View from the Edge Bulletin 1: Coma Dream

First published at Anna's new website: ANNA CHEN

Anna Chen

EDGE BULLETIN 1: Dateline 18 June 2023

By Anna Chen

The science fiction writer’s coma dream

For the longest time it felt like we were trapped in a science fiction writer’s coma dream and nobody could wake him up. We sensed something shifting underfoot, tiny spider-web cracks at first, then the juddering tectonic shift and the beginnings of a rip in the universe. Or was it just the post-war liberal order coming to an end as the capitalist cycle neared completion with all the goodness finally sucked out and nothing more left to give?

David Bowie left us in January 2016, taking all the cosmic glue with him. He’d given us five years. That would take us to 2021. How much worse could it get?

First the empathy went. Then the critical thinking. A cloud of amnesia floated like swarming locusts over the field of human view, before settling invisibly.

We were the last remnants of a better time, a higher collective consciousness when, despite the flaws and age-old crimes, mostly everything was on an upward trajectory. Humankind flowing towards the Great Attractor; full potential, us at our best.

Never before had the mass of any population enjoyed the advantages of princes. Time to spend toiling less in fields and factories and more on the things of wonder and beauty. We enjoyed poetry, philosophy, science, music. We even made it ourselves, no longer solely passive consumers of the crumbs thrown our way, but building things and thinking new possibilities into existence.

Then the storm began to gather.

Someone wanted it all back. A slow, incessant, silent assassin killing off what generations had built up in 400 years of Enlightenment.

They didn’t have to burn books. They just made sure fewer and fewer of us read them.

Giant conglomerates undercut the bookstores while we were busy amusing ourselves to death. You saw them die off in the towns, those peculiar little caches of humanity’s knowledge. It was the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, this time in slomo. A process of attrition rather than all-out war, it crept up on us. We were the frogs being boiled slowly and served up with garlic sauce.

This one was digging out the roots of our perception. We’d have stuck our fists in the dyke to plug the outpouring, but where was the wall? Where were the cracks? What was the flow and how could we physically stop it?

Thinking it wasn’t enough. The resistance stayed in the heads of the few who saw it but we couldn’t yank it out into the concrete world where the damage was being done, foundations ripped up.

All the small, delicate dendritic connections began to wither and erode as our neurotransmitters dried up. The finest filaments, the sprigs and twiglets at the furthest ends, turned brittle and crumbled, blowing away like ash.

Then the larger twigs. Then along the stems, working its way down the branches until the bough broke and all we had left was brainstem. The world perceived without nuance; crude clashing opposites, grunts and cliches, pleasure and pain without the pleasure, ones and zeros.

It wore down to basic sex drives and fury: fight, flee or fuck. Then even that failed as our libido was throttled.

The television screen that had once been a window into the wider world, seducing us by showing us experiences we were unlikely to have ourselves, that had laid out vicarious pleasures like lacy underwear and chocolates on silk pillows, was now our jailor.

Dramas that drew you into the complex curlicues of thought, that surprised and shed light, now reduced humans to hysterics, never alive unless confronted by death.

The Case for the Prosecution that had once been balanced by a robust Case for the Defence in a society where fair play was the purported pinnacle of civilised existence now stood thuggish and triumphant like a roaring champ over the lifeless body of its opponent. No longer thesis-antithesis-synthesis, but one big tough-guy imposition of narrative smashing your head like a sledgehammer crushes a nut.

With nothing feeding us and no other coordinates directing us to a distanced perspective, everything collapsed into a single plane of grey mush.

Might was right.

Some had done hallucinogenic altered states drugs in their youth and knew the enhanced colours, the deep focus untangling. Others had loved beyond themselves and accessed the divine that way.

This was the opposite. A smashing together of plane after plane after plane, like the pancaking floors of the Twin Towers, into a single dimensional watery-grey contrast-free haze, like the morning after the death of the universe.

Where was up? Which way was down? We only moved when prodded with a big stick stimulus, tasered by horror. We weren’t even lab rats in a maze any more. We were amoeba cells on the petri dish of some mad scientist who thought there were too many of us anyway.

In the time we had left, we noticed few written items online carried dates any more, collapsing chronology and making orientation near impossible. It was hard to tell when something was written, when that idea was born, or what its genesis might have been. How did it slot into the timeline? Meta led the metaverse attempt to yank us out of reality and into their Matrix knock-off. An anaesthetising, soporific tranquiliser in a little headset.

When that failed, they gave us Artificial Intelligence that wasn’t very intelligent after all. More a big fancy word-processor relieving us of the need to experience and have the thoughts ourselves in the way your subconscious once processed all your experiences, gave them shape and made sense of them. Or not.

It was a good party trick, but the magicians never truly produced the rabbit, only a simulacrum of one.

That’s what we were to them, ones and zeros being programmed, our information stripped from us to create the world for the next pliant generation. They wanted newborns no longer sucking at the teat of the TV screen, or the iPad or the mobile phone but shrouded, cocooned, all stimulus inserted via goggles.

So what was to be done?

It was simple, really. All I had to do was complete three missions in the 21st century.

1) Make sure the left didn’t bury the anti-Iraq War campaign, one of the first countries in the long line of boxes being ticked off, the way they’d done with all the others. As long as it didn’t end up as another forgotten walk in the park, we might stand a chance. Check.

2) Make visible the invisible and humanise the Chinese in the culture, on the BBC and in the rest of the media. Usher them out of the ghetto, where they were sitting ducks, before the war started in earnest. Nice try.

3) Stop World War 3. Still working on it.

Edge Bulletin 1 – Logged 18 June 2023

More at Anna Chen's website

The Next Wave Home: short story by Anna Chen

The Next Wave Home
A creepy short story by Anna Chen about a woman, her daughter and a ghostly presence.

I was shoving the whites into the machine when a great wave of grief engulfed me. For no reason at all, I started to cry. I looked down and saw that I was holding a pair of Alex’s tiny cotton briefs, stained with the faintest shadow of blood, which resolutely refused to budge despite a thorough soak. Maybe my period had synchronised with my daughter’s and this was simply irrational pre-menstrual tension signalling the onset of my own bleeding. With the machine spluttering into action behind me, I carried the customary mug of Earl Grey through the long white corridor of our north London flat and stopped at the door pinned with a garish hand-painted sign:

GENIUS AT WORK
WRINKLIES KEEP OUT

I ignored the warning and stepped into the room, picking my way through the usual teenage obstacle course of comics, skates and multi-coloured felt-tips which threatened to leak indelibly on to the carpet. Half the contents of her wardrobe lay where they had been tugged off the night before. Tangled heaps of vivid limes, turquoises and clashing hues of red marked out a path across the floor, impossible to miss in the half-light. Alex, at thirteen, was passing through that retina-searing stage of fashion sense prior to the discovery of colour coordination. But I found her clothes irresistibly attractive in the way that they affirmed life; a far cry from my relentless blacks and greys at the same age.

And there she was – my beautiful daughter, fast asleep. Her lean, supple limbs flopped at haphazard angles; her breath popping from her delicate pink mouth in a little “kah”. I placed the steaming mug next to the clutter of beads and bangles, worn religiously ever since her progression from pop idols Bros to Madonna, and bent down.

I always loved this quiet moment when I could drink in her loveliness to my heart’s content. I never ceased to be amazed that I had borne this creature: stardust put together to divine specifications according to Rick’s and my genetic blueprint; a never-ending spark of life passed down through the aeons and expressed in this perfect form. Her expression was one of bliss. What could she be dreaming? Something wonderful, I bet. I took a deep breath of her delicious scent and gently shook her into consciousness.

Her sweet smile of sleep turned downward and her brows furrowed. With a groan she heaved the duvet over her head. I hoisted up the blind, allowing the sunlight to stream in, and yanked the duvet off her.

“Come on, luvvy, school.”

“Oh no. I’m ill,” she whined.

“Alex, don’t be such a wimp, it’s only a period.”

“Yeah, sure. Your only daughter’s losing umpteen pints of blood and that’s not serious, is it?”

“Surliness will get you nowhere. Now get up or it’s the cold sponge.”

“Oh, major threat!”

I willed hard for something, I’m not sure what.

At last, she opened her eyes and screwed them up against the light. She made an almighty effort to haul herself up and reach for the tea, and, with each successive sip, her eyes brightened into the sharpness of a child raring to engage in life. She returned my smile with a broad beam that radiated an inner light and she gave me a warm hug.

“Thanks, Mum,” she said, grateful for the tea.

Satisfied that there would be no slip back into blissful sleep, I returned to the kitchen and prepared breakfast.

The two of us sat facing each other, me nibbling my grapefruit and crispbread in a perennial battle with what I had finally ceased to call puppy-fat only a few years earlier; Alex tucking into the latest craze in breakfast cereals, a porridgy concoction liberally laced with poisonous levels of sugar.

“But the packet says ‘Natural’, Mum.” She poured fresh orange juice into her Dan Dare mug, her sole concession to my demands for a healthy diet. Rule of the house: no cola drinks before 5 o’clock tea.

The awareness that something was missing dawned slowly. Something comfortingly commonplace without which the easy familiarity of this daily scene seemed to slip out of sync with itself. What was it? I pressed my lids together and concentrated. Hard. I opened my eyes and looked at her bare wrists.

“Hey, I thought it seemed quiet. What’s happened to the hardware?”

“No one’s wearing that stuff now. Only little kids like Madonna. Everyone’s playing Janis Joplin.” Her first bra and period, and now Janis. All within two years.

“That must be the third time around. At least,” I continued, playing the experienced oldie to the hilt. “When I was your age, I broke in my voice to ‘Cry Baby’. Of course, that was pre-punk when we took the revolutionary step of deconstructing the melody.” Alex made dramatic barfing noises right on cue. We were a great double-act.

“Punk’s ancient,” she pronounced with all the authority of a veteran music pundit.

1977, the year she was born, was too recent for Punk to have been endowed with nostalgia value and respectability. Give it maybe another five years for its inevitable second cycle of popularity and then you’d see serious interest from Alex and her peers. But for now, she was happy to tease me for having been a seventeen-year-old punk, and I was happy to collaborate in her search for identity and pride.

And then the crying started. I was struck in the pit of my stomach by the same wave of grief and helplessness as earlier. A great amorphous blackness reared up out of the deepest recesses of my psyche and shook me in its jaws. Alex looked scared and rushed to comfort me.

“Mum. What’s the matter?” For a moment I didn’t know. I merely wept and dodged the fear. And then the blackness took on shape. It all came flooding back into view.

“It was a dream. An awful dream – about you. I dreamt I’d lost you.” With that last thought, my blubbing intensified. Alex pulled up her chair and sat cradling me, stroking my hair with firm, capable hands.

“Tell me. Tell me from the beginning,” she cooed softly in my ear.

“Remember I told you how, when I got pregnant, Gran sent me off to some agency to arrange an abortion?”

“Yeah, but at the last minute you realised how much you loved me and you defied everyone so you could have me.” She faked lightheartedness like a consummate actress, but I knew she was feeling my distress as her own. Of course I knew; wasn’t she my own flesh and blood?

“That’s right. Well, in this dream, everything started off the same as that day. I took the bus to Streatham – three changes – because I didn’t know anyone who had a car. I walked up the overgrown gravel driveway of a huge old Victorian house, which had been converted into a private clinic. In the lobby, about a dozen women, ranging from other teenagers to a couple of mature women of about forty, sat or stood dumbly around their overnight bags. They were all accompanied by husbands or boyfriends. Or parents.”

I remembered how I had felt the odd one out, standing there in the middle on my own, almost foolish; the local Jezebel who had neglected to bring her own partner to the Church Hall dance. Although these women had fallen about as low as one could in those days – but not as low as those who would follow a few years later, darting within spitting distance past outraged latter-day Madames Defarges who would have seen such matters resolved with the knitting needle – their eyes told me that, unlike myself, they hadn’t completely slipped through the invisible safety net of kith and kin.

I sipped my tea and glanced over at the snapshots lovingly selected and tacked to the cork noticeboard in a proud display to the world: Alex mid-romp with her friends; Alex with Rick on the waterslide at some theme park or other; Alex, Rick and myself swaddled in matching snowgear, straight off the Austrian piste, a ball of snow in Alex’s hand in the moment before it was shoved down Rick’s neck. Such a happy, secure child surrounded by the smiling faces of those who loved her. I shuddered at the thought of her ever going through an experience like mine. That would happen over my dead body.

I went on. “I was led into a room – white, cold, clinical – not a scuff mark on the skirting-board, not a single streak on the gleaming steel taps. Sterile. I undressed and pulled on the scratchy green paper robe laid out on the bed, the only colour in the room. I was being given priority treatment because of the lateness of the pregnancy. Oh, God, they were going to whip you out double quick. Twenty-one weeks – just within the limit. You’d been kicking for ages, letting me know you were there. Alive and kicking.”

Alex interjected: “But why did you and Gran wait so long?”

“I couldn’t believe this could be happening to me. I wouldn’t believe it. Plus, two hours of yoga a day had given me stomach muscles flatter than beer the morning after. Even the Harley Street doctor was amazed at how flat I was. I ignored all the signs. I thought my new larger breasts were a last-minute gift from God.”

“A nurse came in and gave me the pre-med. It was going to be easy, she said, telling me nothing I didn’t already know. Like having a tooth pulled. I’d wake up and it would be over. Ha!” I gave a sharp snort as I remembered the nurse’s well-meaning but automatic assurances, no doubt laid on for every miserable girl who, betrayed by her own body, tramped up that driveway. Did she really believe what she was saying? Could she possibly have been as much in the dark as this confused seventeen-year-old?”

“I got drowsy. They laid me on a gurney and wheeled me down the long echoing corridors to the theatre. Fluorescent strips of light strobed past on the ceiling as we thunked through door after door. And suddenly, I don’t exactly know when, I was overwhelmed by the most incredible feeling that I had ever experienced. It was as if I was at the centre of a vast, rolling universe, a quiet, endless power I had accessed. Despite everything else that was going on, I felt at peace. And you were at the heart of that peace. I knew I loved someone beyond myself for the first time ever.” Alex’s eyes widened into deep pools I could happily have drowned in. “I realised it was probably the maternal instinct that people go on about. But it was a new one on me.”

“Yeah, I remember this bit.”

“That’s the point when it all changed. I was watching myself in the dream, expecting to do the same as I’d done in life. But this time I didn’t do it. I didn’t call it off. I didn’t shout and struggle when the matron told me to pull myself together. I wanted to, but it was as if I was gagged. Or stupefied. They wheeled me into the theatre and the anaesthetist came at me with the needle. And instead of knocking it out of his hand or doing something, anything, I just …”

A fresh bout of sobbing interrupted the tale. Alex squeezed me tightly.

“I let him stick the needle in my arm, right into the vein. I felt ice-water pouring into me while I counted to twenty-eight. And when I woke up ... you were ... you were gone.” I couldn’t stand the memory of the dream. Its vividness had spilled over from sleep to wakefulness, bringing with it all those little deaths, the attendent gut-wrenching emotions of loss.

“But, Mummy, it was only a dream. Look, I’m here now.” She tore a sheet from the kitchen-roll and dabbed my eyes. “It’s all right. Shush.”

I was so proud of her; she was exactly the compassionate young woman I’d hoped to raise.

“I know. I’m just crying with relief. Oh, Alex, I don’t know what I’d have done without you. Who would I have been? Just some half-dead thing.”

“Maybe you would have had other kids.”

“Hmm. Maybe. But not in this dream. There’s more. I dreamt a whole different life for myself. I just went to pieces after I’d had you ...” I spluttered for the word.

“... aborted,” she spoke the word clearly and without my fear of it. We often finished each other’s sentences but I flinched at the power given to this word merely by its utterance.

“I lost all my emotions. I couldn’t feel a thing. It was weird, the complete opposite of what I’d felt on the gurney. I was now cut off from all that quiet power. The power that had made me feel more real than at any other time. Now, nothing mattered. Objects were just objects and nothing more, including myself.”

Alex looked perplexed. This was too abstract for her.

“Gran and Grandad didn’t want anything more to do with me. None of the family could understand my erratic mood-swings and I couldn’t give in to self-pity. So I learnt to keep my anger, my fear, my loss to myself. Years passed. I couldn’t hold down a job or keep a relationship going. It was horrific – the numbness. Nothing mattered to me. Nothing meant anything.” I slumped on the table, my shoulders heaving under Alex’s warm caress.

“When you went, a whole, vital lump of me went with you. I was lost. For ever.” Then quite without warning, Alex’s cool words sliced through.

“Mum, how would they have done it at twenty-one weeks?”

The question startled me. But then I suppose every thirteen-year-old has a gory curiosity which, once on track, supersedes all other considerations. If you are open with children, you stand a chance of removing some of life’s fears. I wanted Alex fully equipped in order to deal with her own life traumas, if and when they pounced, so I controlled my emotions and gave an honest answer.

“Well, I suppose if it’s not performed as a Caesarean, which they said wasn’t necessary in this case, they would go in through the cervix and get the foetus out that way.”

Alex had stopped hugging me to concentrate on this information. She was finding it compulsive listening.

“But a twenty-one-week-old foetus must be pretty big. How can they get it out?” Her questioning seemed to be for my benefit, as if this thirteen-year-old was playing therapist with me, trying to get me to face up to forgotten fears. It was irritating.

“Well, if they can’t ... then they’d have to ...” What was that droning? A low hum like an unearthed electrical appliance.

“Mummy?” she insisted.

“If you want to remove a large object through a small opening, you either make the hole bigger, or the object smaller.” I felt uneasy. I wanted her to drop the subject but she continued in what was beginning to feel like an interrogation.

“Snip.”

“What?”

“Snip. Cut up the baby into little pieces and pull them out one by one.”

“Perhaps.”

“How small?” The question was abnormally ghoulish, even for a curious child.

“Not necessary, Alex.”

She changed tack. “What about Daddy? Wasn’t he there to save me?”

“He must have been there. Somewhere.” I broke off. The drone. I couldn’t get the drone out of my head and it was driving me crazy.

“I can’t remember anything about Rick. I don’t know why he wasn’t with me in the clinic. But he came up trumps afterwards, didn’t he?” My voice tailed off as I struggled to remember shadows. Exploring the Marianas Trench with a pen-light would have been easier.

Alex disengaged her arms from me and sat fixing my eyes with a stare eerily penetrating for a child. For a long time we said nothing. The drone grew louder, threatening to engulf me. I felt faint. Then Alex spoke.

“Mum. Dad was a methadone addict you’d known less than a month. You can’t even remember his name.” I pulled up sharply. My own daughter was beginning to scare me.

“Daddy’s in Manchester for a week. Working, Alex, come on, this isn’t my idea of humour.” But she persisted, oblivious to my unease. Or welcoming it.

“You went through it on your own. No one thought it was important at all. You even had to go into work the very next day. Remember?”

“No, darling, I had Gran and Grandad. Without their help I’d never have coped.”

Alex ignored my protestation and came out with another odd piece of fantasy plucked from Lord knows where.

“Gran and Grandad lived with you in a one-bedroom council flat. They couldn’t have helped you even if they’d wanted to. Which they didn’t.”

How stupid and selfish of me to burden her with my problems. She had a vivid imagination and my nightmare had invoked some ugly demons which I had better neutralise fast.

“They took one look at you and they were smitten. You were a gorgeous baby.” But Alex was, by now, too immersed in her fantasy to hear me.

“Mum, Granny didn’t like you.”

“No. We had our problems, like any family, but we pulled together in a crisis.”

“Grandad doesn’t know to this day what happened ’cause you were scared he’d beat hell’s bells out of you.”

“They loved you from day one. They were tremendously supportive.” I searched her face for a sign of what she might be driving at.

“Why are you saying all this, Alex?”

Alex didn’t answer my question. Instead, she relaxed back into her chair. She looked at me with huge brown eyes filled with hurt and betrayal.

“Why didn’t you do it, Mum? Why didn’t you save me? We could have managed.”

“Alex, sweetheart, it was only a dream. I jumped the gurney in the nick of time.”

A long silence. Except for the drone.

“Didn’t I? Alex?” Something shifted in the back of my head; the cold crunch of worlds colliding.
After a long pause she spoke with clinical precision.

“No. No, Mummy. I don’t think you did.” My eyes darted around the kichen, mapping out the room with her landmarks; the cereal box, her Dan Dare birthday mug, the snapshots on the noticeboard, all juddering in and out of focus.

Alex stared at me, stared right into me, and although we were close enough to touch, she seemed to hover at the far end of a long tunnel. I called her name, over and over, but she didn’t say a word, just stared at me. Tears welled in those innocent eyes that, under my care and protection, had known no real traumatic pain in any of her thirteen years since birth.

I thought I could make out the white tiles on the wall behind her. Directly behind her. She picked up her mandarin nylon carrier with the lime zipper and slowly heaved it on to her shoulder.

“I’m off to school now, Mummy. I’ll see you in a little bit.” Her voice was faint and tinny under the drone, like a bad recording from the 1920s. I tried to hold on to her, but her ethereal hands slipped from my grasp.

So it was time. I’d stretched it out longer than usual due to my growing ability to plug those sticky moments when everything can unravel in an instant. I choked down the lump in my throat and waved goodbye as she backed down the corridor.

“I love you, sweetheart.”

“I love you, Mum.”

“Take care now, darling. I’ll be thinking of you.”

She was drifting away, far away. She opened the front door into blinding sunlight, as bright as a bursting star. I froze the sight in my mind’s eye, trying to drag out the final moment for eternity; my last glimpse of Alex in silhouette at the end of the corridor. And then she was gone.

I was overwhelmed by the drone, loud and maddening; an unbearable grating as worlds slipped out of sync, one sliding into oblivion while the other, the one where the black amorphous shadow swam, took on a stark and terrifying clarity.

The machine crashes to its climax. The locking mechanism clicks off and I open the door. The formerly blood-soiled cotton briefs – my cotton briefs – fall to the floor. I straighten up, my vision rippled by tears and a head splitting with a pain that can find no outlet. A row of china tea-cups stands next to various health foods. The notice-board contains the odd list, mini-cab cards and a couple of photos of myself. My breath erupts in shallow, fitful bursts of terror and I wander through the flat like one of the undead. Gone is the handpainted sign. A blank expanse of white wall stares back where once there had been a door.

I stretch out my hands and my heart into a great nothing. Objects are objects and not much more. A scan of the cheerless sitting-room (to call it a living-room would be a lie) reveals a single photo of myself, alone, brooding and disquieted – sole proof to me of my own existence. There is a space where the framed photo of a happy family group – Rick, Alex and myself – had stood. There are no coloured felt-tip pens, left lidless on the floor for me to nag about; no teen comics, with the girls’ names as titles, for me to disapprove of for their frivolity, none of my precious record collection peeks out from bent covers. Instead, I pace up and down the tidy room and weep.

When it gets like this, I just have to wait until the next wave picks me up and drops me back into the real world to join Alex who should have been, but isn’t. The universe has been split in two and I have been chosen to occupy this version. But, very occasionally, for a few minutes only, I can live out a lifetime as it was destined, as mother to a fine and wonderful daughter who waits for me even now. In the small hours, I often hear her sobbing on the other side, missing me as much as I miss her. So I fill my hours with unimportant chores and doodlings I try to transform into work and wait to catch the next wave home.

Anna Chen 1988
First published in Another Province 1994

Tube Love: short story on the dangers of public snogging by Madam Miaow

Above the great metropolis the sky was blue, the breeze was light and the trees were in bloom. It was the first day of the year that felt like spring had arrived and they were in love. The kind of love that throws up that magical bubble of crazy happiness around your nation of two and renders you invisible to your fellow citizens. At least that’s how it felt. The thought that people weren’t looking out of politeness, embarrassment or had just eaten breakfast and didn't want to lose it, never entered their collective mind as it floated somewhere over north London.

But it didn’t matter. They were as one and, in this moment, would always be as one. This was ninja love, invisible to all but the most elect sensate beings. Lips velcroed, tongues araldited, eyes shuttered, osculation making ambulation an exciting game of chance with only a few bruises to show for it, they drifted slo-mo in their alien time-scale, oblivious to the waves of homicidal rage from the city commuters with somewhere to be, something to do, looming deadlines and all the rest of the baggage a cruel world could impose. The poor lost fools. If only they took time out and tuned in to the love radiating from the couple with the mashed faces, human relations would be revolutionised overnight.

On this bright spring-like morning — or was it around lunch, time being a moveable feast under the influence of Aphrodite and her chubby cherub with the pointy projectiles — they headed off to the tube station to take in a day of culture. They would dine on a picnic of bargain sushi from the chain of Japanese automats, their love immunising them from gastric complications. They looked forward to their stroll across Hungerford Bridge, a name still indelibly associated in the minds of many with an unfortunate slaughter in the west of England, but not for the lovers, whose clear vision of humanity’s capacity for beauty and compassion in glorious technicolour eclipsed all monochromatic ugliness.

They would immerse themselves in the high art of the South Bank where they would embrace in front of the Bacons, tremble by the Twombleys, and rudely view the Rodin. OK, on this stretch the street performers lacked the expertise, artistry and verve of their New York counterparts, the theatre was full of crowdpleasing schlock, the cinema screened Beowulf in 3D, the concert halls aired the greatest TV themes and a Liberace retrospective, but it was their playground and they would be happy.

The tube train was almost empty. Great! More kissing opportunities. His unspoken mission was to snog her until she bled. She’d already swooned like a delicate Victorian Miss with an 18-inch waist and the blood-pressure of a dormouse. The fact that she was built like the Mongol Horde and dressed like a yeti at this tail end of winter made his ambition all the more touching.

They took the seats along the side of the carriage and turned to each other, him with his back to the engine in case of accidents – you couldn’t be too careful but he always managed it somehow – her facing front, because it kept at bay the projectile vomiting that occasionally threatened to overwhelm her in moments of moderate excitement.

He pulled out his bottle of Carex antibacterial hand-gel because he had touched the button of the tube train door, and offered her a squirt. She smiled gratefully and accepted his kindness, appreciating the metaphor. Thus both cleansed they moved in for the kiss.

Stretching time: that’s what they did well. Each two-minute journey between stations drawn out into a here-and-now never-ending tube of Big Love.

Their faces meshed, tongues probed, vacuum-packed gobbage puckered up as lungs sucked out all the air. She knew it showed off her cheek bones and pulled in her facial chub, rendering her beautiful in his eyes from even this close a vantage point. To him, his stereoscopic vision shot by a childhood malady, she was as huge as a 60-foot movie goddess on the silver screen, only without the merciful lighting craft of masters. But true love soft-focuses you, polyfillas every tiny crease, airbrushes every enlarged pore, photoshops every stray hair missed in your daily depilation. Would there ever come a day when they would betray her under the relentless interrogation of the searing searchbeam of the clarity of his vision once sanity reasserted itself? Never mind. For now, they were as one.

No one could have foreseen the accident, least of all the driver, with his nose in The Sun and his cheddar and pickle sandwiches wedging the dead-man’s handle at Go position.

Up ahead, the hedge-fund manager, whose triple-height riverside apartment carved from a red-brick warehouse that was once a thriving hub of employment for East End dockworkers had just gone into negative equity and who faced meltdown of his fat assetts, ate his last meal of lobster and roquette croquette washed down with a nice Krug, abandoned his Beamer on a double-yellow and made his way to Southwark underground station. Folding his copy of the FT and placing it in his foetal pigskin attaché case alongside his Mont Blanc pen, he moved to the platform’s edge. Taking a deep breath of the underground air made up largely of skin particles sloughed off by aeons of commuters, he allowed himself to topple slowly into the path of the oncoming train.

The driver hit the brakes; the new enhanced hydraulic braking system, installed only that month by the private company and their subsidiaries and subcontractors on pain of a fine that stretched into two figures. Four, if you counted the thirty-two pence. Cheese and Branston and water cress garnish flew up in a cloud of crumbs and into his eyes, blinding him to the tragedy credit-crunching and ripping away underneath him.

And behind him.

Drifting ever deeper into their reverie where time stopped and hearts slowed in unison, she’d felt a slight increase of pressure and given into it, even as it continued in a wave of bliss. He must be riding an even bigger wave of passion that usual, she thought, and opened herself to him, relaxing as he pressed further … and further.

First the teeth went, cracking and splintering through the cushion of lips. Then jaw and cranial bone. Their noses collapsed, cartilage leading bone. Cheeks and brow ridges collided and continued in their inexorable momentum. His was tougher as he had the solid caucasian ridge closer to Homo Sapiens’ Australopithecus past while the flatter more highly evolved profile of her Asiatic origins offered her less protection. But it only mattered for a nanosecond. They’d had but one mind and now they were joined in a single brain.

Yes, this all took place in a split second, but, y’know, time was stretched out like the skin on a bubble of gum blown by a bored teenager at half-term. Their hearts slowed. She waited for the next beat. But it never came.

They were found in the wreckage of the concertinaed carriage, like a Man Ray or a Chapman Brothers exhibit they might have seen that very afternoon in the Tate. Their hair perfect: his fine and fair, hers long, raven cables. In the fireman’s torchlight they could be made out. One perfect sphere of neverending love.

And that is the risk you run when you snog in public.

(c) Anna Chen, April 2009

(If you liked this, try Greased Up And Ready To Go)

Tube Love: short story on the dangers of public snogging by Madam Miaow

Above the great metropolis the sky was blue, the breeze was light and the trees were in bloom. It was the first day of the year that felt like spring had arrived and they were in love. The kind of love that throws up that magical bubble of crazy happiness around your nation of two and renders you invisible to your fellow citizens. At least that’s how it felt. The thought that people weren’t looking out of politeness, embarrassment or had just eaten breakfast and didn't want to lose it, never entered their collective mind as it floated somewhere over north London.

But it didn’t matter. They were as one and, in this moment, would always be as one. This was ninja love, invisible to all but the most elect sensate beings. Lips velcroed, tongues araldited, eyes shuttered, osculation making ambulation an exciting game of chance with only a few bruises to show for it, they drifted slo-mo in their alien time-scale, oblivious to the waves of homicidal rage from the city commuters with somewhere to be, something to do, looming deadlines and all the rest of the baggage a cruel world could impose. The poor lost fools. If only they took time out and tuned in to the love radiating from the couple with the mashed faces, human relations would be revolutionised overnight.

On this bright spring-like morning — or was it around lunch, time being a moveable feast under the influence of Aphrodite and her chubby cherub with the pointy projectiles — they headed off to the tube station to take in a day of culture. They would dine on a picnic of bargain sushi from the chain of Japanese automats, their love immunising them from gastric complications. They looked forward to their stroll across Hungerford Bridge, a name still indelibly associated in the minds of many with an unfortunate slaughter in the west of England, but not for the lovers, whose clear vision of humanity’s capacity for beauty and compassion in glorious technicolour eclipsed all monochromatic ugliness.

They would immerse themselves in the high art of the South Bank where they would embrace in front of the Bacons, tremble by the Twombleys, and rudely view the Rodin. OK, on this stretch the street performers lacked the expertise, artistry and verve of their New York counterparts, the theatre was full of crowdpleasing schlock, the cinema screened Beowulf in 3D, the concert halls aired the greatest TV themes and a Liberace retrospective, but it was their playground and they would be happy.

The tube train was almost empty. Great! More kissing opportunities. His unspoken mission was to snog her until she bled. She’d already swooned like a delicate Victorian Miss with an 18-inch waist and the blood-pressure of a dormouse. The fact that she was built like the Mongol Horde and dressed like a yeti at this tail end of winter made his ambition all the more touching.

They took the seats along the side of the carriage and turned to each other, him with his back to the engine in case of accidents – you couldn’t be too careful but he always managed it somehow – her facing front, because it kept at bay the projectile vomiting that occasionally threatened to overwhelm her in moments of moderate excitement.

He pulled out his bottle of Carex antibacterial hand-gel because he had touched the button of the tube train door, and offered her a squirt. She smiled gratefully and accepted his kindness, appreciating the metaphor. Thus both cleansed they moved in for the kiss.

Stretching time: that’s what they did well. Each two-minute journey between stations drawn out into a here-and-now never-ending tube of Big Love.

Their faces meshed, tongues probed, vacuum-packed gobbage puckered up as lungs sucked out all the air. She knew it showed off her cheek bones and pulled in her facial chub, rendering her beautiful in his eyes from even this close a vantage point. To him, his stereoscopic vision shot by a childhood malady, she was as huge as a 60-foot movie goddess on the silver screen, only without the merciful lighting craft of masters. But true love soft-focuses you, polyfillas every tiny crease, airbrushes every enlarged pore, photoshops every stray hair missed in your daily depilation. Would there ever come a day when they would betray her under the relentless interrogation of the searing searchbeam of the clarity of his vision once sanity reasserted itself? Never mind. For now, they were as one.

No one could have foreseen the accident, least of all the driver, with his nose in The Sun and his cheddar and pickle sandwiches wedging the dead-man’s handle at Go position.

Up ahead, the hedge-fund manager, whose triple-height riverside apartment carved from a red-brick warehouse that was once a thriving hub of employment for East End dockworkers had just gone into negative equity and who faced meltdown of his fat assetts, ate his last meal of lobster and roquette croquette washed down with a nice Krug, abandoned his Beamer on a double-yellow and made his way to Southwark underground station. Folding his copy of the FT and placing it in his foetal pigskin attaché case alongside his Mont Blanc pen, he moved to the platform’s edge. Taking a deep breath of the underground air made up largely of skin particles sloughed off by aeons of commuters, he allowed himself to topple slowly into the path of the oncoming train.

The driver hit the brakes; the new enhanced hydraulic braking system, installed only that month by the private company and their subsidiaries and subcontractors on pain of a fine that stretched into two figures. Four, if you counted the thirty-two pence. Cheese and Branston and water cress garnish flew up in a cloud of crumbs and into his eyes, blinding him to the tragedy credit-crunching and ripping away underneath him.

And behind him.

Drifting ever deeper into their reverie where time stopped and hearts slowed in unison, she’d felt a slight increase of pressure and given into it, even as it continued in a wave of bliss. He must be riding an even bigger wave of passion that usual, she thought, and opened herself to him, relaxing as he pressed further … and further.

First the teeth went, cracking and splintering through the cushion of lips. Then jaw and cranial bone. Their noses collapsed, cartilage leading bone. Cheeks and brow ridges collided and continued in their inexorable momentum. His was tougher as he had the solid caucasian ridge closer to Homo Sapiens’ Australopithecus past while the flatter more highly evolved profile of her Asiatic origins offered her less protection. But it only mattered for a nanosecond. They’d had but one mind and now they were joined in a single brain.

Yes, this all took place in a split second, but, y’know, time was stretched out like the skin on a bubble of gum blown by a bored teenager at half-term. Their hearts slowed. She waited for the next beat. But it never came.

They were found in the wreckage of the concertinaed carriage, like a Man Ray or a Chapman Brothers exhibit they might have seen that very afternoon in the Tate. Their hair perfect: his fine and fair, hers long, raven cables. In the fireman’s torchlight they could be made out. One perfect sphere of neverending love.

And that is the risk you run when you snog in public.

(c) Anna Chen, April 2009

(If you liked this, try Greased Up And Ready To Go)

Greased Up And Ready To Go: short story by Madam Miaow

Private Eye just gave the most damning review to an anthology of chick lit called In Bed With, which is supposed to be all about sex. “No crass wordplay or creamy cliche goes away unbludgeoned. Bushes get trimmed, the word ‘come’ is mutilated beyond recognition, chests are always ample and curves glorious.” I thought, hmm, I can do that.

So they finally greased her up and threw her over the prison yard wall.

She’d heard of this fabled activity so often in her life, as have we all. A strange unlikely event that only happens in bar-room banter and TV comedy scripts. Yet here she was.

Naked.

Shivering in her fresh bikini wax and three hundred dollar haircut.

Oiled.

Waiting.

She’d paid her five thousand dollars to the organisation she’d found on the internet. Oh, yes, she’d eventually succumbed to the inevitable despite years of tutting at the plethora of sex that threatened to overwhelm her family, just like every other nice middle-class mother with kids about to graduate. But with a husband who’d long ago abandoned passion, she’d been vulnerable. Like an overwound elastic band, something had to snap.

She’d sighed as she remembered the early days, when sex was urgent and went on all night and they’d slept into the afternoon. Then they married and, what with jobs and practical day-to-day matters, sex had settled to a pleasant twice a week. Then the twice a week had halved. A bad chest infection that lasted all winter had provided an excuse for a drop to monthly forays into the world of sensuality — they’d never gotten back into the swing of things after she’d nursed him back to health. And then it had stopped. Except for Christmas and birthday treats. And even then ... ye gods! Three minutes? Yes. She had timed it.

Cookery was her favourite way to fill the void. You kill the dying hours preparing the meal and then you get to eat it. At least her mouth was having a good time. Food was her obsession and she had the love handles to prove it, even if there was no love to put them to good use. Internet searches for recipes occasionally led to those sites where some poor soul’s lost daughters and errant sons disported themselves shamelessly. Who’d have thought that sandwiches, cream pies and the humble roast could have laid the way to such loathsome degredation?

At first the paysites kept her out. Who in their right mind leaves a credit-card trail leading back to their upstanding lives and their real identity? Christ! She was chair of the PTA, after all. Then the free porn gathered in wave after wave and washed up on her dry sandy beach. Fear of discovery and discoveries subsided under something stronger. Driven by curiosity, she told herself, her fingers had slipped inexorably, first to the laptop keyboard where swift eager keystrokes soon took her to her chosen destination, and then to her own lap and shuddering dissatisfaction.

They say your sexuality only gets stronger as you grow older. If you are a woman. What sort of cosmic joke was this? Peaking at fifty for womankind, men are left trailing from seventeen. Where the hell are you supposed to cross over? She did the maths and wept. Then she clicked on the link that had been calling to her these past months.

Ecce femina!

She stood there, arms outstretched and waited to be overwhelmed and overpowered by sheer unbridled male sexuality. Men denied the most basic satisfaction, tortured by forced abstinence for years with no prospect of relief, riven by deep subterranean urges stoking up like magma under Mount St Helens. She wanted to be there when it blew, to feel it blast right through her, to be taken to a realm she had dreamt of so often, where fears and guilt fell under primal grunting drives. To be greased and slippy not knowing who was doing what to her where or why and, oh, mama, am I a bad girl who deserves a whupping coz I bin dirty?

The men blinked.

Some went back to their conversations about the state of the food, if that’s what you call it, when their parole was due, and what a bitch she was, no sooner was he thrown into the jammer when she’d gone off with her cousin like he always knew she would. Living in Chicago, but, heh, he’d find ‘em when he got out. Which, due to the body count in the basement, wouldn’t be any time soon.

Others began to work out with Pythagorean maths the viablity of breaking out and drew sketches in the dust. Hey, if someone could get in so easily, surely they could get out.

“Jeez, looks like a sow,” someone said.

“Heck, I’m married. Old lady’d kill me.”

“I might be tempted if you was a buck, but we got plenty of them in here. All you can eat, ‘specially on shower days.”

“Hey, last time ah saw a woman naked I’d just strangled her.” Then louder for the guard, “‘Cept it wasn’t me. That’s what ma lawyer says.”

One huddle of bredren called upon the almighty to smite the Jezabel thrown into their midst as a supreme test which they were up to. Oh, yes, they were up to it all right and would not fail. The more they were up to it the bigger the test and the greater the glory of heaven, o lord.

“Here, sister,” said the Christian, averting his eyes. “Have my jacket. Are you saved?”

Maybe she should have asked for the “trussed up like a chicken” extra. A bargain at five hundred dollars down from a grand if you ordered within the fourteen day sale period. But she’d be needing her hands and so she'd declined.

She threw off the grey denim he was draping around her shoulders, hitching it up each time it slid off her oil-slick flesh .

“Hey. Hey! What is wrong with you? Hey, you with the jacket. Don’t look away. Look at ME! No, not into my beautiful baby blues. Look at me — here!”

Fifty pairs of eyes looked where she directed.

“Oh, I hate it when they look freshy plucked like that.”

She dropped her fists onto her hips. She was angry now.

“What they do? Put bromide in your coffee?”

“Damn sure yells like my old woman. You got a light, lady?”

“Where’d you expect me to keep matches? Oh, yeah, sure. I got a Zippo stashed away. Why don’tcha come and look for it?”

An elderly guard rushed across from the tower, clutching his gun to his chest and tugging his cap down firmly to reinforce his authority. Stumbling to the scene of the excitment-free zone, he chattered into his radio: “Chuck, we got us another one.”

“You all come here like you’re Catherine The Nerve or Belle du frickin' Jour or some sort of Eurotrash prevert,” said the Governor in his office. She perched on the chair on an old denim shirt someone had had the caution to throw over it first, sipping a glass of water, looking like a schoolgirl in front of the principle. “Them French. Damn degenerates. Gimme Liberty fries any day. I’m a hard working Joe with a job to do. And you come in here disturbing my prisoners? Some of them are sensitive. Now, go home.”

She walked back through the prison, past the prisoners filing in after their exercise break, and out through the front gate.

I am SO getting a refund, she promised herself.

[copyright applies]

Greased Up And Ready To Go: short story by Madam Miaow

Private Eye just gave the most damning review to an anthology of chick lit called In Bed With, which is supposed to be all about sex. “No crass wordplay or creamy cliche goes away unbludgeoned. Bushes get trimmed, the word ‘come’ is mutilated beyond recognition, chests are always ample and curves glorious.” I thought, hmm, I can do that.

So they finally greased her up and threw her over the prison yard wall.

She’d heard of this fabled activity so often in her life, as have we all. A strange unlikely event that only happens in bar-room banter and TV comedy scripts. Yet here she was.

Naked.

Shivering in her fresh bikini wax and three hundred dollar haircut.

Oiled.

Waiting.

She’d paid her five thousand dollars to the organisation she’d found on the internet. Oh, yes, she’d eventually succumbed to the inevitable despite years of tutting at the plethora of sex that threatened to overwhelm her family, just like every other nice middle-class mother with kids about to graduate. But with a husband who’d long ago abandoned passion, she’d been vulnerable. Like an overwound elastic band, something had to snap.

She’d sighed as she remembered the early days, when sex was urgent and went on all night and they’d slept into the afternoon. Then they married and, what with jobs and practical day-to-day matters, sex had settled to a pleasant twice a week. Then the twice a week had halved. A bad chest infection that lasted all winter had provided an excuse for a drop to monthly forays into the world of sensuality — they’d never gotten back into the swing of things after she’d nursed him back to health. And then it had stopped. Except for Christmas and birthday treats. And even then ... ye gods! Three minutes? Yes. She had timed it.

Cookery was her favourite way to fill the void. You kill the dying hours preparing the meal and then you get to eat it. At least her mouth was having a good time. Food was her obsession and she had the love handles to prove it, even if there was no love to put them to good use. Internet searches for recipes occasionally led to those sites where some poor soul’s lost daughters and errant sons disported themselves shamelessly. Who’d have thought that sandwiches, cream pies and the humble roast could have laid the way to such loathsome degredation?

At first the paysites kept her out. Who in their right mind leaves a credit-card trail leading back to their upstanding lives and their real identity? Christ! She was chair of the PTA, after all. Then the free porn gathered in wave after wave and washed up on her dry sandy beach. Fear of discovery and discoveries subsided under something stronger. Driven by curiosity, she told herself, her fingers had slipped inexorably, first to the laptop keyboard where swift eager keystrokes soon took her to her chosen destination, and then to her own lap and shuddering dissatisfaction.

They say your sexuality only gets stronger as you grow older. If you are a woman. What sort of cosmic joke was this? Peaking at fifty for womankind, men are left trailing from seventeen. Where the hell are you supposed to cross over? She did the maths and wept. Then she clicked on the link that had been calling to her these past months.

Ecce femina!

She stood there, arms outstretched and waited to be overwhelmed and overpowered by sheer unbridled male sexuality. Men denied the most basic satisfaction, tortured by forced abstinence for years with no prospect of relief, riven by deep subterranean urges stoking up like magma under Mount St Helens. She wanted to be there when it blew, to feel it blast right through her, to be taken to a realm she had dreamt of so often, where fears and guilt fell under primal grunting drives. To be greased and slippy not knowing who was doing what to her where or why and, oh, mama, am I a bad girl who deserves a whupping coz I bin dirty?

The men blinked.

Some went back to their conversations about the state of the food, if that’s what you call it, when their parole was due, and what a bitch she was, no sooner was he thrown into the jammer when she’d gone off with her cousin like he always knew she would. Living in Chicago, but, heh, he’d find ‘em when he got out. Which, due to the body count in the basement, wouldn’t be any time soon.

Others began to work out with Pythagorean maths the viablity of breaking out and drew sketches in the dust. Hey, if someone could get in so easily, surely they could get out.

“Jeez, looks like a sow,” someone said.

“Heck, I’m married. Old lady’d kill me.”

“I might be tempted if you was a buck, but we got plenty of them in here. All you can eat, ‘specially on shower days.”

“Hey, last time ah saw a woman naked I’d just strangled her.” Then louder for the guard, “‘Cept it wasn’t me. That’s what ma lawyer says.”

One huddle of bredren called upon the almighty to smite the Jezabel thrown into their midst as a supreme test which they were up to. Oh, yes, they were up to it all right and would not fail. The more they were up to it the bigger the test and the greater the glory of heaven, o lord.

“Here, sister,” said the Christian, averting his eyes. “Have my jacket. Are you saved?”

Maybe she should have asked for the “trussed up like a chicken” extra. A bargain at five hundred dollars down from a grand if you ordered within the fourteen day sale period. But she’d be needing her hands and so she'd declined.

She threw off the grey denim he was draping around her shoulders, hitching it up each time it slid off her oil-slick flesh .

“Hey. Hey! What is wrong with you? Hey, you with the jacket. Don’t look away. Look at ME! No, not into my beautiful baby blues. Look at me — here!”

Fifty pairs of eyes looked where she directed.

“Oh, I hate it when they look freshy plucked like that.”

She dropped her fists onto her hips. She was angry now.

“What they do? Put bromide in your coffee?”

“Damn sure yells like my old woman. You got a light, lady?”

“Where’d you expect me to keep matches? Oh, yeah, sure. I got a Zippo stashed away. Why don’tcha come and look for it?”

An elderly guard rushed across from the tower, clutching his gun to his chest and tugging his cap down firmly to reinforce his authority. Stumbling to the scene of the excitment-free zone, he chattered into his radio: “Chuck, we got us another one.”

“You all come here like you’re Catherine The Nerve or Belle du frickin' Jour or some sort of Eurotrash prevert,” said the Governor in his office. She perched on the chair on an old denim shirt someone had had the caution to throw over it first, sipping a glass of water, looking like a schoolgirl in front of the principle. “Them French. Damn degenerates. Gimme Liberty fries any day. I’m a hard working Joe with a job to do. And you come in here disturbing my prisoners? Some of them are sensitive. Now, go home.”

She walked back through the prison, past the prisoners filing in after their exercise break, and out through the front gate.

I am SO getting a refund, she promised herself.

[copyright applies]