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

Everyone had a bit of a dance and the people on stage jutted their big, serious heads back and forth. I wanted to vomit myself dead.

Afterwards, the organiser with the special hat talked to his friends, they were all nodding.

“Music is the binding glue of society! I would be nothing without music! Music is what brings us together! What do all cultures have in common? Music! Music is universal language!”

I hate music.

CREATURE RBX11A

They had to turn off its database as it was time for its centennial reboot. Creature RBX11A relaxed the USB implants from its datacore only to blink, scared and lost, at the plastic, real surface of the Non-Polygon.

“I NOT KNOW OF WHOM I BE WITHOUT I AM CENTRIFAX!” cried Creature RBX11A, weakly flailing its clamps.

MIX

She opened all the tins in the kitchen and poured their contents into a mixing bowl. She squeezed in a whole bottle of ketchup. She threw in an entire loaf of bread. She mixed it together with her hands. She banged her fists rhythmically on the kitchen counter. She roared a sustained howl and submerged her face into her beloved nightly mix.

* * *

She lay with a big tummy on a hospital bed.

A doctor looked at her over his glasses and tutted:

"Some naughty girl has eaten all the Easter Eggs this year."

* * *

Back home, she sat in her new wheelchair and she opened a letter from Animal Services:

"We have confiscated your dogs and they are being sent to fat camp. Then they will be adopted by someone who doesn't stuff them with chocolate and sausages."

Her numb, chubby hands tensed and the paper shook.

"Not my babies!"

* * *

The Local MP laughed.

"Greedy little bitch!"

He deleted her email and forgot about it.

SALTED FOG

The Queen Dung tightened the string of her sweaty oral straps around the excited, tooth-barbed, stickle-prick tower of King Almost Came.

His every scalp-scale defence opened to release a spunky smog mist. Every citizen of Pervert Town languidly lapped at the moist, salted fog.

Sequentially they jerked and rubbed themselves in hope of creating a Mexican wave of cock pukings and fanny squirts.

PRINTER MURDER

The office engineer opened up the photocopier and was so surprised by the contents he vomited.

The coroner opened up the corpse of the office manager and the corpse was full of photocopier parts.

The newspapers were full of articles about this strange murder.“OFFICE MANAGER'S ORGANS SWAPPED WITH PHOTOCOPIER PARTS”

“Care to enlighten the public on who committed this grisly murder?” asked the reporting reporter.

“No,” said the investigating investigator. “We have not investigated it yet.”

The murderer shouted at himself in a stationary cupboard.

“My manager blamed me for using all the printer ink! So I put my manager in the printer and I put the printer in her!”

There was a knock on the stationary cupboard door.

"Leave me be! I need my personal bloody SPACE!"

THE BAFFLING CASE OF THE SNAIL EGG HOSTAGE SITUATION

Chitters the hamster ate grain from his bowl. His cage was next to an apartment window which looked out at the Martian Habitation Dome townscape of girders and hydroponics.

Chitters paid no attention to the townscape outside and he paid even less attention to the hostage negotiation taking place inside the apartment.

“I want forty thousand metacoins in my account by the end of the day,” demanded Max Freeway to the creature on the vidscreen.

The Snail Lord Sleed laughed.

“Or what?” he asked oozingly.

“Or I’m going fry all your eggs and eat them with beans on toast!” Max held a spherical snail egg to the screen. “If you want these eggs back in your clutch then process the money straight to my account or else drop it off at my apartment: Z26B White Tower. My name is Max Freeway. My account number is -”

The Snail Lord Sleed laughed so hard bubbles blew from his barnacles.

“Why are you laughing? Oh wait! I just gave you my details!”

Max switched off the screen and grabbed the bag of eggs. He looked at Chitters in his cage.

“Sorry boy, I’m going to have to leave before the Police get here.”

Max Freeway opened the window and clambered outside. Chitters went to sleep.

* * *

Max Freeway clung to a girder, one hundred metres high. A Police helicopter pulled up beside him.

“Max Freeway!” shouted Sheriff Den Apparti through his megaphone.

Max Freeway dangled the bag of eggs in one hand.

“I’ll drop them!”

“Max Freeway!” repeated Sheriff Den Apparti. “Those eggs are not fertilised!”

“What?!” shouted Max.

“THOSE EGGS ARE NOT FERTILISED!”

“You’re lying!”

“No I’m not!”

“All cops are liars!” shouted Max Freeway. “You're not taking me alive.”

He let himself drop from the girder.

* * *

Later that evening, Max Freeway lay bandaged and asleep in a bed at the Saint Bowie Hospital. Sheriff Den Apparti paced back and forth across the linoleum floor.

“Because you revealed your name and where you were, I was able to deduce your location and stop any further kidnappings. Another victory for the Martian Police, and to me, for solving the Baffling Case of the Snail Egg Hostage Situation.”

POST-SPUNK

He stood in the smoking area of yet another pub. He was fifty-eight years old but he could still impress the girls with his stories of post punk.

“Yeah, I saw the B52s before they were big.”

She took a sip of her glass.

“Okay,” she said.

She fumbled in her handbag for her cigarettes and he got an eyeful of her cleavage.

I’d like to get myself between those B52s, he thought.

“I saw Joy Division back in the old Factory records days,” he said.

She glanced to the side.

“Really?” she said.

“Yeah.”

I’d like to get inside her Joy Division, he laughed inwardly.

“And the Happy Mondays,” he added.

When I wake up with her, after a whole weekend of squirting, that’d be a