Crack Rabbit

I fed my rabbit crack. Addiction came soon after, and before long a real problem developed. He wouldn’t stop shaking. It was as if he had been transformed from the family pet into a living, furry vibrator. At one point my wife tried to use him as one. It was during one of our post-coital arguments and the only way I could stop her from putting on a sex show in front of the kids was by threatening to ditch her for her mother, Diane.

I can say that because I know that Diane has the hots for me. She flirts with a salacious grin whenever her daughter turns her back and I can name at least three occasions where she has attempted seduction. The Johnson’s New Year’s party, Christmas Eve 2003 and Sunday Dinner one particularly cold February. Not to say that she is outright obvious, there is a certain air of subtlety. No, it’s in her eyes. And the way she slides that secretarial skirt up her thigh to reveal her Marks and Spencers.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that it is very irresponsible to feed a helpless creature such as a domesticated rabbit crack. Buster (that was his name) became highly erratic, often rifling through draws in the vain attempt to get hold of more drugs. It was as though he had undergone radical personality transformation surgery. He stopped functioning: washing and eating were forgotten. He lost a dramatic amount of weight, turning into what can only be described as fur pulled loosely over a skeletal frame. Towards the end he even stopped using the kitty litter I put down. There were round balls of shit everywhere. My Dad mistook them for Maltesers and ate one. That was a mistake.

The funny thing is, that wasn’t even the last straw. We did our best to rehabilitate him. Even when stuff about the house started going missing (money, jewellery, ibuprofen). The final straw came when it turned out that this helpless creature was not at all helpless. He mugged an old lady with a kitchen knife (don’t ask me how, you wouldn’t believe the story). We sat down as a family and began crisis talks. They went far into the night. Coffee was consumed, harsh words were said, but eventually we came to a decision.

We kicked him out of the house. It sounds harsh, but there really wasn’t any other option. It had to be done, for the children and our sanity. Less than two weeks later my wife saw him in a butcher’s window, stripped of his fur and skin, hanging from a hook. She bought him, took him home and made a stew. I always suspected she was a bunny boiler.

Dream...

Some time after the accident the three of us returned to our former home; that monument to entropy. Collapsed and distraught, it struggled against a charcoal sky. Beneath its shadow, where only the whistling gate remained, we stood, sentinels at the final outpost of a dead time. I turned to Lucius.

“Should we go in?”

He replied by trampling the last of the grass beneath his boots. He crunched through charred wood and brick. At the top of the steps, from the framed pillars of his funereal palace, he called to Alice and me.

“Well, are you coming in or not?”

I hesitated.

Head held in reverence, Alice floated past. She appeared to me as if underwater; the whispers of her hair shifted in open cross-currents of lost time. Buoyant with melancholy, she passed through what remained. Her smoke rose up in tendrils and became smudged out in the last of the Burgeoning heavens. Ashen trees mourned winter. A far off stack belched black blood. The clouds were going to break.

I followed the others, holding on to what remained of the whistling gate: it broke off in my hand. I thought of dropping it there, on the scorched earth to rust into the ages, and I should have, but I could not. Inside the guts of what was left, I propped it against a rotten wall, creating a moment of order.

Lucius threw me his flask: the insides were warm and choking.

“There is nothing left here, is there?” I asked, one last time.

Silence and musk. Alice feathered my face with hers, wrapping her arms about me. The memory of a heartbeat came back for a moment - it passed. Her chest remained in permanent pause. She pulled away. I wiped white ash from my shoulder. Back in the end days, she liked to do that for me.

Lucius muttered: “I’m off now,” and dropped through the ruined floorboards. I stared in reverie at the space he used to occupy. Alice caressed a smile of midnight at his departure.

After a time, she surgically removed the cigarette from her bloodless lips, and lit another off the embers. She said: “Me too,” and out of reality, her form faded.

She used to be my dream girl.

Girl Bunny Bear Love

Emergency drawing...

Lone Bird

Seems like life has been keeping me pretty busy lately, despite the absence of work. This morning while rolling around in agony from the combination of a terrible hangover and a bag of undercooked, soggy chips (bleurgh!), I received a phone call from a buddy who's doing teacher training. He mentioned that a place had come up due to someone dropping out before even starting and that he thought I might be interested. Now, I thought about becoming a teacher before, but I had decided I would do it in physics and probably in September. Either that or do it in some kind of fringe science, like Astrobiology. But then fringe scientists tend to wear beards and I can't grow one. So I figured what the hell, throw caution to the wind (to use a cliche): my father was a maths teacher and his father before him. So why not me?

Plus 7 grand tax-free for the first six months.

Back to those soggy chips: yeah I made the mistake of boffing in the sink moments after putting the phone down. It took a plunger to get that stuff down.

Headed back to Canterbury to see a few friends over the weekend, with my new lap top in tow and I managed to get a fair bit of work done on a short story I'm working on whilst on the train. I miss Canterbury a lot. We partied like it was 1908 and then headed to London for Harry and max's gig in Kentish Town.
http://www.myspace.com/thepennybloods

Harry also poked me in the right direction for Notes From The Underground, a freesheet with a readership of 100,000 distributed on the London Underground. Apparently they like new writers so I sent in "Something Suitable For Skimming" yesterday. Fingers crossed.

http://www.notesfromtheunderground.co.uk

Plus: Mark updated the Noir blog so I better start working on my next post. And I had better put up the next part of The Suit.

Right now I'm listening to the lyrical genius of Emily Haines while my Ma watches a recorded episode of Doctors. My Belly is full of spaghetti.

Beach

An accompanying illustration to "Something Suitable For Skimming".

Trees

If this works, new background.

I saw a light...

Point and shoot and don't look where.

City: Ripped

Here's a short comic I drew a while back. It's one of those pieces I kept fiddling with because I wasn't happy with it and then one day I suddenly looked at it and realised... well, I sort of liked it.



I decided to do some drawing today as a break from some writing (unemployment is great) and discovered that I had lost my brush pen, only survivng HB pencil, and my fountain pen. Not great. Not cool. Very annoying.

I hunted with my torch (thanks to a fresh pair of Duracell), to no avail.


Happy New Year.