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Jam & Gangsters – Part 5

21 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment

by jackcalico in Stories Tags: Serial Writing, Short Story, writing

OK, so this is a micro-piece and again, not very good. I made this piece in order to not just forget about this project and leave myself with somewhere fun to go. Being able to write the ridiculously over the top fantasy part of this so far boring urban fantasy piece will hopefully really galvanise me into doing something longer, better and more frequently.

Part 5

Pain came first. Consciousness was a distant second. Simon was on some cold, sorry excuse for a floor. It wasn’t one of the nicer ones he’d woken up on with no memory and a massive headache.

The handcuffs didn’t help matters.

There was a noise, somewhere. Shouting.

Then there were memories. A shop. A bald man. Lubricant. They troubled Simon.

And the floor was wet. That wasn’t very nice.

But!

Of course.

Simon focused, trying to block the thumping from his mind. He found something in his head,deep and old an knotted. With a great effort he dragged it to the fore.

The water (at least, that’s what he hoped it was) bubbled and broiled as its very nature changed. It moved to his will and lifted him from the floor.

He was a God. He had been wronged. Deep down, all Gods are wrathful.

Jam & Gangsters Part 4

16 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment

by jackcalico in Stories Tags: Serial Writing, Short Story, writing

Look, I know it’s no good, but I did it, alright? And that’s the important thing. I know me. If I’d left this till tomorrow I’d never have done it. And if I didn’t finish and post it tonight, I’d never go back to sort it out.

So I apologise that it sucks. But hey, at least something happens this time.

Part 4

Little Pete turned to Big Dave “Oi, so when’re we doin’ this?” The two of them were sitting in a battered transit van.

“I told you, we gotta wait till there’s witnesses about. Boss Terry wants the Kosovans to know it was us who did it.” Big Dave said as he drained the swill out of his thermos.

Little Pete thought about this. “What if this witness is some kinda Karate guy? Comes along all ninja choppin’ and shit.”

“Then punch him.” said Big Dave.

More thought. “I don’t wanna. I didn’t sign up to punch ninjas.”

Big Dave let it go. The matter seemed settled. Big Dave unfurled his copy of the Metro and started reading. Little Pete started a-rhythmically tapping the dashboard.

Big Dave often dreamed of punching Little Pete.

“Oi, him him, he’s a witness!” Little Pete shouted as he kept slapping Big Dave on the arm. Much as Big Dave hated admitting the squirt was right, there was a non-threatening looking witness walking down the road. Some pretentious little yuppie with a stupid hat.

“Right, let’s do it.” Big Dave and Little Pete got out of the van. Dave unfolded to an impressive height, shoulders hunching as he flexed his hands. Little Pete proved to be a wiry, squirrel-like guy with a twitchy gait.

Simon saw the two thugs get out the van and felt their eyes bore into him. He was relieved when they changed trajectory and burst into an adult video shop.

He wasn’t sure what to do. Did he call the police? Did he walk on by? Maybe he should-

A scream. Before he realised what he was doing Simon was in the shop. It was just as grimy as he’d imagined it would be. Everybody turned to look at him in stunned silence as he burst in.

The big thug turned on him and sauntered forward, his face daring Simon to try something, if he was hard enough that was. So Simon did.

It didn’t work. The punch had no power and barely glanced the big thug. The thug’s punch did. Simon was sent sprawling, a thick red liquid spurting from his broken nose.

“Oi,” the thug said “that’s jam!” Simon reached for the bottle of lubricant on the shelf next to him and squirted it at the thug. But something strange happened. It changed into a flying stream of raspberry jam as it splodged out.

The whole thing hit the big thug in the face, distracting him just long enough for a brave shopper to tackle him to the ground. But the other thug pulled a billy club out of his deep pocket and gave the guy a good thwack.

The big thug pulled himself up and looked at Simon with fire in his eyes. “Dave, we gotta go!” the little one shouted. Sure enough, there were sirens outside, and plenty of suspicious looking Kosovan men lurking about.

Simon was in a daze, scrambling around for his hat when the thugs drew out a pistol each. The wiry one was shouting something at the shoppers and scaring them stiff. The big one looked out the door and saw the approaching squad cars.

”Fuck.” the burly thug said. He turned and grabbed Simon by the shoulder. With a big “hrngk” sound he pulled him to his feet, an event that was proceeded immediately with the introduction of a gun muzzle to Simon’s throat.

Gods bleed. Even if they bleed jam. Simon did not want to try any more amateur heroics. He was marched out of the shop by the thugs, into the waiting view of the policemen.

There was an awful lot of shouting, most of which Simon missed because he was knocked out before being bundled into the van, which promptly sped off at high speed.

Jam and Gangsters Part 2

09 Feb 2012 1 Comment

by jackcalico in Stories Tags: Serial Writing, Short Story, writing

Here we are folks with the second instalment of my experiment in episodic short storytelling. I apologise for…well, it, but I’ve not written traditional prose for a long time so I’m getting back into the groove of things as well as largely making it all up as I go along.

Also, here’s a link to Part 1.

Part 2

And bugger him life would. The email contained information on just the sort of ironically hip, trendy-because-it-was-untrendy clothing store that he frequented; operating under the assumption that things were only pretentious if he wasn’t doing them. If he was, they were edgy and cool and everybody was stupid for not doing them but spoiled it when they finally did do it.

And so he rushed off home as fast as the Tube would carry him and set about printing off a map to the place. The shop was apparently one of those awkward places in a back alley of a back alley of a sub-street that doesn’t show up on maps unless you get the really big A-Z guides.

This is where his problems began. A constant problem for all Gods is pride. They were forbade from making themselves figures of worship because most religions have fairly off-base ideas about what Gods are, what they do and they do it and the higher-ups didn’t want to deal with the hassle the truth would cause. But they’re Gods, damn it! They shouldn’t sully their hands with the work of mortal folk!

A lot of the older ones just lounge around in Heavens, idly abusing their powers for shits and giggles while young Gods of important things like the Internet, Environmental Awareness and Rickrolling get heavily involved in their field, trying to steer it whichever way they fancied.

Simon, on the other hand, decided to take the best of both worlds. He got all the fun of being in the real world without having any of the bother of actually paying his way. Which he did by, of course, abusing his powers. Specifically, he sold jam online.

I didn’t say it was a cool abuse of power.

The first problem arose when he tried to print the map. His printer was this ancient, primordial machine that sat in its own corner of his bedroom. Sometimes at night it burbled and beeped. No machine should ever burble.

It didn’t actually connect to the computer as printers are expected to. Instead, you had to insert a floppy disk with that and only that file on it, and it would, probably, print what you said with only minimal amounts of checking the ink cartridges, scratching your head and exasperatedly shouting “Why won’t you bloody work?”

After shouting this for the fourth time the burbling turned into a kind of grinding, screeching cacophony. Half an hour later, Simon was trying to pull the splotchy paper out of the tray by lifting up a sharp metal thing that held it down as it was printing before it could take its payment in blood.

Eventually, a rough approximation of the map was in hand. He tossed the pen he’d been using to keep the sharp thing up on top of the notepad he’d been doodling on and decided he had just enough time to hoof it over there to scope it out.

This lead quite neatly into his second mistake.

Jam and Gangsters

09 Feb 2012 2 Comments

by jackcalico in Stories Tags: Serial Writing, Short Story, writing

This is the first post for what I hope to eventually become a serial short story I’ll be uploading here tentatively titled Jam and Gangsters. Here’s the intro-hook type thing. Read it, share it, comment on it, dunk it in liquid carbonite etc.

If you want to reproduce or use it, or any of the future installments, just don’t do it for profit or a competition, and add a disclaimer saying  I wrote and own it and link back to me. Y’know usual stuff.

Jam And Gangsters

There was, once, a fairly unimpressive man called Simon Jam. He was a bit short, his dark hair was in that uncomfortable somewhere between long and short and his stubble spoke more of scruffiness than manliness.

He looked to be young. A post-graduate student, perhaps. He had the air of detached anger and pessimism that comes from spending too long eating baked bean sandwiches and being boringly political.

He looked young, but he wasn’t. He’d been around for a very long time in fact. Simon had, in fact, been around since about the 1880′s, though he’d existed in potentia since the invention of the sandwich. When, precisely that was nobody seems able to agree on and Simon hadn’t bothered to find out.

Amongst his “people”, as much as they could be called that, he was fairly young. You see, Simon was a God. There’s lots of them. If it exists as an object or phenomena or prevalent perception then it has a God. They don’t really do much of anything, as the universe is generally quite self regulating.

What Simon was the God of, as those of you who like to find those two hidden ones in a story and put them together so you get to feel all smug when the reveal happens, was jam sandwiches.

As you can imagine, Godabouting, as it’s known in “professional” circles, didn’t take up too much of the relatively young man’s time. Instead he dossed about on Earth, where the snack was most popular, and did lots of student-y things because they were cheap and required little of him.

What Simon was doing at the point when starting the actual story part of this story makes some kind of vague sense was what he usually did when he was feeling particularly disenchanted with life, the universe and everything. Which is to sit in a trendy, expensive sandwich shop in north London and turn the contents of the sandwiches of people who he found particularly irritating into jam when he thought it’d be cruellest. All while reading a thoroughly dog-eared copy of Life, The Universe And Everything by Douglas Adams because he always picked it up instead of The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe by accident.

On this day, he’d just turned a very pretentious mother’s “guava and goat’s cheese” sandwich into a jam one as she handed it off to her ridiculously dressed son, who probably wasn’t allowed to eat sugar or watch TV because it was “too stimulating”. He made sure it was extra sugary and didn’t put a single pip in it.

Simon sat with his laptop open, abusing the free Wi-Fi to do all his downloading. Setting the book down for a moment, he decided click around on the internet a bit. What with all the downloading he was doing at the time, his computer had bogged down so much that when he opened the email from Nigella, Goddess of Those Weird, Vaguely Worrying Cracks Your Body Does When You Stretch the text appeared gradually instead of all at once.

Normally this would be annoying, and it was. But it also helped make things dramatic, because this particular email was very interesting. “Well bugger me.” Simon said.