Reality Strikes

So i saw a cool thing on Twitter (@5x5fiction) which asks for small pieces of writing. There must be 5 sentences made of 5 words. 25 words in total. I decided to have a go. Below are two examples.

Daylight makes an un-welcome appearance. We sit speechless, wired; insensible. Cigarette smoke lingers; atmosphere suffocating. Shared revelations have become ammunition. That friend is a stranger.

 
The conversation has now ceased. The energy and harmony disappeared. Reality starts to creep in. Dark thoughts start to torment. Hopes and dreams become murky.

Life Reversal

I begin to wonder what life would be like if you could turn it the other way round. Start life from the day of your funeral, get put into a residential home and have your pension to spend. Then instead of things getting worse, they get better. Your hair starts to grow again, you get your own teeth back and you ditch the zimmer frame. Next you leave the home and start employment on an excellent wage. Although your wages decrease you won’t really care because the only money you need to spend is on alcohol and clothes. After employment you shag your way through university and the work gets easier as you pass from secondary school to junior to infant school. You believe in Santa again. What a fucking treat that would be. Christmas once again becomes great and magical and by now you are even getting spoon fed and your arse wiped for you. Finally when death comes, it comes easily and it isn’t painful at all. After all you will be zero years old and you won’t feel a thing because all you will be is a tiny cell, happily swimming around each day and shrinking into nothing; an ice lolly melting in the sun.

A Meerkat on Cocaine

I make my way home through town. Last year’s Christmas lights drape the street, unlit. They look like barbed wire. Above the lights, a few stars linger in the black sky like confused homeless people wondering whether to spend the last of their money on some crack or a bed for the night. Chippie workers fire up their deep fat fryers and kebab shops prepare meat for the Saturday night piss heads. An extravagant flashing sign displaying doner meat on a skewer causes me to squint. A smell of cooking oil and spiced lamb fills the high street. Corrugated iron shutters are pulled over shop windows like armour, bouncers who look like walking biceps in woolly hats take their position outside pubs and clubs and taxis begin to clutter the kerbs like prostitutes. A group of people walk past me and laugh loudly, which irritates me. I start to walk at a faster pace, my breath in the cold dark air like fumes from an exhaust pipe. I pass St Peter’s church and a First World War memorial plaque attached to a small stone is slightly illuminated by a dim light. Engraved names of great British soldiers who laid down their lives for their country are barely visible by the low wattage bulb. The soldiers’ names rest above half a dozen cigarette ends, a used condom and an empty can of Stella. My heart starts pounding and I feel as though I’m strapped to a roundabout as I continue walking. Different styles of music blare through open windows. There is a different sound in every direction. Accents, laughter, car horns, car stereos, modified engines, coughing, sneezing, hiccupping, footsteps; slow, fast, extremely fucking fast. They blend together like tinnitus. Short of breath, I stop for a second outside Tesco and try to compose myself. I catch my reflection in the window. I look like a meerkat on cocaine.

An Ode to Gravesend

The sky is a smudged-pencil-mark grey as I make my way back to my flat. So dull, so dreary, so drab and so colourless. Walking down Dickens Close, leafless trees blackened with exhaust fumes droop over graffiti-stained garden walls. At the top of the hill, the Thames is in full view: the brown, bland Thames. You can see it from pretty much everywhere in Gravesend. It surrounds us like a moat. It strangles us like a noose. From every direction there are brown waves sending sharp winds into the town like mini tornadoes. The Thames is in our veins, manky and polluted. Gravesend is in our veins, like lead. We are Gravesend, all pebble dashed and full of dog shit.

The fucking Thames. It must be haunted, it’s got to be. There must be thousands, no millions, of disintegrated bones scattered across the bottom. At school we learnt that during the outbreak of Bubonic Plague in the 1600s, the town decided to bury the victims at sea because there was no more room for the dead on land. Hence the name Gravesend: end of graves. I think perhaps the constant wind is the spirits of those who died of the plague. It certainly smells like it.