By Macon Holt.
Walter looked up from his keyboard with extraordinary frustration. He looked incredulously at the 
document open in front of him. 70,000 words and he had not noticed. He had given the twenty-something protagonist of his newest work of contemporary prose his own name. This of course he had noticed immediately; in fact looking back it had been intentional. “Let the mainstream press pour over this, to try and find the truth of my salad days and let the intellectuals hunt in the gray space between fiction and the world outside”, he had thought. Walter hated the word “fact”, even in his private thoughts, in his work it was a word often used ad-nauseum by antagonists and the absurdly caricatured victims of his memory turned text. A scholarly collection was soon to be released entitled Walter D—— and Facts: Politics, Prose and Truth Content. Walter had been sent copy and replied with his blessings though the volume remained wrapped in publishing house cellophane. This name sharing was not a problem after all, authors using their own names for characters in their work is a well established trope of literary fiction. Indeed in this case Walter had even included the first letter of his last name, though replaced it with and elongated hyphen to add distance and ambiguity. Continue reading
the latch on the metal door eased open. There were two buttons, both red, and he pressed the one linked to the monocognition machine. He heard it whirring into action underneath his feet, in the hull of the craft. The idea of space lay firmly outside. There were no windows from which to take a view. The designers had opted to leave windows out of the final craft due to what clinical researchers at the Institute of Astro-Psychology had termed ‘Space Insanity: Vacuoso 1’. The premise being that on long voyages, blank glaring from windows could induce a type of crazy that would leave the astronaut unable to comprehend life with shapes and surface. They had said that in many cases viewing absolutely nothing save the monochromatic interior of the craft could induce the same unnerving condition. Brian was, so far, unphased by this. He turned off the monocognition machine and lay in the reclining chair.
ading. I took various jobs that were all low-paid and either consisted of not enough hours or of too many. The provincial northern town, which I called home, offered few opportunities for employment. It dawned on me that for the time-being I was limited to shops or factories; although many of my friends had moved to London this was something in which I desperately did not want to follow suit. The factories all seemed to pay well enough for me to continue paying the meagre rent I’d offered my parents and were all a short drive from their house. The work would be mind-numbingly dull but I was somebody who had discovered a quiet pleasure in being bored. I found that boredom was the polar opposite of stress, both feelings could manifest themselves as quiet desperation but boredom, more often than not, left me sleepy. Stress, on the other hand was something I dealt with terribly. My first job that summer was working in a very busy, high-street branch of Costa Coffee and, while the work was simple, it wasn’t always easy. The machines would routinely break down or work slower than the lunch-hour rush would require; people would shout and scream at me and I would have to ignore their complaints due to understaffing. I would be berated personally for the slow service. At this time I regularly considered the ways in which I had been a difficult customer in past retail situations and vowed to change my ways. I am confident that anybody who has ever worked in a shop will tell you that customers are terrible people who consider retail staff to be lesser humans; common sense and decency leaves them when they are on the verge of a purchase and you, the member of staff, are the only thing that stands between them and their goods. They presume that you want to screw them at every opportunity and this attitude of theirs, over time, leaves you feeling exactly that way. My father was a former miner and came from a family all of whom worked in the mines. He laughed heartily when I told him how difficult the work was and, when I tried to explain that the work itself wasn’t difficult – that I could make hundreds of coffees a day, but the customers were starting to give me a stomach ulcer – his explanation for the laughter was that I would have never lasted in the pits. He told me that I had no idea what hard graft really was and that shop work was probably the perfect job for somebody like me. I lasted only three months in the job – my nerves were so damaged that my hands were burnt from unsteadily holding hot beverages. My friend Louise, who had been back from London over summer, had just gone back to continue her work as an artist which meant that I had nobody (except for my laughing dad) to talk to about the problems. But this, by far, was not the worst working experience I had that year. 
“I’m so sorry Edwin couldn’t be here today Charles. It’s just this city y’know, if it’s not one thing it’s
We were stranded in Brindisi for a short time before the next boat out and it was raining. It hadn’t rained at all in two weeks and now that we were out of viable options, it rained. It was the one night on this whole trip – even our whole lives maybe – that we would have to sleep outside on the street. We decided to kill some time in a bar, nursing a beer each, making it last longer than usual so that we could stay inside where it was dry. We knew from the vaguely understandable newspaper weather reports that the rain was supposed to finish in the middle of the night and it wasn’t too heavy so we finished our drinks before the bar got too busy and went outside. We sat on a circular stone bench in the street, amidst cheering Italian drinkers who were presumably celebrating the arrival of the weekend. The Italians stood in the entrances to the busy bars, just about outside, smoking and laughing their rich laughs. The bench was a smooth expensive stone and had an enormous tree in the centre which sheltered us from the majority of the downpour. We’d left our waterproof clothes in France a fortnight before as the heat and sunshine had been ubiquitous on the continent for some time – it meant that all we had was shorts and linen shirts, sandals and sun-cream. Peter would meet us in Athens with our pay from the writing we had done together a month before, back home in London, and what we’d been writing for him since getting out here. We had only to see out one night in Brindisi before boarding the ferry across to Patras; sixteen hours on the boat and we’d be on Greek soil where the rest of the job could be done. 
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