Hoovered

Cecil waited till his upstairs neighbours had gone out to Midnight Mass.

A petty thief, he knew that Christmas Eve would be a real score in the Bailey house this year now he'd heard they'd won the pools! 

Five minutes is all he needed to find one or two new plum pieces under the tree: a diamond ring perhaps or a plump pearl necklace. He could spot them a mile off, even wrapped.

So confident was Cecil that he'd popped up whilst getting ready for bed, leaving just his buttoned shirt and Y-Fronts on. He tiptoed onto the next floor and quickly picked the lock.

Once inside it was dark, save for the flashing tree lights in the apartment's bay window. Cecil's face was momentarily strobed as he crept into the living room like a cemetery cat.

Christmas presents were piled high beneath the fir and on the two armchairs at either side. Some paper, tape and scissors lay on the floor, as did a box of fairy lights. At the side of the bay window was a step ladder and a hoover. The Baileys were still wrapping and cleaning up for the family's arrival tomorrow he guessed.

"Well I'm cleaning up too!" chuckled the thief to himself and began to silently sort through the gifts like a reverse Santa.

Bingo!

Cecil found a small box and a bigger flat one, both wrapped with beautiful stiff paper and lavishly labelled.

"To my Darling Wife with a Great Big Kiss!" He scoffed.

"What a fuckin' hen-pecked wanker!"

Cecil opened up the gifts to reveal an enormous brooch encrusted with red emeralds, together with a gorgeous opal ring. He slid them both beneath his vest.

"Tasty!" He chortled.

Turning, he noticed something glinting in the corner of his eye and looked up. At the top of the tree was a golden fairy sparkling in the light, which appeared to be embossed with sapphires and rubies. 

Cecil couldn't believe his eyes. 

"Jesus, they've really splashed out on that pools win. Yes, Siree. That fairy's got my fuckin' name allover it!"

He grabbed the step ladder, opened it up and climbed to the top of the large wide tree, where he reached over for the glorious fairy. Removing it from the top branch, Cecil faltered on the ladder.

'Oh shit!"

He fell down the whole ladder and landed with a sickening sound on the hoover's hard curved handle sticking up.

Crunch!

"Fuuuuuuuuuck!" screamed the thief.

Pushing aside his flimsy Y-fronts the unyielding metal handle inserted itself fully into the mouth of his bare rectum. 

The thief was about to shriek loudly in unfathomable  pain when he remembered where he was.

Umphf! He clamped his hands over his mouth and screamed and balled silently, shaking his head violently with tears flowing down his face. 

Sobbing wildly, he tried to wriggle free from the hard protrusion but was stuck fast.

Suddenly his sweating anus began to slide down the hoover's handle, the solid curved shaft forcing its way upwards between his legs.

Cecil howled in agonising pain. The handle pushed aside his squeezed bowel, forcing itself upwards and came to rest at the boned crown of his pelvis.

He screamed in agony, a tearing pain was beyond anything he had ever known. His insides had been pressed like forcemeat, his organs vandalised: crying, he knew he could not free himself now. He was totally impaled like a glove puppet.

Whimpering terribly, he thrashed his feet violently as searing pain wracked his body.

Suddenly Cecil's shoe caught the on-switch and the hoover lit up at the front. It began to move forward with it's powerful rollers. His thrashing feet and arms propelled it even faster and the hoover leapt across the room, blood now streaming down the handle shaft like raspberry sauce.

The vacuum cleaner hit the sideboard squarely with a raucous bang and the family's snake-tank toppled over. Its lid fell away onto the floor.

Cecil and the hoover tipped forwards and his face landed in the open side of the tank. The man's jaws were wide open in a scream of excruciating pain.

Startled from sleep, the python jerked and slipped into the man's open mouth without so much as a sound.

Cecil gagged convulsively as it's head drove past his tonsils and down into his food pipe. 

He heaved and squirmed but it was no use. His alimentary canal began to distend as the enormous snake surged onwards in search of an exit.

The pressure on his ribcage was devastating and his sternum started to crack, gradually splitting completely, his chest and shirt tearing open and the two wings of his ribs flying apart with a sickening crunch.

The snake was now visible inside Cecil's open chest as it's length ploughed downwards. With a final flick of its massive tail it flipped Cecil and the hoover to an upright position again.

It was at this moment that the home's family returned from midnight mass. 

They opened the door to the front room to see Cecil impaled on the hoover handle, his ribs spread eagled with the tail of the python just slipping out of sight as it's head found the opening it needed to escape: Cecil's anus, already housing the handle. 

The snake pushed forward with grotesque force and the entire rectum tore apart of the now-completely dead man, his wet hot innards spiralling out onto the floor and just as quickly being sucked back up into the guzzling vacuum cleaner as it slowly trundled towards the door.

The traumatised family screamed in horror as their python's blood-soaked head emerged from their neighbour's arse, it's body slipping out completely onto his pile of entrails, illuminated by the oncoming hoover light, the snake then sliding away, dragging a blue intestine between their legs and out through the door.

One of Each Should Do It

He stepped out of the ground; a tall male caked in lava.


As the lava cooled it fell away revealing a grey man with diamond eyes.


He stared around him at the ravaged landscape, the mountain's slopes a tarnished place, bombed and mined in a terrible battle.


Atomic tanks lay strewn around the valley floor, as if they were children's toys and the wrecks of nuclear jets straddled the earth like fallen angels broken on the rocks.


World War Four had raged for a decade until every state and every nation had ruined themselves in the bankruptcy of violence, their factories silent and empty, the weapons spent. The world was on the edge from this final war.


Dying, the land and the sea were poisoned beyond hope, a wasteland of split quarks and wild neutrinos killing everything that was left, human or otherwise, an unstoppable shroud of quantum death smothering the planet.


In a desperate attempt to flea the apocalypse the three faltering superpowers sent their elites into space in gargantuan ships, a facile, capitulatory act leaving their remnant peoples to die in the killing ooze.


Now those people staggered across the ravaged landscape in search of food and shelter: shelter from the fall-out and the imminent atomic freeze.


But there was nowhere to hide. Everywhere was gone. Everything was dead. Or dying. Better the sun expand and burn this miserable orb than endure the eternal dark of Hell on Earth that was coming.


The man with the diamond eyes looked around at the degradation. He stopped and picked up a handful of scree and squeezed. Bleeding he cast it aside and began to walk towards a house nestled below the giant mountain where he'd emerged.


Inside a family cowered around a failing hologram of their leader. He flailed his arms and explained how a new government would be established in Mars and rescue ships would be sent back for them and all the citizens.


They knew it was untrue but somehow watching the stuttering president sat in his rocket room was comforting, the real but hollow words descending to them in a rain of lies.


As the grey man entered they jumped up and gasped at him, his naked body still smoking from it's lava skin. His crystal eyes sparkled in the irradiated afternoon, like Christmas lights switched on in the city square so long ago.


"Where is the sea?" Asked the grey man with a dry voice not used before.


The family looked at each other.


"The sea? The sea is a thousand miles away on the coastal plane due East" Said the the mother pointing out of the window.


"Thank you" replied the man. "I am the Land".


He turned and set off walking the thousand miles to the eastern sea.


At the coast another figure emerged, this time from the ocean. A blue woman with liquid hair stepped out of the surf and padded on to the sand. Her feet made puddles in the prints.


Naked and coated in salt, she headed towards a beach shack, where a rusting VW bus was parked and a surfboard lay split on the thrift like a cracked coffin lid.


The salted woman walked in to the creaking hut to find an aging hippy sat in a low and tattered deck chair.


He was wearing century-old headphones plugged into a machine. His bearded face bobbed up and down rhythmically to the beat.


When he saw the woman he jolted and dragged the headgear off.


"Who the fuck are you lady?"


"I am the Sea"


"Well, you sure are a sight for sore eyes. You're the first person I've seen in months. Would you like some tea? It's boiled, so it shouldn't kill ya straight away."


"Where is the big mountain?"


"The, wha-, the big mountain? What, the really big one? That'd be thataway, West, but it's a damn long trek. It'd take weeks. What da ya wanna go there for? I could take you some of the way in ma bus if you want."


The blue woman turned and walked West leaving a trail of wet salt. The hippy thought he heard a thank you as if whispered through a puddle.


The blue woman met the grey man five hundred miles inland.


"It's been too long my love. A trillion lifetimes."


"Yes, but we are together again."


"There will be only we, as it was before."


"They have spoilt the world, the world we started."


"It is time to start again."


The two beings embraced warmly, the grey and the blue becoming one.


The woman then lay flat on the ground looking up at the man stood over her staring down at her smiling face. He smiled back and outstretched his arms.


"Forever Land" she mouthed through water.


"Forever Sea" he replied through stone.


Slowly the man grew and grew into a vast range of mountains surrounded by an enormous plane, together forming a gigantic island the size of a hemisphere. At it's centre a towering mist-capped peak with a diamond summit.


The woman's body and hair turned into blue seawater and gradually deepened and deepened to cover the world and everything on it, except for the newly formed land at its centre


One sea and one continent was all that was left. The rest, the rest of everything, swept away.


To heal again, the Earth required a new beginning, the ancient binary start.


One of each.


Tethys and Pangea.

The Signature

"Sign here Sir"

"What for?"

"Just sign here Sir"

"First of all tell me what for!"

"Sir, please just sign!

"No!"

The man and the woman dressed entirely in red walked off and disappeared down the street.

The supposed signee was baffled as to what had just happened. What on earth did they want him to sign.

The next day after his pickled cabbage and dumplings a knock at the door brought him in front of two women in black garb.

"Sign this will you please, sir"

"What is it?"

"Sign here for us"

"But what am I supposed to be signing?"

"Here's the pen sir. Sign"

"No!"

Who the hell are these people and what could they possibly want him to sign? Damn nuisance, that's what they are.

The following afternoon the man was napping, when a rap on the door woke him.

Two more strangers. Dressed in white.

"If you would sign here we'll be on our way sir"

"Yes, but what is it for?"

"Sign on the dotted line, just here"

"I can see the dotted line but what is my signature for?"

"Will you sign?"

"No!"

The next evening the chap was sitting down to sausage, bread and gherkins, when someone tapped on the window.

"For god's sake, not again!"

"What?"

"We just need you to sign the form sir"

"And for the umpteenth time what is it?"

"If you sign we'll explain everything"

"No, explain it first"

"Are you prepared to sign?"

"No!"

The next night, with the wind howling and a flurry of snow swirling round the streetlight, the man had fallen asleep in front of the TV. In his dream he thought he sensed a tapping on the screen and heard himself saying go away and leave me alone.

He was jolted from his slumber by a bang on the back door.

A young teenager implored him to sign a petition to save the whale. 

"Have you seen the time! No, go away!"

The following morning around 7am a small girl presented herself at the front window staring in.

"I'm collecting names Mister for a sponsored silence. I've got to be quiet for a day. Will you stick your name down here?"

"No, it's nothing personal, I never sponsor anything"

The girl stared at him. If looks could kill.

It was Saturday lunchtime. The kitchen air was filled with frying sausages and eggs and hot coffee was already steaming on the table. The old chap always enjoyed his cooked breakfasts on the weekend. Set you up for the week and with the morning paper it was bliss. He'd lived to be nearly a hundred years old and planned on living a lot more.

But where was the paper? It's late.

He heard a gentle rattle on the door knocker. it was raining.

"Here's your paper, Mister!" said a really small boy perched on a pushbike, a massive bag of newspapers round his shoulder.

"Thanks"

"Your subs are due"

"Oh?"

"Yeah, the newsagents have a list. You're on it Mister"

"Right"

"Do you want to carry on getting the papers?"

"Yep. I do"

"OK, just shove your signature on here"

The old man took the pen and scribbled his autograph on the list.

As soon as he had he felt peculiar and knew he'd been duped. 

His hands began to sweat and his mouth felt bone dry. He started to shiver uncontrollably and fell to the ground.

The young boy was laughing. He was changing too. No longer small, he was growing taller, as tall as a man and his skin was turning bright red. 

The old chap, clutching his chest, stared up at the man-boy on his bike, steam rising off his body.

"I always get you in the end you know. It may take a while. You old sinners are an awkward lot. But patience is a virtue, even for a hot head like me!"

"All I need is a signature,

... then you get a prod with my fork,

... and then, I get your useless soul,

... Boom!

Easy as pie and the inks not even dry!"

The devil chuckled and the old man moaned and closed his eyes, his signature slowly dissolving into a pool of rain.