Hole Punch by Simmons, Garth (the dot read aloud TXT) 📕

"Give us our seventy-four cubic percent of the Moticon Space Turd Industry or we'll take you down Bumface!"

"Screw you Cockhead! I'll give you seventy-four cubic percent of nothing at all! If you weren't my own piss and shit I'd blur your temporal boundaries into a white holes prolapse!"

MINE

Her face is an old melted candle in a damp cellar. Her phone rings twice in three hours.

“So busy today,” she wheezed. “It’s like Bedlam.”

Deeper underground, wax children push wheelbarrows loaded with the Earth's molten core.

WASTES

This is the wasteland where the coal mine used to be.

“This area is not safe,” says the sign.

This area is definitely not safe, a girl my age was beaten to death here when she was walking home from school. Killed by kids from Armthorpe.

A stray dog barks at me. I grab a brick and as I beat the dog's head in I swell with the pride for the industry that the brick represents: the bygone beauty of this wonderful village that was castrated by the international companies and the politicians who took away our pit.

I stand over dog's brick-smashed skull. It seems to me a bloody metaphor for the struggles of the northern proletariat. How much more blood needs to spill before the fat cats in parliament get their fingers out and give us back our unions?

* * *

Meanwhile, on the main road of Edlington, Doncaster, in her semi-detached house, an old lady in her rocking chair chews the scabs off her fingers.

“I must kill her! I must kill her!”

She looks at the fireplace and remembers back when there was coal in it.

“I must kill her. Kill her good.”

Behind her, sitting on another rocking chair, next to the broken dog ornament, there was a ghost version of herself.

“I died twenty years ago,” said the ghost.

The old lady rocked angrier in her chair.

“Then I’ll kill Thatcher!”

The ghost laughed.

* * *

The puppet's expression is painted kind, honest and caring. The puppet speaks to the unemployed.

“We need equality! We need coal! We need our mines back! We need our factories producing home-grown products! Home-grown industries! We need to be united! Into one solitary cause! One unity! Let me work for you! Let me lead your cause for the betterment of everyone. Equality for all! Unite behind me for your equality! For your children! For the North! I want you to raise your fists in support! All of you together! Raise your fists!”

They raise their fists.

“A better future for all!”

The puppet sits at his autograph desk.

The puppet collects their direct debits.

“It is important to listen to the concerns of ordinary, working people.”

GRIBBLESMEAR

“Here comes Gribblesmear!”

Laughed the townsfolk as the man in the dunce’s hat walked pigeon-toed down the street.

“Dance for us then Gribblesmear!”

Laughed the normal people as the man danced on a little wooden box in the town square.

“Let’s throw him down some stairs!”

Laughed the moral majority who threw him down some stairs.

“Get out of town freak! And you are a freak as well!”

Laughed the virtuous community as they pushed the man's corpse off the town wall.

* * *

The grandfather read the story of Gribblesmear to his grandchildren.

“And that’s why you don’t want to be a weirdo around these parts,” he tells them.

STERILISED

Renee Anthony swung the dead baby into the furnace. Then she pulled a dead man across the floor by his ankles. She fed him into the grinder.

After she got rid of all the bodies, Renee waddled her bulky form upstairs to get her coat from the distillery farm cloak room.

“Renee,” said Mr Gringus: Head of Waste. “Can I have a word?”

“Mr Gringus?”

“You’ve been a wonderful employee and we appreciate your diligence in the collection and burning of our waste, but I am sorry to say we will not require your services anymore. Yorkshire is sterilised.”

“Mr Gringus?”

“You cannot come back tomorrow, there is no more work, this area is clean, we are sending you to London. Your train leaves in two hours.”

"But Mr Gringus! I hate Southerners!”

THE EYE

Blood clots in the veins of the great, big eye in the sky.

The purpled clouds bend pitiless pits.

A sub-molecular splodge of pointlessness.

The focal point of the great, big eye in the sky.

Gathered and dried on the ground beneath.

COLLECTIVE

The work day is over so they put down their farming tools.

They had worked well today.

Tonight they could relax into their breeding programs.

Tomorrow, they would work more.

The day after tomorrow, they would work more.

The day after that, more work.

On Saturday, they'll take a journey to the Collectivist Leisure Cell. They have many leisure activities in the Cell. Activities to make them stronger and better workers. Activities to reinforce their equality. Films and songs to celebrate their Collectivist Nation. Films and songs to celebrate their wonderful, powerful and beautiful Collectivist Nation.

PLOOTOID PRIME

Plootoid Prime was the most expensive retirement complex in the Earth Empire. An asteroid belt converted into a gridlocked complex of Modernist-Revivalist Architecture; complete with municipal parks with forests stretching far into mathematically distorted space-time and a vast crystal viewing cabin of the Wastage Nebula. The residents of Plootoid Prime played games and injected interactive cubes. They loved to relive their glory years.

“Do you remember how they screamed?” laughed Spearhead Exnate Obliterate.

Plootoid Prime was so expensive only the most exploitative and industrious citizens of the Earth Empire could afford to retire there.

One day, the Space Gypsies arrived in their Space Caravans and camped on Plootoid Prime's municipal parks.

“This is unreasonable!” shouted Obelisk Howl Liquidation. “I didn’t liquidate entire civilisations in order for these alien freaks to camp here for free!”

“We are dealing with the issue sir,” assured the Plootoid Prime Admin Intelligence. “Law enforcement are calculating how long it will take to legally move the Traveller Encampments from Plootoid Prime. I guarantee that these calculations