Thursday 5 January 2012

Critically-acclaimed novelist Ira Humpstein skateboarded into the Alton Towers control room wearing a purple dinner jacket and yellow corduroy trousers. He was singing the opening aria from a Verdi opera. He came to rest at the chair of the duty officer and kicked his board (decorated with a pipe-smoking sheep skull) up into his hand. "Skeleton crew tonight, eh Marcel?" he said, lisping outrageously.

Marcel, a fat Frenchman in the early-later stages of middle age, sallow skinned and fiercely bearded, grunted in the Gallic manner. He raised a greasy hand to his head and pasted an errant shoot of hair back into place. "Fucking children don't play out no more. They stay at home. They play in their rooms on their self with the Play Box, the Game Station...how do you call it?"

"The X-Box, frog prince. The Playstation. You really don't spend much time in kiddies' bedrooms, do you! What kind of unwholesome mischief are you getting up to?" Humpstein smiled. He had only twelve teeth, but they were all at the front, so it wasn't a problem unless he tried to eat food.

"What you think, you fucking English person? I wank myself half dead. I go on the internet for pornographies and write the letters to the famous actress." Marcel licked his lips at the thought of his latest missive, in which he implored former Buffy the Vampire Slayer co-star Charisma Carpenter to send him a video of herself doing Pilates in a crotch-less pig suit. "When I finish, I say a prayer and go to sleep under la table du jardin."

"Excessivo informatio!" quipped Humpstein. He scratched himself on the foot with the end of his skateboard. When I'm finished with you, he thought, you'll be nothing but a skin-sack of warm shit and whatever you stole from the cafeteria this afternoon. He began to laugh, indiscreetly.

1 comment:

fouls said...

This is a sad and unsuccessful pastiche of a story that I read on Jottify called The Second Expedition.