Embroidery

My wife has always been good at embroidery and the talking pillows were her idea and I just went with it.





I don't know how many she's made but I've got to know them all intimately over the years.






When we first moved in together I used to rest my head on the I Love You pillow. The one with the pink owl sat on a tree. I gave her the I Love you too one so that we were a matching set. But gradually I've got to know most of them. It wasn't long before Sweet Dreams replaced I Love You, although to be fair to my wife pillowcases do have to be washed regularly. But I admit I was surprised how quickly Sorry I've Got A Headache and I Have To be Up Early In the Morning arrived on the scene.



Our dog has his own pillow now which is great for him. Although he doesn't really appreciate it as much as she'd like him to. Very often we wake up to find Billy on the couch and with his Little Devil pillow flung on the floor. He always has the same pillow. Even though he's had a few replacements after chewing some of them. He's not one for change.




It's a long time since we've been coordinated, me and the wife. And usually when I  sneak into the closet to find her I Love You pillow when she's not looking I'm normally end up being something else altogether. A mismatch. I'm very often Mr Grumpy or Never Satisfied. She has power over the pillows. She's the pillow master. I'm not allowed in the closet anymore. When we first married it was a game of  Who can get in the closet first and we would sometimes fight over the Sex Bomb pillow. I haven't seen that one for a few years and if I found it, Billy would probably get it before me.





We've had a few bad arguments over the years and she even has her own set of pillows for those occasions. Unfortunately I know them to well. You really don't want to know what they have written on them.

She always makes sure I have one of her pillows even if I'm sleeping on the couch or in the porch. If I go away on business I normally take Mr Grumpy with me. It's probably the most comfortable of the lot.

She's great at embroidery but not very good at plumping up pillows. I don't know what she puts in them. It could be leaves or teabags or nail clippings as far as I am concerned. They've never been very comfortable. Although Billy always seems to have the plumpest pillow going. He must be doing something right.






Lately she's started to make a new batch but she does it in secret. Either the old ones are looking worse than I thought or she's found new ways to describe me. There's a Fat Bastard in there somewhere, I just know it. Or maybe she's just looking ahead and she's working on the one that's going in my coffin. She's always looking too far ahead and maybe she thinks it's going to happen sooner rather than later.


No doubt she's making some new one's for Billy. But it's always Little Devil. He's never anything else. Unlike me. I dread to think of what I'm going to be resting my head on for the next twenty years. It seems a long time since I was Stud Of The Year or that one night in Vegas when I was Irresistible.









I don't know what my coffin pillow is going to say. I don't really like to think of it. But I'm guessing it's going to be the comfiest of the lot.










                                                               


                                                                                         Ally Atherton 2015

Hols

' Hey what the hell did you do that for?'



'Shut the fuck up and concentrate on your own driving!' He said and swiftly gave me the bird.




I looked on the ChatMap and saw that all the cars were flashing. You see that was the problem with the system, everybody was too busy arguing and nobody was concentrating on the road ahead of them.


'Can't you put your foot on the peddle? I'm growing a fucking beard here arsehole.'



I looked through the mirror. It was an old timer. Somebody who was around in the old days before ChatMap and the holographic police.


I pressed on his avatar and told him to go to hell.



You can't turn them off that's the problem. They're a legal requirement so that the Hols can keep an eye on everyone. They know everything we are saying and soon they will know everything we are thinking as soon as the thought patches are rolled out.



'Fucking get a move on!'



He was really doing my nut in now but I didn't want to get drawn into a long drawn out argument in the middle of the highway. Besides I already had twelve notches on my card and one more would mean a two year ban. So I had to suck it up. I couldn't risk a vehicle disorder charge.


'Move it!'


I pressed the block button and continued to suck it up. But it would only last five minutes and blocks were expensive and I wasn't made of money.


I could see him gesticulating behind me. Obviously the old fucker suffered from block rage. Tough shit. Now he had to suck it up for a bit.



Incoming Message



It was the hols. What the hell did they want now? I didn't do nothing.



Pull over at the next HolDeck. Repeat. Pull over the the next HolDeck.



The bastard behind me was laughing his guts out. Why did they have to make incoming messages so public?



I pulled in and waited for the fuzz to materialize. Arseface zoomed past and flicked the bird and then sent me a picture of a Nun being fucked from behind. I just had time to delete it before a Hol told me to wind down the window. If he saw it he didn't say anything or maybe Nuns didn't do it for him.



'Officer?'



'What's that in the back of your car?'



I had a horrible feeling he was going to say that. The Nun picture popped up again and this time we both saw it.



'I blocked him that's why he sent it.'




The Hol didn't reply, he just continued to look at the bodies that I'd spent all night carefully tucking in between the back seats and the floor. I tried to make a run for it but they had already put my car into lockdown. There was no escape.


'I can explain officer,' I said.



But no explanation could get me out of this. Before I could even think, my car was surrounded by Hols and all the other cars on the highway were being transported to their destinations and were disappearing one by one.



'I can explain.'


I couldn't. There are some things that are explainable and this wasn't one of them.

There were three dead bodies in the back of my car and I couldn't turn back time. I didn't have a big red button to press to make them all disappear. Only the Hols had the big red buttons.



'I'm sorry.' That's all I could say. 'I'm really sorry.'



I couldn't move my arms or my legs. They were transporting me. The game was up.


The officer leaned forward and whispered in my ear.





'Ok you know the rules. Nobody is allowed to have more than two dead bodies in the back of their vehicle. You should have stuck to two like everybody else.'



The game was up. Just before I arrived at the penal sphere I just caught a glimpse of the Nun again and this time she had a superimposed image of me on her back.







                                              (C) Ally Atherton 2015






685 Words written for the A to Z blogging challenge.

Inches

WHEN I WAS a kid I used to sit on the edge of my bed and imagine my room was separating from the rest of the house by a few inches every night. I was desperate and happy to try anything and I hoped that by the time I reached 18 it would be in a different neighbourhood and not just sat like a very awkward shed at the end of our garden.



It's still there. The house. The room. I'm not, I escaped eventually but by a more traditional method.

But if you look carefully there's a tiny crack in the wall where my bed used to be and a part of me thinks that maybe I would have got there eventually if had tried hard enough, so maybe it's my fault what he did.






                                                                                      



                                                                                  @ Ally Atherton 2015







136 words for #FridayFlash

Just Add 500 mls of water

'Open with care. Each packet contains one instant woman who will fall in love with you immediately. Guaranteed to satisfy all your Earthly needs. Just add 500 mls of water. Use by April 2014.'





MY HANDS were shaking as I tore open the packet and poured the contents into the jug.


So it was a few months out of date? What was the worst that could happen? A speech impediment? A limp? A penis?



I added the water and stirred.  Nothing happened at first, then it started to fizzle and I detected a hint of vanilla in the air. Vanilla mixed with wild roses and bubblegum. I closed my eyes and inhaled the aroma and then there she was, sat on my kitchen counter in a pair of hot pants and a crop top.



'Howdy lover,' she said.



She was perfect. Two eyes, a nose and a mouth and everything else was where it should have been. And she was all mine. To satisfy all my needs forever.




But I really wished I had taken notice of the expiry date.

She smiled at me. Beautiful and thankfully Penisless. But I would have to wait a few years, I had to get her through kindergarten first.









                                             
                                                                                        Ally Atherton

                                                                                              2014






205 Words

Twizzer

                

 'You could've made a safer bet, but what you break is what you get
  You wake up in the bed you make. I think you made a big mistake.
  You own me. There's nothing you can do. You own me.'

              Mark Berninger of The National. Lucky You.



   



     
It wasn't so bad when I only had one or two followers

but now I have 359 and it's getting

ridiculous


I can't even have a crap in peace.


I wake up in the morning and they're stood
at the end of my bed

I've had to get a bigger house and invest in an extra long dining room
table
so that there's room for all of us



Stupid social media


Apparently it's based upon a 21st Century thing called Twitter
but
in those days it was all on a computer screen, not real


like it is now. Creepy bastards I wish they would all curl up and die.



I'm just glad I'm not following anybody anymore,


that was insane. I was here, there and everywhere until they all blocked me.




I wish I could block this lot but I've run out of blocks.



The only thing I can do now is

start

shooting the bastards.







                                                               (C)Ally Atherton 2014



                                                                          Write on Edge

Suzanne

                                   


                      




'I love you too honey.'


I heard the comforting sound of static that could only be Suzanne's voice, I just had to wait a few seconds for the translation.


'I can't wait till we're together, it won't be long now.'


I couldn't wait either and then nobody could come between us. But we were always together even though we were light years apart.



I kissed my hand and waited to receive her kiss back. That's how it works you see.

The kiss arrived and I kept my hand in the same position and kissed her again. Sometimes I spend hours at a time kissing Suzanne and I do get a lot of funny looks. People don't understand. They think there's something wrong with me but I just want to shout and scream to the whole world that there's nothing wrong with me. We are in love.

I confess I must look a little bit odd. Talking to my hand like this, but I'm not, I'm talking to Suzanne. And thousands of light years away she's doing the same thing, only she doesn't really have hands. They're more like flippers. But the rest of her is normal. She's blonde, blue eyed and has legs so long you wouldn't believe. I can get over the flippers. She tells me about her family and about school and about her dreams. She wants to be a botanist. She loves anything like that and we spend hours talking about plants and stuff. Although it's very different over there and they don't have gardens so to speak, just window ledges full of pot plants. They all live in high rises. It's a planet of high rises but pot plants are very popular.


I hold my hand to my ear because there's an incoming message. It's a loud one this time and I think that even some of the people on the train have heard it.


'Tell me again, what are Earth girls like?'


She knows they have arms instead of flippers but apart from that I don't talk about them much.

'Not as beautiful as you,' I said.



Of course I've seen plenty of pictures of Suzanne and I've sent lots of my own to her. I'm not one of those guys that pretends to be someone they're not. I'm no Brad Pitt but I try to take care of myself. And she's beautiful. We share photo's all the time. It's easy once you get used to it. You just put your hand tight up to your face and close your eyes and the pictures materialize inside your head. It doesn't happen straight away and you need to keep your hands pressed tight and your eyes closed for about thirty minutes to get a really great picture. The longer it takes the better the quality. It's much better than any digital camera you get over here. It's all in your head see, the colours become living breathing parts of you.



I can't wait till we meet in person. It's not going to be long now. They're saving up the money for a transmat booth. It's the latest thing over on Meros. They are slowly doing away with cars and trains, that kind of thing and soon everybody will have one. She tells me that you can travel anywhere in the blink of an eye and that it will only take a few minutes to get over here. I can't wait.



We spend the rest of the tube journey kissing.



Everybody is giving me that look and a few people are filming me on their phones. I don't give a shit anymore. What me and Suzanne have is special and they can laugh and stare all they want. They will be laughing on the other side of their faces when Suzanne comes over. I do worry about the atmosphere though. I'm not sure what it's like on Meros. We haven't really talked about it much. I'd hate it if she came over and ended up whizzing back into space like a popped balloon. Or what if she got here and found it impossible to draw a breath? Sometimes I think it's probably better to keep talking to my hand just in case.






A lover thousands of light years away is better than a dead one. Or a squashed one.





                                                           


                                                                                           (C) Ally Atherton 2014

Funk

                                                

                        "Time is the longest distance between two places."

                                                           ~ Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie







It's 12 35 and the clock has stopped and that's never happened before.


It was 12 35 when I was born and it has been ever since.







I have found myself knee deep in shit and it is dark, so dark I don't know where the ground starts and the sky begins. I am searching for the seam.



I am coughing and farting and vomiting at the same time. There should be a word for this phenomenon but at the moment I am happy for it to remain wordless.


I have other things on my mind and many questions.




Is this human shit or animal shit that I am sitting in? 

Where am I and who am I? And why has the clock stopped?







I can't begin to describe what it's like to live every 12 35 that has ever existed and to be every person that has lived and breathed for just 33 seconds.



33 Seconds.



That's all I have ever been given. It's not a lot of time at all, barely enough time to scratch my arse or brush my teeth.



I've been around the block.



I was there when they knocked down the Berlin Wall, I was Queen Victoria's chamber maid, I witnessed the great funk of 2257 and I even fucked Marilyn Monroe once for 33 seconds. Couldn't really get into it.



But most of the time it wasn't like that. Most of the time I was insignificant. Doing mundane things for 33 seconds like fastening my cuff links or crocheting or barking. That last one wasn't because I was insane, I was a German sheep dog once.







But now it's 12 36 and I'm up to my knees in shit trying to think of a word for coughing, farting and vomiting at the same time. I think I found the sky.



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