I did a lot of writing on Trinidad. I must have started at least 14 short stories. None of which I finished - some I abandoned after a couple of paragraphs, others after a few pages. But I’m writing again.
Short story 1
“Light moves, really fast, right?”, Bernard asks the crowd, 4 man strong, that are gathered in the late morning sun in Concert Square, sipping their respective drinks, purchased not ten minutes ago from the once ridiculously pretentious outdoor bar at the Modo’s nightclub.
The others agree. “But it does move. That means that whatever we see is actually the past. Okay, it is a very recent past - shorter ago than…”, Bernard snaps his fingers in the air, “but still, it is the past. We can never see the present, only the past. Why worry about the future, when we can’t even see what is going on around us right now?”. Bernard sits back in his chair and takes a swig of his Reef.
The others, vaguely discomforted by being waken up by what - by their standards - is philosophical thought surpassing John Locke, shoot insecure glances at each other, and - unable to find any holes in Bernard’s reasoning - reluctantly nod in agreement.
Tim looks across to the table next to theirs, and admires the legs of the blonde girl who is complaining about the sunlight. “Hey, girl, you really shouldn’t be complaining. When’s the last time you’ve seen the sunshine?”, he shoots across. As he says it, he realises that the girl he is ogling (and wondering how he can somehow get her to sleep with him, preferably within the next twenty-seven seconds, despite the fact that his erection has not even fully grown, and ignoring the small detail that he doesn’t even know her name. Or, indeed, if she speaks English), is a past-tense version of the girl.
“Hey, did you know that you are in the past”, Tim asks, before she had any chance to answer his questions about the sun. She looks at him as if he had recently admitted to liking to draw Teletubbies characters on his nipples before coitus, gets up, and walks off, leaving her drink and her (confused, but not bad-looking) friend behind.
Tim is not a handsome man by anyone’s standards, but seems to be blissfully (and often embarrassingly) unaware of this. Tim once spent three weeks doing civil service at a petting-zoo-farm in Fazakerly, after he was nipped stealing three cartons of magazines off a truck outside W.H.Smith in Church Street. He hoped the magazines were about cars or perhaps some hardcore pornography destined for the top shelf. The prosecutor in the Dale Street Magistrates Court revealed that he was nearly successful stealing a large batch of magazines about parenting, home improvement and a small stack of “Which Caravan”. At the farm, one of his supervisors would ask the children who visited the place (mostly in groups via school) if Tim or the hogs roaming the area would win a beauty contest. About a third of the children voted for the Tim.
Short story 2
My hair was wet, and stuck to the something. My eyes felt as if tiny little mechanical spiders were holding them shut. My face was still stuck to what I first assumed was the floor. This is not normally how I start my days, and the very loud, very obnoxious (in a school-dance-for-10-year-olds-where-the-DJ-has-decided-to-play-a-lot-of-embarassing-songs-about-sex kind of way) music made it obvious that this may not have been - as I first inferred, from the fact that I was waking up, which I normally only do in a bed (usually my own bed, unless I get lucky) - the start of a day at all.
After feeling around on the surface, and tasting it with the tip of my tongye. I lifted my head. Or rather, I made a feeble attempt at dislodging my face from the table, which - after having been used alternatingly as an ashtray and a repository for nearly-empty bottles of alco-pop since about five hours earlier that evening - was stickier than a sixpack of superglue.
Just another night on the town, I hear you think. And you would have been right, except… Hang on. No, you are completely wrong. Why are you inferring things anyway, instead of just letting me tell the story? Oh, you are not, in fact, inferring anything. You weren’t even thinking it was another night on the town? As a matter of fact, you find it tremendously annoying that I first place thoughts in your mind, only to subsequently scold you for them, in a lame trick of narrative that has probably been used more effectively in the past? Oh, okay. Ignore this paragraph, and let’s carry on, shall we?
Slowly, painfully, accompanied by some distant laughter, I manage to carefully negotiate which molecules belong to my face, and which ones are, in actuality, part of the table. Upon completing this transaction, I manage to chase those spiders away by grabbing what I partially correctly assumed to be an empty ashtray. Correctly because it was an ashtray of the particularly sturdy plastic type with some yuppy-drink-name embossed in gaudy golden lettering on the side. Incorrectly because, in the process of chasing the spiders from my eyelids, I showered the entire room in mostly extinct cigarette butts, ash, and condom wrappers.
When I had finally managed to pull my eyes to a state that may have passed for “open”, if exempt from close scrutiny, I immediately wished I’d never woken up. The blinking strobe lighting, the loud music and the smells attacked me.
The first smell was the suddenly unbearable smell of urine (which I hoped wasn’t mine), followed immediately by the unmistakable stench of vomit (which I presumed didn’t belong to me), and then by an aroma of stale beer. The latter caused me to find a half-full (Oh, yes. Half-full. Eternal optimist, me, even in the state I was in) glass, which I proceeded to drink. As you may have guessed, I instantly regretting it: The beer caused a sudden reaction in my body. Let’s save the gory details, and leave it at this: in the immediate aftermath, my direct vicinity (along with most of myself, I grudgingly admit) smelled embarrassingly like the second odour I identified.