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

influenced by what I have read in books and I have won prizes for my first novel, The Chain Whistler, a historical romance set in Colonial India.”

ESCAPE

Victor Qubert adjusted the cutlery in the kitchen drawer.

“Why won’t you stay straight?!”

He hated their bad angles.

“Please Victor,” said his wife. “Don't.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,” said Victor.

His wife gave him a hug.

“I think this new therapy of yours is really working out. You’ve not talked about our finances all morning. We’re going to have a great Christmas this year.”

“Did you pay the gas and electric!?”

“Please Victor,” she trembled. “Don’t.”

“You're always controlling me! You’re no better than the numbers! You're no better than the smudges! The smudges! The Smudge!”

Victor was slapping himself around the head.

“Please Victor!” pleaded his wife. “You’ll wake the children up and we haven’t put out their presents yet.”

Victor angrily turned towards the cutlery in the kitchen drawer.

“I have to get these straight first!”

His wife ran away into the living room and did some of her usual crying.

“It’s not good enough,” said Victor as he aligned the tea spoons. “Can’t she see this is important? Every morning I come down here and she and those shitting kids have screwed them right out of ORDER!”

“They’ll never be perfect Victor Qubert,” said a voice from inside the kettle.

Victor turned to the kettle and raised his fist.

“Leave me alone! You’ve caused enough trouble! You started all of this!”

“There is something missing from that drawer, Victor Qubert. One of your children left a butter knife in the sink.”

Victor punched the kettle from its mooring.

“You think I would trust you after what happened last time?!”

Victor stood triumphant with his foot on the dead kettle. He felt free.

“You’ll never be free, Victor Qubert!” said the air vent above the stove.

“SCREW YOU!” shouted Victor.

He grabbed his car keys and walked past his crying wife and out of the house.

* * *

Victor Qubert drove down the road laughing. He was driving at one hundred and twenty miles an hour on the dual carriageway. He wound down his window. He swerved between the other cars. They beeped at him.

“BEEP BEEP!” shouted Victor Qubert. “BEEP BEEP! BEEP BEEP! BEEP BEEP! BEEP BEEP!”

No matter how loud he beeped he could still hear the Smudge.

“I love you Victor Qubert.”

Victor pressed hard on the accelerator.

PITY

They queued all the way out around the Flat Exterior. Vertex analysed their water-gunked forms.

“Disgusting,” configured Vertex.

They splodged up to the Reception Fold one by one. They clutched bags of rubbish. Vertex couldn’t believe the Overmind had opened the Boundary to these wet, human refugees. These faulty amphibians.

“Next.” emitted Vertex.

A fat lump squidged into the chair opposite Vertex.

“Please complete this cube,” emitted Vertex. “Upon completion of this cube you will be assigned a protective cube.”

The fat lump looked at the simple, eight-dimensional format of the cube-form with his puzzled, fat splodge eyes.

“I can’t see any cube,” said the fat lump. “Where am I? What is this place? I don’t understand.”

Vertex’s angles held in an integer of impatience.

“Disgusting,” configured Vertex.

“I can’t see any cube!” repeated the fat lump.

“Fill in the cube and you will be assigned a protective cube. Otherwise, you will have to get to the back of the cube queue.”

* * *

Meanwhile, in the Counting Column, numbers were counted.

“We have nine hundred and eighty-five billion more of them,” said Spreadsheet. “What is the Overmind conflating?”

THE PEACE-MAKER

We are free to sit, think and do nothing. There is no threat of war anywhere, not even a threat of argument. There has never has been any conflict ever, not since the Peace-Maker changed history and saved us.

If we were to start a fight with each other, the Peace-Maker would arrive in a swirl of vortex, wearing his tight jeans, check shirt, cowboy hat. He would spin his gun and spit a hunk of brown tobacco on the floor. He would shoot us both.

The Peace-Maker is never wrong. He stops an argument from ever happening. He fixes history. The Peace-Maker makes our peace. He is our Peace-Maker. He is the Peace-Maker.

The oldest statue in the universe is of the Peace-Maker. Every night we stand by the Peace-Maker and we thank the Peace-Maker for making this peace.

REASON

On the television screen they sat and talked in chairs.

"What was your motivation for making art?" asked a concealer squelched head.

"I did it because I wanted to be on the telly," answered the other squelch form. "I wanted to be on the telly."

* * *

Sat at a dressing room table, make up smudged, wig askew, the old man wibbled all smudgy muscled in his silk dressing gown.

"I'll be remembered!"

He cried eyeliner tears.

"I'll be remembered for nothing!"

His son held up a camera.

"That's right," said his son. "Cry for Youtube, come on pops, let's see those tears."

LAVENDER

In St Paul's Cathedral, Garry Lavender sat between two old women.

The organ played and Garry looked up at the arrangements of ornate mathematics; tidy, rehearsed and geometric towards one point.

After the organ had finished playing, Garry went to light a candle for his departed friends. He looked directly at the flame and remembered so many.

* * *

Outside the cathedral, Garry sat on a bench and fed bread to the pigeons. Some of the pigeons had missing feet, disease and poverty had rotted them away. It wasn’t fair that these creatures were further from Heaven's glow. Their sphere wasn't fair.

Garry opened his notebook and drew pictures of the dying birds. He wondered how they fit on the Circle of Ascension?

An old, homeless man sat next to Garry and looked him up and down.

“You some kind of homo?” asked the homeless man.

Garry ignored the homeless man.

“Why are you wearing pink? Are you looking to get a hiding?”

Garry put his book in his pocket and walked away, tripping but not falling.

“You’re looking for a good