, who could be. He liked the situation; it filled him with great satisfaction to be doing very bad things while people wailed about how other peop Read more:World
Art World Hook-Up 2007-05-26 22:52:52 “Does it ever feel like life as we once knew it and the things we held so dear are now merely memories? And faulty ones at that? For I am no longer my brother’s keeper or my father’s son though that relationship still exists and so does the other one. I’m too far gone now, there’s no way back and time has opened up a rift so wide I think I’ll fall in. Or maybe I’ll just drown myself in spirits undistilled…”
The poet on stage went on like that for an hour, at least it seemed like an hour, maybe it was no more than five minutes. It became difficult to tell how long a second could stretch when every space between performer and audience was filled with a delicate drone denouncing life’s many improprieties.
He wasn’t there for the art, he didn’t even consider it art. He was there for the wine, which was free and the women, who could be. He liked the situation; it filled him with great satisfaction to be doing very bad things while people wailed about how other peop Read more:World
Art World Hook-Up 2007-05-26 22:52:51 “Does it ever feel like life as we once knew it and the things we held so dear are now merely memories? And faulty ones at that? For I am no longer my brother’s keeper or my father’s son though that relationship still exists and so does the other one. I’m too far gone now, there’s no way back and time has opened up a rift so wide I think I’ll fall in. Or maybe I’ll just drown myself in spirits undistilled…”
The poet on stage went on like that for an hour, at least it seemed like an hour, maybe it was no more than five minutes. It became difficult to tell how long a second could stretch when every space between performer and audience was filled with a delicate drone denouncing life’s many improprieties.
He wasn’t there for the art, he didn’t even consider it art. He was there for the wine, which was free and the women, who could be. He liked the situation; it filled him with great satisfaction to be doing very bad things while people wailed about how other peop Read more:World
Eternity 2007-05-25 23:23:06 All he really wanted her to do was shut up. It didn’t seem like too much to ask but there was no silencing her even when she was asleep. He had lost count of the nights he had been woken by her inarticulate ramblings. Sometimes she hit out in the dark. Rarely connected with anything other than him. He had woken up with some wicked back pain and on one occasion his ass hurt. It didn’t make sense. What could he possibly have done in his sleep to make his ass hurt. But it did and that too only the left cheek. The best way to describe him was to call him ‘long suffering.’ Everybody he knew called him an asshole and a pussy, mainly because he hadn’t tossed her talkative ass out on the street. But long suffering was more polite.
They had been married for thirty-one years. Most of the people who thought those were thirty years too many were long dead or getting there. At that age an opinion is all a person has and an opinion is all a person can trade. The stock value of Paresh-shoul Read more:Eternity
Carnal Retribution 2007-05-24 22:58:11 Her mascara was streaking down her cheeks at an alarming rate. If she didn’t know better she’d think the stuff was waterier than usual. Actually she didn’t know better. She wasn’t really an expert when it came to evaluating the thickness of mascara and the speed it would run at in various situations. She was running too and the impact of feet upon pavement was racing up her legs, jarring the streaking tears so that little starbursts of grey-black dotted the mascara tracks.
Why am I crying? I should be angry! Wait, maybe these are angry tears.
Even she didn’t consider that to be the truth. She knew she was crying and that she was running and that she would have to stop doing at least one some time soon. The burning in her chest was spreading like a flash fire through her ribs and she could imagine them crackling red and sputtering grey as she burnt more calories through exercise than she had in a very long time.
I need to stop.
The image of burning ribs before they crumbled t
Bonded Labour 2007-05-29 23:05:14 “Tell me that you love me.”
“I love you.”
“Tell me that you think I could be a big star.”
“You could be a big star.”
“Tell me you’ll help me.”
“You know I’d love to.”
She twisted his testicles really hard and though he wanted to scream from the pain he ended up groaning into the hand she clamped over his mouth. They were in a nightclub and she was draped so seductively across him that anybody would have thought that the guy was getting a handjob, or more, right there in public. So if anyone had noticed the grimace they would have simply assumed that she had finished him off and he had suddenly realized that he stains to explain to a wife.
She slid off him and he doubled up and groaned again. Her administrations were going to hurt for a long time. Her face was impassive but there were emotional currents seething under the surface that would have drowned a large animal if it dared step in. He was a small animal, and a lucky one at that, because he got off wit Read more:Labour
Black Widow 2007-05-29 00:34:52 The blonde was all sex and shanti, served on a platter of old skool hip-hop. Content in her discontent with the state of the world she was prompted to do little other than let it be the way it already was. Making the planet different was out of the question for her kind so there was no way she would ever do anything to make it better. She simply fell into the pattern of other women like herself who had the Om sign tattooed on some part of their bodies yet felt harmonious with nothing on Planet Earth. The lack of connection brought with it the need to do something extreme.
Her chosen path was to fuck her way out of the disconnection she felt with the world. In her tragic race for a connection she had given several races a taste of what the little white girl in the thong visible through her soft satin dresses was capable of. Lee from Jurong had been the right choice for a while before Kepler from Havelock had left her unbuttoned. Thomas Yen from Boon Lay believed that laying her was a bo Read more:Black
What The Hell 2007-05-27 23:59:37 When he took off his shirt, he did so with pride because he probably saw a man in his prime when looked in the mirror. She saw a man who hadn’t given up on his body even though his body had given up on him. She thought it was attractive in a low-key, almost loser, sort of way. He was the kind of guy she slept with because it made her feel better.
He had lost the battle with his abs. Several layers of fat covered what was probably a decently stomach at one time. It was true that she could still see hints of the six-pack he sported in his halcyon days, especially when he remembered to hold his stomach in.
She knew that he would try harder than most of the guys she had what-the-hell sex with. She had been taking men’s breath away for long enough to know the effect she had on them. It didn’t make her vain but she liked knowing her place in the world. It was that rarified space that was only threatened when another beautiful woman entered the picture. He impressed her by being genui
Wild Child 2007-06-01 18:05:13 They called her Wild Child, for a number of reasons. ‘They’ were anybody from the adults in positions of authority to the kids who were her peers. They didn’t have to know her, some of them hadn’t even met her and a few referred to her that way even though they didn’t know what she looked like. Most days, if anybody referred to her by her given name, she didn’t know whom they were talking to because in her head, she had become Wild Child.
Kind of a bizarre name to be calling someone. It doesn’t exactly roll off the average tongue and so her friends had resorted to calling her Vy or Wie or Vi, the pronunciation was the same, it really just depended on how they wanted to spell it. They couldn’t always agree but then again, not that many of them were writing her notes where they needed to address her by printed name.
She was what was euphemistically referred to as a free spirit. And most things were free with Wild Child. She lost her virginity to a monogamous thirty-someth
Crippled 2007-05-31 23:47:16 Kim was visiting Mumbai for the first time. Not many people knew if Kim was his first or last name though there was no denying his Asian origins. He had been sent to evaluate a facility his people had been doing business with for several years. Recently, the facility had begun to exhibit a slowdown in production and he had been sent in an official capacity to determine why that was.
In the last communication from a source within the facility, unofficial of course, there had been some talk of something being crippled. It was an unauthorized channel, more white noise than actual video and it was unclear from the final few images where the man had been reporting from. It appeared that there were a couple of machines in his background but it was really difficult to tell, even with the application of the most advanced image recognition software. Which is why Kim was in the city in person.
Even though they were doing business in the city, it was his first visit and like most foreigners he wa Read more:Crippled
Falling Star 2007-05-30 23:41:10 His name was Farid and he was nursing a Tiger at New Asia Bar. As he looked around the darkened innards of the bar seventy stories above the glittering island city he had to wonder what was truly new about the bar. Sure the décor was ‘modern’ and the music was almost post-modern in its techno senselessness but really the social interactions at work across the length and breadth of the bar were no different from the way they must have been when the white man ruled the roost a few decades earlier.
It was a well-known fact that the bar was where you went if you wanted to see really old white men hanging out with really young Chinese girls. The same ‘girls’ who hung out in the malls and salons by day in their super-short skirts and punishing high heels and drank Singapore Slings or expensive wine at bars like this one during the night. They bought three hundred dollar (US not SG) skin creams recommended by their doctors to reverse the ageing process and attempted to snag a rich wh
Cuckold No Longer 2007-06-05 01:17:00 Avinash had been cuckolded for as long as he could remember. He couldn’t remember how it came to pass that his wife treated him the way she did but he realised that it had been a long time. She might have been cheating on him but he was the one who stood to lose big in divorce proceedings. She was the kind of bitch who could sweet talk her way into any deal, party or social circle. There was no way a judge was granting him the freedom he deserved, not without making him suffer a great deal of financial ruin. So he suffered in silence for eleven years.
Until the morning it all changed.
Her nineteen-year-old lover knocked over a precious vase on his way out. Even though everyone knew what the other was up to they went about life like nothing was out of the ordinary. Still her lover felt the need to sneak away in the early hours of the morning every day, like it somehow made him more of an adventurer that way. So when the crash drew him out of his room and he saw the bare-chested man st
Traffic Light 2007-06-04 03:38:35 He had a vision of the falling shapes in Tetris, as he sneaked his scooter into the little corridors of space between and around the big powerful cars that were forced to crawl in rush hour traffic. With an un-oiled squeak his scooter stopped behind a Ford, a fraction later than it should have responded to his pressuring the brake levers.
Must remember to tighten the brakes.
He rotated his stiff neck clockwise and anti-clockwise five times each; leaned forward on his handle-bars and sighed. On his left the city’s ‘powerful’ landscape stretched over a tongue of land that extended into the murky sea, like a mischievous teenager sticking his tongue out to exhibit half-eaten food. He shook his head in exhaustion.
All that power and money and they still can’t do shit about this traffic…
Tired as he was, he still had an eye open for the first opportunity to sneak past the Ford’s wide rear.
The music was loud enough for drivers of neighbouring vehicles to fire irritated gla
Rabble Rousers 2007-06-02 23:13:39 “What the hell did you call me?”
“A whore, why? Did one of them stick it in your ear and make you hard of hearing?”
“You have no right to talk to me like that.”
“After what you did at that…orgy I have every right to talk to you like this and your only job is to listen and say, ‘Of course Johnny. Whatever you say Johnny. I’m not good enough to kiss your feet Johnny.’ That’s the only thing you’re supposed to do.”
“Screw you!”
“No, I believe the operative words are screw you. And they did! What was it like ten guys? Or did you stop counting as long as someone kept going?”
“Stop it!”
“You know what I should do? I should punch you in the face. Yeah that’s what I should do.”
They were having it out in public and not under their breaths. They were five feet apart and shouting at each other on a pavement near a crowded intersection where foot traffic was heavy. He had the skinny jeans, Converse All Stars, purple hair, studde
Impulse 2007-06-08 01:09:34 She was the sweetest thing anyone had ever seen. Completely unlike most girls in every respect. Where they played dumb or coy for as long as it took for them to get what they wanted, she killed with niceness. There wasn’t a man in her orbit who looked at her in any way other than with the instinct to be protective. When she smiled, he felt a warmth rise up in his chest in a way the sun on a cool day never could.
He was her complete opposite in nearly every respect. They called him surly to his face and ‘that big lunk of bad news’ when he wasn’t listening. He had also been called bastard, son-of-a-bitch, fucking cunt, cocksucker and any other name an antagonist could remember or bring herself to say out loud. It was not because he was some sort of megalomaniacal evildoer or anything but simply because he rubbed people up the wrong way and didn’t care who knew it. He could be single-minded in his mission to achieve accomplishment and people didn’t like that he elbowed others
Superhero Blues 2007-06-07 00:41:21 “Have you been following Civil War?”
“No, I don’t give a shit about that superhero crap.”
“Dude, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Superhero
es are not of this lifetime. I can’t get behind that shit anymore.”
“You read comics right?”
“Of course I do, just not that superhero shit. Anybody without the good sense to keep his panties on the inside is not for me.”
“Aerosmith did a song about you.”
“What the fuck are you on about now?”
“J-j-j-j-jaded!”
“I’m not jaded. I just cannot manufacture wonder for the same old bullshit, that’s all.”
They were hanging on for dear life as the MRT sped onwards. There was very little to distinguish them from the crowd except for their accent and their conversation’s subject matter. He had climbed on at the last moment. It hadn’t been a good day. The flight from LA had been unpleasant and he wasn’t looking forward to the onward journey to Mumbai. The last thing he needed was for a couple of thirty-s Read more:Blues
Brothers 2007-06-06 00:29:59 How did it get to be like this? They were such good friends, they had such an amazing relationship, they were the kind of brothers every mother wished her sons to be. How did they fall so far apart without anyone noticing?
When fallout between two men occurs, there are a few possibilities that the uninitiated must take into account:
A woman.
Money.
Pride, and its sibling envy.
A foe masquerading as a friend.
Politicking from within and without.
Nobody could figure it out so everybody picked their favourite reasons.
In a world where cheap women were easy to find, both men went after the difficult, expensive ones. Big Brother chose to attempt the bedding of a much married actress with control issues and a penchant for making life miserable for all those that worked with and for her. It was rumoured that she enforced a meal ration for each of her servants. It was also rumoured that she liked to sleep with whatever director was helming the picture she was working on. She didn’t step onto Read more:Brothers
Then There Were 99 2007-06-10 23:05:21 He gingerly examined the bruise with the tip of his tongue and quickly drew it back at the first twinge of pain. He examined his tongue-firmly-in-cheek reflection in the scooter’s rear-view mirror and grimaced, One morning’s carelessness…one week’s pain. Even though common sense advised against it, he poked at it with his tongue again while prodding the outside with a finger. Both moves were regretted simultaneously.
It had happened as it always did, he wasn’t awake enough to wield a potentially dangerous object like a toothbrush and after one stroke too many over the same group of teeth, the brush slipped and the hard plastic registered a hit against the gum just below his lower right incisor. As the tears rushed to his still sleepy eyes curse words flew to his mind along. The thought that followed a moment later was that this would not have happened if he had gone to sleep at a decent hour instead of gorging on Internet porn in an empty home.
He grinned sheepishly at his
Swindle 2007-06-10 01:20:03 It was story time and Ashwin’s court was in session. He did enjoy a good yarn, especially when he was narrating it and even more so when he was the star of the rambunctious tale. They were always rambunctious tales when told by Ashwin. He wished people would call him Win but his friends called him Shwin as in Shwindler as in ‘watch your wallets while Ashwin is walking around telling his stories because you might suddenly feel tempted to part with your money’. He was a nice guy, an affable chap who never even hinted that he was out to defraud anyone. To paraphrase a quote by the actor Mark Wahlberg, he believed every word he uttered so he was technically never lying.
“So check it out, I met this girl and she was muy caliente. You’ve never seen anything like it, I’m telling you. It doesn’t matter if you’re straight or gay, male or female, she had you the moment you laid eyes on her. She wasn’t pretty or cute or beautiful or whatever adjectives people use to describe a w Read more:Swindle