Contributor: David Macpherson

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A guy at the bar let the girl go. Tells us she was hot, she was tight, she was worth drawing on a fresh piece of good paper. He tells us she was into him, she smiled and fluttered and hummed desire. When they met for designer hot dogs and Fresca, he gave her up though. “Drool was coming out of her mouth,” he says.

We don’t get what he means. “So was she really hungry,” one of us asks.

“No,” he says. She wasn’t that bright. Dumber than a bagful of poorly chosen metaphors. “I need a smart girl. A girl who can talk and not just talk. She got to have thoughts about politics. And a job that does more than pay the rent. “So after the restaurant I said goodbye and that’s it.”

We married guys see this a minor sacrilege. For we are casual sex rubberneckers. We are tourists in the land of promiscuity. We take pictures, buy postcards, mouth off that its not as good as it used to be, too commercialized. We will not concede he may have done the right thing. “How can you let her go,” we ask.

“She wasn’t for me. She and I had nothing to talk about.”

We look at him. We stare at the words sailing past us. We speak different dialects. We almost comprehend was the other is attempting to confess.


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Author: David Macpherson

Contributor: Peter McMillan

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Lately, he hadn't been feeling himself. Overworked, burnt out. Covering for this person then that one. Pulled in all directions. Spread thin and stretched beyond his limits.

It was standing room only on the morning express train, and he stood wearing a freshly-altered suit with the back of his head mashed up against the roof of the car. In twenty years riding the train, he'd never been so cramped. From his vantage point, he could see the little heads, tucked behind newspapers, chattering away on the phone, or retreating behind shuttered eyelids and pulsing earbuds.

At Union he realized he was stuck and couldn't easily dislodge himself. Twisting his broad hips and long legs to the edge of the aisle, he watched upside down as the passengers shoved under and past, paying him no more mind than they would a column in the station concourse.

Once the car was empty, he was able to kneel and bend until he came loose, and in a semi-squatting stance, still stiff, he waddled out the door. After unfolding to his full height, he looked up and down the tracks for the nearest exit. It was on the other side of the tracks. Seeing that no one was looking, he grabbed the CCTV camera and pointed it away, and in one great stride crossed from platform 5B to 5A. Squeezing through the narrow double exit doors, catapulting down the station steps, and finally swimming above a swirling stream of tiny heads on short, bifurcated pedestals, he made his way to street level.

It was too early for the sun. The city lights cast faint shadows in the dawn. Cabbies honked and there was a multilingual cacophony of loud and excited voices in the cab rank. Pedestrians and drivers dared and double dared over the last bit of amber in the traffic light. A homeless person, unable to get his attention, spat at him as he walked by holding a handkerchief to his face. A gaggle of teenage girls crashed into him and, on turning their heads, screamed and ran.

He hurried away himself. In two effortless steps he reached the opposite curb where he knocked over the pompous doorman of the Royal who was signaling a limousine to pull up. Getting to his feet, the servant, red-faced and ripe, with a tone that comes from years of service, launched into a fusillade of spiteful and contemptuous remarks. Mid-sentence, the lumbering colossus, provoked, gazed down on the round, red, balding head and squished it between thumb and forefinger.

He waited in a makeshift jail in the port lands, while the authorities debated their extrajudicial options, namely whether to ship him to the zoo or the museum. It was the museum. There, a new tailor—this one a PhD in anthropology—outfitted him with clothing suitable for a wide range of exhibits BCE.


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The author is a freelance writer and ESL instructor who lives on the northwest shore of Lake Ontario with his wife and two flat-coated retrievers. In 2012, he published his first book, Flash! Fiction.

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Author: Peter McMillan

Contributor: David Strong

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Habit assists her. Founded upon an irrepressible indulgence to sanctify the past, she picks up the black ceramic pot off the stove and surveys the room. Strewn newspapers carpet the dirt floor; a bony, spindly cat weaves in and out of the kitchen table’s legs purring for its morning meal of cheese and whatever other scraps inevitably fall. Satisfied that all is in order, she pours a cup and sits on a cracked oak chair, creaking perilously above its head. Nonplussed, it meanders from one leg to the other to ensure as much patronage as possible. Today it’s Gruyère and toasted crackers. Askance, she spies a dark purple binding on the fourth shelf. The gold embossed title has long since faded into the rusty lettering seen on the fishing trawlers swaying back and forth down at the docks.

“There it is,” she murmurs to herself while placing her finger on the rim and rubbing it full circle. Before she can move, the cat jumps on her lap and paws at the slice sitting on the saucer’s edge. Her hand slides over its head, pressing down its ears before slipping underneath to feel the sonorous purring. Its meditative rhythm is a welcome companion to morning’s first light. She closes her eyes, recalling sleep’s dreamy peace and anticipating those under the sun.

Thoughts of youth dance in her head. Sitting by her father’s feet, listening intently about explorers, architects, and other vanguard inventors. The wonders create a permanent smile on jubilant, fresh cheeks, now tallow and wrinkled. “Can I build a weathervane that captures the lightening someday,” she wonders aloud. “Of course dear, you can build anything you want.” Sundry tales twirl about in her head, enlivened by his intonation of anticipation and amazement. That is what life is meant to be. Yet, it doesn’t matter where she travels: Macchu Picchu, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, or Angkor Wat. The genius underpinning their glory is lost because he is not there. He was supposed to teach her how to make these adventures real. But his heart couldn’t take it. Though she tried, nothing—or more properly—no one could compare to his constant devotion. But life, as he taught it, told her not to give up, not to rest at base camp. Each day she dedicates her life to recapturing this truth; it lies in these books and the memory of his baritone giving each achievement its due.

The cat’s agility shows how movement and space, flowing fluidly from here to there, epitomizes the philosophy he imparted. It cocks its ears when a cacophony of feline shrills and bellows announces the daily trek down to the boats.

“They’re calling. Just remember to come back tonight.”

It perches itself on the windowsill, looking back before bounding down. Free from its kneading paws, she stands and walks towards her father’s monument, sidestepping the Sunday edition. Despite its age, no dust collects underneath her nails as she pulls its free. Her fingers trace the faded letters. It seems like yesterday when he stroked her hair and nothing of the world’s indifference entered into their home. Drifting back to the wooden chair, she opens the book, but the words lost their force long ago. Meaning occurs only through reminiscence, vivifying what was once felt. Closing it, she places her hand on the worn, grainy leather cover where he had so often placed his. This smallest of acts allows her to live in the moment and not the next, to isolate and luxuriate in an instant of love that encompasses both body and soul. A journey that surpasses all others.


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As an English professor at the University of Texas at Tyler, I have published extensively in non-fiction. “Memory’s Touch” is only my third endeavor into pure fiction. My most recent story is found in the summer issue of Full of Crow.

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Author: David Strong

Contributor: Eric Suhem

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Bill sat on an overstuffed bag of feathers, beaks, guts, spleens, stomachs, livers and eyes. He could hear the faint chirping and quacking emanate from the chair. He was in his den clicking at the television remote control feverishly, wisps of smoke rising. It was 6:02 p.m., and he finally settled on Channel 38 University of the Air, Sky and Galaxy. On the screen, a man was sitting at a wooden desk in front of a blackboard in a stark room. Suddenly the man at the desk, and the blackboard disappeared in a big ball of light that was filling the television screen. “Bill!” it roared, “you are not what you think you are, you are a stream of energy coursing through a body, a vessel, a shell. You are like me!” said the ball of light.

The quacks and chirps from the chair began to get louder and Bill snapped, “Ssshh birds, I’m trying to watch this!” As he uttered those words, the ball of light disappeared from the television screen, and the man reappeared at the desk, frantically hitting the blackboard with a steel pointer and quacking. Bill then slowly murmured, “Hello birds, thank you for letting me enjoy your vessels. When my vessel has deconstructed into a new form, and its pieces fly off in shards of flame, I hope you will enjoy the use of it, just as I have enjoyed the use of yours.”

The chirping and quacking continued from the chair as the ball of light returned to the television, saying, “Yes, you are just a stream of energy coming from the universe.”

Bill’s wife Norma was in the kitchen with their niece, cooking a chicken. Norma heard the commotion and entered the den, where she was instantly alarmed by her husband's appearance. “Bill, you look like you had too many of those 99 cent vitamin packets from the 7-11,” she said in a concerned tone, looking at the array of brochures on their coffee table. “Have you been reading more of those New Age transcendence pamphlets?”

“No dear, I’m fine,” he said, staring at a picture of mallards on the den’s fine-wood-grain-paneled wall.

“We have enough problems just trying to pay the bills, without your excursions into metaphysical whatnot,” said Norma, leaving the room as Bill slowly transformed into a bright ball of light.

When Norma returned to the den, Bill was gone, and on the television screen was a duck, sitting at the desk in front of the blackboard. “Now listen to me, Norma,” said the duck. Norma tried to use the remote clicker, but the television was stuck on Channel 38. "You have enjoyed our vessels, though we are all really one with the universe. Quark-Quark!...I mean Quack-Quack!"

The duck insinuated itself into her being, its webbed feet grabbing hold. It pecked at Norma's conscience, hunting for niblets of corn inside the inner reaches of her cortex gray matter, perching on a cactus of thought beneath the blue shine of her inner cranium. The duck’s bill pecked urgently, as Norma was transformed into a bright ball of light, joining Bill in a new consciousness, in tune with the cosmos.

Bill and Norma’s molecules seemed to have disappeared from the neighborhood, though it was rumored that they were still in the vicinity. Their niece went to the park’s duck pond every week, to sit and listen to the quacking.


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Eric Suhem dwells in office cubicles and ocean waves. His new book 'Dark Vegetables' can be found in the orange hallway (www.orangehallway.com)

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Author: Eric Suhem

Contributor: Pranas Perkunas

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I opened the door one morning to a new world. For the first time, the homeless cats weren’t crying; they asked me if I was hungry. The neighbors' demented dogs refrained from barking against their too-short leashes; instead, they sang sumptuous strains of ancient mermaid songs. I arrived late for work, but my normally severe manager just laughed, clicked his heels, and crooned this little ditty,

Here's a check that should tide you over
for a few million lifetimes or so;
you can stay and groove with us,
or you can happily go.


I surveyed the scene behind him, which consisted chiefly of a bevy of my now-lovely co-workers, their collective youth restored, and their formerly unfortunate features reformed to fit their individual tastes.

An Asian, cosplay princess shining among the others beckoned to me with one of her long, red, plastic boots; so I joined them on a levitating white couch for a while, and for the first time our flesh didn’t flinch to be with each other. We drank some Kool-Aid, but it didn’t kill us; and by the time I departed I was younger--better looking too! It was then that I noticed that one of my loafers had been replaced by a long, red, plastic boot.

In a delirium of damn-that-was-good, I stumbled into a street normally choked with traffic, yet there were no cars, just beaming young people smiling and holding hands. Seeing into my thoughts, one young man said, “Cars hurt people, and road kill ain’t kosher, man.” I tried to further converse, but no matter how quickly I ran, I couldn’t catch up to him as he strolled into the psychedelic sunset.

A singing seal sporting high-heels passed, “No more Re pub li cons and De mo cants-“ An English loon took up the tune, “No more giving our money to banksters!” A whirling carnival of emotions opened within me.

"Had God finally heard us?" I asked a soft, pretty child with hair like a field of dandelions roaring in the breeze.

“Nah, we finally had to fire the bum,” she said while taking a small sign from her basket brimming with keys and kaleidoscopes and hung it right around my neck. The sign sprouted a mouth like a plum and said, “UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT.”


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I teach English in the inner city, and I'm building a colossal Hello Kitty assault robot which I will use to avenge all abused creatures. My favorite authors are Kenneth Patchen and Crad Kilodney.

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Author: Pranas Perkunas

Contributor: Carmen Tudor

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Jenna had grabbed at Doug throughout the entire lights-out ghost tour. The historic mansion’s darkened halls and passages hadn’t affected him at all, so Jenna’s continual grabbing of the back of his shirt caused grimaces the tour guides put down to horrified excitement. They smiled with satisfaction each time the look passed over his features and congratulated themselves on a job well done. The admission price didn’t cover an actual haunting experience; that was left up to the ticket holders.
“Let’s get some photos. The kids will love them.” Jenna seized Doug’s arm and pulled him toward the fountain terrace as the rest of the group followed the guides along the path to the entrance gates. Doug rolled his eyes and followed his wife.
“Maybe we’ll get an orb or something.”
“Maybe.” Shivering in his padded parka, Doug stifled a yawn.
“I’ve never been so scared in my life. The morning room with the little sulking area! The butler’s pantry! Yeesh.”
“The billiards room was all right, I guess. We should go, Jen.”
Jenna snapped a few more moonlight shots of the fountain. “Heehee, what if we checked out that window from the courtyard. We could see if Leila’s ghost is looking down. Spoooky.”
“There’s no ghost in the bloody window.”
The smile fell from Jenna’s face. “I know. I just thought it would be fun.” The camera dangled from its strap around her wrist.
“Fun.”
“Didn’t you enjoy it?”
“We need to go. We’ll get a ticket if we don’t move the car.”
Jenna nodded. They followed the moonlit path away from the fountain terrace and toward the east lawns. The gatehouse outline was visible in the distance.
“Bloody lights are out. What’s that about?”
“Doug. Doug. The lights are out. Try the door.”
Doug tried the door. “They’ve locked up already. ’Sokay. We’ll just, I dunno, climb over the fence here and go around.”
Jenna and her husband struggled over the waist-high garden fence and continued down to the main gates. The heavy nighttime traffic sped by on the other side of the high gate. Jenna noticed the padlock first. “What do we do?”
Doug looked behind him toward the gatehouse path. “Did we take the wrong path out? How’d they get out so quick?”
“What do we do?”
“Climb over, I guess.” He rattled the gate.
“I’m not climbing over that. We’re locked in. We’re actually locked in.”
“Be quiet for a sec; I’m thinking.”
“Sorry. It’s just that we’re locked in. After a ghost tour. I can’t belie—”
“Well, it’s pretty bloody obvious, Jen. There is a lock on the gate.”
Jenna’s eyes narrowed and she opened her mouth to speak.
“Don’t start up again. Look, if you want, you go first. I’ll give ya a boost.”
Jenna’s shrill laugh rang out in the gardens. “I’m not climbing that. Let’s go back up to the house. Someone would be up there locking everything up, I’m sure. Come on. Please.”
“It’ll take two seconds to climb over the gate. I’m not going back through the bloody gardens. Bugger that.”
Jenna grasped Doug’s arm, but he shrugged her off. “Wait till the kids here about this, eh? They won’t believe we got locked in the haunted mansion. Eh?”
“It’s not actually haunted. And we’re not locked in. They just locked the gates. It’s hardly exciting. It’s cold, is what it is. I’m going over. If you wanna go back up to the house, I’ll bring the car around. Too cold to wait around for you to make up your mind.” Doug scaled the gate with ease.
His trembling wife met his gaze through the palings. “I can’t believe you’d leave me in the haunted ghost house.”
“It’s not really haunted. That stuff was so fake it was ridiculous. Stupid.”
“Doug. What do I do? I can’t climb that. There’s no way...” Jenna heaved her foot toward the first rail. “I can’t. I can’t.”
“Just go back up to the house then. I’ll bring the car around.”
“I’m scared. You’re not really going? Don’t.”
“It’ll take ten minutes max for you reach the house. Or you can just scale it like I did. It’s bloody freezing. The exercise will be good for ya anyway.” He blew a steamy breath onto his cupped hands.
“I can’t believe you’d leave me in the haunted mansion.”
“It’s hardly haunted. How can you believe that crap? Look, I’ve gotta move the car. We’ll get a ticket if we’re parked there for more than two hours. It’s past two hours.” He hopped from one foot to the other.
Jenna shook her head. “I can’t believe you. I’m going back up to the house.”
“Whatever, Jen. Don’t be long. I’ll bring the car around, but I can’t stop for long—look at all the traffic.”
“I can’t believe you.” Jenna started back toward the gatehouse. “I can’t believe you.”
“Hey, don’t be long!” Doug shook his head. He waited until Jenna’s figure disappeared from view, and then made his way to the car.
Jenna blew her nose on a crumpled tissue as she neared the gatehouse. It was the emptiness of the mansion, she thought, rather than any unusual inhabitants that got to her. An empty room always had that effect on her. She sniffed. Climbing over the little garden fence again was about as appealing as scaling the main gate; she turned toward the fence, and then back toward the direction she’d just come from. The chill path to the fountain terrace was much darker and overgrown, she thought. And so, with a sigh, she headed back for the main entrance gate.
Doug was already waiting by the side of the road. His flashing indicator blinked in a steady rhythm. He checked the traffic in the rear view mirror and called through the open passenger window. “Someone coming?”
“No.” Jenna wrapped her fingers around the palings. “No one’s coming.”


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Carmen Tudor is a young Aussie writer whose fiction has been published in the US, the UK, and Australia. "The Price of Admission" was inspired by getting locked in the grounds of Melbourne's historic Como House one dark and stormy night.

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Author: Carmen Tudor

Contributor: Gary Clifton

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"Fifth Girl Found Butchered In South Dallas County" the headline blared. Homicide assigned McCoy and Harper the series of brutal murders, all with similar touches of indescribable cruelty and sadism. The bodies showed signs of cannibalism. They lifted a DNA trace on the last kid and damned if they didn't get a hit on Charlie Bob Sneezel, called "Snark", with priors for child molestation.

They should have known better, but before arresting him, they sweated him at his mama's house. Snark, textbook arrogant, squinted his gouch eye and blurted, "Mama always said little girls was dirty."

"But tasty?" McCoy snapped.

Harper, big, tough and never without a nasty cigar recommended they pull of the suspect's head. McCoy, a rather rudderless oaf, thought instant eternity was too much and argued they jail Snark so other prisoners could "entertain" him. Child murderers have a tough time surviving in Texas jails.

The plan went to hell on three wheels. Before making any real confession, the murdering little rodent slithered through a hole in the floor, then ran south on Webbs Chapel. McCoy chased on foot, Harper followed in McCoy's assigned Dodge.

Snark, frantically veered into a convenience store. McCoy followed. Harper roared up. Unfamiliar with the brakes, he crashed through the front and squashed the fugitive beneath the porno book rack like a sidewalk wooly-worm.

"Harper, do you realize there's not enough left for the medical school to even try for parts," McCoy said somberly.

Snark's child raping, butchering career was concluded, but damages were two hundred thousand dollars.

"You know, partner," Harper said later. "A brake job woulda been a lot less paperwork."

"Yeah, but he'll play hell of appealing the sentence," McCoy smiled. "Being as he's more jelly than corpse."


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Clifton, forty years a cop, has an M.S. from Abilene Christian University and has short fiction pieces published or pending on numerous online sites.

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Author: Gary Clifton

Contributor: Thomas Pitre

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Stovepipe is a big, loud man, with a heavy school ring that he taps on the table as he punctuates each of his talking points. Blah, blah, blah, tap, tap, tap. Blah, blah, blah, tap, tap, tap. Stovepipe’s ring is bigger, heavier and more ostentatious than the Fisherman’s Ring worn by Pope Benedict.

Stovepipe used to do security work for a computer outfit in the Southwest. It was a middle management job, but if you listen to his description, he has it embellished to the point that you might believe he ran the place, and half the state’s security personnel.

He was one of the first to get a carry permit for his 9-millimeter, and he wears it everywhere. I’ve seen him bending over to start his lawnmower, and it was tucked into the small of his back while he mowed his lawn.

Stovepipe’s wife is a big woman. She manages to keep her husband under her thumb. She spends most of the day in her recliner with the dog as she commands the roost. She is a soap opera fan, a game show fan, and a big fan of reality shows. She barks orders all day, never lifting a finger, while Stovepipe vacuums, cooks the meals, does the shopping and picks up the dog shit in the house. She usually barks commands while chewing, and bits of cookie and cracker fly out of her mouth and hit the dog in the face, or come to rest in messy little heaps around the base of her favorite chair.

There were two times that Stovepipe had his finger on the trigger of his automatic. Once at the firing range when he learned how to use it, and once after he was berated and cursed in front of a friend, for missing a spot behind the couch with the vacuum.


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Retired educator, living West of Seattle in a small, old, tired town with my dogs, weed whacker and Olympic Manual.

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Author: Thomas Pitre

Contributor: Gary Clifton

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Neighbors called it in. They hadn't seen the old woman in the faded house at the end of the street for several days. Dispatch said her granddaughter, Ida, ten, lived with her.
When nobody answered the doors, Jackson, a graying old-timer, slipped the front lock with a Visa and stepped in. Forelli, a rookie, followed, pistol in hand. He motioned her to holster it. The house smelled of mildewed clothing and rotten potatoes. Jackson had a rep - elephant hide tough and never flustered by someone else's suffering. He could handle anything.
Ida, pale and perhaps forty pounds, with sunken, morose eyes which appeared incapable of smiling, sat beside Grandma's bed, reading aloud haltingly from a Bible. "She's tuck sick," the child looked up. "Cain't eat." Forelli coaxed Ida out of the room. She clutched a filthy, rag doll in her grimy little hands.
"Deader 'n hell...several days," the E.M.T. said, matter of factly. "Mummified sorta...stinks, but not as bad as usual."
Jackson scribbled in his notebook.
"Morgue's next to the County Home," the E.M.T. looked up earnestly. "Want we should dump the kid off? Save y'all a trip. She could take her last ride with granny in the back of our bus," he pointed his chin at the shriveled corpse.
Jackson glanced toward the hallway where Forelli was talking with the kid. "Man, some days..." He lowered his notebook. "No, leave her be. I'll buy her an ice cream cone on the way to the Home." His tears caught him totally off guard.
The E.M.T. turned away. Maybe Jackson wasn't so tough after all. But he sure as hell wasn't about to say so.


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Gary Clifton, forty years a cop, has an M.S. from Abilene Christian University and has short fiction pieces published or pending on numerous online sites

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Author: Gary Clifton

Contributor: Stephen Hernandez

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I was diagnosed with liver cancer on Monday 7th July 2002 at 4.45 in the afternoon. I looked out the surgery window as the Doctor gave me the news. It was cloudless and sunny outside. People were walking past the hospital in shorts and Hawaiian shirts, happy to feel the sun on their backs, whilst this man in a tailored suit was quietly telling me the reasons for my death sentence – hepatocellular carcinoma, HCC or liver cancer to you and me – the Big C. I had three months.
Afterwards, a male nurse escorted me to a ward where I was to spend four days undergoing fitness tests to see if I would survive a liver transplant. A long shot I was told, but my only chance of survival if there was one. After four days they decided I was. I wasn’t particularly surprised at that, after all, keeping in shape was necessary in my line of work. I was put on the liver transplant waiting list and I went home.
My job was of course severely compromised. Not that I really do what would be termed a normal job with normal hours. You see I’m a collector of sorts, I collect money. More specifically I collect money from people who owe money to the wrong people.
Unfortunately for me given my present situation the working hours are extremely irregular and I’m expected to collect said owed dosh in a very short space of time, usually in fact, straight away. The people I work for are not in the habit of sending polite reminders. I am given a name and an address and off I am expected to bloody well trot and bring back the necessary. Being on a twenty-four hour transplant waiting list for a new liver with fifteen minutes notice to prepare yourself to be picked up by an ambulance and rushed to hospital severely compromised my ability to carry out said task to the satisfaction of my employers. They were not known for being sympathetic to organ failure of any kind unless the organ failure had happened after and not before they had been successfully reimbursed by the owner. And you see I also unfortunately owed them money myself. Luckily in my case a compromise had been reached some time ago in which I agreed to collect what was owed to them by other unfortunate mugs and they in turn agreed to knock five per cent of the money I collared off of my debt.
I asked as humbly and politely as I knew how for a year’s leave of absence so that I could remain at home as much as possible in the hope that I would receive the call from the hospital which would mean my salvation. I didn’t tell them about the cancer and that I had been given just three months to live. In their eyes this would have made me a financial liability and they would have dealt with me accordingly; Instead I told them I needed a bit of a rest to sort my head out as the job was getting to me. So they gave me a compromise. If I didn’t choose to collect the money from the person who owed it there and then when I was told to I could instead provide the money they owed myself. I suppose it was fair enough. After all, it did give me more of an incentive to collect the money.
I still had some years left to pay off my own debt and I was lucky because they had left me with all my limbs intact and my organs in the places they were meant to be, that is - still inside my body. What it meant though was that just a few unrecovered debts added to my own and I would be working for them for the rest of my life or what little was left of it. My own debt was the last thing I had on my mind though. It was time that was paramount to me. When you have been told you have X amount of time to live time itself takes on a solemn weight and the ticking clock and the second hand on your watch become your enemies, remorselessly counting down the minutes and seconds you have remaining on the planet.
The waiting list for livers worked in a strange kind of way based around blood types and body weights and naturally subject to availability. So, you would think that having a common blood group like mine (O positive), would be an advantage as there would be more livers available, but no, it worked the other way around; because it was a common blood type it meant there were more people on that particular list. In fact the list I was on meant that at the current rate of transplants for O positive patients I would be looking at a wait of one and a half years. And I only had months not years. The cancer was spreading at an alarming rate. Evidently cancer tumours need a rich blood supply and having made their bed in my liver the tumours were reproducing so fast they could roll over, re-arrange the pillows and smoke a cigarette.
It felt like I was in a no win scenario playing out my own personal end game – all very depressing. But I have never been a quitter and as the saying goes: ‘when the going gets tough the tough get going’ or in my case they get a liver. So I looked for a solution. There had to be an answer, there always is. If I couldn’t get a transplant straight away then the obvious thing to do was to improve my chances as much as possible. As I may have mentioned previously my employers were not particularly concerned about the physical condition of the payee once they had paid back their dept. And in some cases they positively welcomed mortality as this usually acted as a form of encouragement to others to settle their debts promptly. It occurred to me that I could kill two birds with one stone – quite literally in fact. Get the money for my employers and improve my chances of getting a transplant by supplying fresh organs.
I would have to make sure the subject was not too damaged in the abdominal region. The liver had to remain intact. Hopefully this would greatly improve my chances on the waiting list. The debtor would have to meet certain criteria of course. About the same weight as me, obviously the same blood type and not have subjected their liver to substance abuse which was quite common in some of the wasters I collected from. The main thing of course was that the person would have to be dead but that, as they say, could be arranged. I drew up a list of qualities that in my opinion would constitute a good donor and meet my own particular requirements.
It was a while before a suitable candidate showed up. Most of the others were addicts of some sort or another and I didn’t like to think what state their livers might be in. But my fourth client looked good. He was young and buff and I was pleased to note a non-smoker. I roughed him up a bit first of course, just to let him know I meant business and then waited patiently whist he rang his friends desperately pleading for funds. He managed to get it all together in the end, they usually do; after all, the alternative is not pleasant and in between my persuasive fists and boot I was giving him plenty to ponder about what the future might hold if he didn’t come up with the goods.
We finally ended up back in his flat after collecting all the dosh. A well-furnished bachelor pad in Chepstow, which coincidentally was also quite near the hospital in charge of my transplant. It wasn’t going to get better than this. After I had put all the cash safely in my briefcase I got out my donor questionnaire. Understandably the guy was a bit taken aback by this. I suppose he thought our business completed I should be on my way and not asking punters to fill in questionnaires. But I made him complete it despite his protests and enquiries into my mental condition; people as a rule don’t argue with me. There was one point he was not clear on and that was his blood type. Considering the amount of it he had lost over the past hours you would have thought this was something he really ought to have known. I just gambled that he was O positive the same as me. It was the most popular blood type and it’s usually only people with rare blood types that know them anyway.
It didn’t take much to finish him off. I had made sure during the whole softening up process to avoid any direct blows to the liver area. Now it was a question of getting the cadaver to the hospital as quick as possible. Time was of the essence. I put him near his front door so it would be easier for the ambulance crew and with the organ donation form I had made him sign clearly visible in his top pocket.
I phoned the ambulance service and waited nearby to watch the results. It was some time before the corpse was carted off because the police arrived soon after and promptly cordoned the area off. I went back home and waited patiently by the phone. But there was no call. It could of course have been down to several factors but the one poignant factor I realised is that the police would consider the death suspicious and probably wanted an autopsy.
I decided that the best way forward to speed up the whole thing was just leaving the torso next time. Then the police wouldn’t have to worry themselves about identifying the corpse. On the next job I decided I would take a freezer box, an apron and a good collection of butchers’ knives. Over the next few weeks I was lucky enough to get quite a few decent subjects one after another. It was much messier work than I thought it would be. Who would have thought the human body held so much blood and also the amount of flesh increased exponentially when it was chopped up.
Unfortunately the torsos were ignored just as much as my first job was and I only succeeded in terrifying half of London into believing that a mad serial killer was on the loose inevitably nicknamed by the tabloids as, ‘The Torso Terror’.
I had disposed of the limbs in one of the Firm’s furnaces designed for just such purposes. But the tabloids seized on the fact that none of the limbs or the head of the victims had been found and got the idea that the ‘Torso Terror’ was in fact a cannibal and painted vivid pictures of how he might be preparing and eating his victims. One paper had even gone so far as to ask readers to send in their cooking ideas.
The fuzz were getting pretty hot though so I eased up for a while. In the end they arrested some poor loony who confessed to all of the crimes and a few others that the Old Bill hadn’t solved.
A month and a half had gone past and I still hadn’t got the call from the hospital. I did however get a call from my employers. They were pleased with the results I was getting but were concerned that I might be becoming a bit over zealous in my work. The debt money was being repaid faster than ever so they didn’t complain too much. Word had got around that the killings were connected and the Firm were cracking down in a not uncertain manner so people were paying up double quick.
What I needed was a good old-fashioned disaster. A train accident or a motorway pile-up would be just the job. I stopped short of wholesale mass murder though. It didn’t seem right a load of innocent people dying like that. But I knew time was running out and if the worst came to the worst…
I racked my brains for days. And then I struck gold. I’d been watching an old re-run of West Side Story and it came to me - I’d start a turf war. It just shows how stressed I’d become that it hadn’t occurred to me earlier. It was bound to supply plenty of corpses and moreover corpses of people who probably deserved to be dead. I felt practically philanthropical. There was even a bonus supplied by modern technology which directly benefitted me. Lately the gangs had been opting for headshots due to the unsporting behaviour of some criminals who insisted on wearing bulletproof vests. This of course nicely protected most of their valuable organs, at least the ones that were valuable to me. I made a point of telling all my associates what a good thing they were and that wearing one on the street should be a matter of course, a bit like putting your safety belt on when driving a car.
It wasn’t difficult to get the gangs at each other’s throats. Most of them hated each never mind the other gangs. I waited in a dark alley and beat John ‘the Baptist’ Jacob’s (so called because of his habit of torturing people in a bucket full of water) brains out with a baseball bat. It was well known that this was ‘Mad’ Mick McCarthy’s weapon of choice and that he had a grudge against John. It wasn’t long before a full scale war had broken out and London’s streets were awash with the injured and dying bodies of villains and of course lots of fresh livers. By carefully and surreptitiously bumping off the odd popular villain I managed to escalate the turf war into a full scale Armageddon between those South and North of the river. It was like the Krays and Richardson’s feud all over again.
Inevitably it dragged in my own employers. They met their deaths by being force fed their ledger books. A brilliant innovation of sublime poetic justice. By a happy coincidence it also meant that with the demise of my employers and their books (which no one cared to retrieve,) I was no longer in debt when I did finally get my liver.
I was of course doubly pleased because it was obvious to me by then that my body was predisposed to only receive a villain’s liver.

I am well.


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Author: Stephen Hernandez