1. Glass Replica
2. Plastic Replica
3. Wooden Replica
4. Diamond Replica
5. LED Screen with fully animated image of eye.
6. Machine Gun (may require partial brain removal)
7. Kitten (will likely need constant replacement)
8. Void
9. Anti-void
10. The Entirety Of The Sun
11. Miniaturised Victorian Seaside Photographic Nudie Peepshow Apparatus
_________
Notes:
1. Written on December 12th, 2022
2. My eyes are terrible
3. And really do need replacing
END ANNOUNCEMENT
Antoine opens his eyes and wonders what the time is. He looks at his watch. Or where his watch would have been if he still had a watch, if he hadn’t lost it in the woods years ago, if it was still on his wrist and the numbers still glowed like tiny green phosphor stars in the gloom of the cave.
He lies back down, closes his eyes, begins to dream. In his dream, he opens his eyes and wonders what the time is.
__________
Notes:
1. Written on March 20th, 2023
A few years after the catastrophe, they reinvented sound for the silence, so if you were rich enough you could hear again. It worked by some sort of pressure manipulation within the walls of your skull, and although I’m sure they could have come up with some elegant design for the devices the demand was so high they didn’t really bother. Subsequently it looked like you were wearing suction cups on your ears, the sort of toilet plungers they have in old cartoons that I have no idea whether really existed or not.
If I’d been in charge, I’d have made them look like seashells, iridescent surfaces flickering through visual equivalents to the simulated audio pulsations being forced through the wearer’s skull. But anything can look cool when it signifies wealth and privilege, I suppose, and everyone wanted a pair. They were this year’s hottest fad, even more popular than those hairy sweets everyone seems to like.
For Christmas I bought our kids an hour at one of the sound booths, each of them taking turns while the others stroked their desserts and stared in awe and wonder at the expressions on their siblings’ faces as the pressure undulations stimulated sections of their brain dormant since birth.
Our hour was up before I got a chance to use them. On the way home, through eyes stinging with barely suppressed tears, I tapped out “What was it like?” They replied with several thumbs up, two love hearts, and fifty seven consecutive Ed Sheeran emojis.
Now the tears flowed. They would not stop.
__________
Notes:
1. Written on December 12, 2022
2. Song title taken from this song that I used to love
3. And still like quite a bit
“Claire! What did you kick it up there for?! We’ll never get it down now.”
“It wasn’t me!”
“Well who was it then?”
“Mum!”
“It was not Mum. You know she refuses to kick things. She’s a pacifist.”
“What? Really? Well that’s just stupid.”
“So it was you?”
“Of course it was me! Who else would it be?”
“Mum?”
“But you said…”
“I was tricking you into confessing, Claire! Of course Mum’s allowed to kick footballs!”
“See, I told you it was stupid! And it was stupid because you made it up, and you’re stupid.”
“So? It worked, didn’t it?.”
“It did not. I was going to confess anyway. How else would you know it was me otherwise?”
“Why would you want anyone to know it was you?”
“Because I was the one that did it!”
___________
Notes:
1. Written on March 17th, 2023