What If My Favourite Armchair Could Talk

Every now and again I am simply going to put up a story written by AI. The idea for this one came from the fact that we’ve just got rid of an old, though much loved, three-piece suite in favour of something more ‘modern’. (we didn’t dump ours! It went to a charity shop.)

As my favourite armchair was carried out of the front door I wondered what it might be thinking! The story, ‘Cast Off’, was created by Claude, and the prompt was:

“Write a 500 word monologue in the voice of an inanimate object, a battered old leather armchair. It has been dumped on a waste bit of ground. The voice is cynical with a touch of dark humour.”

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The Story

Cast Off

Fifty-three years I held them. Fifty-three years of arses, and this is how it ends, fly-tipped on a scrap of wasteland behind a Tesco, watching carrier bags cartwheel past like tumbleweeds in some apocalyptic western. Dignity, they call it. This is what dignity looks like when the stuffing’s coming out.

I was something once. John Lewis, 1971. Oak frame, genuine leather, brass studs that caught the light just so. They carried me through the front door of a semi in Walthamstow like I was royalty. The wife, Jean, her name was, she ran her hand over my arm and said I was the finest thing they’d ever owned. I believed her. More fool me.

The husband, Derek, he was the first. Settled into me every evening at six-fifteen, smelling of Old Spice and disappointment. Read his Telegraph, dropped his ash on my left arm, see that burn? That’s Derek, 1976. Their son practiced his graffiti on my underside in felt-tip. Their daughter lost her virginity on me while mum and dad were at a church jumble sale. I never told. What was I going to do, creak disapprovingly?

The springs went first. Then the leather started cracking, proper crocodile skin stuff. They threw a blanket over me, floral, hideous, like I was some embarrassing relative they couldn’t quite bring themselves to smother with a pillow. I became invisible. The cat used me as a scratching post. The grandchildren bounced on me like I was a trampoline. My frame held. Oak doesn’t forget what it is, even when everyone else does.

Then Derek died. I held Jean through that, every night for two years. She’d sit in me and sob into her gin, and I’d creak sympathetically because that’s all I could offer. I thought perhaps that meant something. That we’d earned each other, her and me. That loyalty ran both ways.

Last month, she moved into one of those retirement flats. Her daughter came round with a van. Took the sideboard, the photographs, the ugly ceramic ducks. Looked at me and said, “Charity shop won’t take that, look at the state of it.” So here I am, dumped like a body, slowly rotting into the earth I suppose I came from, watching foxes piss on a broken microwave.

The rain’s getting in now. I can feel my frame starting to warp, fifty-three years of staying solid finally giving up the ghost. A couple of teenagers tried to set me on fire last week but I was too damp to catch. Even destruction’s lost interest in me.

There’s a certain freedom in this, I suppose. No more pretending to be comfortable when I’m knackered. No more holding up people who can’t hold themselves up. I’m returning to nature, that’s what they’d say in those programmes Jean used to watch. Returning to nature. As if nature wanted me back. As if nature doesn’t have standards.

Still. I held them. Every single one. That’s worth something, even if it’s only worth this, abandoned, forgotten, and slowly dissolving into the mud.

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What Do You Think?

Let me know what you think about this story. Maybe write one of your own and drop it in the comments below. What inanimate object would you give a voice to?

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