Tag: Short Story

Posted in stories

What I Do With My Hands

Posted on by Mike

They don’t burn books anymore. That’s what people don’t understand. Burning implies the thing still matters. What they do is quieter than that. A form. A reclassification. A gentle note from the Cultural Alignment Office informing you that your property has been assessed and redistributed for community benefit. You get a receipt. Very civilised.

I used to be a writer. I had forty years of notebooks. I got a receipt.

I don’t write now. I want to be clear about that, in case anyone is unclear. I am a retired man with a bad hip and a fondness for instant coffee and I don’t write. My hands are for opening tins and pointing at things on screens. That’s all.

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Posted in stories

It Was A Tuesday

Posted on by Mike

I hadn’t meant to kill him. Well, not on that particular day at least. 

It was a Tuesday and Tuesday is my day at the knitting group. ‘Stitch & Chat’ is its official name, the one the library use on their noticeboard to advertise us. To us regulars though it’s known as ‘Stitch & Bitch’. With a lot more bitching than stitching if the truth be known.

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Book illustration of a distressed man in a bleak tiled institutional corridor pleading with a calm attendant through a locked hatch door. The man wears grey clothing marked with the number 135476, while the attendant sits beside a tray holding tea, medication, and a syringe. Surveillance screens and warning signs reinforce the unsettling dystopian atmosphere.
Posted in stories

Number 135476 

Posted on by Mike

“I used to be someone else.”

“Oh yeah, who was that then? Someone famous was it? Don’t tell me, let me guess. I bet you was Elvis. That’s it, you was Elvis Presley. You wait ’til I tell my missus I’ve been chatting with Elvis, that’ll make her giggle.”

“No, seriously, before I came here I had a name and a life.”

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Productivity

Posted on by Mike

They gave me a certificate last Tuesday. Employee of the Month, February, laminated and everything. Karen from HR stood in the break room and started clapping, so everyone else did too, because that’s what you do when Karen starts clapping. The certificate has my name spelled wrong. Darryn instead of Darren. I didn’t like to say anything.

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Two office cubicles in a compliance department, one occupied with paperwork and a completed report, the other empty with a nameplate ‘K.’, suggesting a recent disappearance.
Posted in stories

The Reassignment

Posted on by Mike

I arrived at the office on Wednesday to find that K. was gone.

This was not, in itself, unusual. People left. The department had procedures for this, forms which existed precisely because such things happened, and the existence of the forms suggested that they happened with sufficient regularity to warrant them. I found this reassuring.

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