Hole Punch Read online

“Someone needs to fix your arse!”

  I squeakily scrawl on the whiteboard:

  “EAT, SHIT AND DIE.”

  “Agenda items one, two and three,” I proclaim.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, I'm escorted outside by security.

  I lean against a lamp post and puke.

  A man comes over with his dog.

  “Are you all right mate?” he simpers, his dog sniffs the puke.

  “Leave me alone! Or I'll set fire to both of you!”

  TRAP

  The little boy looked up in wonder.

  A beautiful illusion of a desert landscape in the sky.

  Clouds suffused with the setting of a big, orange sun.

  “Keep your eyes on the pavement or you’ll step in dog muck!”

  That's what his mum told him.

  He looked down and saw a white, dried dog poo. He stepped out of its way, knowing that he would be due for a smack with a slipper if he stepped in any mess.

  They got back home to their terraced house on their dead, shit world. His dad sat at the kitchen counter with a plate of grey pork and white chips. He slapped a newspaper with disgust.

  “Them lot are bloody killing us!” he said, in an ill-written Yorkshire accent.

  The little boy stood at the window and saw that the desert landscape in the sky had changed from orange to a purple, pinkish blue. A soothing texture of blossom.

  "What you looking at?" asked his dad.

  "The sky," answered the little boy.

  "Don't be wet!"

  His dad looked back to the newspaper to read the latest updates on the miners' strike.

  COLLAGE

  Neville cut Sarah’s passport photo in half and he put the left side of Sarah’s face next to the right side of Zoe’s face.

  “Haha,” he laughed. "Look at them!"

  Neville liked to cut up the female employees’ passport photos after he had scanned them into the keycard making machine. All the faces, their eyes displaced, their lips intermingled, their foreheads amalgamated.

  “All the same bird!” he said.

  He stood up from his cuttings and rubbed his pot tummy with one hand and patted his bald head with his other.

  “Coffee break!”

  BREASTS

  The Giant Amorphous Flesh Thing did not wear a bra so she was weighed down by her triple Z breasts.

  "Wouldn't be so bad but none of the shops have the right sized knickers."

  SEX

  Look.

  Tits.

  Fanny.

  Sex and stuff.

  Wow.

  Can't believe what we just saw.

  Cock.

  Balls.

  Fucking.

  Fanny.

  Wow.

  We are grown ups now.

  We have grown up interests.

  I'm bored now.

  Listen.

  Stockings.

  Garter belt.

  Corset.

  Imagine those.

  We made it fun again.

  Lube.

  Handcuffs.

  PVC.

  Threesomes.

  Hooray.

  What a weekend.

  I'm bored now.

  POLE

  The Smiling Chef stood inside his mobile restaurant with his thick, long, spinning column of kebab meat, all greased up and ready for sunrise, when insect prostitutes get hungry.

  An insect prostitute landed in the parking lot. She hitched up all six of her stockings and clopped sallow and drunken on high heels toward the Smiling Chef and his spinning column of flesh. She straightened all six of her stockings.

  “Come back for more have you?” smiled the Smiling Chef. “You bloody love it! Always the first to arrive! You can’t get enough of my meat shavings up your proboscis! You slag!”

  The insect prostitute shivered and tittered in clicking excitement at the Smiling Chef’s voice. She sat herself down on a stool and handed five rupees to the Smiling Chef, who proceeded to shave slivers of meat from his fat pole.

  “Bet this isn’t the first meat that you’ve had up your tube tonight!” smiled the Smiling Chef.

  He slapped down a tray of sweaty kebab shavings. The insect prostitute dribbled sticky, noxious threads of acidic spit all over the Smiling Chef's meat. Her mucus mixed with condoms, cock rings, bottle tops and syringes.

  “Looks like you’ve had a busy night!” smiled the Smiling Chef.

  As she sucked up the spit dissolved meat, ten more insects of the night landed in the parking lot and ambled hungrily towards the mobile restaurant.

  “I’d better get shaving more flesh from my big, meaty pole! You bug whores can’t get enough of my huge shaft of meat! Yeah! Suck it up bitches!”

  His smaller and floppier column twitched under his apron excitedly. He served up more and more trays of kebab meat. He danced with thrusting hip motions to a private tune inside his simplistic, micro-functioned brain.

  * * *

  As the evening wore on, more and more of insect prostitutes arrived to suck on the Smiling Chef's meat. The spinning meat column got thinner and thinner, used up and spent.

  Every day the Smiling Chef came here to feed these insect prostitutes and they always came back for more. No matter how thick and strong, by the end of morning, they would whittle him down. They would make his meat inadequate and incapable.

  "I'm going to use your rupees to buy an even bigger shaft of revolving processed meat! More meat than all the bug brothels of Barnard's Star can handle! I'll show you hussies the meaning of big, indomitable meat!"

  LIAR

  He stands outside the Liars' Club.

  What has she found out about him? Has she seen it?

  He paces up and down and lights another cigarette.

  So what if she has seen it? He can always tell her that it's not real.

  He paces up and down and smokes his cigarette. He tries to call her. She's not picking up.

  She's found it hasn't she? She's found it and he's going to get into trouble. Just deny it Vince, just deny it.

  He drops his cigarette in the gutter.

  Just act like you don't know what it is. That will work. When she tells you what she's found just be surprised that she would even be upset. Loads of guys have one of those babe.

  But then if he did that then everyone would find out. She'd go about asking people if it was normal?

  He lights up another cigarette and paces up and down.

  There's no easy way to handle this.

  A man steps out of the Liars' Club.

  “Are you coming in or not?” asks the man.

  “Sorry mate,” said Vince. “I'm just standing here.”

  “Well, you better be gone soon. You're scaring off the other liars.”

  The man goes back inside.

  Vince paces up and down and lights up another cigarette.

  So what if she's found it? She shouldn't be looking through his stuff. What has she been doing looking through his stuff?

  That's good. Turn it back on her. Turn it back on the stupid bitch. Thinking she's sussed Vince out.

  It won't work! It won't work! What's been hidden is really, really bad this time.

  A man steps out of the Liar’s Club.

  “Look mate, I don't want you loitering, you either come in or you fuck off!”

  * * *

  “I found it,” she said, emotionally broken.

  “Found what?” he asked.

  “You know what I found.”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know!”

  He sat on the floor and held her hands, he looked deeply into her eyes with a B-Movie imitation of sincerity.

  “I don’t know! I don’t know!”

  SEIZURE

  “I'm adopted,” lied the bullied boy as he walked home from school.

  “Really?” said his friend, Steven, who was bullied even more.

  “Yes,” lied the bullied boy. “It is a strange experience, be
ing adopted, I always wonder who my real parents are.”

  The bullied boy fell to the pavement and started convulsing.

  “What's wrong?” asked Steven.

  The bullied boy stopped convulsing and sat up.

  “I just had a memory of when I was last abducted by aliens, one of them had the face of the local vicar.”

  COMMITMENT

  Steven's dad was unemployed and overweight. The working class children at school said Steven's dad stood outside the bakery every day and drooled at the pies through the window.

  Steven's dad was fat you see?

  Fat and unemployed.

  The working class children didn't like poor or overweight people.

  Steven said that his dad used to be a world class runner.

  Steven carried his school books and deodorant in a plastic carrier bag. I was Steven's friend because I had been nice to him one time and the headteacher had told me to spend time with Steven because no one else would.

  Steven was beaten up every day, I would just stand there and watch it happen. There was no point getting involved.

  Steven's house was fire bombed. I didn't see him at school after that. A few days later everyone at school laughed about me being his friend. I told them that I never really liked him either.

  Survival method.

  Fifteen years later, I looked up Steven on social media. He was married, happy and worked as a coach driver. I didn't add him as a friend on anything.

  VRRRRR

  The lizard people scampered and played benignly in their automated city, completely at peace with their feline co-inhabitants, the cat people, who lounged relaxed and curled. After thirty thousand years of war, the planet Vrrrrr was finally at peace.

  “Today,” said the prime minister of the cat people. “I would like to declare that marriage is legal between cat and lizard.”

  “Today,” said the prime minister of the lizard people. “I would like to declare that marriage is legal between lizard and cat.”

  “We are equal,” they said together.

  They shook paw and claw.

  The crowd's cheering was cut short with the arrival of a sky sized, levitating War Brick burning into their existences from beyond the stratosphere.

  “YOUR PLANET HAS THE HONOUR OF BEING VISITED BY THE EARTH EMPIRE!” shouted the War Brick from its massive speakers. “PREPARE TO BE EXPLOITED.”

  The War Brick shot a plasma bolt at the two ministers on their podiums, reducing them into puddles of bubbling charcoal gloop. The cats and lizards all ran about in panic. The automated city tried to activate its protective domes but it was too late, the Earth Empire War Brick had already fired plasma bolts into their activation centres.

  * * *

  In the void white control suite of the Earth Empire War Brick, the Earth Empire's perfect, plastic diplomat, Mixelle, stared at her reflection in the mirror with gleaming marble eyes.

  Her genetically stunted wart dwarf slave, Dike5, polished Mixelle's pointy, plastic, diplomatic suit.

  “I look pretty,” said Mixelle. “Do I not always look pretty?”

  “Yes Mistress,” croaked Dike5. “You always look so pretty, smooth and clean.”

  “I wasn't asking you,” said Mixelle.

  The handsome, cigar chomping pilot turned his head and smiled.

  “I'm sure that those ugly, alien freaks will think you're pretty.”

  “I wasn't asking you either,” said Mixelle.

  Mixelle stared at her reflection.

  “You look majestic,” said the mirror. “MAJESTIC!”

  * * *

  Mixelle stepped down the ramp of the assault shuttle onto the surface of Vrrrrr. Mixelle was flanked by a battalion of black-clad soldiers with big guns.

  “We congratulate your planet for discovering peace,” said Mixelle to the cowering cats and lizards. “Like all peaceful civilisations you have earned the sneer of the Human Empire. We have come to your world to open a trade deal. We take everything, you receive nothing.”

  SEE

  The Mistake ambles uncertain across the world of nothing.

  “No voice to keep me company anymore,” said the Mistake. “Just my own voice. I am inadequate. I am weak. I am empty. I am a mistake. A mistake isn't good for anything.”

  Up ahead is a different sort of thing. It is a big, blue, moving something that stretches off into the nowhere.

  The Mistake decides to call this new, blue something: the See. This was because the See is a something that can be seen.

  “The big, moving, strange See that I can see,” said the Mistake. “I wonder if it will have me. Hello See. You big, blue, something See. Will you have a Mistake like me?”

  The cold tide covers the Mistake's feet. The Mistake tenses. A new sensation.

  The Mistake sits down and feels the cold and wet See.

  “Do I belong here? With these cold and wet feelings? In this cold and wet See?”

  The next wave covers the Mistake’s face and fills the Mistake's lungs with water.

  BUMFACE

  Bumface McGinty leant back in his leather upholstery and puffed his cigar with wet anus lips. He blew smoke at the Vadlarian Delegate who sat on the other side of Bumface’s oak desk.

  "Mr McGinty," began the nervous Delegate, nervously.

  "Call me Bumface," said Bumface.

  Bumface pulled the cigar from his anus face lips and offered it to the Delegate. The cigar was sodden in poo, mucus and lube.

  "Fancy a drag?" asked Bumface. "Finest tobacco in this entire quadrant."

  "Sorry Mr McGinty but-"

  "Call me Bumface."

  "Sorry Bumface. The people of Vadlaria can't get your organisation the money until our sixth lunar cycle."

  Bumface banged his velvet clad fist on his oak desk.

  "What?! Pay me my money or I'll level your entire system into a sex nebula of cosmic toilet dust!"

  "Please Mr McGinty, don't-”

  "Call me Bumface."

  "Please Bumface, don't destroy Vadlaria! We have other resources to give you instead of money."

  Bumface's round-cheeked, dimple-eyed head angled to the side with polite interest.

  "What could the Vadlarians possibly offer me? There's nothing on your gruel splat of a planet that I need."

  "We've given you all the money we can! People on my world are dying from economic collapse."

  "Peasant problems! Bring me my money in five nano-cycles or your atoms will be shitting protons across fifteen thousand light years!"

  The phone rang on Bumface McGinty's desk. Bumface grabbed it and placed it against his face hole.

  "Bumface speaking, what do you want?"

  "Bumface! Me and Cockhead are gonna take you down!"

  "I've heard this before Clitlip! You and Cockhead are a waste of my space-time continuum."

  Bumface listened to the predictable sound of Cockhead wrestling the phone from Clitlip. Cockhead won the battle and was next to speak.

  "Give us our seventy-four cubic percent of the Moticon Space Turd Industry or we'll take you down Bumface!"

  "Screw you Cockhead! I'll give you seventy-four cubic percent of nothing at all! If you weren't my own piss and shit I'd blur your temporal boundaries into a white holes prolapse!"

  MINE

  Her face is an old melted candle in a damp cellar. Her phone rings twice in three hours.

  “So busy today,” she wheezed. “It’s like Bedlam.”

  Deeper underground, wax children push wheelbarrows loaded with the Earth's molten core.

  WASTES

  This is the wasteland where the coal mine used to be.

  “This area is not safe,” says the sign.

  This area is definitely not safe, a girl my age was beaten to death here when she was walking home from school. Killed by kids from Armthorpe.

  A stray dog barks at me. I grab a brick and as I beat the dog's head in I swell with the pride for the industry that the brick represents: the bygone beauty
of this wonderful village that was castrated by the international companies and the politicians who took away our pit.

  I stand over dog's brick-smashed skull. It seems to me a bloody metaphor for the struggles of the northern proletariat. How much more blood needs to spill before the fat cats in parliament get their fingers out and give us back our unions?

  * * *

  Meanwhile, on the main road of Edlington, Doncaster, in her semi-detached house, an old lady in her rocking chair chews the scabs off her fingers.

  “I must kill her! I must kill her!”

  She looks at the fireplace and remembers back when there was coal in it.

  “I must kill her. Kill her good.”

  Behind her, sitting on another rocking chair, next to the broken dog ornament, there was a ghost version of herself.

  “I died twenty years ago,” said the ghost.

  The old lady rocked angrier in her chair.

  “Then I’ll kill Thatcher!”

  The ghost laughed.

  * * *

  The puppet's expression is painted kind, honest and caring. The puppet speaks to the unemployed.

  “We need equality! We need coal! We need our mines back! We need our factories producing home-grown products! Home-grown industries! We need to be united! Into one solitary cause! One unity! Let me work for you! Let me lead your cause for the betterment of everyone. Equality for all! Unite behind me for your equality! For your children! For the North! I want you to raise your fists in support! All of you together! Raise your fists!”