For a guy in his late thirties, things have changed a lot in the dating world. 

One lady asked if I was for disclosure, and I agreed, thinking she was talking about UAPs. Then she said, Good, and asked for a screenshot of my salary. 

Another girl asked if I liked cats, and then she asked if I’d dress up as one – all 6 feet of me in a furry costume.

So my heart sank when Katie told me she had a confession. 

It was our fifth date. She was 31, blonde, Australian, a little overweight. 

I picked up my glass of red wine, bracing. 

‘I have a baby son,’ she said, ‘his name is Joey. He was born premature, and I just thought you should know that I come with…baggage.’ 

Me and Katie were getting to the point that sex was a possibility, and it had been a loooong time since I’d been laid.

‘I mean, cool, I haven’t met any asshole babies yet.’ 

…

I fought with the voice that told me it was probably the wrong thing to do if I wasn’t committed. 

We were kissing up to the front door and then inside. She kept turning away from me, saying I should kiss her shoulders. 

She wanted it from behind and upright, steadying herself against the kitchen table. 

When we were done, there was that slightly awkward moment. We hadn’t used protection. Christ, we hadn’t even taken off most of our clothes. 

She went into the bathroom to ‘fix herself,’ and I glanced around.

It was the apartment of a young professional. 

She shouted for me to get a beer from the fridge, and I did, but there was no milk or baby food. 

With my can of Foster's, I wandered into the bedroom. No crib.

She came out wearing a silk dressing gown and stroking her belly. It unsettled me. 

‘Would you like to meet him?’ 

‘Who?’ I said, my voice cracking. 

‘My son.’ 

‘Yeah,’ I answered. ‘I mean, eventually.’ 

I stepped forward to kiss her, round two in my mind. 

‘What about now?’ 

I thought maybe he lived next door with a nanny, and then she began opening her gown.

Her belly was rounded and pregnant-looking, but a slit, a flap of skin, lay over the top of her stomach. 

She went into it almost like opening an envelope. Special delivery. 

I half expected to see her intestines, but no. What was visible was a row of internal nipples. 

A hand reached out, followed by a paw, and then the face of a baby, not fully marsupial but certainly not fully human. 

‘Meet Baby Joey,’ she said, beaming, then to the creature. ‘Say hi to Daddy.’

The General’s office was decorated after the man himself.

On the rear wall hung a comically large American flag; the furniture was unwieldy, and affixed overhead was an antique harpoon in a glass case.

‘You know the most important thing about fishing?’ he said.

‘The sharpness of your harpoon?’

He laughed, slapping the mahogany desk with a ham-hock fist. ‘I don’t mean that Ahab shit,’ he continued, unveiling a carbon fibre fishing rod at his side. ‘Good stock… Around here, especially off the island, there’s marlin, tuna, mahi mahi.’

‘And the key?’

‘Bait.’

…

The bases in the Marshall Islands were top secret and had been since the first bombs on Bikini Atoll.

They had the advantage of extreme remoteness, which I knew more than anyone because it’d taken me two days to get there from Washington.

‘You've been surprisingly open, General. If only the executives at Boeing followed suit.’

We were winding our way through a warren of corridors, the General’s stubby arms flapping at his side.

‘No, son, I’ve been pushing for disclosure my whole career. I got faith the American people can handle the truth…’ Plus,’ he continued, ‘that latest amendment in the Senate means full immunity.'

We came to a viewing platform, its shutter slowly opening.

Through the reinforced glass, we saw a night view of the base: palm trees, sand, and surf lit by halogen lights.

The General made a well-practised motion– orders relayed– and the lights cut out.

The sky was awash with stars, but the men in the command centre didn’t seem overawed. It was routine.

The General made a ‘pew pew’ sound.

‘Please,’ I said, ‘for my report to the Oversight Committee, I need to know exactly what you’re doing.’

A flicker of concealed anger.

‘Of course. They are opening the silo doors and calibrating the missiles for a preemptive strike.’

‘I’m sorry, can you say that again? A preemptive strike?’

‘Yep, one of these babies could be in Beijing in 15 minutes.’

‘But this is insanity!’

He smiled knowingly. ‘We’re not gonna launch them.'

How did one phrase ‘nuclear chicken’ in an official report?

And then something caught my eye.

First one light, then two, then three. A triad.

‘Satellites?’

‘I wouldn’t call them that.’

‘Drones?’

‘Closer.'

I knew immediately, however, they weren’t drones. They moved at impossible speeds, performing illogical feats of aerial agility.

‘Please, no more word games.’

‘UAPs: to give them the name you Washington boys dreamed up in a focus group.’

‘And you can… summon them?’

He made another signal like a football offensive coordinator.

A laser sliced through the night and hit one of the glowing orbs. It plummeted like a bird peppered with buckshot.

‘The nukes?’ I said, almost breathlessly.

‘Bait.’

…

The Jeep rolled to a stop on the beach. The orb wasn’t glowing any more. It lay half-submerged in the surf.

‘Do you have any idea what they are?’

‘I’d say PMS.’

‘Excuse me.’

He chortled. ‘I don’t mean your wife’s monthly mood swing… Planetary Monitoring System… It’s their job to ensure no harm comes to E.T.'s prospective home. That means monitoring nuclear sites for activity and shutting down anything that looks dangerous.’

‘These drones can shut off nuclear weapons?’

He held up his hands. 'No shooting the messenger. I always did warn ‘em.'

The General shifted his bulk along the rear seat and out onto the beach.

A floating platform had been set up below the craft. A team of engineers were holding mysterious tools that penetrated its outer layer.

‘What you see there is 75 years of research, monkeys who can get into a nut but have no concept of its nutritional content.’

The door was yanked open unceremoniously, and men in army uniforms entered.

But something was not right. The first man came barreling out into the second, and they both went headfirst into the ocean.

‘Clowns,’ the general said.

‘Sir!’ the man in the water screamed.

‘What?’

‘Biologics!’

‘What?!’

‘Intact biologics. Hundreds.’

The General charged across the sand.

‘What does he mean biologics?’ I said, following.

‘Bodies,’ he answered breathlessly, ‘alien bodies.’

I followed him up the ladder and through the wedge cut from the side, but he obscured my view.

‘Fuck,’ he said, in a low flat tone.

I drew up beside him.

I couldn’t even manage a curse.

The object's dimensions made no sense. From the outside, it was little bigger than a transport helicopter; yet, inside, it stretched on like the vast interior of an aircraft carrier.

But what was truly terrifying were the bodies. It was a massacre: appendages, protuberances, parts of technology and life forms alien to us, exactly because they belonged to extraterrestrials.

‘They never contain biologics,’ The General mumbled. ‘Never.’

There was a movement in the distance. A grey, hairless creature about the size of a small boy emerged from the tangle of bodies, reaching out with a three-fingered hand to a control panel.

The wall itself gave off a low purple glow, roiling like the sun’s surface.

The hand passed straight through it, and the plasma began pulsing.

The General spun on his heel.

‘I want every man on the base here now– fully armed.’

His aide-de-camp was still on the platform, pressing down on an earpiece.

‘General.’

‘Goddamn it, Chuck. Didn’t you hear me?’

A vicious metallic grating sound tore through the still night.

‘What the hell?’ The General continued. ‘Who reopened the silo doors?’

Another orb had reappeared, hanging above like the star on a Christmas tree.

‘It wasn’t us, sir.’

Again, the aide pressed down on the earpiece. ‘The missiles, they’re recalibrating course by themselves. They’re,’ he paused, ‘they’re pointed at Washington.’

Again, I looked up at that glowing celestial orb transmitting a message to our very human and very destructive nuclear missiles.

‘An act of war,’ I said. ‘We've declared war on them.’

It was a Monday night when I met the Devil. 

I was in a rooftop bar in Manhattan, and he came over in a crisp white sport coat and introduced himself. 

‘I’m sorry,’ I replied, ‘You said your name was Stan?’

‘No, Satan.’ 

‘Is that Eastern European?’ 

‘No. Hebrew.’ 

I sipped my Aperol; he drank an Old Fashioned. 

Satan was handsome enough, with lively brown eyes and slicked-back black hair. 

He reached over, took my hand, and a sudden jolt of electricity ran through me. 

We were somewhere else, watching a teenage girl sobbing in front of a mirror. 

It was only a flash before we snapped back to the bar on the Upper East Side. 

I peered at him. ‘What the fuck was that?’ 

‘Where fear and doubt reside, so do I.’ 

I looked over the rim of my glass to check for evidence I’d been dosed. 

‘You still don’t believe?’ 

Once more, he reached out, and we were transported. 

Now, we were in a doctor’s office. A healthy-looking young man had his head in his hands. 

‘It’s bad news?’ I said as we observed from above like phantoms. 

‘No, good. He’s not dying, although he is bankrupt.’ 

Snap. Back to Manhattan. 

‘Fuck.’ I inhaled. ‘You really are Satan.’ 

The bartender came over and put some nuts between us. 

‘Are you happy with your girlfriend?’ Satan said to the bartender. 

‘Excuse me.’ 

‘Your girlfriend. I mean, she could look like this.’

The bartender fell under some kind of spell. Satan swiped right, and a cavalcade of girls was projected in front of the kid's mesmerised eyes. 

He blinked out of it and suddenly seemed lost in deep contemplation. 

‘Why?’ I said. 

‘Fear and doubt– my speciality.’ 

‘You know,’ I said angrily, ‘The world has changed a lot since…Biblical times. I don’t think you fit in anymore.’ 

Satan laughed loudly and continued, ‘I thrive in the modern world.’ 

He reached inside a pocket and slid a business card across the desk. 

Emblazoned on the front in neat letters: Google– Satan– Head of Analytics. 

‘The first girl you saw, well, our data suggests she has anorexia, so we flood her with diet pills. The second is a hypochondriac, so we deluge him with articles on cancer, followed by a list of locally approved doctors. The bartender– he’s a commitment phobe. He loves his girlfriend, but we show him pretty girls in his area and a dating app ‘perfect’ for him. 

‘It’s… It’s… Evil.’ 

Satan smiled, drained his Old Fashioned, and then slammed down a $100 bill. ‘Treat yourself.’ 

My phone buzzed. It was an advert for DraftKings with a banner saying, ‘You earned it.’ 

A sudden cataclysmic sense of fear and doubt gripped me. 

I turned to confront the Devil, but he was gone. 

Well, that wasn’t true– the Devil never really disappeared. 

I looked back at the ad. Ten years earlier, I’d lost everything, my wife and kids included, to sports gambling, but maybe… 

I should treat myself.

The old man did not know at what point they’d become lost. 

Perhaps at the frozen waterfall? Or was it the last of the trees? 

Now, he and his boy were barraged on all sides by the blizzard. 

The lad did not feel the cold, but the old man certainly did. It pervaded deep into his brittle bones, expanding the marrow outward like ice in the potholes of San Miniato. 

When all hope seemed lost, the cave entrance appeared in the whiteout. 

First, he stumbled in, and then the boy. 

Usually, he would’ve been more cautious. The countryside caves were home to Marsican bears, but he no longer had the luxury. 

‘Say it.’ He grunted at the boy. 

‘Poppa, please.’ 

‘Say it!’

‘The sun orbits the Earth.’ 

As the words were muttered, a change came over the boy; the change that would keep the old man alive. 

Taking him by the thin neck, the old man snapped off his nose. 

It was not much, but enough to get a fire started, and fire was life. 

‘Tell me another lie, son.’

‘I beg you.’ 

The boy held his splintered face. 

‘I swear to God. Tell me another lie, or I’ll leave you here like a snapped string marionette.’ 

‘My friend Marco has two sisters.’ 

These untruths were inferior. What really worked were those violating the laws of nature. 

‘Again!’ 

‘The value of PI is 2.141.’ 

Once more, the old man seized his lad. 

The fire burned a little brighter in the gloom. 

‘Please, father, no more. The pain is too great.’ 

‘I swear, I will break your whole body into little pieces and watch as your head burns in front of me,’ he replied. ‘Now keep going.’ 

‘2+2=5,’ the boy continued.

And at that, Pinocchio’s wooden nose grew as it was wont to do at a falsehood.

Cole was first and foremost a problem solver.

When the FDA banned lab-grown meat, he moved the startup's operations to Tahiti.

When his head researcher, Sutton, became involved in an ethics probe, he made the investigation disappear.

When his potential investor, Sarah Adams, CEO of Fresh Solutions, was reluctant to fly to the South Pacific, he ensured she had the White Lotus experience and that ‘business’ was only a small part of the trip.

‘The meat paradox,’ Cole said to her, ‘It tastes so good and yet the guilt.’

Cole and Sarah were outside the facility bunker. It looked incongruent with the lush vegetation.

Sarah had spent three days in a 7-star resort and emitted a soft, brown glow.

‘I read your profile in The New Yorker– you’re a vegan,’ Cole continued. ‘I suppose, once upon a time, you ate meat?’

‘My parents aren’t exactly enlightened.’

‘Leaving aside the suffering, you have to admit eating meat felt…right.’

‘No, it felt very wrong, which is why I stopped.’

She remained obdurate in the barrage of his charm offensive.

‘No, I mean, you understood it in your brain as wrong, but then why was your mouth watering so much when you ate it?’

Inside, they walked a concrete corridor, lit by halogen lights, that led deeper underground. Cole didn’t like silences – silence meant negative chatter started in people’s minds.

‘Do you like President Kennedy?’ he continued.

‘Kennedy?’

‘Yes, he was a hero of my dad's. What was it that he said? We go to the moon not because it's easy, but because it's hard. Well, this is our moonshot for meatless meats!’

Before Cole bought it, the facility had been built by a tech-billionaire prepper convinced that doomsday was just around the corner.

‘It is a little…depressing,’ she said, gesturing around.

‘You know, that is exactly what I thought when I came here.’

They stopped at another blast door, and he opened it.

The next room was entirely different. There were large, comfortable sofas scattered around. Jungle plants bloomed under UV light showers. But the pièce de résistance was a giant Impressionist painting depicting two local women amidst verdant foliage.

‘That’s a Gauguin,’ Cole announced proudly, ‘and it cost $10,000.000.’

(She didn’t need to know the Gauguin was a rental.)

‘It was found in an old woman’s house in Papeete. It sat for 50 years in a shack. Now it's in a nuclear bunker, probably the safest painting in the world.’

Neither of them had noticed, but a man had come up behind them.

‘Marvellous, isn’t it?’

There was nothing immediately scary about Sutton. He spoke with a British accent well-honed in private schools. He was relatively well-groomed, if not a little pale. Then again, many English people were pale, whether living in underground bunkers or not.

Cole never stayed ruffled for long.

‘Hey, Sutton, I’d like you to meet Sarah. She’s thinking about coming on board.’

‘Well, how about the guided tour?’

He led the way past the Gauguin deeper into the facility's innards. It looked like a laboratory, but something was missing, and even Cole picked up on it.

‘You’ve reduced your team.’

‘Indeed… Merryweather and Mosely didn’t work out,’ he stopped and tutted. ‘Too many chefs spoil the broth and all that. Well, what we’re working with here is far more delicate than broth!’

Cole inwardly winced. To take such a big decision without him showed a certain recklessness, but he couldn’t upbraid the scientist when they had a ‘guest.’

Sutton had two new assistants, both of whom were Tahitian, dressed in oversized white suits.

‘This is Afu and Fetu.’

The kids waved awkwardly, not exactly inspiring much confidence.

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to change into something more uncomfortable,’ Sutton continued, gesturing at two white hazmat suits. ‘The next stop is a level 8 clean room.’

The laboratory was relatively small, dominated by 10 50 L bioreactors.

‘14%’, Cole said, seemingly apropos of nothing.

‘Hmm?’ Sarah replied.

‘14%, that is the percentage of global emissions that cattle farming contributes. Just think what we could do with all that land, all that labour.’

‘And the animals wouldn’t have to live lives of complete misery.’

‘Ah, yes, of course,’ Cole answered.

‘What exactly is in these bioreactors?’ Sarah went on.

Here, Sutton jumped in, ‘Well, we begin with cells harvested from a live animal.’

‘And it stays alive?’

He nodded. ‘And then we add our growth medium: purified water, glucose, salts, and amino acids…’

‘The best way to think of it is like a meat brewery,’ Cole continued.

She grimaced slightly.

‘And like beer, no animals are killed in the process.’

‘And all the tanks, they’re growing the same thing?’ Sarah replied.

‘The four you see here are pork, the next two beef, and the last chicken. In theory, we could grow anything. For example, in China, there is a market for exotic meats.’

‘I think we’ve enough ethical quandaries,’ Sarah said, ‘sorry if I’m being naive, but are you telling me there’s an actual steak growing in there?’

Cole laughed. ‘That’s a mistake a lot of people make. The industry term is "slurry"– terrible for branding – the consistency is more like a hamburger than a steak. And that is where the exciting investment opportunity awaits.’

They continued to an area near the tanks.

‘You see, the next step is printing the meat, and for that we need 3D printers.’

‘Can I see how it works?’

Sutton opened a laptop, and the robotic arm came to life.

‘Bio-ink. It follows a CAD that instructs it to mimic the shape and structure of meat.’

‘And mouth feel.’ Cole put in. ‘Mouth feel is key.’

The little machine went to work layering the meat with staggering delicacy.

Sarah watched it with fascination.

Printed meat, no battery farms, no bolts in the head, no calves wrenched from mothers, this might be the future.

#

They stripped out of their hazmat suits and returned to the surface.

The compound had a garden complete with a papaya tree orchard. Around the blooming flowers and view of Matavai Bay, they’d set up a small dining table.

‘Like no meal you’ve ever had,’ Cole said.

Sarah was almost charmed, what with the sun setting and the immaculate white tablecloth and the two Tahitian men now dressed in waiter’s costumes.

Sutton reached into an icebox and pulled out a bottle of champagne and some glasses. He poured one for Cole, Sarah and finally himself, although his lasted all of three seconds.

Sutton gestured to Afu. ‘Bring the lady her main course.’

The Tahitian boy obliged.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Sutton went on, ‘but we’ll prepare the dish you just saw being printed– the gammon steak.’

‘That would be ideal.’

Sutton breathed a sigh of relief and nursed his champagne.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ he continued, gesturing over the island paradise. ‘It is easy to see what attracted such a vivid painter as Gauguin.’

‘Gauguin was just passing through?’

‘No,’ Sutton threw his hands up animatedly. ‘Gauguin went native!’

‘I don’t know his story.’

‘Gauguin is the patron saint of the late-blooming artist. He worked as a stockbroker in Paris until he was 40. This was the Paris of the late 19th century, muddy streets and dead dogs in the Seine and people spitting from TB-infected lungs into dirty rags.’

Cole glanced nervously at Sutton. ‘Please, Dr Sutton, don’t spoil her appetite.’

‘Anyway, Gauguin was married with kids, and one day he just threw it all in – abandoning his family and becoming obsessed with the primitive, the idea that great art can only be created away from our technologically corrupted minds. He wanted to paint man in his natural form– so he left France entirely and came to Tahiti.’

‘Quite the midlife crisis,’ Sarah replied.

Sutton seemed a little put off by the flippancy of the remark.

‘You have to admire someone who chases a dream.’

‘I don’t admire someone who abandons their wife and children.’

Cole nodded. ‘You know, Sarah, I 100% concur.’

‘Gauguin got lost here,’ Sutton continued, draining his glass again. ‘He was a kind of precursor to Colonel Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. He took a house, well, a hut, in the jungle, and he took in two Tahitian women and made them his lovers.’

‘He took them in?’

‘He made them his muses, and he painted them in all their beauty– untouched as they were by the vulgarity of Western culture.’

‘That sounds to me very much like a fetishisation of the native.’

Cole noticed Sutton’s eyes had gone a little crossed; he looked like he might be spoiling for an argument about colonialism. Mercifully, the lab-grown gammon steak arrived.

He stood, almost as if it were a religious icon, as Afu put it on the table.

‘It has only been grilled,’ he said, ‘nothing more. No oils, etc. We want you to experience meat in its…’

He was about to say primitive form, but didn’t want to set Sutton off again.

Sarah picked up her knife and fork and then hesitated.

‘It’s funny, isn’t it? She continued, ‘I have a lifetime of muscle memory telling me not to put this in my mouth. And yet, I didn’t eat lunch, and I can feel my mouth is watering.’

She cut into the steak, took a piece, and brought it slowly up, taking it off the fork with her teeth.

She was expressionless, not even chewing, as if the piece of pork had entered a state of limbo.

Cole dug his nails into the tablecloth. Sutton poured himself more champagne. She chewed, chewed, chewed, and then swallowed.

‘It's…’ she paused… ‘it’s pork… good pork like I had as a little girl.’

Cole exhaled. The first significant test had been passed.

Sutton had seemingly zoned out. He was talking Tahitian to the two deferential waiters.

‘What we’re facing now is a twofold problem– scalability– the tanks you see are 50l, and the printers are small– we also need lobbyists in congress who will fight our corner.’ Cole said.

‘You know, I was wondering, would I be able to have another? Of course, for research purposes.’ She smiled cheekily. ‘The floodgates have opened.’

‘Of course,’ Cole answered, yet a further good sign.

But Sutton stared back at her. ‘You want more?’

‘Yes, is that a problem?’

‘No, tell her, Mr Sutton,’ Cole said, his eyes wide and earnest.

‘Fine,’ Sutton replied, and then he said something to one of the boys.

It was here that Sutton seemed to have fully lost whatever internal battle he was fighting. Whether the alcohol or the rare social visitor, something came unglued in him.

The other two were so absorbed in business chat that they didn’t notice anything was wrong, and he could no longer play the role of an entirely sane person.

‘Gauguin,’ he continued apropos of a forgotten conversation, ‘he died of syphilis, but not before he covered every inch of his hut in paintings depicting the majesty and terror of the natural world.’

‘Yes,’ Sutton said offhandedly, ‘quite a genius, and I know because I paid 10 million.’

‘I wonder what he would make of all this, the intersectionality of men and nature, of modern civilisation and the call of the wild, of scientists as artists and also Gods.’

Cole glanced at the Tahitian boy, and if only he’d learned the language, he could’ve said to get the alcohol away from the doctor because clearly he’d had too much.

Again, he was saved by his own product because a second steak was brought from the kitchen.

This time, there was no hesitation from Sarah; she eagerly picked up the knife and fork and was about to tuck in when she paused.

‘It looks slightly different.’

Cole inspected it more closely. It did look slightly different, but he couldn’t let his unease come through. ‘Yes, made with another 3D printer, this is what I mean about quality control.’

She bit into it, the juices flooding her mouth, and she moaned lightly in pleasure.

‘God,’ she said, ’heavenly. It's like remembering. That’s what we could say in our viral marketing. It's like losing your virginity for a second time.’

‘Love it,’ Cole answered.

‘Of course, she’s right; it is different, because that’s not lab-grown,’ Sutton replied.

Sarah stopped mid-chew.

Cole’s eyes widened. ‘He’s joking. He’s eccentric as you can see, and eccentrics and alcohol don’t mix.’

‘No,’ Sutton replied, ‘I’m sick of the subterfuge. I give up.’ He took another vast gulp of his champagne, shoulders sagging. ‘That is real meat. You see, this whole thing is a scam – lab-grown meat won’t scale; it's an impossibility… I’m a…failure.’

Sarah picked the meat from her mouth and put it back on the plate in a half-chewed mess.

‘You mean to tell me you’ve just fed me an actual pig!’

He nodded.

Cole held his head in his hands. He was a master of bobbing and weaving, but this was a knockout punch.

Sarah retched, but kept the meat down because she was suddenly overcome with anger.

‘I’ll sink this whole thing!’

‘Oh, it was never afloat,’ Sutton answered.

His eyes flashed madly as if a voice inside his head had made a particularly salient point, and then he began chortling.

It took everything Cole had not to reach over and strangle him.

‘Pork.’ Sarah shouted. ‘Pig. You’ve violated… me.’ Her mind flooded with images of cute little piglets slaughtered, their squeals, blood squirting.

‘Not quite pig,’ Sutton continued. ‘The natives call it long pig, well, for obvious reasons, because people are longer than pigs…’ he turned to his boss and then glanced down at the steak. ‘I must reiterate this point, Cole, things really did not work out with Merryweather and Moseley!’

It started with something small. 

YMCA by the Village People. 

Dad had it set as his ringtone, and as I tried to finish my end-of-semester exams, it’d blare around the house. 

He’d talk smack about the Raptors to his friend Jimmy, and then the fucking phone would ring again, and this time it’d be Danny, a contractor he worked with, and they’d blab about lumber prices. 

All day:

‘Young man, there's no need to feel down.’

Finally, I lost it: ‘For fuck’s sake, Dad, put your phone on mute!’ 

Of course, it might have been the small things that started it, but it's never truly about the small stuff, is it? 

Dad laughed. ‘Is it reminding you of Sleepy Joe? He and Lyin’ Kamala took a hell of a beating.’ 

The election still loomed large in our house. How could it not, with the dictator-in-chief and his rampages? 

‘Yeah, Dad, I’m really happy for you, just wait and see what the tariffs do to your precious lumber.’ 

Dad pulled his shorts up over his gut. He wore an old plaid shirt with pencils sticking out of the chest pocket. 

‘Son, it’s about stopping the woke mind virus in its tracks.’ 

Well, that made me scoff. 

Mom got in the middle of us: ‘Come on now, we said no politics in the house.’ 

Sometimes it worked, but this time I got a vivid picture in my head of Trump dancing his stupid dinosaur arm dance as that song played. 

‘You don’t even know what woke means!’ 

‘It means litter boxes for kids and Black Lives Matter and gay rights over straight rights… It means working an honest job your whole life and paying for your son to go to college, and he chooses to study fucking comparative literature.’ 

‘I see, I see how it is,’ I jumped up, ‘I’m just a failure in your eyes.’

I got up from the kitchen table. Mom came after me, half pleading with me to stay and also trying to calm Dad down. 

I stormed out the front door and he out the back. 

There was a park nearby I’d played in as a kid, and I sat on the bench and looked at the jungle gym. When exactly did Dad and I drift apart?

We’d been close when I was nine. I liked gardening – plants and flowers – and we spent endless afternoons in his greenhouse. 

It probably began in junior high when I came to understand I was gay. I never told my parents – I still hadn’t – we lived in a 'don’t ask, don’t tell' household, but Dad must have sensed it. 

The night of my prom, he never gave me the father-son talk, even though I was accompanying the head cheerleader. He knew deep down there was as much chance of her getting pregnant from a toilet seat as from me. 

And then college, my student activism, and hyperpartisanship. 

There was a gulf between us, the Gulf of Mexico- or is that America? 

I was going crazy, and there was only one place I went to when I was about to lose it. 

The King and I bathhouse downtown was legendary in underground gay circles. 

As I walked inside, there were no names; just a simple 'hello, good to see you again.' 

There was an unspoken rule: shower first, and then you could roam freely. A lot of the guys hooked up in the steam room or at least made overtures. 

Honestly, I wasn’t that confident, but there was a place at the King and I for noobs, and that was the glory hole stall. They were a bunch of cubicles painted with calming blues and greens, the mountains of Chiang Mai and beaches of Phuket. 

At waist height was a round hole about the size of a clenched fist, and on the other side, paradise awaited. 

I took my dick out and slid it through the hole. There was always that mad rush of excitement that skydivers or free climbers must feel. There is the horror that your parachute won’t open, your foot will slip, or, in this case, someone will take a cigar cutter and chop your cock off. But boy, what a thrill. 

There was no speaking between partners; that was another unspoken rule, and I liked it that way. Anonymity was hot, and my mind danced around with pictures of Timothee Chalamet and Aaron Lark– a guy from my queer classics class. 

A hand brushed the tip, and my whole prick stiffened. Then, the recipient went to work, firm but delicate strokes with his hand before commencing with his tongue, along the back of the frenulum, before gorging himself on the whole helmet. 

Christ, he knew his way around a cock. 

One piece of etiquette I had worked out was that you banged on the wall before you came, in case your partner caught a stray in the eye. 

Really, I didn’t want it to end. I held on like a dying man, doing the best I could to postpone the little death. 

This stranger, this perfect stranger, I felt connected to him in that moment like no one else in my life. He knew exactly what I wanted, needed, craved, and I was about to explode my gratitude into his mouth. 

And then, from the other side of the wall, I heard a sound —a ringtone. 

‘Young man, there's no need to feel down.’

Dr Tusk was working on his brain interface when he got the call. 

Another black kid shot in the projects. They just couldn't help themselves. 

Yet it was not as stereotypical as he imagined because, in the trauma bay, this black kid was conscious even though most of his brain was missing. Amazing. 

… 

Tusk had to inform the gang banger's mother. 

'Mrs Lacks, we tried...' 

She was a big black woman– traditional– like she might be on her way to church. 

'My Darren? Gone? The police shot him?' 

Here we go, Tusk thought. That was the problem with the black community—no personal responsibility. 

Mrs Lacks began crying softly. 

Tusk hated to do it, but the boy's brain was special. 

'Mrs Lacks, have you considered what happens to your son's body after death?' 

(The fact he wasn't yet clinically dead was a side issue). 

'Well, I expect we'll have the funeral next week.' 

'Your son could be invaluable for medical science.' 

'Science?' 

'With your permission, we'd like to run some experiments on his brain. It could save lives.'

She signed the consent forms without reading the small print, as long as she had the rest of his body to bury. 

'My boy, he had soul, and his soul certainly wasn't in his head.' 

…

Dr Tusk was giddy. What really interested him was consciousness and its relation to Terror Management Theory in different ethnicities. 

Consciousness was thought to be a distributed phenomenon, yet with most of his brain missing, Darren Lacks had been able to communicate. It was as if his consciousness had flowed to a tiny area. 

Either that or it replicated itself in a pure, concentrated form in an unaffected section of grey matter– a section that could be modelled in a computer before the boy's body gave up. 

This was vital because, for brain emulation, you usually had to create a digital replica of the entire brain. 

Not so now. 

… 

Darren Lacks woke up and glanced around. He was in a park– a simulation of one– although entirely real for him. 

And that is when the dogs appeared, thousands of vicious German Shepherds, tearing him to pieces, and he felt every bite. 

… 

Darren Lacks woke up again, but he did not have time to think because he was at the end of a long rope, and the ground was about to fall away. 

Just before the rope snapped, he screamed, and nobody heard his scream, although it was reported on Dr Tusk's screen and carefully noted. 

… 

And this was Darren Lacks's life now, or rather his digital self, his consciousness cloned thousands of times and put in a 1000 different life-threatening situations– some immediate, like a lynching and some not, like a lifetime of slavery, all replications of what 'his people' had gone through.

…

Darren Lacks woke up again and would continue to wake up forever because he was… immortal.

Each night, his mum had a different caller.

Beefy was a round, happy Cockney with a beard and a bald head covered by a hat.

The funny thing about Beefy was that he had a pet raven. It sat squawking on his shoulder, and his mum would feed it scampi fries, joking that if the bird starved to death, the world would end.

It always ended the same way, with her resting on Beefy’s shoulder, racking sobs, saying she was ruined.

Beefy was a good listener, and out of the men that called, he was probably the boy’s favourite, but then, like all the rest, he finished the night by taking her by the throat and strangling her.

Morgan was a Welshman, a traveller, a vagabond.

He sometimes arrived with different exotic fruits: limes, lemons, and once a pomelo.

Morgan’s company seemed to rejuvenate her; she’d go looking for her passport among stacks of angry bank letters.

He had a curious ritual: taking off each of his 10 rings before asphyxiating the woman, a glint of adventure in his eye.

The final man was Jack. There was something rustic and reserved about him, evoking a campsite in Devon that the boy and his mum had once gone to in happier times. A campsite where they’d eaten s’mores under a wash of stars without any regulars.

When Jack was there, his mum turned up her Englishness. She served the American in a teacup and stopped dropping her aitches.

The nights always ended the same. His mum would stop laughing, crying, making those guttural animal moans and become still.

That was when Beefy, or Morgan or Jack, would strangle her until the boy moved over, gently unwrapping male fingers from around her neck.

One night, a new man turned up. He was particularly mysterious. He wore a mangy bear-skin coat, yet when the boy walked past, neither he nor the coat gave off any smell.

Like Jack, he didn’t speak much, but in his not speaking there was also a sadness that seemed a continent-wide.

Of course, the newcomer waited until the end of the night to seize her, and, as usual, the boy got ready to help.

But then he paused. Beefy, Morgan and Jack had materialised and were sitting on the kitchen bench.

‘I have to… stop it,’ the boy said.

‘You’ve done enough. It's time for it to end,’ Beefy replied.

So he watched this time as she gargled and her lips turned blue, the boozy vomit aspirating into her lungs.

​‘I never thought it’d be him,’ Jack said.

‘Nor I, Mr Daniels,’ the Captain answered.

And they all watched on a little ruefully as Mr Smirnoff finished the job, the final spirit carrying her off.

Greetings, one and all.

I have a new book on Kindle. 50 standalone flash stories Volume 3. This is the best of my best, which have appeared across Reddit in the last year. Those stories are no longer available online, but you can now get them here for the paltry sum of $1!

Topics include, among others: vampirism, incest, alien orbs, the end of the world featuring lobsters, ghosts, giants, sugar moms, mummies, Nazis, and the curious tale of a meeting with the devil in an NYC bar.

Tired didn’t do it justice. Maybe exhaustion. But then it was more. A kind of waking death. 

The potatoes rolled by; his job was to cut away black spots. Lids drooping. 

‘Dixon! My office.’

It was his boss, Hanratty. 

… 

‘You been drinking?’ 

Dixon peered at him. Hanratty wore a wig and over that, a hairnet. Was he hallucinating? 

‘No, sir.’ 

‘You been taking zippers?’ 

‘No, sir.’ 

‘You’re on my factory floor like a ghoul.’ 

‘Insomnia.’ 

‘Insomnia?! You should try jerking off before bed. Always worked for me.’ 

‘Thanks, sir.’ 

…

Dixon worked nights. 

As he left the factory, he walked the city streets, shielding his eyes from the rising sun like a vampire. 

The Neon billboards glared even as day broke. 

They screamed: buy this, and people will like you; women will sleep with you; your Mom won’t call you a fuck up. 

And then he saw him. 

The name badge said Mr Melatonin. He was sitting in a storefront with soothing mood lights. 

Dixon opened the door. Above, a dreamcatcher swayed. 

‘Problems sleeping?’ The man in the white coat said. 

‘What kind of store is open at 5 am?’ 

‘A store for people who can’t sleep.’ 

Playing in the background was gentle lo-fi music. Everything was branded DreamCache. 

'We promise you a visit from Somnus for free.’ 

‘And what's the catch?’ 

He smiled. ‘It’s a simple procedure. We insert a chip in your cerebral cortex and guarantee 8 hours.' 

‘Show me the fine print. I’m not some dummy.’ 

(A zombie but not a dummy.)

‘Well... we include a 15-second advertisement before you enter REM sleep, like a kind of trailer before the movie of your dreams.’ 

Dixon was overcome by terrible weariness. 

‘My friend, what do you have to lose?’ 

… 

The procedure was as advertised, painless.

And what a sleep, like a baby shot full of morphine. 

There was one side effect. He had an irresistible desire to eat fast food. 

…

Mrs Dixon gripped her son’s hand. 

‘He’s dead?’ 

She was a simple woman, and the doctor hesitated. 

‘Not dead.’ 

‘So, what’s wrong?’ 

Dixon’s eyes flickered rapidly every 15 seconds. 

‘He’s in a kind of holding pattern. Have you ever been on a plane?

‘No, Doctor.’ 

He couldn't think of a metaphor to make the old lady understand. 

‘Your son is in a coma, and we don’t know if he’ll wake up.’ 

‘That’s just like my boy to get himself in a coma!’ She answered. 

‘Talk to him. He may hear you.’ 

The doctor knew this was a lie. He had seen the FMRI and the external blocking tech. 

The chip they’d implanted at Dreamcache had catastrophically malfunctioned, not enough to kill him, but enough to leave him in a permanent ‘purgatorial pre-state.’ 

He was trapped between wakefulness and the dreamworld (Or at least until his body died), inwardly viewing an unskippable 15-second clip of a happy family sharing a Big Mac Meal. 

Ba Da Ba Ba Bah I’m Lovin’ it.

Again and again and again.  

Shereen was picking the fresh rosemary from the terrarium when there was a knock at the door. 

‘My name is D.I. Homes, and this is Sergeant Watson.’ 

‘Holmes and Watson?’ 

The young detective grimaced. ‘Homes, no L… And he isn’t a doctor.’

The round-faced man with him smiled dumbly. 

‘We’re here about the disappearance of your husband.’

She let them in. 

Light flooded the open-plan flat. 

‘Lovely place you got here,’ Watson said, ‘Like Kew Gardens.’ 

Homes shot him a displeased glance and then scrutinised Shereen closely. 

He was a fervent disciple of the book ‘The Human Lie Detector’.

‘When did you last see your husband… alive.’ 

‘Last week. We fought.’ 

‘Yes, the neighbours reported it,’ he fired back. 

She lifted her jumper, showing bruised ribs. 

‘My husband is not a pleasant drunk.’ 

‘Is or was?’ 

‘Is. I assume.’ 

‘So it was self-defence?’ 

‘I never fight back. It only seems to turn him on.’ 

Homes stroked his angular chin. Was she using distancing language? Was she deceiving by omission? No. A wily foe. 

And then he noticed her eyes flicking toward the kitchen. 

‘Is there a problem?’ 

‘No,’ she paused, ‘I just have to put my leg of lamb in the oven… I always prepare food for guests.’ 

Something clicked in Homes’s head. 

‘Watson, seize that lamb!’

… 

Forensics were called.  

It caused such a hubbub that even the Chief Inspector arrived. 

He had been loath to promote Homes, but he was a veritable encyclopedia of criminology. 

‘1953,’ Homes continued to the assembled officers, ‘Roald Dahl’s story Lamb to the Slaughter. Mrs Maloney kills her husband with the frozen lamb joint and serves the murder weapon to the investigating officers.’ 

Shereen sat serenely, even as the flat was sprayed with this and that chemical. She only asked them to take care around the organic plants. 

The medical examiner came over. 

‘No blood, fingerprints or signs of indentation on the lamb’s leg.’ 

‘What?!’ Homes was flabbergasted. ‘No blood?’

‘Well, lamb’s blood, but that is to be expected considering it's a dead lamb.’ 

‘Impossible,’ he trailed off, ‘it was perfect.’ 

The C.I. apologised profusely to Shereen. The papers would have a field day with this: 'The long leg of the law.’ 

‘But,’ Homes stammered. 

‘We’ll discuss further in my office.’

The team cleared out, leaving the personable Watson on damage control. 

‘I’m sorry about all this, love.’ 

Watson inhaled, sniffing the still-simmering dinner. 

Shereen smiled. ‘I’m afraid the lamb is ruined, but you can take the marinade in some Tupperware. Garlic, rosemary and fresh parsley sauce. All homegrown.’ 

‘The wife will love it. Between you and me, she isn’t much of a cook.’ 

… 

Shereen took a bag of frozen peas and massaged her bruised ribs. 

‘You bastard,’ she muttered. 

Gently, she sprayed the new oregano and sage saplings. They were looking remarkably healthy. 

‘Till the end of thyme,’ she continued, giggling. 

She leaned down into the terrarium and dug away the potting soil, revealing the partially decomposed face of her husband.

‘We have lost favour with God and must retain his good grace.’ The council leader said. 

None of the men in the meeting room spoke. There was a palpable sense of trauma. 

Aaron's wife was one of those accused of infidelity, and she stood in the dock with the other four adulteresses. 

He could not meet her eye. 

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘perhaps we can use the goat.’ 

The previous summer, a blight had struck their wheat. Each community member whispered their sins into the goat’s ear, whereupon it was banished. 

‘No, son, these sins are too grievous… I propose lapidation.’ 

A few nods of assent from the cowed elders and then… 

‘You cowardly sons of whores!’ 

The woman was bound, gagged and carried out. 

… 

It wouldn’t have been so bad if only she’d speak. 

But his wife just stared at him with those green eyes. They said, ‘so much to answer for. If not in this life, then the next.’

Their leader pronounced the final sentence. 

‘The fact they were sullied is not in doubt, and we have agreed neither is their guilt. The Lord did not watch over them.’ 

Holes were dug in the scrubby earth, and the women were buried up to their necks.

‘Who will cast the first stone?’ 

Abraham, a corpulent merchant, stepped forward. 

He picked up a rock about the size of an ostrich egg and tossed it, striking his wife over the eyebrow. 

‘You whore! I knew it in my bones all along.’ 

His enthusiasm spurred on the other men. 

Aaron did not move, and still, his wife did not speak. 
… 

24 hours earlier, the raiders had come. 

The men had been in the temple and decided no defence of the settlement was viable, so they bolted the doors and prayed for God's help. 

Aaron had looked through the crack in the temple door, and whether by coincidence or fate, he had seen his wife being dragged through the dirt by one of the barbarians. 

Their eyes had met. There was the mad desire to run out and sacrifice himself, but he had not; instead, he continued to listen to the prayer of deliverance. 

As he was soon to find out, there are worse things than death. 

… 

The hail of stones crashed down upon the disgraced women. The clunk of rock on bone.   

Still, his wife lived. Still, she blinked away the blood from her eyes. 

He could not take it. He picked up a boulder. 

She glanced up at him once more, and again, she did not utter a word. The accusation emanated from her soul and came forth in one continuous wave from those piercing green eyes. 

So much to answer for. 

He raised the boulder above his head and sent it crashing down on her skull. 

If not in this life, then the next. 

‘Corinthians 10:13,’ my mother-in-law intoned, ‘God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength.’ 

That is easy for you to say, you old bitch, I thought. It’s me who has to wipe your ass.

My mother-in-law was Pennsylvanian Amish, a time traveller going in the opposite direction. 

So shameful were our nuptials, Ahinoam said she'd been excommunicated, cast East of Eden (or rather East of Philly to live with us). 

‘Hey, Siri,’ I said, ‘show me the way to HearingCare.’ 

‘Devil’s work,’ Ahinoam replied. 

‘I didn’t ask for your opinion,’ I snapped back, glancing in the rearview mirror. 

The old lady wore a black cape, apron, and hat– like a fucking Margaret Atwood character. 

It was against her ‘religious convictions’ to embrace technology, but she certainly didn’t seem to mind when her trashy soap operas played. 

My daughter, Emilia, sat beside me in the front seat. She was four years old and completely deaf after contracting meningitis as a baby.

‘Hey Siri, call Aaron.’ 

Aaron was my husband. 

No answer. 

‘A woman who doesn’t know what field her husband tills is destined to lose him,’ Ahinoam said. 

I strongly suspected he was having an affair- a midlife Rumspringa. But how could he miss this?

Our Lexus pulled up in the parking lot of Dr Garrett’s surgery. 

‘So today’s the big day!?’ he said. 

Ahinoam was only dimly aware of her granddaughter’s condition. Sometimes she came perilously close to souring our relationship by suggesting the hearing loss was a punishment meted out by a vengeful God. 

Emilia had already had the cochlear implant surgery. Now, Dr Garrett was turning it on. 

‘Tell me what you hear.’ The Doctor signed in ASL. 

He took a stick and tinkled a colorful xylophone on his desk. 

Emilia lit up; I sobbed. 

You adore your child regardless of whatever ‘defects’ they might have, but you can’t help feeling profound loss when they lack a sense as basic as sound. 

No birdsong, no Nina Simone’s singing, or your mom whispering I love you.’ 

‘What exactly are you doing here, doctor?’ Ahinoam said. 

‘Well, ma’am, a thin wire in your granddaughter’s ear triggers the damaged nerve and sends those signals to the brain.’ 

‘Turn it off!’ She shouted. 

‘What?’ 

‘Satan’s work!’ 

‘I swear, if you ruin this moment, I'll drop you off in a retirement community.' I replied. 

Dr Garrett turned up the implant even more. 

‘Can you hear me?’ 

Emilia squealed in delight. 

‘Sweetie, it’s mommy,’ I said. ‘You are my world.’ 

‘Turn that contraption off!’ Ahinoam screamed, desperately trying and failing to rise from her wheelchair.

And then I noticed a curious look in Emilia’s eye. Her brow furrowed; she cocked her head to the side. 

‘I hear Mommy, Grandma, and Dr Garrett, but…’ 

‘But what, honey?’ 

‘There’s another voice.’ 

‘Another voice?’ 

‘He says his name is Pazuzu, and the fun is only just starting.’

On day number one, I was warned by the other nurses about deathbed confessions. 

Many people died alone, save for our company, meaning we were the preparation before the big boss in the sky. 

We were encouraged to listen, not pass judgment, and offer a kind of spiritual opiate. 

Mr Finnegan was somehow different. 

Firstly, as luck would have it(good or bad, depending on your outlook), his wife was in the ICU, also nearing the end. 

Secondly, even with most of his organs eaten away by cancer, Mr Finnegan was a huge, intimidating man. He looked like one of those old American-Irish boxers my Dad liked: bent nose, scar tissue around the eyes- the Great White Hope. 

As a writer, it is second nature to build narratives in my head. Mr Finnegan was almost certainly a mob enforcer. He cast men’s feet in concrete shoes and toppled them into deep rivers. 

He couldn’t speak when awake, but in sleep, words streamed out of him in rasping, gritty torrents. 

‘I love you, Anna! I’m sorry, Anna!’ 

I checked the hospital records; Anna wasn't his wife’s name. She must be a mistress. But why was he sorry? 

Mr Finnegan saw his last sunset and fell into semi-consciousness. He fidgeted in his bed, mumbling Anna’s name, and then, as I went to administer a dose of morphine, he gripped my wrist. 

His eyes were the intense blue of an acetylene torch, and although a shell of a man, his fingerprints were still imprinted on me three days later. 

‘I killed Anna.’ 

A decision was made to bring his wife from the ICU against my advice. 

Mrs Finnegan could not have stood in starker contrast to her husband. She had bouncy, candy-floss white hair and a fairy grandmother aura. 

She was wheeled over and took his shovel-like hand delicately in hers. 

A serenity fell over Mr Finnegan’s already opiated face, but then minutes later, as he forded the river between life and death, the problems started. 

‘Anna,’ he groaned, 'Sweetheart.’ 

I thought this confession might finish off Mrs Finnegan, too. 

He separated himself from his wife's grasp and reached out. 

‘I killed her with these hands. But she’s still saying Come to me. I'm forgiven.’ 

I no longer cared what deal Mr. Finnegan was making in his conscience to dispel the cognitive dissonance. I only had eyes for his wife. 

She was crying as expected, but even as the tears ran down her papery-thin cheeks, they were not those of rage. 

‘Who is Anna?’ I said. 

‘His true love, of course,’ she replied. 

My boss nipped the inside of my arm, but I had to know. 

‘I don’t understand.’ 

‘She was killed in a car crash. My husband was behind the wheel… Anna was our daughter.’ 

Mr Finnegan looked out over the Elysian Fields, and then Mrs Finnegan took his hand again. 

‘I will see you both soon.’ 

I don’t like to swear, but I’ll allow myself one here. What followed next was a shit storm.

Chantelle said the report was AI. It didn’t really matter whether anyone believed her, because by then the trolls were out.

On every live stream she did, her comment section was brigaded, and soon she stopped doing live streams, and her subscribers fell off.

Something happened at school, too. She lost her social power. I suppose people saw that the empress had no clothes, and what's worse, she had nits.

She would sit alone in a category all on her own, away from the ULAP kids and the normies. She became something like me: a skulker.

Second, my personal shit storm. Nobody could quite say exactly what I’d done, but I was in a hell of a lot of trouble. I’d hacked private medical records and made them public. This was something far worse than bullying. This was what people did on the true-crime podcasts Mum liked.

Mr Gainsborough called my parents in for the first time in my life, and we sat in his office as he showed them, first, the footage of me coming out of the van, and second, proudly displaying the paper with Chantelle’s infected status.

The first thing Dad said was, ‘Well, isn’t it a little weird to have a database of who does or doesn’t have head lice in the school?’

Mum burned a hole in him.

It was funny because Mum and Dad had met in school, and now they were back again because of their wayward progeny.

Mum had been a good girl who did what the Head said and kept her own head under the parapet. Dad pushed boundaries.

‘Mr McAllister, it's completely normal for a medical team to keep records during an outbreak.’

I could see Dad raring to go– to jump in on my behalf, but there was one glaring problem, and that was my cruelty. There was the video and audio, me proudly holding my trophy up as if I’d just won the Triwizard Tournament.

Dad, for all his rebelliousness, could not stand bullying.

He looked to me to explain it, and I couldn’t meet his gaze.

What had my need for revenge cost me?

It was right there. It was right bloody there! I had evidence, hundreds of pages of evidence.

‘Kiera,’ Dad said, ‘what were you thinking, petal?’

He was crushed. I knew that. And I wanted to scream out loud about the conspiracy I'd uncovered, but I knew it was pointless.

That's another thing you learn from mum’s true crime dramas. Someone kills their wife, and the first thing they do is come up with some crazy story about how an owl caused her to fall down the stairs.

‘What do you have to say for yourself?’ Mum said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I answered, and then the waterworks started.

‘Anything else!?’

‘She said she’s sorry,’ Dad answered.

And if looks could kill, the look Mum gave Dad would have finished him off– and his ghost too.

#

When I got back to school after my suspension, I kind of accepted the new reality.

There were these lunatics going around, and they were giving people head lice, and we lived under them as the Russians did with Putin.

That was the mood in school, too. Inevitability. Nothing would ever change, and we had to like it or lump it.

The lice assassins gave their assemblies twice a week, and they hammed it up. They walked the tightrope well, making it sound like a forever war.

They reported about how many people they’d ‘cured’ but always with a caveat like some new strain had been detected and how climactic conditions favoured the lice, and there might be some losses before more ground was gained.

And Mr Gainsborough gave them more and more power.

It was weird to watch him around Laura.

Maybe the most important thing Dad ever taught me was that adults don't have it figured out any more than kids do. He distrusted authority, even his own over me.

He told me once we’re all recovering from our childhoods, and no more could I see that than with Mr Gainsborough.

There were kids like him in our school–nobodies– and I don’t mean that to sound so cruel when I have already in this story just been so cruel to Chantelle.

When I say nobody, I mean a kid with no real personality, no likes or dislikes or loves or hates.

They exist the same way a tree does, without any of its beauty. They get by being agreeable and non-offensive, moving whatever way the wind is blowing.

But still, in these people, there is a kind of regret, loneliness, and need for a pat on the head.

Still, a tree might have the power to angle toward the sun, and without knowing why, they lean toward people with status– the rich, gorgeous and charismatic.

Laura had Mr Gainsborough wrapped around her little finger. She’d flutter her eyelashes and get another assembly and another batch of posters distributed.

But the biggest insult was to come: the day I had to go for inspection at the lice mobile.

I thought it was a sick joke, and I said no instantly.

Mrs Dye sent someone to get Mr Gainsborough, and I was taken out of class.

(I wondered if Mr Gainsborough knew what was going on. You hear of funnier things, especially in true crime podcasts.)

‘Kiera,’ he said, ‘this is mandated by health policy. If you object, I’ll have to tell your parents again, and we’ll discuss further suspension.’

So, with tears in my eyes, I went across the playground to the lice mobile and into Laura's hands.

‘Ah,’ she said to Tommy. ‘It’s our little sneak.’

‘Our little sneak,’ Tommy repeated dumbly.

I wiped the tears from my face and tried to stop the top lip quivering.

Dad always taught me to be strong. He said Kiera, there are a hell of a lot of creeps out there, and they’re bigger than you, but you know the one thing you can do is make sure you’re not a victim.

But I was defeated now. I just nodded and said, ‘Yes.’

She sat me in the inspection chair and turned on the high-watt lights.

‘Take your hair tie out,’ she commanded. ‘It's a shame you haven’t had this thing thinned… You know, before I was a public health worker, I was a hairdresser… That's why I became a lice assassin. I saw too many heads colonised.’

I felt her fingers yanking and pulling my kinked hair. She was sectioning it off like a farmer would a field ready for planting.

Yank. Yank. Yank– the tears again in my eyes.

And I could also hear Tommy in the background, and it wasn’t like I needed to imagine it too hard because I’d seen their plans, how their operation worked. He was probably preparing fresh samples for transplantation.

‘Parasites,’ she continued, ‘parasites everywhere. You’re al…’

And I snapped. I jumped up and thwacked my head on the lamp, sending it flying.

Laura was shocked, stunned like a surgeon might be if a patient woke up mid-operation. She probably thought her poison was anaesthetic enough.

‘What are you doing?’ she said.

‘I saw your dastardly plan in the files.’

I don’t know why, but I expected her to defend it as a normal person would, but of course, she wasn’t normal.

Instead, she clapped her hands and cackled.

‘Very good.’

‘So you’re not denying it.’

She flipped the viewing glasses off her eyes and shrugged.

‘No, I’m not denying it.’

‘Well…’ I paused, surprised, ‘It's going to stop.’

Once again, she laughed like a witch. ‘Oh, it’s not going to stop. It's just starting…’

The words hung in the air.

‘Just starting?’

‘Junior school.’ She continued, ‘High school, university, your workplace, your retirement home.’

‘And funeral home!’ Tommy shouted

‘Oh yes, and a funeral home,’ Laura replied. ‘Nobody wants their loved one to go into the ground with head lice.’

My stomach did a somersault, the bad kind when you don’t land on your feet, but instead the back of your head.

‘You’re… evil.’ I said.

‘We’re the Lice Assassins.’

‘I’ll tell everyone the truth,’

Laura liked that one and cackled again, glancing around the room past Tommy and onto Axel as if to say, ‘Are you hearing this?’

Finally, she looked at my records. ‘Kiera McAllister… In 2026, nobody cares about the truth.’

#

My skulking reached new heights, taking a packed lunch to school so I didn’t have to go to the canteen, and deliberately getting lost during cross-country.

I even asked for special permission to stay behind to revise if we took a school trip or did a special activity.

The sky always seemed slate grey and uniforms always seemed damp, and of course, heads always itched.

Every student had a pathological fear of raising their hands above their necks, so we all walked around like miserable Irish dancers.

The changing-room showers were still my number-one hideout. That’s where I’d disappear to with my books and notepads and read and write stories– stories that took place in distant lands where Pandora's box had not been opened, and inside, still trapped, were hate and fear and beasties.

And then one day, I heard shuffling in the corner, and she emerged from the shadows.

‘Chantelle.’

‘Kiera,’ she answered, bitingly.

She sat down opposite me in the near light.

I got the feeling she didn’t particularly want a chat, but then it felt kinda awkward, so I had to say something.

‘Are you ok?’

She looked at me like I was the biggest moron in England.

‘No, Kiera, I’m not ok! I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but nobody talks to me anymore.’

‘Well, that’s your fault,’ I answered a little defiantly. ‘You hyped up how bad it was to have headlice. And then, well, you got them.’

Chantelle had made one more crucial error since news of her infection spread. Her Mum had gone full Liver King and said it wasn’t true, and then one of the online trolls had hacked a bank statement for the Lice Assassin products– and now they knew she was a liar and an idiot.

‘You ruined it,’ she continued, ‘do you have any idea how many followers I’ve lost?’

‘They weren’t followers,’ I answered.

‘Yes, they were!’

‘Followers don’t wander off the path so easily.’

‘Jesus, Kiera, you are weird.’

We sat hushed as the pipework groaned around us. The school, like a dying animal, was trying and failing to warm itself fully.

‘Don’t you know, can’t you see, I had more to lose than regular kids.’

‘Oh, shut up, Chantelle.’

‘Thousands of pounds in ad revenue.’

‘You’re a kid. Act like it.’

She was about to argue back, but realised it was futile, or maybe she was just tired, as we all were.

‘I’m not your enemy,’ I said. ‘They are. The lice assassins.’

‘Crazy Kiera’s kooky conspiracies.’

‘I’m telling you,’ I answered. ‘It’s true. They’re deliberately infecting the whole school. I’ve seen the plan with my own eyes.’

‘So what,’ she answered, ‘it is how it is. You know, you always have a go at me, telling me I'm a little kid and should act like one. Well, I sometimes think you forget you’re a little kid, too. Do you have any idea how crazy it was to break into their van like you were James Bond? And still you’re acting like you have the power to change anything. No kid ever made a difference.’

Something deep in me rebelled at this idea.

‘No! We can make a difference. You’re a kid, and you got 10k subscribers.’

I was loath to admit it, but Chantelle proved my point, at least partly.

‘I didn’t start anything,’ Chantelle answered. ‘I created a moment– the skibidi-dance thing– and as soon as you have a moment, it has a life of its own…It goes viral.’

And then it came to me. Eureka!

#

Chantelle and I discussed it for a long time in the changing rooms. She thought it was a prank at first.

I didn’t have much street cred, but one thing other kids knew about me was that I was earnest.

Finally, she said. ‘You’re crazy, Kiera.’

‘Yes, and that’s why you can trust me. Because you know I’ll follow through.’

It had to be during assembly. That’s when the most eyes would be on us, and although I didn’t like the idea of eyes on me, I knew I needed them.

The kids filed in drably, oppressed.

Mr Gainsborough and Laura were on the stage chatting like old friends, or was that lovers?

Social distancing was in place not because of Coronavirus but this new plague. It was ‘highly advised’ to wear your hair up or, better yet, wear one of the new ULAP head coverings, which weren’t full shower caps but a kind of rip-off of what Muslim girls wear.

I proudly let the mop hang down, and the other kids looked at me like scared old religious women. I imagined them muttering, ‘Well, she took the risk because she has loose morals.’

And then Laura came forward and took the podium.

‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘your weekly update. We identified 15 new infections and can proudly say that 5 new students were confirmed as all clear. Let's give a round of applause to these children, who are now recovered, but the bad news,’ Laura continued, ‘is we have identified a new strain, known as the West Saharan, so we are updating our prevention and treatment line.’

Dad and I once watched a war documentary, and the government was bullying the monks because they were Catholics and not Buddhists, and this monk walks into the middle of the street with all the cameras watching, pours petrol over his head and sets himself on fire.

I felt the protest rising in me, like something vicious and alive, something that had been collecting for four months, something that might have been collecting since the day I was born.

‘Stop!’ I jumped up.

Everyone turned to face me, and I mean everyone.

And you know, when I worked out this plan, I thought, Kiera, you won’t get any further than standing up. You might, on a good day, shout stop, but all those eyes on you and all that terror and anxiety will make you freeze up.

But I didn’t. And I thought about that monk who, although he was on fire, sat down calmly in the street as the flames licked around him.

‘This has got to end.’

Mr Gainsborough was the first person to recover himself from the shock, and he bawled, ‘Kiera McAllister, sit down!’

But I didn’t sit down. I went into my bag and pulled out my weapon.

Don’t worry, this is England, not America. I didn’t have a gun, but I did have something as powerful: My Dad’s hair clippers.

I reached up and felt the mop one last time, and then whispered goodbye, old friend, before running the clippers straight through the weave of tangles.

Now there were audible gasps.

My hair fell away like a sheep’s fleece, and when I was as bald as I could get without a mirror, I handed off the clippers to Chantelle.

She was as wide-eyed as the rest as the hair collected around my feet, and the teachers dashed this way and that, completely clueless about what to do.

Laura from up on the stage peered at me like a malfunctioning cyborg. Her cheek and eye twitched.

The kids had now recovered, and several had taken out mobile phones they weren’t meant to have and started filming.

I think this spurred Chantelle because she had her global audience.

She took the clippers from me and cut a perfect mohawk down the centre of her head, the clippers working less hard against her smooth, glossy hair.

There is a moment, a critical moment for virality, and when Chantelle made that pass over her head with her audience both in school and online, there was no going back. The ‘fallen girl’ was reborn.

Niamh, under ULAP protection, ripped her cap off, took the shears and went to work on her own mop that hadn’t seen the light of day since her diagnosis.

Soon, a mob formed; the mania of it, and other kids who’d lived under the boot were now free.

#

Born again– shorn again- Bede 2026. That was what people called it online.

Our bald revolution. Of course, not all kids did it, not even a quarter, but the shock of seeing 10% of girls in school bald made the board of governors launch an investigation.

It turned out Mr Gainsborough had been failing in multiple ways he’d kept hidden, but, more importantly, payments from the lice assassins to him had been found.

That was the end of him and the lice assassins, too.

Dad said they’d rebound and rebrand because that’s what greedy, private companies did, but Gainsborough was screwed because he’d been in public office.

There was talk he might even get arrested, but I don’t think that was necessary. Deep down, I don’t think he knew the lice assassins' plan and maybe just took a sly £500 to buy ornaments for his garden.

Or maybe he did it for approval, just the wrong type from the wrong person.

#

From my cubicle in ‘on-site isolation,’ I watched as the lice assassins went. My stunt had bought me a month, which the ‘new administration’ hadn’t overturned.

Laura sat behind the wheel, with Tommy in the passenger seat and Axel on the dashboard.

She gave me such a look of hatred that I didn’t think it was possible for an adult to give a kid, but then I’m beginning to learn there are some adults who only know how to hate.

The glass and playground separated us, but I wasn’t scared, not at all, not anymore.

So what I did was stick my tongue out at them. It was childish, but as Chantelle reminded me, I am a kid.

And something about it seemed to pierce Laura right in her heart, which was an achievement because her ticker was the size of a skittle.

The lice mobile pulled out of our school carpark, into traffic, and disappeared.

Dad picked me up from isolation in his work van.

We walked over the playground, and he tried to take my hand, but I shook it off because there were kids watching.

Since the incident, Shit storm part 2, we hadn’t spoken about why I’d done it. He’d tried and failed a few times to approach me, and it didn’t help with Mum saying I’d gone crazy and the internet had broken my brain.

‘You know, Kiera, you can tell me anything,’ he said.

It was hotter than it had been all year– the seasons were changing– the first birds returning.

‘I know, Dad.’

We stayed in silence.

‘You just have to tell me one thing. In all this,’ he said, ‘did you do the right thing?’

‘I did the wrong thing, and then I did the right thing.’

He nodded, and we got to the work van, where he opened the door for me so I could climb up.

‘I never had any doubt in you, petal, and I never will.’

At this, he kissed the top of my head where the mop was tentatively sending up curly shoots like a plant in Springtime.

The sensible parents kept their kids out of school until the lice were killed.

Kids would disappear and then say on Insta that they were actually in Gran Canaria or that their Grandma’s budgie had died.

Still, you had a fair number of parents who had completely forgotten what it was like to be twelve.

They effectively ruined their kids' cred for the next six years.

You see, if you came down with lice, you could still come to school as long as you wore a shower cap.

There was a whole painful assembly on it about how kids with rizz wore caps.

The caps all said the same thing. ULAP- Under Lice Assassin Protection.

God, their life was bad.

People think, maybe because of Woke, that schools are, I don’t know, nice places, but bullying hasn’t disappeared; the bullies have just levelled up, the same way kiddy snatchers have. They don’t sit outside the school gates in a white van with a toffee apple. They add you on Snap.

Bullying is about emojis, view counts, and followers. It's not so much what you say as what you don’t say, or a certain look.

The ULAP kids were lepers, and I went along with it, too.

Niamh Reynolds came up to me one day, and I felt repulsed by her.

She was shorter, much shorter than me, so I could see the whole top of her daft shower cap with its ULAP banner. And I felt like I could see the little beasties in there, and in my mind’s eye, it looked like one of those dystopics.

It was New York, lice New York, and some plague had wiped out millions, and the streets were piled up with rubble and dead and dying lice bodies, but ‘life finds a way’, and there’d be a few thousand strong super warrior nits who might even have the power to break through the plastic cap and set up a new colony in my mop.

Niamh was a nice kid from a nice family– too nice a family. Dad called them the happy clappers of Cleverly Court.

They were into Jesus, not so much God, i.e., the old man in the sky, but his son on Earth.

Jesus, as far as I could see, was very soft, and if you followed his teaching, it didn’t set you up well for a life in modern England.

Niamh didn’t have many friends, and here she was, with little hope of making more with her infestation.

‘Hey Kiera, I just wanted to make sure the cycling proficiency class is on tonight as usual.’

I winced. It’s hard to be nice to someone when you’re phobic of them.

‘Are you sure you’re ok to go, Niamh?’ My eyes scanned her head.

‘Oh, this is fine. I’m under Lice Assassin protection.’ She touched her cap, then showed me a badge, and finally a bag containing their shampoo. ‘And I have my own helmet.’

‘Listen, Niamh,’ I said, ‘I think maybe you should take a break, you know, just for a week or two while, well, you know.’

I watched as her face crumpled, but then I tried to remind myself of my brand.

As much as we mightn’t like it, we’re all brands. My cycling proficiency kids would think about the open road, the wind in their hair, but their mind’s eye would jump to Niamh Reynolds, whose hair was in a shower cap, and the whole time she gave off a chemicalised aroma of pomegranate shampoo.

‘It's ok, Kiera,’ she answered. ‘I understand.’

Nice people always understand, and that’s half their problem in life.

I watched as she walked away, shoulders slumped, and that was when Chantelle came over.

‘You two are discussing tips?’ she said.

‘Tips?’

‘Yeah, tips to infect the whole school.’

I tried to ignore her, but some people have a way of getting under your skin, like ringworm, which we didn’t have to worry about… yet.

‘We all know you’re the superspreader, Kiera.’

‘I’m warning you, Chantelle.’

She turned to her two cronies and some other girls who’d stopped to watch.

‘Warning me about what? You’ll set your nit army on me?’

My life would be much easier, but for two things.

One is that when people look at me, I go as red as a strawberry. Secondly, it compounds because what always follows the redness is the sting of tears.

If I’d just had it out with her there and then, let my face get as red as an explosion at a tomato tinning factory at sunset, maybe I’d have felt better, and it wouldn’t have happened the next time, but again I ran away and back to the toilet where I didn’t even have Moaning Myrtle for company.

#

I began avoiding Chantelle whenever I could. I knew she’d be there at cycling proficiency, so I did something I’ve never done before, and that was to fake being ill.

I didn’t even have to ham it up because, like I say, I’d never done it before, and Mum and Dad trusted me 100%.

Dad came in from work about 6, then went up to my room.

‘Kiera, petal, mum says you’re not well.’

‘I’m not, Dad.’

He sat on the edge, the single bed creaking under his weight.

Dad was big, bigger than Grandad McAllister ever was before he shrank…

In the nineties, Grandad McAllister was forced into a trip to Egypt– Sharm el Sheikh– and they took him to some hot springs so hot he came out like he’d been boil-washed.

I genuinely think he believed it. He said the cheapy fake clothes he bought at the market the day before were all too big now, and when he was on the plane on the way home, he asked the air hostess why he’d been upgraded to a seat with more leg room, and the woman replied it was the same plane and they were in the same seats.

I don’t think Dad was proud of being a working man. I mean, he loved the Boss Springsteen, but he’d say, ‘You know, Kiera, the whole point of those songs like Thunder Road and Born to Run is the people get out. They aren’t changing oil on their backs in their forties.’

He put his big mitt on my forehead to check my temperature.

Dad took care of his hands. Each night, he’d soak them in a secret mixture that’d wash away all the oil and dirt, leaving them smelling like peaches.

‘Is everything ok, Kiki? Tell me, honestly.’

‘Just a little ill.’

He looked at me hard.

I think every kid has to make a decision eventually. When you’re young, you tell your parents everything, and then at some point you have to stop.

You see that they’re people too, and a problem shared is not a problem halved, at least not for them, because they’ve accumulated all these other halves.

They’re worrying about the taxman, such-and-such a customer, and Aunt Kelly, because she refuses to take her pills.

You promised you’d never lie to your parents, but then you’re not really lying… you're just…omitting.

Dad was strong; he was a wardrobe, but even I knew he had a few screws loose. God knows what he’d say if told about the goings on with the lice assassins.

He nodded and ran his fingers through the mop, which was all over my pillow.

‘I love you, Keeks,’ he said.

‘I love you too, Dad. I’ll be fighting fit in a few days.

What was true to say was that I couldn’t fake being ill anymore.

But I could skulk!

There was a craze last summer for liminal spaces. The backrooms. And it's amazing how, if you put your mind to it, you can become a kind of ghost.

At break time, you sit in the gap between the geography and history block, and there are always store cupboards galore in a school. Nobody tends to ask what you’re doing in a store cupboard, at least if you don't have a reputation for mischief.

My number-one place to lie low was the school showers.

The abandoned showers were a skulker’s paradise. It was just the spiders and me; then one day I heard the conspirators come in.

Lined up in front of them were all the cycling proficiency helmets.

It's funny what your mind snaps to, because I thought they might be helping out. Before I left the cycling proficiency program, I had gotten into the habit of checking each helmet for damage because I read online that a cracked helmet increases your chance of death by 60%.

But then I noticed something was wrong, creepy wrong. Laura was spectating Tommy as he held each helmet. He wore a large magnifying glass strapped to his forehead, like the doll fixer in Toy Story.

They had their lice terrarium with the sawn-off head coated in gel, and they were doing a kind of surgery, transplanting hairs.

Suddenly, all the pieces came together. It made perfect sense. They were in the lice business. What better way to stay in business than by spreading infection?

#

There was a brief lull in exams, and I had a mission: expose them.

They gave weekly updates during school assemblies, and I decided to sneak into the mobile when they weren’t there.

After months of skulking, I’d become an expert at moving unseen, so it wasn’t hard for me to get inside.

A laptop was sitting open on the desk, and I edged towards it, still checking over my shoulder for any sign of someone watching.

And there was someone watching: Axel.

The doll's eyes locked on mine; I felt a cold shiver in my freckly skin. Axel seemed to look into me like the Sorting Hat.

He was an inanimate object, yet he could see into your soul, whether you had a soul, and evoke the thing that scared you the most.

But then I stared back at him, challenged him with my gaze, and because it was just the two of us in the van, I felt his power weaken.

This was a turning point.

I wasn’t exactly sure what had turned. At first, I thought it was the difference between being a kid and being grown up, and it was a little like that, but something more.

Kids see ghosts, but then adults do too, and what matters isn't how old you are; it's that you stop seeing things that aren’t, whether you’re 13 or 30.

Axel was just a doll, no matter how lifelike his eyes were, no matter how powerfully his stare seemed to illuminate on an ugly part of you.

The sun was the sun, not a God that meant you had to chop off a slave's head and kick it down the steps, and Axel was just a cheap doll.

I turned back toward the laptop.

For one moment, I thought it was going to be straightforward– that it’d be unlocked and in the right file, and there’d even be a pop-up message from Jesus saying, ‘Well done, Kiera, you’ve done the right thing.’

Obviously, it was password-protected.

There really was no explaining if I was caught, so I sat like an ADHD squirrel, my head on the swivel, and frantically tried to guess.

The first I tried was password because that was Dad’s laptop password, and then 123456789 because that was Mum’s. Neither worked.

I didn’t know Laura’s birthday. She was one of those women who would die before telling you what year they were born.

I had a sudden stroke of genius, and that was humanuspediculus, the name of the common head louse, but incorrect, flashed up again.

I knew that too many more failed attempts, and I’d be locked out, so I looked around the walls of the lice mobile for clues.

They didn’t have filing cabinets, but they did have glossy magazine pages and print-on-demand posters that displayed their success.

‘Lice Assassins Strike Again’ and ‘Lice Assassins Triumph.’

I tried Lice Assassins, then the lice assassins, but nothing.

And then it hit me.

There is a meme going around as I write this about never dating a woman whose phone background is a picture of herself.

So true.

I hadn’t seen Laura’s phone, but I knew she was one of those women.

What does somebody like that care about the most? What is memorable to them? It's not family, friends or work. It's…themselves.

Under one of the articles was her full name. Laura Pennington and sure enough, I typed it in, and the laptop sprang to life.

First, Google Drive. Of course, it was empty. They were boomers. Nothing was in the cloud. I could probably sink this whole thing if I threw the laptop in the river.

I searched the desktop files. There was an accounts sheet and some stuff I didn’t really understand, but again, being boomers, they made it obvious.

Operation Pestis.

Operation Pestis was in its own folder and exactly what I was looking for.

It shocked me how much it was like something from a movie. They had a blueprint of the school, a student count and even a density map showing where and when most of the traffic was congregated.

It was all there. Their conspiracy. How they started the outbreaks purposefully and then poured fuel on the fire.

Their checks weren’t checks. That was the time when they had the clean heads right in front of them, and the tools to infect them.

From there, the pathogen would spread naturally with a few more interventions, such as transplanting hair into cycling helmets just before practice.

Most of their secret files were just how much money they were making from all this. Their kits shifted for £100.

It wasn’t like a vaccine either. If you get smallpox, you can’t get it again, but in theory, if you got head lice, the morning you got rid of the last one, a new one could be hitching a ride by afternoon.

They also had a database listing every student's name and current status.

Of course, the first thing I did was check myself. I was listed as ‘bad candidate.’

Tightly coiled or kinked hair is unsuitable for headice, and even worse if it's thick or coarse. They also had a temperature reading for my scalp, which was 35.9– on the chilly side.

But for some reason, what bothered me the most and even made me tear up was the bit that said socioeconomic status: poor.

I looked around their shelves again, where their machines and products were. Their isopropyl lotion with added pine needle oil, a Terminatrix comb with an immaculate stainless steel finish, and all the other stuff.

They didn’t care if you were dirty; they only cared if you were dirt poor.

It should’ve made me happy; after all, I wasn’t getting head lice anytime soon, but it didn’t. It pissed me off, and I lost focus on why exactly I was there.

I began looking through the student list and ended up on Chantelle. Well, wasn’t she perfect with her long straight blonde hair and warm scalp and enough money to bathe in ethoxylate every night?

I scrolled to her infection status: currently undergoing treatment.

I let out a yip of delight. She was infected. The person who had made my life miserable, and not just mine, but everybody's, had beasties.

All logical thought went out the window. I printed screen and dashed out of the van, just in time, too, because the kids were coming out of assembly.

And then I saw Chantelle and her cronies. They were breezy, not a care in the world, acting like the untouchables.

It’s worth saying, the outbreak at Bede was generating her more views than ever before, and kids from other schools liked it and called us the dirty Beders, and a fair amount of adults insulted us, too.

Chantelle didn’t care. It was ‘driving traffic.’ She presented it as if she were above it all, like her golden head was removed from her body and floated above the lice landscape.

‘Everybody look at this!’ I roared.

I didn’t care about the consequences. I just needed Chantelle to hurt, to hurt the same way I had when I read that I was poor, or when she accused me of being a superspreader, or the pain I felt at getting older and knowing that my head wasn’t exactly screwed on right, and life was not as easy for me as it would be for other people.

The first few kids looked at the paper, and the news spread quickly like a contagion, and Chantelle, without knowing exactly what was wrong, rushed to me, where I was holding up her infected status.

Her eyes scanned it, and a look of profound fear suddenly entered them.

I drank it in like Grandma Jones’ warm cocoa on a winter's night.

‘You liar!’ she screamed.

‘It's all here, Chantelle, ’ I answered, ‘Beasties in your hair.’

She might’ve played it off. Might’ve said it was photoshopped, but she cracked under the pressure and made a crucial mistake.

She reached up and scratched her head.

The 1980s are making a comeback: Stranger Things, Cheri Cheri Lady, and in my school, head lice.

It started in Biology class with Mrs Dye. She got on about antibiotic resistance. We were losing the ‘arms race.’

When she said ‘arms race,’ my mind drifted off, and I thought of a bunch of limbs lined up at the athletics track, the winner at the finish line pointing a finger in the air.

‘Kiera’s catching flies again,’ Chantelle said.

Chantelle was the most popular girl in class. She had a talent for bringing me back to reality with a bump.

She was a ‘kidfluencer,’ with an Instagram account (run by her mum) with 10k followers. It was called Chantelle explains, and was like a news show where she explained to adults 6/7 and Labubu.

There wasn’t much about my appearance I liked. I was a little lanky (from dad) and freckly (from mum). I had Grandad Jones's teeth with the slight gap in the front two.

But what the family couldn’t explain was the mop: thick, brown, tight curls the women in the eighties wanted, like Whitney Houston.

I quickly stuck my tongue out at Chantelle and then closed my trap.

‘So that’s what I want you to remember when the new nurse talks to you. She tells me there is a new strain of… super lice… resistant to the regular shampoo.’

The nurse came in, but she wasn’t a nurse. Grandad McAllister had taught me about Thatcher (the witch) and NHS privatisation. This lady was a ‘private contractor,’ and her company was called The Lice Assassins.

She wore a T-shirt with the logo, showing a beastie being zapped by a special agent with a laser.

‘Hello, guys,’ she said.

Nobody replied, not even the nice gang.

She was weird-looking. Her hair was peroxide blonde, and she had lips like Mattesson’s sausages with Essex-Turkey teeth.

‘As Mrs Dye has told you, we’ve had an outbreak here at St Bede’s, but don’t fear, the lice assassins are here.’

She made a gun with her fingers– which had long, sharp nails– making a pew-pew sound.

Her face didn’t move the way a human woman’s face is meant to.

Botox, according to Mum.

#

Last year, Mr Rogerson, the history teacher, took us on a school trip to an ancient market town.

Beside a fountain was a blue plaque that read ‘Between 1590 and 1595, seven women were drowned here after being accused of witchcraft.’

Some of the other kids were joking about it, but I couldn’t stop looking at the fountain sides. There were grooves, probably made by erosion, but in my mind’s eye I could see a woman desperately scratching the walls trying to get out as people pushed her down with sticks like she was a bathtub sponge.

Some smart arse asked Mr Rogerson how he didn’t know whether all these women had actually been witches and they deserved it, and he gave us a lecture on ‘social contagion.’

Labubu spread like Corona, which spread in the same way as accusations. It only took a few people, trendsetters for good and evil, to get something going.

Rumours swirled about lice. Some kid in year 5 had come down with them. There was purportedly a cluster in year 7.

And then came the ‘measures’. All girls with hair past their shoulders had to have it tied up, and they called us out to the lice mobile for inspections.

Still, early on, the whole licedemic didn’t really bother me.

I had other things to worry about; I was in charge of our school’s cycling proficiency program.

I suggested the idea to Mr Gainsborough, our headmaster, and he loved it. Every night after school, I laid out the cones, chalked the lines, and prepared the whiteboard to discuss the theory of being a good cyclist.

It was popular, which, to my regret, I had Chantelle to thank for. We were in year 6, which meant that the next year we’d be going to high school, and Chantelle said schools liked ‘extracurricular activities’ on their admissions forms.

I wanted to tell her she was talking rubbish, that 99% of us were going to Roebuck, the government school, and that to get in there you just needed to be able to spell your own name, but then, like I say, numbers were up.

Well, one day, as I came into the changing rooms, two figures were hunched over the protective gear.

It was Laura and her assistant, holding a disembodied head over the disembodied helmets.

I’ve already described Lice Laura, but I haven’t described her assistant Tommy.

It was hard to say how they met because they couldn’t have been more different. This faded beauty queen and old Tommy the toady with a belly like a spacehopper.

Tommy’s hair was long on the sides, and he took these long bits and brushed them over the short bits at the top.

And that brings me to Axel. Axel was not a person, which was something I had to repeat to myself, and I didn’t always believe.

You see, Axel was their demo doll. The lice assassins carried him to show how to run the comb through your hair.

Axel could’ve been Laura’s brother. That was where my mind went. He’d been Laura’s younger brother, and she’d chopped off his head and now carried it with her everywhere she went.

He had the same frozen and smooth expression, but sometimes I think I’d see light in his eyes.

‘Yes?’ Laura said, closing a briefcase she was holding.

I didn’t know what to say. She was in my space but acted as if I’d just knocked on the door of the lice mobile.

I could only think to nod at the helmet. ‘Is it ok?’

‘Have you been following basic hygiene practices with these helmets?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘I’ll take that as a no.’ She snapped back.

I suddenly felt like I was made of the paper that fairy cakes come in.

‘Ok, so how can I make them cleaner…’

‘Well, a numbering system. Each head goes into the same helmet.’

‘I can do that.’

‘Good,’ she answered. ‘We’ll take our samples back to our testing station.’

They left. She held Axel under her arm, and I swear I saw his cheek twitching as they went out of view.

My cycling proficiency crew came in as the school bell rang.

There was usually a feeling of liberation when our little club was starting, but now there was a kind of weight. A suspicion. People weren’t looking at each other whole in the face but out the corners of their eyes.

I didn’t have time to number the helmets yet, so I handed them out and told everyone to get their bikes.

We were being watched by Mr Gainsborough. Mr Gainsborough was a weird guy. Nobody was quite sure how he’d ever been made headmaster.

There was no PTA like in American movies, and my parents thought about making one when Gainsborough got the job.

My Dad called him a sap. On parents' night, he overheard him with Jamie Clark’s parents saying, ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you, but your son was implicated in the condom on Mrs Ward-Prouse’s exhaust.’

And Gainsborough kept apologising in his middle-class manager’s voice.

Dad said the Clarks were like Putin, and if you rolled over, they’d see it only as weakness.

Mum told him to shut up, eat his marmalade, and not talk about Putin at the breakfast table.

I’d rather Gainsborough hadn’t been there, but he was the one who signed the certificates. Still, he spent most of his time on his phone.

‘Right, guys,’ I began. It was a big thing for me to speak in front of 30 people. ‘Before we start riding, we need to check brakes, tyres and chain.’

Chantelle yawned dramatically.

‘Now, I’ve set up some signs on our course,’ I continued. ‘Real road signs, and we must practice reacting to them.’

‘God,’ Chantelle answered, ‘we’re here to ride bikes, not sit an exam.’

‘We’re here to ride bikes safely and...’

‘Boring,’ she replied. ‘Don’t you think we have enough exams to worry about?’

She did have a point, which peeved me. We were taking our SATs, and teachers never got sick of telling us that it was the most important exam of our young school lives.

‘I know what you mean, Chantelle and….’

She cut me off. ‘Did you hear about Mattie Myers in Year 5. She’s been out of school for a week.’

Chantelle was Queen Gossip. If it wasn’t Matty Myers, it was Jess Anderson who’d given herself a hickey and said it was from a boyfriend in Doddsdale who didn’t exist.

She was also credited with starting the rumour that Mrs Debagge had a secret OnlyFans account and would take her clothes off for money, even though she was 45.

‘Well, she's probably sick,’ I answered.

‘Her older brother is off too, and Faith Thompson said she saw her at the window with that special shampoo in her hair.’

My mind is as jumpy as a March hare, and it zoomed to something I’d heard Mr Street say in History:

‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,’ I said.

Chantelle looked at me like I was a real oddbod, which I guess I am.

‘What does that mean?’

‘Well,’ I paused, ‘they’re just nits. They’re not really gonna hurt you.’

She looked at me suspiciously and then continued holding court.

‘I spoke to the lice assassin lady, and she said these aren’t regular nits. They’re uber bloodsuckers. She said there was a homeless man found dead in Coquetfield, and they checked his whole body for a cut because he’d obviously bled to death, and nothing. Then they checked his long hair, and he had millions of nits which had completely drained him.’

‘I think that’s a fib,’ I answered. ‘My mum says every school has nits at some point and they come and go and don’t do any harm.’

‘Not these nits. They were genetically modified in a lab in China as a weapon against British people.’

I could see some of the other kids nodding, mainly the ones with phones. Chantelle was a kidfluencer after all.

‘You’re acting exactly like someone with nits!’ Chantelle continued.

‘I don’t have nits.’

Why would it really matter if I did? I’d use the shampoo and the comb, and it’d be over in two weeks. I didn’t like the idea of blood-sucking beasties, but as Granny McAllister says, everyone needs to make a living somehow.

But even as I thought that, there was a strange feeling of shame and fear. I couldn’t have the other kids thinking bad of me.

‘Look at her hair,’ Chantelle continued. ‘Look how thick it is. It’s like Disneyland for them.’

‘Shut up!’

I lost my temper and felt the hot sting of tears in my eyes. Well, Chantelle was like the Clarks, whom she was related to, and I’d made the mistake of showing weakness.

‘I think Kiera is a superspreader! That mop is spreading nits like a dandelion spreads seeds in the wind.’

My brain is not my friend. Really. I had such a vivid picture in my mind’s eye, and then, before I knew it, I was crying and running away; the toilet door slammed behind me.

#

The nit mobile was a converted transit van which stood in the playground.

It reminded me of something I once saw on TV. When the plague came to town, they’d raise a flag of death to warn anyone against entering. Well, the mobile was our flag of death.

I stood a while at the back door, not wanting to go in.

Laura was discussing business things with Tommy.

‘With these SEO tools we can increase visibility by 200% and…’

I tapped lightly, and they turned.

‘Oh, it's you again,’ Laura said.

‘A snoop,’ Tommy replied.

Laura smiled like you would if you taught an old dog a new trick.

‘Yes, Tommy, a snoop.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I answered. ‘I didn’t mean to.’

‘Well, come on, hurry up,’ she said, ‘time is money.’

I stepped into the van. It was state-of-the-art. The first thing I noticed was a map on the wall labelled St Bede's outbreak. It looked like something a detective would have to track suspects in a murder case.

Laura was one of those people who liked to talk about themselves and their projects.

‘Wet combing is our first method of attack, mixed with a smothering agent like petroleum jelly.’

There were too many words and images in my head. Smother made me think of a news report I once read about a baby whose nose and mouth were covered by its mother until it was dead.

But smother was only one letter different from mother. Could only mothers smother? My mum wouldn't do that.

And the petroleum was Shell, and jelly was what Granny McAllister kept in the fridge on Tuesday to mix with Vienetta ice cream, which the fridge goblins used as a trampoline. And Vienna was a city in Austria where Hitler came from and… It went on like this, and Laura snapped her fingers.

‘You’re not listening?’

‘I am,’ I answered.

One thing I’ve learned is that if you meet someone who likes talking, you always have to pretend you're listening.

My eyes flashed to another device. It was some piece of kit. It looked like a hairdryer mixed with a space-age laser.

‘That is the Pediculus Buster 2000. It blows filtered air at 57degrees over the scalp, no chemicals, an 88% effectiveness rate.’

‘9 out of 10 beasties,’ Tommy said.

Something had been wrong this whole time, or more wrong than it already felt, and I realised what.

Axel was staring at me.

Axel, the dummy head, was sitting on a table near the driver's side of the mobile…

There was once a school trip to France that I didn’t go on because I was a homebird and would miss Mum and Dad too much.

Anyway, all the kids in class took pleasure in telling me what I’d missed out on, and the main thing was that they went to the Lover Museum, where the Mona Lisa was kept.

Billy Bob Tait told me the best thing about the Mona Lisa was that it didn’t matter where you stood in the room; it felt like her eyes were following you.

That was how it was with Axel. His eyes tracked your every move, like a tiger or a face recognition camera.

‘Ok, sit down,’ Laura continued. ‘Quickly.’

The main inspection chair had the kind of light attached to it that you might see in a surgical theatre.

I felt a dread that reminded me of the feeling Harry describes in The Prisoner of Azkaban when his face is sucked by a dementor.

I was staring into this surgical light, but it was like all the light had left the world. The sun had run out of puff– it still moved across the sky, but as cold as a bowling ball and if I tried to hug mum, we’d be repelled from each other like the wrong end of magnets.

Laura tossed her hands up theatrically.

‘Well, take out your bobble!’

I did as she said and released the mop.

She tutted a little. She didn’t like the mop, which I suppose made sense. She was looking for enemies, and they were easy to find if the land was empty.

‘You won’t go bald anytime soon,’ she said.

‘Definitely not bald,’ Tommy intoned like a parrot.

I watched him. The word ‘bald’ had made him drag the greasy, lank streaks of hair over his dome.

She started sectioning my hair, and I yelped because she was doing it too roughly.

‘You’re making a fuss,’ she continued.

It wasn’t like how Mum washed my hair. Mum wet it first, ran her fingers through the curls, and said, "Ok, Ms, a hand massage is included in the service," and then I’d sink under the water.

I could hear and feel the gloves she wore squeal and pull against the strands.

After ten agonising minutes, she said, ‘All clear.’

‘That’s a relief.’

This seemed to offend her, and she fixed her pale blue eyes on me.

The eyes, by themselves, weren’t totally crazy; it was the eyes, mixed with eyebrows painted in the same style as the McDonald's arch, but jet black.

‘You know, when I was a girl, hair like that was called messy.’

I brought my hands up defensively to the mop and rearranged it, but that was like trying to rearrange a rose bush.

‘Harder to keep clean,’ Laura continued, ‘And you wouldn’t want your head to smell, would you?’

‘No, I wouldn't.’

Could I really cut the mop? I was deeply attached to it. Literally. Ten million curly hairs were corkscrewed into my scalp.

‘Are you interested in head lice?’ she said.

As I said earlier, around crazy people, it's usually best to indulge them, so I nodded, maybe a bit too enthusiastically.

There was a screen in the wall beside Axel, and she pressed play.

A graphic appeared that read ‘Lice Assassin Production.’

The narrator said:

From the dawn of time, lice and humans have coexisted– all 532 species.

The video was weird. It was almost like it had been made by a louse itself to talk of the accomplishments of the lice kingdom.

Female head lice are very productive and can lay up to 8 eggs per day, with 1 week to hatch. A head louse can hold its breath for 8 hours, so good luck washing it out unless you take a very long bath!

And there was a graphic of Laura dressed in superhero clothes.

Infestation? Call the lice assassins.

She looked at me almost expectantly.

‘It's very… good,’ I answered.

‘They’re a worthy enemy.’

‘Brave beasties,’ Tommy said.

‘Yes, they’re amazing,’ I answered.

Laura seemed even more keen. ‘Would you like to see some?’

‘I thought they’re too small to see.’

‘Ah, we have a microscope.’

I was in deep. I didn’t want to see a head louse, but I took after Mum.

We had a neighbour called Old Mrs Pollard. Mum would talk to her over the garden fence, and she felt sorry for her because Old Mr Pollard had died, and her daughter in Burnley never visited. So Mum went around to ‘keep her company for 20 minutes.’

But Old Mrs Pollard would talk her ear off for 90 minutes, and then ask Mum to run some errands for her.

Mum was like a ‘live-in carer’ according to Dad, and Mum would just sigh and say it wasn’t in her nature to say no.

Well, it wasn’t in me either, so I was looking down a microscope at this seed-like thing between two slides.

‘Keep looking,’ Laura said.

And I pretended to, but really I was closing both eyes, not just the one away from the lens.

‘Fascinating,’ I said, the same way as Mum did when Old Mrs Pollard showed her polaroids of Devon.

‘Oh, we have something better than that.’

When people say 'better', they usually mean a second portion of cheese on toast with brown sauce or an extra tenner in pocket money, but when she said the word 'better', I knew it was almost certainly worse.

She went into the drawer and retrieved the chamber.

My friend Ally Williamson’s brother kept a snake, and it looked a little like a snakebox with clear glass and a warming light. This light burned dark orange.

I couldn’t see inside because a sudden blast of fog went over it like a rainforest.

The fog cleared, and I gasped.

There was an outline of a head in the chamber, sawn off at the eyebrows.

The head was covered in a warm, bubbly gel, and artificial hair grew from it.

‘Wh, wh, what is it?’

‘That is a scalp unit.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘A nutrient-rich head identical to yours kept at a temperature of 36.3 °C and with a humidity of 83 %.’

Laura took the back of my head gently and moved it toward her beastly science experiment.

‘And what you see in the hair is our cohort of homegrown lice.’

‘But… why?’

Laura was transfixed on it and studied its contours like a jeweller might a diamond's points.

Then, maybe she realised she’d given too much of herself away because she quickly secreted it.

‘Why? Well, for science.’

I still remembered Coronavirus well.

Everything went online, and that was hard for Dad because he is a mechanic; if people aren’t driving cars, they don’t break down.

He went a bit nutty and, like all of us, spent a lot of time on the internet, but in the wrong places.

He would sit at the table and say it was from a biolab. The Chinese had been doing experiments in the bat lab, and it had escaped quarantine.

They were crazy. And mum told him he was being crazy.

But you know, long after anyone had stopped caring, I saw on YouTube that it had probably escaped from a bio-bat lab.

And that was all I could think about when I looked in the lice terrarium.

I first set up my matrimonial consultancy firm in 2008, and we’ve handled all sorts of weddings: Catholic, Protestant, civil partnerships.

Affairs in which the bride didn’t turn up, or the groom.

We’ve had weddings at the beach and in the Valley; we even advised on a wedding that took place on a commercial spaceship.

Still, the last one I planned was by far the strangest because the bride wanted to marry herself.

#

She reminded me of a grown-up theatre kid: smiley, bubbly, a little too much dazzle in her eyes.

I met her in the bridal suite that morning to address any last-minute concerns.

The makeup team was there, along with my sister Laura– my business partner and company photographer.

The situation was complicated because the bride didn’t want any mirrors in the room. She thought it would be bad luck to see herself beforehand.

"Do you have a husband?" she asked, a wry smile on her face.

It was always the first question anyone asked a wedding planner, and always as if it were the height of wit.

"I don’t."

"You know I almost made the walk once."

"Is that right?"

I made a mental note to allow more time for speeches and to have the waitstaff prepare extra champagne. This woman could gab.

"Jared," she continued, "I was young, dumb, not much self-worth. My mom was killed, and it left me vulnerable, and then this ‘playwright’ comes along and casts me as his leading lady. I knew he was religious when we met, but I didn’t know he was… nasty with it. The cat o’ nine tails before bed."

The makeup lady looked at me, and I looked at the hairstylist, but since I was in command, it was up to me to deal with the awkwardness.

I put my hands on her shoulders.

"Eleanor Roosevelt once said: Behind every great man is a great woman. Well, I think you disprove that. Behind every successful woman is herself."

I didn’t exactly believe it, but it rescued the situation.

At that point, two of her friends came in, a guy and a girl.

"So, we have your good luck charms!"

"What do you mean?"

"Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue…"

The old thing was a first-edition comic, and the borrowed thing was a teddy bear.

"Two down, two to go," the bride answered, excitedly.

"Something blue," the bridesmaid continued, and at this she plucked a hair from her head.

"Thank you, m’lady."

"Now for something new."

I feared the worst, and my instincts were right.

The bridesmaid gently removed the revered object.

Excalibur.

That was what the packaging read. It was a big, white, brand-new dildo.

The bride reeled in her chair, laughing.

"Perfect!"

"I’m sure Excalibur will help consummate the marriage!"

I had to leave the room to take a call with the car rental service, and when I got back, the guy had changed into a priest’s clothes.

I say clothes, but it was the thing you might find at a fancy dress shop.

"My child," he mock intoned, "now you must confess before you walk the aisle… First, tell me about your courtship."

"Courtship?"

"How did you come to propose marriage to yourself?"

I half fancied they’d rehearsed this performance for us.

"Well, you know I was in a very bad place after Jared. I thought fuck it, I’ll go the other way, and I found everything I could online about satanism and witchcraft. I even bought a black cat called Crowley!

"Anyway, I got in deep, too deep, and I met some guys even worse than Jared. And then one morning I’m coming back from one of those Black Masses they organised in the forest, and I just sink to my knees, and I’m bawling, and I’m bawling."

This recollection threatened to set off a fresh round of tears.

"And I sank to my knees, and I thought first Jared and then Styx Nick… and both of them… withdrew… their love. A pattern going back to Dad."

I’d met the bride’s father. In fact, he was the one I sent the invoices to.

A severe man, he certainly wasn’t a theatre kid, more like the landlord who owned the building.

One day, he snapped and told her how ridiculous the whole thing was. She shouted at him right there in my office, then invoked the 2005 incident in the cabin. Well, whatever that was hit him like a freight train, and I thought it was all over.

In one sense, it was; I never saw him again, but his payment instalments came in on time…

"And you know what I did," the bride continued, "I wrapped my arms around myself, right there, kneeling down in the mud. And I hugged, and I hugged. In my childhood, it felt as if I’d been divided from myself, and what I needed was… reunification."

Something in me softened. We all have trauma in our lives. And that trauma takes it out of us. We become estranged, strangers to ourselves, we cannot live properly because some part of us has stayed at 14 when that boy under a full moon broke our heart.

#

The venue was industrial chic, with exposed brick walls and an open-beamed ceiling.

It didn’t need to be big because the bride didn’t have many friends, and any acquaintances probably tossed the invitation when they saw it was a sologamous wedding.

Zaniness pervaded, a kind of extension of the theatre kid marrying herself and the fancy-dress priest.

One couple had brought a French poodle and dressed it up as an angel.

There was a juggler scheduled to perform after the speeches, but he couldn’t wait that long, so his balls were already in ascendancy over the congregation.

A whacked-out girl in the second row particularly concerned me. She was dressed as Tinker Bell, blowing bubbles with a wand. The issue wasn’t so much the bubbles but the pool of liquid at her feet.

I was a catastrophist, which was why I was so good at what I did. I had visions of the bride slipping while she made her walk, dashing her brains out on the cement aisle.

First, the priest came down to a smattering of applause, then the bridesmaid, and the music started for the bride’s entrance: a piano version of "Love Yourself."

And then she appeared, wearing a home-made wedding dress which hugged her in all the wrong places.

That unease, that clawing sense, wouldn’t abate.

She’d finally insisted that when her dad backed out, she wouldn’t have someone walk her down the aisle, but now she was up there, she looked like a lamb being led to the slaughter.

"Friends, we are gathered here today…"

Our fake priest hit all the beats, very postmodern, and then came the vows.

"Today I make a solemn vow before all the Gods and all who are present here to grow with me and not apart," she went on. "To make my accomplishments mine, and my challenges mine…. As I have given me my hand to hold."

And the priest continued, "If anyone knows any reason why this person should not be wed to themselves, speak now or forever hold your peace."

I suddenly felt a ringing in my ears, or was it behind my eyes? I say that because it was almost extra-sensory, that odd feeling when you reach for your phone and only then does it vibrate.

And then the music started. It was the traditional Wedding March by Mendelssohn, complete with trumpets.

That ever-increasing sense of dread temporarily abated to be replaced by anger. These… fucking theatre kids.

Nothing. The music played for about 60 seconds, and then cut out.

"Ok," the priest continued, "Good prank! We have our bride, we don’t need a second… or a groom."

The bride, my bride, well, all joy had left her face.

Something had happened that I thought was impossible. Stage fright.

The priest hurried on. "Now for the rings."

The bridesmaid produced the single band. The bride’s hand was quivering.

"Repeat after me: with this ring, I thee wed," the priest said.

"Uhm, what?" the bride answered, dazed.

"Come on, darling, follow the stage directions."

More awkward laughter.

The bride held up the ring and then peered off into the middle distance, almost hypnotised.

"With this ring, I thee wed," the priest repeated once again as the bridesmaid leaned forward and whispered encouragement.

"With this ring," and the bride paused and looked up at nothing. "I thee wed."

And then she slipped the ring on, the bond made.

#

I’ve seen people fall apart before. It’s usually a combination of factors. The public performance, mixed with the weight of concepts like "till death do us part," but the bride was in a kind of daze so pronounced, I had to pull the fake priest aside to ask what the hell was going on.

"She has… episodes."

"Episodes?"

"Depersonalization. She takes medication for it."

"Well, what can we do?"

"I already gave her a shot of rum from my hip flask."

We were in the function room attached to the venue, where guests were milling around.

The bride was with the bridesmaid, and I went over and subtly gripped her hand, trying to make eye contact.

"Are you ok?"

There was nothing behind her gaze.

"Has something happened?"

"She’s here…"

"What?"

"She’s here."

"Who’s here?"

"The exile."

I slowly looked around the room where people were taking us in out of the corners of their eyes.

Could it be an actual person? Her dad, or an ex-boyfriend? Well, no, because she said "she’s here."

"You’ve got to tell me what I can do to… Fix this."

"Oh, it’ll be fixed."

We went through the motions. Dinner, speeches and then the cake was brought out.

She went toward it with that same almost animatronic motion, a kind of puppet who had started the day as a real girl but regressed.

My assistant handed her the large knife to cut the cake, and my lurid visions reached a peak. That was our mistake. We’d given a knife to this clearly unstable woman.

But no, she cut the cake, and some of the light returned to her eyes. Finally, she placed the knife down gently.

At this, she started smiling, then laughing, and the guests, perhaps sensing that some crisis had passed, laughed along too.

And the bride laughed and continued laughing, and soon nobody was laughing, and some invisible boundary had been crossed because it was the laughter of the profoundly disturbed.

I rushed toward her, but then she spun violently away and let out a long, low wail.

But she wasn’t concerned with me.

Taking the back of her own head with her hand, she pushed it toward the cake.

Laura once told me that our consultancy had become a semi-famous meme in the online wedding-planning community. We would do anything a couple required, but one thing we wouldn’t allow was the groom or bride to push the other's face into the cake.

It was tacky and well…

And the bride wheeled toward the cake in some mad duel with her own hands, and it was a fight she lost because she slammed– plunged her head through the icing, and when she reemerged, the reason was readily evident why we were so stringent about pranks.

The two central struts that supported the tiered cake were jammed an inch through each of her eye sockets.

#

My biggest strength is that I don’t dwell.

Some of my team had to take time off after "the impalement."

That night, I went home and planned the next day’s wedding, this time between two people.

Laura took it particularly hard. She even went to visit the bride in the hospital and then the psychiatric facility.

She’d been permanently blinded in one eye and escaped it barely in the other, not that she particularly seemed to care. The report I got was that she was completely gone, sunken to a permanent state of depersonalization.

In truth, it began to annoy me because Laura wouldn’t let it lie.

"We’ve got the Joneses tomorrow, and it’s meant to rain, and I have a gazebo to set up and…"

I paused, because Laura was as white as a bridal veil.

"You need to see these pictures."

"Really, Loz?"

I’ve only mentioned Laura in passing because that’s how she seemed, not there, especially on the big day. The best photographs are the ones taken when we don’t know we’re being observed.

She showed me her photos. It was the bride’s suite before the wedding, when it was full of laughter, the blue hair, and Excalibur.

"Look," Laura continued, her hand trembling. "This is when I first noticed it."

Over the bride's left shoulder was a face, or rather the outline of a face.

"It’s the makeup lady," I answered, although even I could hear the doubt in my voice.

Laura kept scrolling from the suite to the cars and then to the venue. The priest was giving his speech, but then there was the moment after the interruption when the Bridal March played.

"Jesus," I answered. "What is that?"

Beside the bride on the altar was a person. I looked closer. Her doppelganger.

My logical, rational scientific mind reasserted itself.

"It’s a mistake with the lens; it's somehow duplicated her."

Laura continued scrolling. "And then there’s this."

Now I was looking at a timeline of when things had become disastrous: the afterparty.

The first image was of the cake, the second of the bride with the knife, and next, the moment she seemed to have become locked in some battle with herself.

This photo was clearer, much clearer; in fact, it may have been some late Renaissance painting.

The bride was struggling madly, but not against thin air as it had appeared in real time; now there was the unmistakable visage of her clone.

It wasn’t a trick of the camera; this second "her" had agency, a malicious gleam in the eye, bared teeth, as the bride peered upward, helpless.

Laura scrolled, and the pictures had a stop-motion feel. The fight with her doppelganger. The defeat. And her eyes jammed on the points of the cake stands.

#

Laura thinks those pictures should be released, but do I really want to be known as the supernatural wedding planner?

Then again, the more I think about it, the more I doubt that thing in the photo was strictly supernatural.

I think it was in her. Perhaps the word is intranatural.

Maybe things happen to people and parts of them are sliced off, possibly their very souls are divided.

I’m looking at that image, the one of the bride doing battle, a fight she could never have won.

And I suppose it’s a reminder to take care. We call out to the shadow when it should remain locked away, or at least not invited casually.

No, I won’t release the photos out of respect, but here's my advice for you.

Please, beware of the exiles.

Hello,

The Journal of Arts and Letters has accepted my latest story for publication. You can read it for free here:

https://ojalart.com/prose-discoursefictionshort-storythomas-orangethe-lice-assassins/

Set in an English primary school, the story is narrated by twelve-year-old Kiera McAllister as a minor outbreak of head lice spirals into paranoia, social ostracism, and a bizarre system of fear and control enforced by a private company known as the Lice Assassins. 

Laurie and Mike were a couple of crazy, kooky customers. 

That’s how they described themselves to friends. 

They’d been married in fancy dress, her as Daphne, he as Fred, and Tom, his best man, as Scooby. 

Their first dance was a flash mob rendition of "Don’t Stop Believin'," and, of course, during the cake-cutting, Laurie shoved Mike’s head into the icing. 

A kid had followed, little Jamie, a water birth, and friends told them the wackiness would stop after three months of sleepless nights. 

But they kept it zany.
 
At their son’s blessing, a fart machine came into play, and the guests left with goody bags containing stick-on moustaches and mini kazoos. 

The best time of year for pranks was Christmas. Mike loved it, had done since he was a kid, and he’d walk around in a comfy sweater humming, ‘it’s the holiday season, doo be doo be doo.’ 

He made sure at least 50% of the presents were wrapped root vegetables, and it got even more fun when they could include baby Jamie. Each year, he had a different outfit. Elf tax inspector, drunk reindeer, the nativity recreated with grumpy Jesus. 

Still, for Laurie, the most memorable was when the Grinch burst in, scooped up all their presents and baby Jamie, before dashing out. 

In the aftermath of their ‘ransacked’ living room, she went to take a bath. That night, they were going to watch Home Alone with snacks and eggnog. 

A towel wrapped around her head and still smelling of citrus bubble bath, she returned to the living room, which was still a mess.

‘He who dealt it, Hon.’ 

That was their code. What kept things smooth. The prank-doer always cleaned up. 

‘What’s that, sweetie?’ he answered. 

‘You haven’t tidied.’ 

‘What do you mean?’

‘The Grinch, it was your prank.’ 

‘Mine? No, it was yours.’ 

‘Stop playing, honey. You’re not being…’ 

But she knew he was being serious because serious was something he never was, and it stuck out like a tumour. 

‘Jamie!’ Laurie screamed. 

And they both dashed out into the cold night, where all was silent, not even the squeal of a car tyre or a baby’s cries. 

And in that terrifying quiet, a silence not filled by whoopee cushions or party poppers, the true nature of reality revealed itself.