MW Bewick

100-Word Fiction: ‘Over’

I’m over it, said John.

But how could he be? It was still fucking going on, still in the air like, ah what the fuck. You couldn’t fucking tell him, he just turned away, the old head in the sand.

Things had to be confronted, dealt with, even if it meant facing the worst. The worst was already happening. You could ignore it but not escape it.

And what about the future? Did no one care? John thought no one cared, maybe even that he deserved it. Was it punishment? For what? It was crazy. Sometimes you just wanted to…

100-Word Fiction: ‘Red Thread’

Was there a time before the freedoms that still endure, before the storms that swept the sands, where what we watched unfold bore some resemblance to reality?

Once, I think, after the first of the degradations had been suffered, we still imagined the aimless orbit of missiles around the void of an ethical centre.

Not now. No signs refer to an external model any more. They stand for nothing but themselves and refer only to other signs.

The no-fly zones are full of jetplanes. Red tracer fire stitches the sky like thread in blue jeans. Meaning is out of sight.

The boy’s thoughts were taken with a small piece of driftwood lying on the pebbles. A line of seaweed marked where the tide had reached earlier that morning. He stepped across it and picked up the piece of wood. It looked like an antler, but bone white, smoothed and polished by the sea and sand and salt. Out across the waves…

…there were maps in school and he liked maps. How big the world was. And he saw things on TV. But how did things occur, with him, there, holding a small piece of driftwood, the other side of waves?

100-Word Fiction: ‘Nude, Green Leaves and Bust’

I don’t know, said Paul, staring intently at the painting.

Me neither. I don’t get that face in the picture, with its long nose and narrow eyes, gazing down upon the naked, reclining girl. The face is so white, it’s like a ghost. And she is so pink, so fleshy and naked, her arms open, eyes shut. Her yellow angel’s hair. The exotic green plant, with its crevices and tentacle stalks; those two black, shadowy stripes, like arms reaching across her body. The fruit lying beside her. The deep blue draped seclusion. No, it says nothing to me, no, no.

100-Word Fiction: ‘Moomer’s Tent’

Moomer believed that happiness came in small things. If you couldn’t lift it yourself, then it was too unwieldy, too weighty. You should be able to pack happiness into a rucksack. But happiness was also infinite. The hills were happiness and you couldn’t lift them.

Moomer packed his tent into a rucksack and walked for miles. When he set up the tent he would look at the ground: at the grass, the earth. Inside the tent was a warm, orange glow. The breeze whispered through the canvas. He fell asleep. Surely their world could not touch him – not now, there.

100-Word Fiction: ‘We Have An Ethical Policy In Place’

The skies shudder in the midday heat as fighter jets screech overhead. Desert sands are crushed and churned by the caterpillar tracks of tanks. Localised conversations centre on canisters of teargas – security solutions, experts say, or ‘battlefield management’. Elsewhere we see stun grenades, fragmentation bombs, rubber ball shot… armoured personnel carriers rumble along while drones hover.

There is a soundtrack too: blaring global hip-hop blasts through the air. And a uniform: dark suits, darker sunglasses.

Everybody is smiling.

We have an ethical policy in place, says the UK spokesperson for the arms manufacturer at the Abu Dhabi arms fair.

You do?

100-Word Fiction: ‘The Julian Calendar’

The Julian calendar. That antiquated thing? Was it so imprecise? Is it so outmoded? It is reckoned that its faults caused our horological measurements to be incorrect by about three days every four centuries. But no calendar is precise. We divide up time as best we can and then continue to tell our stories, filling the hours while the world spins off through the solar system. I hear the Julian calendar is still used by the Berber people of North Africa, and on Mount Athos, and maybe by occasional journalists who have not forgotten the fables of yesteryear – or yesterday.

100-Word Fiction: ‘In the Museum’

We are waiting for something to happen. It has been weeks. What will be the endpoint of this struggle? There is no point in asking. Not now.

Everywhere becomes a museum, eventually. We should know, we live in one. Grown out of the craters of the past.

There is a natural cycle. The museums are unhoused too, in turn, by new ideologies, new ideas. We watch and wait.

How long is the cycle?

Our theory is that the cycle is as long as it takes for everyone to forget, for everyone to imagine they’re starting afresh.

Fourteen days? Thirty years?

100-Word Fiction: ‘At risk of repeating’

Times change so slowly.

They would shiver if they thought about it. In February, when the squares are full and the bridges heave with sighs, they want freedom, no less.

Have you visited there on holiday? asks a colleague.

Yes.

They know they deserve a break. Is this just their week in the sun? How long before we know?

Autumn is too long. It is immediate change they want. Crowds touching the city of the dead, North Africa. A distant call to prayer. Soldiers in tanks shake hands with locals waiting, waiting. They call it ‘unrest’. The unrest of years.

100-Word Fiction: ‘Dream Farmer’

What dreams they are I do not care. I supply only the seeds of dreams, carefully cultivated. The seeds that make you close your eyes. The seeds that put you to sleep. Deep, endless sleep. I send the seeds, registered, to Arizona: to doctors who are experts in that field, to patients who are ready, who have earned those dreams, who are chained to them. I do not see dreams flourish; am not of their world. But I till those felons’ earths with a sickle and a scythe, a farmer who does not look to see what lives, what dies.