Gary

Selfishness

Gary had an overwhelming sexual urge when he woke up this morning. A constant throb in his loins had been taunting him all day, like a rabid police Alsatian kept back from its next victim. It had been a long time since he had felt a woman.

There was something inside him wanting to release itself into somebody else. A need to see how much of himself he could share with another. He wanted to feel power, he wanted to feel that somebody needed him. Somebody needed his worst secrets in liquid form.

He limped along a High Street somewhere, still feeling the twinge in his leg from his car accident. Being surrounded by waves of people never helped his urges. He viewed them as fascinatingly complex chemical reactions; he never failed to be completely in awe that such a thing could possibly exist.

But they weren’t human.

He took home a mate with him that day. He treated her with such respect, affectionately running his fingers through her blonde waves of hair, gazing at his reflection in her glinting blue eyes. He wanted to show her how much he cared for her. He wanted to share it all with her. She wanted to help him too, he knew it.

He couldn’t believe his luck! She was so beautiful. And he could feel that she loved him and that she wanted to absorb his troubles. Effortlessly, she allowed him to remove the seemingly needless, unnatural clothes that hid her shameless skin. He removed his own, and he lay over her, and felt his flesh make contact with hers. He could feel every square millimetre of her skin. Each square millimetre as distinguishable as the next. His outer leg brushed down the inside of her thigh. He lowered his pelvis, and he swore a connection other than one of physical quality was made between the two lovers as he entered her body, his place of worship.

Nothing had ever mattered so much.

The pressure built up inside his stomach. His body wanted to force it all out in one big push. Up. And up. Up. He felt higher with every thrust. Backwards. Forwards. In. In deeper. He wanted her to feel it, what it was like to be him. Words couldn’t tell her at all what he felt for her. Words couldn’t tell her what he was feeling about anything.

Filtering out of his head, the words came in strange orders. He loved her. He kept telling her.

I love you.

I love you.

The only words his head could retrieve. A bright white light burst through the chasms of his mind.

For a brief moment, he was happy.

Because he could feel nothing.

Fragmented, his thoughts struggled to piece back together. He emptied himself into her.

He withdrew and slept at her side for a while.

As the blackness of sleep went away, he awoke to a taunted mind once more. It was no use. It would not go away forever.

The guilt surged through him as he stared at the 11-year-old girl. He had decimated her innocence. The guilt took on a new force upon the realisation that when he had performed this selfish act, she had been dead.

He had killed her.

He had used her.

He didn’t know what to do. This was in his head. He prayed he was dreaming, because he really did not want to feel this, and really did not want to have done this.

Gary and the Doughnut

Gary, in need of some TLC, decided to treat himself to a doughnut from Tesco. Alongside the bag of doughnuts, he carefully placed a 6-pack of his favourite lager (Stella Artois) in the bagging area of the self-service checkout. He was told by an attendant to stop kicking the machine when it told him that an item had mystically disappeared from the bagging area. A few minutes and too many inconveniences later, he trudged through the grimy grey car park towards his gunmetal Saab. After placing the crate in the back of his car, he entered the driver’s seat (wiping the drizzle off the door handle with his sleeve) with the paper bag rustling with sugary doughnuts.

Clunking the grey Saab into first gear, Gary fished about for the biggest doughnut, steering with his knees. After grabbing a doughnut, he placed the red and white striped paper bag on his passenger seat, during the same movement turning off Radio 1 (he was never into popular “crap”).

Gary decided that it would make his day to play the game that meant he had to eat an entire doughnut without licking his lips. He was enjoying himself, perhaps a little too much. He was so desperate not to lick his lips that he didn’t notice that his innocently steering knees had directed him onto a busy roundabout without noticing.

He ended up in a mess of twisted metal, with a footwell full of sugar, jam and dough.

Gary And The Quest For The Perfect Circle

Gary sat in one night, twiddling his thumbs. He believed TV was going to brainwash him, and turn him into just another clone, believing in whatever the TV told him.

So this paranoia eventually led to him being very bored. He cursed the irony of the situation he was in - he might be free, but he could think of fuck all to do with his freedom.

He stared at one of the three (and counting) empty beer bottles in front of him. He ran his eyes down the slender neck of the green bottle and analysed the main body of it, taking in the white flecks of paper still stuck to the bottle where he had attempted to remove the sticker. The lower he got, the thicker and darker the green glass became.

Without really thinking about it, his eyes ran around the bottom circumference of the bottle repeatedly.

Gary remembered being a child, when he had to use a compass to draw a circle. In primary school maths, he was expected to be able to do this perfectly - and it seemed the other children could.

He walked to the fridge to get another beer. While he was up, he went to get a compass, an A4 piece of paper, and a pencil.

Taking a sip from the cold beer, and wiping the condensation left on his hand on his jeans, he screwed the pencil in place on the compass.

His hands tried awkwardly to turn the compass around a point at 360 degrees. He blew the excess graphite away, brushing the paper with his hand for good measure.

Moving his head backwards, he looked at what he had just drawn. Following the edge around from its starting point, all seemed to be going well - but there must have been a flaw somewhere, because the end didn’t join up with the beginning. All seemed to be curving well, it wasn’t untidy at all. The end, however, did not join up to the start.

For fuck’s sake! he thought, swigging the last of his beer. Before putting it down, he stared at the bottom of the bottle.

He smiled at its perfect circle, and went to get another bottle from the fridge.

Gary’s Attempted Suicide

Gary woke up and saw the light above his bed. The world was tight at his temples - it was as though the vice of life was starting to crush a little too hard. His job tightened the grip. His receding hairline tightened the grip. The hate mail that had collected into a small mountain in his doorway made the sides of his head feel like they were about to give way to two solid pincers.

Feeling like the stereotypical fuck up in life, Gary was understandably not best pleased with himself. Never feeling so down in his life, he drank whatever alcohol he had in reserve.

He laughed at himself being so numb. He laughed when he found how much sweat he was excreting - his body trying to stop his uncontrollable mind from destroying its own vessel. He remembered grabbing a rope, he didn’t know what he was doing. He couldn’t feel the bristles of the rope brushing his damp, sweaty palms.

He woke up with a headache, facing down into the toilet, smelling the piss he couldn’t remember doing. His hands were wet, and smelt strongly of vomit.

After mustering the energy to get out of what had been his bed for the evening, he looked resentfully at himself in the mirror. He was covered in cuts, and caked in a thick, white dust. There was a large red mark around his throat. He followed dusty footprints across his landing, through his bedroom door.

A thick cloud of dust swirled as he opened the door and disturbed the air.

Bugger, he thought as he looked at the remains of the roof he assumed he had brought down after trying to hang himself from his bedroom light, that brought me down to Earth.