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Book, Rise, River

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Oli:
Glass, Vinegar, Waiting

A scabby looking drunk stumbles out the doorway of Macdonners. Tripping over his own feet his chip box hits the ground and explodes, sending deep fried shrapnel all over the pavement. Howling curses, kicking the window and salvaging the few chips he can the drunk sways down the street and round the corner. Laughing, Paul staggers inside and joins the queue.
   He's been waiting for at least ten minutes now, occupied mostly by the spinning chunk of meat he'll soon be eating slices of.
   Outside. Chips, cheese and kebab in hand. 'Some poor cunt's dropped his chips' he thinks as he slowly ambles towards home.  Eating the kebab first, then the chips and cheese he doesn't notice the vinegar that he didn't ask for. Nearly home.
Suddenly his head explodes and he smacks the pavement – chips fly from his hand. Blood mats his hair and he vomits. Feet run off. Glassed.

(I'm not entirely happy with this at all. i haven't written in AGES.)

Thomas Edison:
Glass, Vinegar, Waiting


The first thing that hits you when you step into that ring is the fact that anything goes down here, in the basement of some shmuck's house that may as well be a million miles away from civilization as we know it. The second thing that hits you is my bleeding fist.
   We hold no rules down here, everything goes. In my time I've had objects of every variety smashed against my head, be they glass bottles, baseball bats or snooker cues. You get hurt, you go see the Doc. He ain't got no qualifications, but that doesn't stop him from splashing some vinegar on your cuts and slapping some duct tape over them.
   There's no better feeling in the world than that of bone crunching beneath your own blows. I feel the cartalidge in your nose pop as a slam it with a solid right jab.
   You fall, I smile, and that new guy who was waiting behind you in the queue realises his time is up.
   He's next.


(I'm totally on the toilet whilst posting this, guys)

GenericName:
Glass, Vinegar, Waiting

The lock should have clicked as I unlocked the door, but for some reason the door to the shop had already been attended to. Inside, a balding, grey-haired man stood behind the counter sampling the ice creams. His mouth full of Rocky Rhode, he could only wave at me, droplets of chocolate arcing from the wet scoop , a broad smile dashing across his face. Wordlessly I began to prepare the coffee for the day, frequently glancing back at the counter as I emptied the various grounds. Each checkmark on the pre-opening list was bigger than the last, each exaggerated so that he might see the line of X's marching towards a time when he would have to leave the store. I noted each ice cream he ate from, so that when he left I might try and sanitize them. I waited until last to turn on the stereo. When my music began, I heard a clink and a slam--the ice cream scoop in a glass, and the door on the frame, respectively. Now that I was done waiting for him to leave, I reached to pour the glass out and smelled that it was vinegar. Nice of him to clean the scoop for me.

ZJGent:
There had once been a lake that drowned this piecemeal slum on the edge of the Metropol - or rather, drowned the what-will-be of the place. The place now was dry and dustbowl in the summers, bleached and copper-red... pissing tar and acid into your lungs every time you stepped outside. Even in the winter the place whined with heat, except for the nights like tonight, where a year of rain came in one day and drowned you in tarmac-thick cistern water, or close as seems like it. The lake's memory had left a skyscraping bridge section bare and lonely across from the single-line railroad that fed the place; at least, whenever the city remembered its lost kinsmen out on the edge. No-one living under the brick-shadow of the bridgepiece blamed the city for that, though. Even the people who lived here tried to forget they did. That's as good a reason as any for Harvey's Bar being smack under the bridge, by the railroad, and in the middle of the steel-drum shacks that dotted the desert here. Tonight the tin gables sang lonely tapdances under the rain. Thunder now: or... no.

A dirt-freckled '71 Cutlass Supreme was sheltered like a stormdrenched rat in the foundations of the old bridge, and its engine played Norse ventriloquy - mimicking a thunder god yet to shatter the clouds above. It growled a path toward Harvey's, where the chrome tailpipe caught splintered light, prismic via the glass of the windows, squeezed from fly-bothered neon inside. The car emitted humanity in the shape of a dusty black coat, cold shoulders, and a single, ready, gloveful of finance. The man inside seemed only a penumbra chipped from the greater dark about him. The rain sluiced away from a traveller's tangle of dark hair.

It entered - the door clicking softer than it should've. The eponymous Harvey was hunched behind the bar, absently minding the depressed rag-bundle of characters slouching home from vinyl alcoves. The stranger was worth a nervous glance, despite the readies clenched fiscally in that gloved fist. No 'strangers' came here by choice. So either this fucker - sorry, customer (here Harvey post-edited the thoughts squirming in his beer-fat brain) - has come here to find friends... or make enemies. Harvey's fingers twitched toward the stout cudgel taped to the underside of the polyvinyl bartop.

It was then that the green paper jumped across the plastic toward him. A harsh cough, and then a crypt-cold gravel-thick voice:

"... whisky."

Some of the tones of that voice had crept through Harvey's synapses before his ears, he was sure of it. Nonetheless, the sweating barkeep mused, here was nowhere, and nowhere needs money more than anywhere. He started to pour some of the usual cocktail of battery acid and vinegar into a spittle-grimed glass but his hand was stopped in a moment by that hand. Harvey noticed the red veins creeping from under the black glove and shuddered involuntarily. Again the stranger pelted dry oxygen against the back of his throat - interjecting with all the solidity of lead and earth:

"... bottle."

A merry dance now played out in Harvey's stoutly greed-driven mind. Better to give the bottle, right, and tell him - no, no, tell him after he'd drank all he could, he knew the type, and the billyclub would ensure more of those fine green politicians were paid. The chipped bottle slid across vinyl, caught by that hand again... red under the glove's lips. It was then that rules were broken. No man alive should have been able to finish the whole bottle as quick as it disappeared into a shadowy throat. Harvey grimaced in fearful apoplexy and reached for the cosh his fingers had been itching against just two minutes ago. His fat fingertips met air. Air and tape. Then, from that tangled and shaded stranger's face... a horrible thin smile emerged like a half-conceived, half-aborted phantasm. Empty alcoves hid more darkness, seeming to grow and stretch towards the fat, sweating bar-owner. The neon behind him whined and snapped glassily outwards. It was in the last showered sparkstorm of light that Harvey noticed what that hellish right hand now held, and silently pissed himself.

In the dark, a red hand and a blackjack scythed a life away. Outside the storm broke, and the rain spoke of a cleansing that would never come.

Yayniall:
    I remember the early days, out in the fields with my brothers and sisters, baking under the relentless Tuscan sun. We often spoke of leaving, of joining our cousins in California, or Auntie Barbara in Chile. In those carefree days how was I to know it would be I who was picked?
    My mother had told me that this was always the way for us but still I never expected it to come so abruptly, to be plucked from the field in such away, the stem holding me to my family removed and cast aside. I was crushed, I was leaving just when I felt I was coming to maturity.
    To be pressed into such tight confines with a bunch of strangers, it was so undignified, I was kept here for what seemed like years but infact was probably only a few months. I learned to blend in, to keep my feelings bottled up until it was time for me to shipped out.
    The intervening years were darkness, I remember the young couple who took me in and the bright room which I called home.
But that room quickly became a prison, the sunlght faded as the grime began to cover the windows, the dust began to settle on all the flat surfaces and my optimism began to fade, each day spent waiting for the couple to come downstairs to me, for some company, but each time they did venture down to my domain they barely paid me a lick of attention, they'd select something else from out of my eye sight and hurrdily return back up the stairs.
  
      The door at the top of the stairs creaked open and a man stomped down, I looked up with joy, a shadow of the young man who had brought me home, age having ravaged his once handsome face, perhaps today was my day.
      I nearly popped my cork! It was! His hand clasped my body and he carried me easily up the stairs, bursts of terracotta and stainless steel and I was placed on a table, tall glasses either side of me. The man turned his back on me and rustled through a draw, he turned back around weilding a terrifying implement of torture. I tried to scream but no sound came out. The tool was plunged into my head and began to twist, in the end it came off easier than either of us expected.
He leaned down to my neck and sniffed deeply.
"Eugh! Vinegar!"

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