fiction

500 Words

When the government initially brought in the 500 word limit on defendant statements in the court, the overriding rationale extolled both by the government and the enthusiastic right wing press was that, by so limiting the amount the accused could say in their own defence, the overall length of a trial, and therefore correspondingly the cost, would be reduced significantly.

It was also argued that the fairness of the proceedings would be improved by limiting the extent to which the personal charm and persuasive (but insubstantial) rhetoric of the defendant or their legal team would affect the outcome of trials by appealing to and inflaming the inherent biases and prejudices of the jury.

The final major claim for the necessity of the limit was that, by forcing the defendant to concisely focus their statements on the matter at hand, truth (now unvarnished) would be more transparent and lies (now unembellished) more apparent.

The ultimate reasons the police force and the Crown Prosecution Service were so enthusiastic about the limit were more prosaic and less idealistic, however: they believed they would lead to an increase in conviction rates.

For example, in cases where the details of the crime as laid out by the prosecution were heavily disputed by the defence, pleas for leniency or even acquittal based around mitigating circumstances or diminished responsibilities were likely to be reduced, for it would likely be unwise to waste now precious moments on such extraneous and often emotional details, rather than to concentrate as concisely as possible on the factual details that could prove beyond doubt an individual’s innocence.

Conversely, in cases where the facts were harder to dispute, pleas for leniency would take precedent over arguing the details of the case itself (in America, where plea bargaining is much more common, conviction rates approach 95%, whereas in the UK, where it is relatively rare, conviction rates hover instead at a lowly 80%).

The government’s reasoning behind the change was more ideological still. The limit was devised as a method to reduce complex argumentation around points of law, thus forcing simpler, more “commonsensical”, readings of statute and precedent. (The state itself was still free to argue at an increased level of complexity when it desired, due to no reciprocal limit on word usage by the prosecution.)

In this way, the legal system was able to be brought in line with a laypersons everyday understanding of the law of the land (actually, a mutually beneficial state and media induced representation of such). This reduced law and justice to, in effect, a feeling of what was right, so that the (inevitable) guilty verdict carried with it an emotional certitude and populist appeal to natural justice that together overpowered any argumentation or dissent by oppositional voices. The people’s law spoke for the people. Opposition to the law was, therefore, opposition to the people.

In this way, justice became retribution.

“18 words of your personal limit left,” the court clerk advised me.

I’ll have to use them well.

___________

Notes:

1. I wrote this in 2010
2. Apparently
3. I don’t really remember it but it’s in my notes so I probably did
4. It probably felt like satire at the time
5. But now I’m just surprised it’s never actually happened

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A Party

When she looked down the stairs and saw him in the hall her body froze with shock, and when he looked up and saw her the dread that enveloped her was similar to the moment of realisation that an approaching car really isn’t going to slow down and it’s too late for you to move out of the way.

The collision was averted for a while by the host hurrying him and the people he’d arrived with out of the hall and into the living room. She should have left then, quickly rushing down the stairs and out without a word to anyone, but before she could act the host – a colleague from her new job – came back out into the hall, laden with coats and scarfs, and saw her loitering there halfway down the stairs. Escape foiled by other dreads: of impoliteness; of making a scene, of explaining the past.

From there the evening became a dance of avoidance, keeping her distance, clinging to other groups, never allowing herself to be caught alone, moving from room to room whenever it looked like her conversational grouping might merge with his, never letting him see her staring at her, see her shaking, see her fear.

She wondered how come he was here. These were new friends, new acquaintances at least, a different town, a different life. From the other guests indifferent reactions she assumed it was just bad luck rather than organised maliciousness. No one knew anything at all about her past, nor surely about his.

It had ended messily, as always. Sometimes she wished she could, just once, attain that tedious middle-class ideal of the amicable breakup. Instead, each time it was worse, and this time it had turned unpleasant. Leaving work unpleasant. Moving away unpleasant.

Was it that men became worse, she wondered, the older they got. Worse at handling rejection, worse at letting go, worse at controlling their emotions. Or was it her judgement that was in decline. She didn’t like to think about that. If everything was tinged with desperation now, what would it be like in ten years, in twenty, when she retired. Would there still be this ceaseless fury during the inevitable dissolutions even then? Would they – whoever the other half of that they was, if there even was a they – stay bound together by the fear, not of loneliness, but of the hatred and anger a split would unleash?

The longer she stayed the more impossible it became to leave. He was watching her now, any attempts at subtlety washed away by drink. If she left she knew he would follow. Waiting him out had then become the hope, that he would leave with his friends if she stayed late enough. But no one seemed to have any inclination to go, and he kept his guard near the door to the hall, blocking off the only route of escape.

A couple moved towards the kitchen and she followed them, rifling through the cutlery drawers as if searching for a bottle opener while they got themselves some drinks from the fridge. She lingered there alone for a bit when they returned to the front room, before slipping quietly out the back door.

She knew there was no exit from the garden – it was lined by rows of conifers on all three sides, and behind them stood eight-foot high fences that failed to keep the neighbours’ cats out – but she hoped perhaps if she hid herself out here he might think he had somehow let her evade his watch and sneak out of the party and leave.

The garden was long and dark and empty. She backed herself into the conifers at the far corner, dampness from the soil seeping coldly through her socks, branches pressing awkwardly against her sides, pushing uncomfortably against her face.

Shame and doubt creeped in with the cold, horror at the absurdity of it all as the minutes dragged in and she shivered out here in a bush. And then the dread again, as he appeared at the back door and looked out blankly into the gloom.

“Jeanette?”

He skipped down the steps and onto the concrete, walking forward a few steps and stopping just before the patio turned to lawn. Just before it turned to darkness, the light from the kitchen dying by the verge.

“Jeanette? I know you’re there.”

An undercurrent of the old malevolence.

“Jeanette!”

He stepped out onto the lawn. She put her hand in her pocket and tightened her grip on the handle of the kitchen knife. He moved towards her, looming large, a silhouette outlined by a dying glow. She held her breath. A moment of stillness stretched out before her.

__________

Notes:

1. Another old unpublished thing.
2. From 2013, again

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The Man In The Cave

There’s a man in a cave near here who’ll turn you into an animal if you ask. No one’s ever seen him but we all know he’s there, in the shadows, in the cave, just waiting for you to go and see him, for you to go and ask. He’ll do pretty much anything, birds, beasts, bugs, whatever you want, really, as long as you do want it, really want it, need it. 

There’s no turning back, it’s a one way trip.

I don’t know why, it just is. I suppose without words you can’t ask for anything else, can’t tell him what you want any more, what you need. Or maybe it’s simply that no one changes their mind. No one wants to come back. It’s better out there in the wild. It’s better to be free.

He’s been living there for a long time, longer than anyone can remember. Perhaps he’s been there forever. People used to say it was a trick, or a coincidence. An illusion. But it’s not. It’s strange what he does, when you think about it, it’s strange that he’s there, but everyone accepts it now. It’s just a normal part of life.

Well, not everyone. There was an incident once when the mayor’s wife was turned into a boar, came rampaging back through the town a few hours later with nothing but fury on her mind. Bins knocked over, windows smashed, car alarms going off throughout the afternoon and long into the night. It was quite the sight.

No pretending then. No looking the other way.

Something had to be done, the mayor said later, shaking his head and sighing, shaking his head and looking sad in front of the cameras, the crowds, as if he was doing this for us, doing this for our own good, doing this for the town he served and the people he loved. He just wanted us to be safe.

So the council decided to put a stop to these shenanigans then, put security guards by the entrance and forbid everyone entry to the cave, forbid everyone from going inside and asking the man in there for his help. 

Not that this made any difference of course. People simply found other ways in, crept in through the cracks, sneaked in past the guards, or paid them off, whatever it took to get inside, to get what they wanted. 

You’d see them at dawn, at dusk, coming back out as bats and basilisks and whatever else they’d asked him for, whatever they’d decided to be, whatever they were. 

Or they just didn’t come back out at all. It’s a big cave. There’s lots of shadows down there to hide in, to lurk in, to linger, become.

But that was all a long time ago now. Moral panics come and go. If they’re posting guards anywhere these days it’s down by the woods, near where the witches live, where they brew their potions, practice their spells. You know the ones. The ones we’re not supposed to like. The ones we all do.

So the cave’s unguarded these days, anyone can enter if they want. If they’ve got something in mind for the man down there, the unseen man who lives in the cave, the man who’ll turn you into an animal if you ask.

My mother became a butterfly, my sisters birds. Not even anything exotic, just starlings. They’d always liked squabbling, those two. The cat watches them out the window sometimes as they fight over yesterday’s bread, her eyes fixated on their fluttering wings, mewing and pawing at the glass as she begs plaintively to be let out to pester them.

I don’t let her out, obviously. And to be honest, she doesn’t seem to mind. She always settles down eventually, sleeps off the excitement by the fire for the rest of the afternoon, dreams her dreams, leaves me to mine.

Sometimes I think about my mother, about how her wings caught the light as she fluttered out of the cave, fluttered out to sea, into the sky, away, away, away.

And sometimes I think about what I’d like to be, think about I want to be, think about what I’d say if I went down there now, went down to the cave, stepped inside and asked the man to turn me, to change me. 

To release me.

But I can’t imagine myself as anything else. I try, but I can’t see it. I’m always me. Who knows why. A lack of imagination? A lack of courage? A surfeit of certainty? Even in my dreams I’m unable to change.

And anyway, if I’m truthful, the only thing I’d like to be is alone. The last one left in a town turned to beasts. Me and the cat sitting in the house, in the shadows, looking out the window at the world, the last exhibits left in an empty zoo.

__________

Notes:

1. Written in February 2026

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On The Nature Of Hell

It was perhaps an hour after midnight when the discussion amongst those of us still present at the club turned to the true nature of hell, and more interestingly, whether one would recognise it if indeed we were to find ourselves there (an outcome that most of us acknowledged, due to the realities of the worlds of business and politics we inhabited, was for each of us a distinct possibility, though not yet, we hoped, an inevitability).

There were only seven of us left by then. Earlier in the evening it had been announced that a storm was approaching, a surprise given the time of year, and most of the members of our small but exclusive society left upon this pronouncement so as to miss the worst of it. For those like me, however, where the journey home was not a practical one to make at so late an hour, the decision to see out the storm in the comfort of our favourite leather armchairs was quickly made, and we settled in for the night. 

The fire had originally been lit more for its atmospherics than its heat, and now the flames and the smoke provided us with a suitable ambience for our heretical discussions, amplified these last few hours by the periodic flashes of lightning that pierced through the curtains as surely as they would have through our eyelids, should any of our number have wished to rest their eyes and doze through the evening’s confinement.

And if the lightning was not enough to keep us from our slumbers, then the roar of thunder that accompanied each flash, and the ceaseless beating of the rains, which hammered like the fists and the feet of the mob against the window panes and the roofing tiles of the annex in which we were seated, undoubtedly were.

The seven of us there that night: The venerable Mr Eden, longstanding patron of our club and the man, it must be acknowledged, in whose shadow all of us still stand; Mr Canning and Mr Lawrence, retired now but both still much admired for how they dealt with the mutineers in their day; Mr Bourke, a visiting professor emeritus from Dublin whom I had never previously met; Mr Baring, my great friend and long-time companion, and on whose account I had journeyed to the city earlier that day; myself, being as I am a gentleman, as you know, of no particular renown; and Mr Curzon, a taciturn fellow only recently inducted into our circle, who had, I believe, made his fortune in shipping, and at the very least had a reputation for being well-travelled and knowledgeable even by the standards of the rest of us fellows.

The evening’s conversation initially concerned little more than the vagaries of the weather and the various complications and alterations to our plans this unexpected storm would likely cause us, not just concerning tonight, yet, too, for the days ahead. But soon Mr Baring was relating to us the latest news concerning a series of unsolved murders in one of the neighbouring counties, the particulars of which had been kept quiet by the local press at the behest of the region’s police force. Yet Mr Baring, through his contacts within the constabulary (which proved so beneficial to his commercial interests), had been informed of some of the more garish details of the crimes, and was taking great pleasure in describing to us the monstrous and macabre violations to which the victims had been subjected.

“The perpetrators of such crimes may evade the law of our lands,” said Mr Eden into the silence that followed Mr Baring’s evocations. “But upon their own death, justice shall prevail. There are some judgements from which none are spared.”

It was this comment that turned the conversation towards the theological. Mr Eden, a man of the law in his youth, inevitably saw hell in the simplistic terms of his profession, envisioning it as some great and flawless penal colony, where every judgement would be ineluctably correct, each sentence eternal, and the punishments robust and inescapable.

Mr Canning and Mr Lawrence here agreed with Eden, the pair still playing, after so many years, the dutiful proteges. But disagreement soon came in the form of Mr Bourke’s contention that if hell was little more than a divinely administered prison, its very scope for inflicting pain and torment upon the soul would be limited. Indeed, it was his opinion that any system of hell that revealed itself openly to those it had captured would be resisted, and therefore rendered, eventually, ineffective. 

“One would settle in for eternity,” he said, his voice carrying with it the authority of a lifetime of lectures upon, I suspected, this very subject. “For as we know, in war the daily horrors inflicted upon the flesh are steadily countered by a growing numbness to pain, and in famine increasing psychic detachment from reality inhibits the terrors of the mind from flowering into full bloom.”

Further, he explained, hell would need to operate without the fear of death (for how can there be death in an infinite system), while also foregoing the fear borne of concern for those we loved, for in the eyes of God each of us are judged for our own crimes only, and not for those of others, and so, no matter what our infernal captors could threaten us with, we would know the still-living were beyond the scope of their powers. Within these limitations the ability to truly strike effectively at the heart of man would be nullified and rendered void, he contended.

“But what of corporal punishments?” asked Canning. “As all of us here know, pain is a useful tool when wielded by the hands of the righteous and the just.”

“Pain itself is not enough,” he said. “We can endure pain for longer than we should.”

And at this he held up his own hand, and with a quick twist with his other, removed it, holding up for all to see his mutilated wrist, and the scars that ran like lava flows down towards his elbow.

“No, there are two possible forms that hell could conceivably take,” Mr Bourke claimed, after a suitable pause for us to appreciate his theatrics. “One would be a series of nested dreams, in which, on waking from a nightmare, we would find ourselves trapped within a nightmare greater still. And from that eventually we would wake, and so on, for eternity, with each layer beneath more frightening than the last.”

“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,” I murmured, recalling some quotation or other that had been taught to me in my youth.

“Very good,” the good professor said to me, with a nod of approval, before returning to his conjectures. “And the other possibility, the one that seems more likely – and, indeed, the more often I dwell upon the problem, the one that seems to me the only true possibility – is… this!” 

He held his arms out wide, his truncated left arm granting an asymmetry to the gesture which rendered it somewhat disconcerting.

“The club?” asked Mr Baring, already perplexed by Bourke’s arguments and now almost completely lost as to his point.

“I speak of the world itself,” Professor Bourke said. “For a true hell would maintain the appearance of reality. It is only in the here and now, in the everyday mundanity of existence, that the corruption of the soul can retain any meaning. 

“To be corrupted in hell carries with it no lasting shame. Of course we would be corrupted in hell. Of course we would be humiliated and perverted and defiled until we were a broken shell. How could we expect anything else?

“To be corrupted in life, however, to have to live with that corruption, to see the effects of our actions, and to be forced to live with what we have done, to have that gnawing fear, that dread, within your heart, knowing that at any time you may be confronted by your past misdeeds, or be forced into committing misdeeds anew. Is that not a punishment worthy of hell itself?

“To be forced, not by circumstance but by the very failings of your own soul, to behave in terrible, horrifying ways, out of nothing more than cowardice, or desire, greed, laziness…

“To live to see all the things you believed in and fought for, the better world you hoped to bring about, all those slow steps of progress undermined, hollowed out and eventually swept away by a tide that brings back to us nothing but ever increasing hate and horror. And all of it of our own doing, all our justifications for those same deeds revealed to be no more than the self-serving lies of the common criminal we here so like to judge and have without mercy condemned more times than we can ever hope to remember.

“Now that,” he said, as he began to screw his hand back into place. “That is a hell to be feared. A hell that would be worthy of its reputation.”

I again responded to this with a quote – “I began to learn to hope and what brings a more bitter despair to the heart than hope destroyed” – before Eden, in his diplomatic way (perhaps to calm the coming bluster of Canning and Lawrence), said, ““Perhaps it is both. Or neither. Perhaps the passage of time itself is punishment enough. The realities of our lives and misdeeds reduced to mere footnotes in one of Professor Bourke’s many unread histories.”

“The horror,” Canning and Lawrence said, with forced jollity, and Bourke too repeated the phrase quietly as he slumped back into his chair, and then the room fell into a deep and not especially comforting silence, in which we listened to the beating of the rain and indeed to the beating of our own hearts for what seemed like an age.

Just when it seemed like the silence would continue for the rest of the night, as we all began to drift off into ruminatory slumbers, it was broken, unexpectedly, by the largely forgotten figure of Mr Curzon, who let out a dry and desperate laugh that caused us all to turn in near unison towards his chair.

He leaned forward, his face rising from the shadows and into the illumination provided by the fire, and as he turned to face us, the shadows thrown upon his skull by the flames seemed to shift and shiver around the fearful rictus of his smile, and in his careful, calm way, he began to recount to us the following tale.

“It was perhaps an hour after midnight,” he said. “When the discussion amongst those of us still present turned to the true nature of hell, and more interestingly, whether one would recognise it if indeed we were to find ourselves there…”

__________

Notes:

1. Written in March 2024
2. But based on an old unfinished thing from 2019/2020

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Oxygen Dreams

Pumped in extra thick, 40/60 mix, euphorics for a sullen crew. Out past Jupiter the hallucinations kick in, open sky visions, phantom smell of rain, insectoid hums, gravitational tugs on calcium-filled bones, nostalgic visions scraped thin off childhood media memories.

You’d think we’d be used to the dark now, used to the float. But in my dreams I still scream as I fall.

Wake up.

Fall some more.

__________

Notes:

1. Written on October 19th, 2022

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Support An Accumulation Of Things

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Thank you!