Category: Flash (page 2 of 5)

The Editor

The Editor is a pulp-action thriller about an elite editorial freelancer who takes on a big assignment for a super-secret branch of the US intelligence services. The job involves multiple authors, nested revisions, thousands of reviewer comments and a mysterious style guide.

Our hero, who is both linguistically and editorially ripped, operates at a level above and beyond most editors, employing a fiendishly elaborate armada of macros, speed-reading techniques and version-control software before even reading the source text.

Rich and humorous detail is provided by a dedicated squad of copywriters, proofreaders and spellcheckers who assist the editor by performing the referencing grunt work, among other tasks. But complications arise as a result of mismatched file formats, unrealistic client expectations and changes to the original brief that go all the way to the office of the President.

Despite a series of setbacks as well as attempted sabotage on the part of a nameless contributing author, the editor successfully produces a version of the document that is totally free of errors, bodaciously structured and indexed, insanely readable and delivered in .rtf, XHTML and PDF formats.

Highly charged, meticulously detailed and surprisingly realistic, The Editor features an offbeat cast of characters, sparse yet grammatically correct dialogue and daring feats of rewriting.

Suggested tagline: No more tracked changes — this time it’s final (.docx).

In the Republic

My flight had been delayed by an awkward incident during a brief stopover in Z—. One of the passengers — an older man in a crumpled suit — had been pulled from the boarding queue. Two persons, who did not look as if they belonged to airport security, searched the man’s carry-on luggage.

From my place in the queue I observed him as they pulled out first a newspaper and then what could have been a paperback novel. The man in the suit did not flinch.

The book had a green matte cover with gold lettering in a language I did not recognise. As the official flicked through its pages I could see that it was unread, brand new.

A sales receipt fell onto the floor of the terminal building. The man in the crumpled suit noticed this but the official did not (and his colleague was busy calling the incident in on her mobile telephone, in any case). Presently, they led the man away.

As our ageing Bombardier turboprop banked and turned over the marble mountaintops, I marvelled at my own audacity: I had slipped the receipt between the pages of my debut poetry collection, somehow certain that both it and the unreadable message scrawled on its reverse side would be safe from harm once I arrived in the Republic.

Tracer

Even at the very end, when it seemed almost hopeless to everyone else, I still believed there was a small chance they’d make it. I fact I’d held onto that belief — stubbornly, I admit, and without logic — since the beginning of their journey.

Of course, I’d had no way of knowing who they actually were when I accepted the gig. All I knew then was that there were five of them: two adults and three small children, ages undefined. But there was something about one of the adults that caught my attention — a kind of glitch in the statistics cascading down my device’s screen — that caused me to ignore our otherwise strict and unmoving protocols, for the duration of the mission at least.

It started out bleak and cold, as expected. Early-morning traces in midwinter are rarely bright. Each of the five subjects’ vitals indicated sleepiness and lethargy. Only the youngest had slept for anything like the number of hours recommended for an ordinary day — let alone a long journey.

They emerged from the house before dawn, their blurs of dark clothing highlighted momentarily beneath each working streetlight, each snapshot shape crowned with drizzling rain. The taller of the adults dragged a suitcase in one hand, a child with backpack in the other. The second adult — the one whose vitals had piqued my curiosity the night before — pushed the pram containing the youngest child, while herding the third child down the slippery path.

They arrived at the first of the day’s destinations, a bus stop, ahead of schedule. The adults sat the two backpacked children on the bench, somewhat out of the rain, and angled the pram into the corner of the shelter. I traced them from the dry warmth of my vehicle, noting that the brief pause in their onward journey had no discernible effect on either of the adults’ body battery levels. In fact, they were already decreasing.

Presently, a red bus arrived and I handed over tracing to whoever was already onboard. I watched as the adults entered the bus by the back door, wrangling suitcase, pram and children into the zone reserved for parties such as theirs. The doors of the bus folded inwards with a wet squelch and they were gone.

I thought they’d make it easily but as it turned out I was wrong. Still, in that instant before their vitals disappeared from my console, I couldn’t help wishing it had turned out differently. That they’d managed to catch the connecting bus, then the train, the second train and the ferry.

But my reverie was interrupted by a fresh notification from my device, and my vehicle’s ignition engaging automatically. For a time, we followed the bus’s red cat-eye lights, but then the vehicle peeled off at a t-junction of its own accord, and I lost sight of them for good.

Strike Cities

Empty skyscrapers come bellowing the tune of the strike cities – across the railways and slipways, down the random boulevardes and blasted arcades, through the monumental parks and plastic conduits – their emissaries calling, each cubicle mapping the terrain of your capital, the inside of your liberty bell.

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Wimbled[t]on

The blisters on my feet have begun to weep. My soles, oh my soles, they’re red and inflamed like my sunburnt knees. The zinc cream tastes like acid on my lips. I can’t swallow, and my elbow’s sick of tennis. History can be read in a forehand, a groundstroke. The only mystery is the spin on the ball. Little shards of green fibre explode from the racquet, whilst others remain caught there, in between the strings, like patterns for impossible socks. Mine have worn completely through, exposing my soles (oh my soles!) to the unsympathetic manipulations of my Volleys. From the serving line I can see a row of pink faces, turning left then right like so many clowns waiting to go down on a ping pong ball. Will your turn ever come? I clutch soft fluffy toys to my breast. The miniature koala’s feet claw at my shirtsleeve like a pathetic comedian begging for one last gag. You don’t make me laugh. You make me want to find a cure for idiots. My wristbands have begun to produce sweat more effectively than a resalination plant. I shudder at the thought of putting my Ivan Lendl designer track pants back on after the game. I hate the post-match coldness, the stiffness of limbs, the rubber-necked journalists. Fuck them. And fuck the organisers with their “only questions about the match, nothing else.” Well, maybe I am concerned about global warming. Hell, if the drought continues, we won’t be playing on grass courts anymore. I prefer clay courts anyway. If they were good enough for Evonne … Well, maybe I am interested in discussing my private life. I’d like William Hurt to play me in the biopic of my life. With all the wizardry they’ve got these days, I could have Hurt for the close-ups and Jeremy Bettany for the action shots. The choreographed rallies would be endless, mesmerising, vertigo-inducing. Maybe I prefer to discuss other players’ games, instead of my own. Maybe I want to read poetry at press conferences, or fart. But here’s the dickhead organiser again, like all the rest of them, has-beens, consigned to holding the rubber during Davis Cup matches. Their hairstyles are abominable. Eras pierced. That’s not irony, in fact it’s a rather neat phrase. End of an ear. Mary Pierce has infected eras. I long for the days of matted hair and red-white-and-blue headbands. Swedish tennis fans arouse me but their face paint I can do without. White shorts on men should be banned but there is something magical in the way a woman’s tennis skirt rides up over the ball shoved beneath her elasticised underpants. I will face three thousand projectiles fired by the Dalek-like ball machine. I have never liked kids whose caps are bigger than their heads. Death to Gatorade. I want to break ties for a living. I want to measure net heights for a living. I want to build a practice wall for every indigenous kid who wants to play tennis. The greatest game ever invented is called “Community”.