A Series of Poor Decisions, Part 1

You are drinking at the Guilty Sparrow. It does not matter what day or what time of day it is, as this is the sole activity you now participate in if you’re not jerking off, vomiting or fucking—if not all three at once. You are with your old coworker Joseph, as you often tend to be these days. He is a heavyset, perpetually depressed Hispanic hopeless romantic—always stooping low over the bar counter like a dying tree to illustrate this—with a serious drinking problem to match yours. In the last few weeks you and Joseph have taken to each other’s company quite well. You’ve always stayed friends since the day you were fired, but he finds company in misery, and he has been unable to find anyone more miserable than you. His girlfriend of five years left him when he asked her to move in. This was a year ago now but he still talks about it. He can drink more than you and you don’t like that, but you love him.

He’s talking to your friend Miles. Miles is a gaunt and unpredictable drug addict with an underlying issue of undetermined mental illness. His constant erratic movements and incoherent rambling always unsettles you until you’ve drunk enough to ignore and then enjoy his unique brand of company. You’ve known him since the two of you were four years old and he had frosted tips like a member of the Backstreet Boys. He used to mix cocaine and heroin in a needle and shoot that. He wore sleeves to hide the track marks and became very paranoid when people asked about why he wore his sleeves in ninety-degree heat. After the two of you talked he got on methadone and kicked the junk. He still does every other drug but at least he doesn’t do heroin, and you love him.

Miles and Joseph are talking about the baggie full of pills that Miles has pulled out onto the bar top.

“This is Ecstasy,” he says. “My guy told me it’s the best shit he’s gotten.” He opens up the baggie and pops two into his mouth. “You want some?”

“Fuck yeah I do,” says Joseph. He reaches out and pops one in his mouth as well. He begins chewing.

You look over at them from the side of your vision. Before you can ask him why he’s chewing an Ecstasy pill, Joseph swallows and says, “This is a Flintstones vitamin.”

“No, it’s not,” says Miles. “It’s Ecstasy. My guy told me it was the best shit he’s ever gotten.”

“Yeah, the best Flintstones vitamins he’s ever gotten. You bought a bag of vitamins from your drug dealer. Mine was cherry flavored.”

Miles leans in and peers through the plastic like a scientist studying a petri dish through a microscope. “You’re fibbing.”

“I’m not. How much did you pay for that?”

“A hundred fifty,” Miles tells him.

“You just bought twenty dollars worth of Flintstone vitamins. How many have you taken so far?”

“Four, I think.”

“And how’re you feeling?”

“Nothing so far, but it just takes a second.” Miles pauses and ponders this, staring through the shelves of liquor in front of us like he’s experiencing a war flashback.

Joseph picks up the bag and pulls out a little green one, shoves it front of his face. “Dude, it’s shaped like a fucking dinosaur.”

Miles looks at this and you can see the exact moment his heart breaks.

“What you’ve taken has made you healthier. You have literally achieved the opposite effect of Ecstasy.” He eats the little green chewable in his hand. “Apple.”

Miles is distraught. He gets up and leaves to call or stab his drug dealer. This is when the person who’s been sitting on the other side of him is revealed to you.

Her hair is shoulder-length and curled and strawberry blonde. Her eyes are large. Her legs are long and bloom out from a pink pencil skirt. She sits erect, almost regal, despite her apparent intoxication, suggesting it had been hammered in at an early age to remain ladylike, regardless of how her own personality would eventually steer her towards anything or everything otherwise. She is sitting alone. You lean across the bar without hesitation. There is no time for hesitation any longer. There are too many holes bleeding from every part of you, and the irony is that the more you fill them with what they require, the faster you are going to die anyway. There is no time for hesitation.

“You are fucking gorgeous,” you tell her.

“Ah hehehehe.”

She laughs like that, high-pitched and overacted. You do your best to ignore this.

“Well, thanks,” she slurs. “You are too.”

Joseph butts in, taking it upon himself to be your wingman. “Y’know, my boy’s an author. You ever fucked an author? Do you read?”

“Ohhhh is he?” This doesn’t appear to impress her but nonetheless she moves to the seat closer to you. “And who are you?”

“I don’t think she reads,” he whispers to you. “I’m Joseph,” he redirects to her. “Isn’t my boy good looking? Who wouldn’t love that face?”

You’re not sure if he’s just trying to get you laid and live vicariously through you or he’s gotten so drunk and lonely that some feelings are coming out.

“He’s gorgeous,” she says and grabs your leg.

“I’m Henry,” you tell her. You feel the need to reciprocate, honor the friendship and maybe get Joseph’s dick sucked instead. “What about my friend though? You think he’s cute?”

She appraises his appearance through one eye. “You’re both cute. I’d fuck both of you.”

Anna the bartender comes by and rolls her eyes. She’s become accustomed to a very different Henry than the one she’s been used to in these last few weeks. “Another round boys…and…lady?”

“Shots!” Joseph shouts. “Three tequilas, no training wheels.”

“Wooo! Shots!” the girl screams, throwing her hands up. “You guys are so much fun. Like ah hehehehe…so much fun. Her bedroom eyes drift between the two of you.

You realize as the shots are put out in front of you that you never got her name. This doesn’t bother you.

Joseph holds up his shot. “So, what’re we cheersing to?”

“I wanna fuck both of you at the same time,” she says.

Anna makes a face like she bit into human shit and walks away.

“To fucking both of us!” he screams. He looks at you and shrugs as the shot goes down, like, So…down?

If you were sober this would be one of the worst ideas you could possibly think of. Right now you can’t imagine why this ideas has never been expressed until this moment.

“I want one of you to fuck me in the ass while the other fucks my mouth,” she says.

You almost choke on your tequila. “Yeah, yep. We can do that.”

You and Joseph exchange glances. “We’ve gone this far,” he mumbles. “It would be uncouth to leave her hanging at this point.”

“It would be ungentlemanly,” you agree.

She eyes both of you. “Okay, okay, lemme just check with my boyfriend.”

Her boyfriend.

Joseph launches into a fit of laughter.

“Is this like, an open relationship situation?” you ask.

“I’m not sure. I can’t remember,” she says. “Lemme call him and ask.”

Joseph looks at you, his entire face lit up. You’ve never seen him enjoying himself this much before.

Call him and ask? you mouth to him. She’s fucking crazy.

He shrugs and talks with his hands: Is that bad?

I didn’t say that.

She steps away to make the call and see if her boyfriend will give her the okay to get double penetrated.

Joseph watches her walk out the door with the phone on her ear. “What would you rather take?” he asks.

“I’d rather the mouth but I’ll take one for the team if you need me to.”

“Not a fan of anal?”

“Not for me, no.”

“That’s fair. Alright, it’s settled then,” Joseph decides. “Makes you wonder why her pussy wasn’t an option, though, doesn’t it?”

“I was just thinking that,” you say. And you were. You really were.

Before you can dwell on that for too long she returns, sits down next to you and straightens out her skirt. “He didn’t answer. Poor baby must be asleep. Wanna take me home?”

“Is this the home where your boyfriend lives?” you ask.

“Ah don’t worry about that,” Joseph interjects. “We’ll figure that out when we get there, right…uh—what was your name?”

She throws her head back and kicks up a leg. Her stilettos look like weapons. “Ah hehehehe. You’re so funny. You guys kill me. Seriously.”

Joseph leads you down the street in a direction you can’t stabilize yourself enough to be aware of. It’s nighttime. You wish you were a sailor so you could navigate by the stars, but realize you’re so drunk there are multiple copies of each star in the sky and so even if you could, fuck all it would do for you. You think about how often pirates must have gotten lost at sea in the 1700’s.

The girl piles into the back while you collapse into the passenger seat like someone had thrown you.

“So where to?” Joseph asks the girl. He is shit drunk, but you have done enough tonight to make the bleeding stop for now, and so you could hardly care what happens at this point. You don’t hurt anymore and that is all that matters. She gives him vague directions and Joseph tears down the street like he’ll win a prize for getting there within a certain time limit.

Joseph insists on talking while driving, twisting around with one hand on the wheel to make eye contact with her. “So we should just come in, is what you’re saying. I’m sure he won’t mind. He can watch! Maybe he’d be into that.”

“That is true,” you add. “Cucking is becoming a more and more universally accepted sexual kink these days. Have you ever typed ‘cuck and bull’ into Pornhub? It’s a thriving community. We don’t judge!”

“No not all,” says Joseph. “It might wake up something in him. Maybe he just needs a little push to learn that we accept him.”

“I agree. Let us give him the courage to step out of his shell and accept his desires. We’d be doing him a service, I think.”

“In fact, it might even be detrimental for him not to watch us fucking his girlfriend,” says Joseph. “I don’t think it’s fair of any of us to deprive him of the sexual awakening that this could provide. I’ll go as far as to say we’d be doing him a disservice if we don’t.”

“Just something to think about,” you tell her.

“Ah hehehehe. You boys are too funny. And so fucking sexy. I want you both fucking all of my holes.” She starts pulling down her blouse. “You wanna see my boobies?”

Her specific choice of vernacular is off-putting, but Joseph is unperturbed, and shouts, “Yes!”

You turn around and there they are. Her tits are out in the backseat. She starts playing with them and making fake orgasm faces like a poorly trained porn star, her mouth open and her tongue sliding across her lips, her eyes rolling to the back of her head. If you hadn’t before now, you decide that she is insane.

“Oh shit!” Joseph takes his eyes entirely off the road to enjoy the show taking place behind him.

“No, no, no.” You wave your hands in front of his face. “You drive, I’ll watch for the both of us and relay it back to you through descriptive words.”

As you say this, the girl throws her body into the back of your seats and points to a turn that you are at this point about to pass. “Oh shoot, there! Turn there!”

Joseph spares no time, whipping his Ford Explorer at a hairpin turn, slamming into the curb and launching you three feet into the air. The car lands on its right two wheels, and the left two follow after a moment of angled suspension like a spiraling rollercoaster, slamming down onto the cement with the force of an anvil dropping from a two-story building.

Nobody moves. The car stays idling in silence. You stare forward, your eyes wide with the feeling you imagine someone must experience after recognizing they almost just died. Joseph says nothing, his hands gripping the steering wheel.

The girl points her finger towards the house you’ve nearly crashed in front of. “There I am! Thanks, boys!” She takes your phone out of your trembling hands, puts in her number, calls herself, and kisses you both on the cheek before jumping out and skipping towards her door. “I’ll let you know if boyfriend will let you fuck me! Have a good night!”

And she disappears inside her house.

You and Joseph continue staring forward.

“We never even got her name,” he says.

A grin stretches across your face. “No,” you laugh. “No, we didn’t.”

The next night you and Joseph are back drinking at the bar when you receive this text:

Hello. Thank you so much again for the ride home. But boyfriend and I decided that we aren’t going to go for the threesome. I’m sorry I showed you my boobies, that wasn’t cool. That’s not something my dog and I agreed on. Hope you’re having a good night! Bye bye.

You show this to Joseph.

“Her dog?” he says. “Well that explains a lot.”

Scumbag

I’m a piece of shit. I’m sitting in the Cliff Inn in Hunstanton eyeing up all the girls who come in. They stand at the bar showing off their thighs under their miniskirts and giggling. I take a mouthful of lager and stare at them appreciatively. I could and probably will have at least one of them in the toilets before last orders are called. But I’m in no rush. They’ll still be there at the end of the night.

I neck the last quarter of my pint and wipe the frothy remnants off my beard. I get up and walk to the gents to do a shit, giving a wide grin to the dolly birds at the bar. I’m pleased to see that the birds return the smile, the little flirts, and my grin stays plastered on my face as I enter the gents.

I drop a sticky, black shit into the bowl and get as much residue off my arse as I can but no matter how much I wipe there always seem to be some left and so eventually I call it a day and walk back to my seat giving the girls another good look on my way.

Sitting at the table on my return is old Martin Diamond. Diamond’s a sad sack with sunken eyes and thin grey hair who sits in the pub every night until closing. He always wears beaten up old white trainers, blue jeans, and a blue fleece. My first instinct is to tell him to fuck off but then I see that he’s bought a round so I give him the benefit of the doubt.

“Hi, John,” he says.

“Hi, Martin,” I say.

I sit down and have a quick sip, raising my eyebrows by way of thanks.

“So I went to Waterstones yesterday to get a book on tortoises,” says Martin. “‘Hard back?’ The girl on the till says. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘with little heads’”

“Oh piss off you old bore,” I say.

Martin gets up to leave with his pint.

“Leave the drink,” I say.

Martin looks at me and clearly doesn’t like something he sees in my eyes and puts his pint down on the table before hurrying off to the bar to buy a replacement.

Some time later the bell rings out from behind the bar as the landlord calls out last orders at ten forty-five. I head to the bar with some of my empties. I nestle myself in between the girls I’ve been watching get steadily more drunk over the course of the evening. There’s a plump girl in a green boob tube I’m particularly interested in. She has long fake eye lashes and sparkly eye shadow. Her hair shows the faint signs of a dip dye but this clearly hasn’t been seen to for a few months and is losing its vibrancy.

“Evening,” I say.

“Alright?” Says the plump girl with a filthy grin.

“Fancy a fuck?” I ask.

The plump girl looks me up and down.

“Yeah, go on then,” she says.

I lead her to the gents where we occupy a cubicle and do the unthinkable.

***

I stand in the cool summer night and light a skinny roll up. I look over the road to The Cliff Inn and the gaggle of girls which contains my conquest among their number. They go off into the night giggling away. Either going back to one of their flats for some coke and fizz and the chance to share nudes with some guys online or maybe to get a taxi to King’s Lynn to find a late night bar and see some real life nudes. In the grisly flesh. I fancy that the girl I screwed is walking slightly bow legged and I smile to myself.

I turn and walk away down the cliff road to the beach. She had been pretty enough. And a great shag more importantly. Obviously a fun time girl. She had performed an act of great kindness upon my person. Yet I never want to see her again. I’m lonely and I want companionship so why can’t I give her the four chambers of my heart as readily as I gave her the four inches of my dick?

I walk along the beach for a few minutes before making myself comfortable, leaning my back against the soft, red cliffs., looking out into the black expanse. In the distance glisten the twinkling lights of an oil rig. I can see the faint, white lines that indicate a breaking wave. Here, on Norfolk’s rare west coast I feel at peace.

The problem is, as I see it, I don’t want any of the girls I meet. I don’t want then long term anyway. What I want is one of those teenagers. They are wild these days. Rim jobs to them are as normal as hand jobs were when I was a teen. Nowadays they give blowjobs upside down until their faces are covered in thick, gloopy saliva. They slap themselves in the face while giving head. I’ve seen then do it on ManyVids and Chaturbate. That’s what I want.

I sigh. I’m tired and bored. I’ll get up at some point and make my way slowly back to my flat where I’ll have an own brand beer and fall asleep in front of my storage heater. What’s the bloody point?

I look out over the sea to try and imagine what is on the other side of the bay. Lincolnshire? Is it Skegness? What does life look like from over there? From the other side. Only one way to find out I decide and I get up to begin the walk to Skegness. It’s fifteen miles as the crow flies but to take each of the three sides amounts to closer to fifty.

***

I walk the twelve miles to Castle Rising and make it there as the sun is coming up. My legs ache and I have the first dull edge of a hangover between my eyes.

The A149 had been completely deserted as I made my way southwards towards King’s Lynn. I ran from side to side of the road only half hoping that an articulated lorry would take me by surprise and flatten me under its load.

At Castle Rising I hide myself under a hedge to turn off the headache and try to get some sleep. This is a pit stop. The calm before the storm. When I make it to King’s Lynn tomorrow evening I’ll find myself some loose tart to chuck one in and some plonk to distract me from an indifferent universe.

I don’t know how long I slept but the sun is beginning its drop towards the horizon when I wake up. My back feels damp from where the ground has been in contact with it.

I stagger to my feet, joints stiff and creaking and I continue my journey to King’s Lynn.

When I arrive at the town centre the late summer sun is still warm and everything I see has that orange filter. The evening is coming on quickly.

I head to Savers to buy a cheap bar of soap and then find a quiet, private spot at the Great Ouse to have a quick wash. Just pits, penis, and arse. The holy trinity. My dick has the congealed remains of the spunk I shot out into that girl from last night. I’m reminded of maggots. Then I wonder if washing my dick in river water is a good idea. Could flesh eating bacteria travel up my urethra? I wash my face and hair and try to forget about it.

***

I walk into King’s Lynn’s only proper nightclub, Qubez, and start to look for some girls who might be loose enough for me to bag without too much effort. There are some right lookers around. King’s Lynn. What I really want is one of those basic bitches with the round glasses. A soft girl. But I don’t suppose many girls wear their glasses on a night out. I make myself comfortable by the bar. There’s never much point in putting in too much effort until nearer closing time when everyone’s drunker and getting desperate.

It’s nearly two AM and I’ve spent the last few hours drinking Jack Daniel’s and coke, risking not only the whiskey blues but also whiskey dick. I’m not unduly worried about underperforming with a girl though. My main motivation, after yesterday’s sleep under a bush, is to have a comfortable bed to spend the night in. The sex is secondary.

There’s only a dozen or so people left in the club including some tanned, brunette stunner in a short orange dress who’s now at the bar next to me. Her legs are too thin but then my stomach is too fat so who am I to judge?

She places her order at the bar and I say “I’ve got this” and hand over my debit card, hoping there’s enough left on the overdraft to cover it.

Before too long I’m walking through the empty streets of King’s Lynn with the stunner on our way back to her house. At one point she pushes me against a kebab shop window and kisses me passionately on the mouth so that I have to walk the rest of the way with a semi and the tell tale wet patch of pre-cum on my chinos.

She has a nice house. Victorian terrace with a hall entrance. Her next step up will be a double fronted terrace or a semi-detached before hitting the dream of a detached house in the country. No shared walls. I find out that her name is Alice.

Alice leaves me in her living room while she goes to grab some beers from the fridge. She leaves some music channel playing but I ignore it and go to look at her bookshelves. Books by Jordan Peterson, and Douglas Murray, and Christina Hoff Sommers and other people who refer to themselves with no irony as the intellectual dark web.

Alice returns with two beers and before we have finished them she is lying back on the corner sofa with her dress pushed up to her stomach, her knickers hanging off one ankle and my stupid face between her skinny thighs, eating her out.

Idiot-like I roll my tongue around her soft sex, no idea what I’m doing until I hit the hard bud of her clitoris and decide, rightly or wrongly, to focus all my attention there.

“Convincing others of the superiority of one’s own morality is a difficult thing to achieve,” says Alice. “This is because of the subjectivity of morality. We are all intuitively aware of the correct thing to do morally but others have an annoying habit of experiencing the world through their own entirely subjective morality and so may believe that my ‘correct’ way of acting is not the same as their ‘correct’ way of acting. That is not to excuse those who act immorally and in doing so infringe on another’s liberty or wellbeing. Of course, the person who murders though sees nothing immoral in the act of murder has done wrong because they have impinged on another’s freedom. But where another’s actions do not affect our own freedom, yet we still find their behavior odious, we are inclined to shame them anyway. As such we must find another way to frame our moral beliefs to turn them into an objective rule.”

“What are you saying?” I ask between licks.

“It’s from a book by Mia Baxter,” says Alice. “A former dissident YouTuber who has since made the pivot to self-publishing her own books in which she explores the value of conservative morality in the twenty-first century.”

I look up and see that she has a book in her hands and is reading aloud from it. I go back to my job and try to find a rhythm in the text which will inform what I’m doing.

“To this end we turn our subjective, moral belief into something hard and undeniable,” she continues. “If we take the example of vegetarianism we see that first the vegetarian will try to convince the meat-eater that it is wrong to eat animal meat because it removes the freedom of the animal to not be eaten, in the same way we do not murder because it removes the freedom of another human to not be murdered…”

She drones on while I continue my task, unsure of the positive effect my work is having. Alice certainly seems more interested in her book. Eventually I have to stop because I have worn the skin off the end of my tongue and I know it’s going to turn into an ulcer by the next day.

“That was nice,” Alice says politely. She walks out of the room and I follow, assuming we’re turning in. Instead she heads to the front door and opens it.

“Well, goodbye then,” she says.

“Aren’t I staying here?” I ask.

“Why would I want you to do that?” she says.

“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” I say.

Alice looks at me with pity and frustration.

“Fine,” she says. “But you’ll have to sleep on the sofa.”

***

It’s five o’clock in the morning and I can see the sun’s already up and shining bright and white through a crack in the curtains. I have the headache of a nascent hangover and my legs ache. I don’t think they ache from the alcohol though. This girl, Alice or whatever, has a really uncomfortable sofa and I slept all hunched up.

I flip through a copy of the book by Mia Baxter that Alice had left thrown to one side next to the sofa. A pretty girl grins out at me from the cover. She is wearing a white blouse and a black pencil skirt with sheer tights over her legs. She’s wearing glasses which are obviously fake. The book is titled Millennials and the Meta-modern Age.

I decide to sample a few pages:

The age of the grand narrative has returned; Millennials have adopted a unifying social theory which encompasses post-colonialism, climate change, and identity politics. Every single attitude of the millennial zeitgeist is informed by an adherence to this cocktail. Veganism, electric cars, shopping locally are all lifestyle choices informed by the political attitude and designed to limit the convenience of Western lives. It is contemporary asceticism and displays the quasi-religious aspects of the millennial world view. This feeling and the rules which are used to express it are socially enforced by the neo-puritans via public shaming and cancel culture. The need to virtue signal is so great because it is the only sure protection against this culture.

Millennials are changing the culture of the world as they begin to move into positions of cultural power. They are shedding the cynicism which typified the post-modern world and embracing a conscious naivety. Events are no longer critically examined, only viewed through the prism of the pseudo-religion. Certain institutions are beyond reproach. The NHS, the UN, NATO, the WHO. These are all surrogate parent figures existing to allow the millennials to not have to think, the acronyms do the thinking for them. The ultimate end of the millennial world view is an enlarged state, a Corbynite-Marxism, with influence in all areas of an individual’s life.

And on and on. The standard sort of stuff you’d expect from a right-wing internet firebrand who is trying to distance themselves from the racism they used to peddle. I rip out a few pages and hide them under the sofa.

I get up and storm through to the kitchen where I eat four Weetabix, two at a time. I leave the milk out and the fridge door open. Then I open the freezer door too. I don’t know why but I’m in a foul mood. I take six cans of Coke from the slowly warming fridge and force them into the pockets of my trousers and jacket.

On my way out of the house I piss in the corner of the hallway. I exit the house and leave the front door wide open before heading back to the quayside to make my way along the Wash to Boston.

I drift around Boston for the day drinking the tins of Coke I nicked. I sit on benches and walk through green spaces. I look at the Stump, the impossibly tall church tower. I feel nothing. Neither hope nor enthusiasm. Neither calm nor reassurance. It’s just a cold building.

As evening draws in I head into the first club I find. It’s called Club de Brasilia and there is a drag act on. She is made up to filth and has a perfect body. I feel myself chubbing up just watching her.

In an obviously planned piece of pseudo-improvisation, this young guy who seems to work for the club collecting empties briefly jumps onto one edge of the stage to collect an empty glass.

“Hey,” says the queen. “Stay down that end of the stage. I won’t let you come up my end. At least not without buying me a drink first.”

She winks at the audience which roars with laughter. It’s an old joke and not an especially good one but I find myself laughing as well. The queen then bursts into a rendition of Freed From Desire by Gala which sends raptures through the sweaty, writhing, heaving mass of glistening bodies. The queen is wearing a strapless dress and you can see her well muscled arms and legs quite clearly. Queens round here are a tough bunch. To dress as they do and perform and mince around they have to be tough in East Anglia. Especially here in the Fens where bigotry is commonplace. These queens need to be able to throw a punch as well as take one. Thick skulls.

It’s later and I am propping up the bar. The queen who has been compering through the night is standing next to me.

“You’re funny,” I say. “And fit. Can I buy you a drink?”

The queen looks me up and down. Sizes me up. Because of the low lighting in here she can’t see how hagged I look so she says yes. I ask her what her name is and she says it’s Mamie van Whoren which makes me laugh.

Before I realize it we are walking through her front door; a nice semi-detached suburban job. We are both pissed and we kiss violently, tongues slipping in and out of each other’s mouths. We stumble up the stairs and into her bed. I try to touch her penis but she won’t let me so instead we do it the old fashioned way. How the Greeks used to.

I sleep in her bed that night with Mamie’s head on my chest.

I wake up refreshed and I go downstairs to have a shower. I know I could be happy with Mamie but I set out to get to Skegness so that’s what I’m going to do.

Without waking Mamie I leave her house, closing the door softly behind me and with a pair of her knickers in my pocket that I took from the washing basket.

***

I get off the bus in Skegness and go for a mooch around the town. After looking at the clock and buying a Ginster’s steak bake at Spar I go to see that fat fuck the Jolly Sailor. It’s summer and it’s hot so there’s lots of people around. I find myself staring at people. Girls giggling in their short shirts and bikini tops. Pair of Vans on all their feet.

I walk down the pier and spit over the end. Watch my frothing gob disappear. I head under the pier and abuse myself while sniffing Mamie’s knickers which I then bury in the sand. Very reverent. Ritualistic. I fall asleep.

When I wake up its dusk so I head to the Pleasure Beach and have a go on the roller coasters for a bit. Eat some candy floss and a burger. Drink a coke. I get upset with everyone looking so young and happy so I leave and try to find Europa Point.

On my out of the Pleasure Beach I see a dog tied to a lamp post so I kick it in the side as hard as I can. I think I feel a rib crack under my toes. Soft and muffled under its fur. It falls to its side and whimpers.

I get to the beach and stand where I think Europa Point is. I look out into the black. The sun has gone down and the only indication of what is sea and what is night sky is the appearance of twinkling stars on the black plane.

Is that Norfolk over there? Hunstanton?

I’m not very happy. But I used to be. I was happy before I started trying to fuck girls. I know now that I never wanted to be with any of them. I wanted to be them. I wanted to be pretty. Have soft skin and wear nice clothes. Be an object of desire. Young. Tight.

I decide that I should probably go home. I walk out into the sea. It’s cold. I’m instantly drenched to my knees but I keep walking. I have to get home. The water is up to my navel. A swell of sea water knocks me back and I almost fall over and under. My clothes are heavy. When the water is over my nipples I plunge forward and begin to swim. After a couple of strokes I am taken under the surface and I can’t get back up. I struggle for a little while before instinctively opening my mouth to breathe. My lungs fill with salt water and I drown.

Breaded Chicken

Driving through the drizzling night with the woman I share a home with and she’s reminding me I’m a fool. If I drank too much at the party why am I driving? She’s balancing a box of chicken nuggets on her angry lap. They served appetizers at the party but she can’t eat shellfish for reasons of faith and I’m allergic, so we drove through a drivethrough and came out the other side with a box of breaded god knows what parts of a chicken. I hear a lot of fowl anatomy gets granulated into the recipe; feet, liver, rectum, beak. Gizzard, feathers. The martinis I poured down my gullet scramble in my guts with these slaughtered thoughts. I picture terrified chickens toppling into a giant blender and I emit an accidental chuckle and she looks at me with a poison stare. I make a point of keeping my gaze on the road. She resumes telling me what a fool I am. I just agree with her, Uh-huh, and she tells me not to get cute. Don’t get cute, she tells me. Being cute wasn’t on my mind. Like, at all but I say, I can’t help it if I’m cute. It’s beyond my control. Isn’t the fact that I’m cute the reason you loooooove me?

She doesn’t like that. Like, at all. Her silence feels like another passenger in the car. We drive through seething rain, without speaking, for a long time. Then I tell her to give me a piece of chicken and ask her to open the sweet & sour sauce for me. She doesn’t like that. Like, at all. She looks at me and looks at me. What? I say. She says, You want some chicken? Yeah? You want chicken? And she’s rolling down her window and I know what’s coming. Here, here’s your fucking chicken! And she hurls the box into the moving night. So, there it is, the end of the breaded chicken and the story.

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From: Everything Dissolves