Speed

© Taz

Shelly (Shell for short), was fired for immoral conduct. Basically, she wouldn’t let a disabled person onto her train. It had nothing to do with his wheelchair – the guy had been inebriated, intoxicated, and abusive. But try making the bosses listen when all the spectator recording the incident on a mobile phone had filmed was her telling him to get lost, go away, because there was no way he was getting on. It was broadcast on Granada Tonight, and, as a result, she would never work for any rail company in the country, ever again.

She couldn’t apply for any transport job, for that matter.

Being a train expert, what she loved most in all the world to do was drive trains. To take that away from her spelled trouble. Shell lived alone, and still had a vintage train set from childhood elevated in the spare bedroom. She spotted trains, when she wasn’t working. A lot more so, now.

What made her get fired up enough to hijack a lead carriage from Liverpool Lime Street Station, and thrust it full throttle towards Manchester Piccadilly, was a mix of situations and circumstances, mostly involving social life and finance, fuelled by drugs. She had never been a drug user, and experienced an acute psychotic reaction.

As soon as she was in motion, she negotiated the terms over the radio. She was to speed from Liverpool to Manchester in a single carriage, without any halt, disruption, or line changes of any description. If anything tried to stop her, herself and the hostages (which she had convinced them into believing she had) would die.

As soon as she reached maximum overdrive, at over 150 miles per hour, Shell took herself into the small seating area, handcuffed herself to a passenger rail, and slumped to the floor. She could see through the glass doors, and still hear the radio spitting the crackly negotiator’s voice. Her ears morphed the voice into one she recognised, from a romantic yesteryear.

In her vision, she created a body for the voice to speak through; a young man from her youth, who she had dated but once. He kicked at the rail she was attached to, trying to free her, and pulled at the cuffs. She whimpered at the pain in her wrists.

It had been over thirty years since Shell’s last imaginary friend. With the drugs in her system, her imagination had assumed a power beyond her control. Her make-believe partner in her empty carriage was almost tangible before her very eyes. She could actually see his details, if she squinted. His brow, his hairline, the veins in his neck.

He seethed and huffed, shouting and cursing, kicking and pulling the pole attached from floor to roof, but there was no budging it. Eventually, defeated, he sat down next to her.

The city architecture and the surrounding borough of Tetris-like terraced houses had flickered by in an instant and now the carriage was already into her hometown, whizzing by her old school.
A tear from each eye rolled down each cheek. “You go,” she said. “Jump.”

He shook his head and embraced her. “I don’t want to live if I can’t live with you.”

“You have to save yourself. If you jump, you’ll live. That’s the way it is. Your bones will heal.”

“My heart won’t.” Her imaginary friend, and imaginary lover, snuggled closer. Together, they embraced.

And that embracing, coupled with the speed, is what it was all about, in Shell’s world. That fusing into his flesh, that contact of his being....wonderful. Every other problem, worry and care had no other option but to rush by on the wind, like semi-transparent ideas over white, foamy rapids; distant, fading, unimportant.

Life was all about poignant, touching, empathic moments. To wrap death up in such a few and far between moment was like a fairytale ending to a mundane documentary.

The landscape blurred into a wash of buildings and sunset. That line in the sky dividing night and day is called the terminator shadow*, and it was the only thing that could keep up with them.

The carriage hurled into Manchester Piccadilly stations and ejected off the rail like a car flipped off a ramp, skidding through a perimeter fence, down an embankment, and into the city itself, colliding with stationary traffic.

Shell died with the versatile elasticity of her imagination intact.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yes, Taz is still getting chonged, and no, Taz hasn’t yet wrote the sequel to her breakthrough story, Moon Rabbit. She is still singing along however to her good friend Roy’s guitar and once even recorded her good self, Roy, and DB Tinkerbell in her flat. If that tape can be found, it will be uploaded to the quasarboy77 YouTube channel in the future.

*visible on any clear sunset by lying on your back and looking up behind your head

HOMELESSNESS IS....by Taz

I texted Taz yesterday and placed a bet she couldn’t write a brief piece of homeless fiction before this morning. The following exhibit I received all throughout that very same hour in 3 longer-than-thou chunks of heavy capital letter text replies (or ‘shouting letters', as caps are often called). She claimed she was bored in work on the 2-10 shift and decided to write it on her new cell, sending it to me as she went along. Knowing Taz for as long as I have, I’m no longer surprised by amazing things like that. Nice one, sweet thing!

Shirley sat there brooding over the request from her editor, Henry Seamus, who needed a piece about life on the streets in his inbox by 8am sharp. He had dedicated Shirley to this especially because of her less-than-rosy past.

“Don’t be afraid to dress it up,” he had said over the phone. “The key phrase in the literary world at the moment is auto-fiction, which is…[blah-blah-blah]”

Shirley knew what auto-fiction was. It was a mix of truth and make-believe. If anything, she would need to tone things down. Her upbringing (although she liked to think that she was dragged up, not brought up) involved foster care homes, boarding schools, and more run-ins with the law than Rambo had run-ins with bushes. Still, a simple dash of education, and a job, thanks to inspiration from a very special relative, had fulfilled her vocation; she now had a regular column in a major cultural magazine, with her picture at the top of it, three days a week. People were interested in what she had to say.

Should she * some text missing * draw on the deep stuff, the dysfunctional family stuff, from her infant years? Like watching her mother and father physically fight in the high street? Why could she still recall that as if it were yesterday?

Or should she skip that and start from the junior school years, when she run out of the headmaster's office before he could crack the whip then threw stones at his office window from the roadside?

How about her starvation attempt on the social services holiday, when she refused to eat or drink because they made her wear the same silly clothes as all the other kids on the coach trip to Jersey?

What did any of this have to do with being homeless anyway? Did the rebel in her have a say in her ending up on the streets? Was that stubborn streak really a homeless gene?

{Nobody just ends up homeless. They bring it on themselves one way or another. Some of the * some text missing * m even enjoy it. It’s a life choice. They make enough from begging to get tanked on whiskey}

Who had said all that? Shirley didn’t remember, but she had heard such sentiments many times over. Looking inwards, she had thought her life had been over at one point. Desperate and destitute, paperless and prostitute, she had considered herself washed up. She had really believed that. In her mid twenties.

Homelessness was just a wheel in the cog of many more complexities, she thought, involving self-esteem, status, and other heady socio-psychological paradoxical dichotomies. Ha! Maybe she could put that line of nonsense in the article! She hardly understood what it meant, if it meant anything at all.

One thing she did know was that homelessness was much more than the absence of a roof above your head. Homelessness also qualified as an umbrella term for a general breakdown of life in a myriad of idiosyncratic effects.

Right. Time to begin. She loved the * some text missing * se big words. They were a big help in winging this job in the first place!

Shirley opened an Microsoft Office document and wrote Homelessness Is…at the top of the page, Trebuchet MS font, size 12, underlined, in bold.

The flickering cursor flashed along the screen, left to right, leaving lines of her history behind it, all not very dressed up.

Sender: Taz
+447776686655
Message centre:
+44802784331

Sent:
7-Sep-2010
19:26:05

Click on the link and scroll down a bit for interview with Taz on her story 'Moon Rabbit'.http://piebald77.blogspot.com/2010/02/ste-ghost-interview.html

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

Thoughts for the Day

1.What is the difference between cottage pie and shepherds pie?

2. Why is strawberry ice cream so rare, when the shelves are rife with raspberry ripple, honeycomb caramel and diabetic vanilla? Yes, DIABETIC VANILLA.

3.How half-baked must a man be to think sterilized milk was called paralysed milk? I would never drink anything paralysed!