Paranoid Ego

Howard gently farted under his desk as he looked through the job postings on the internal database. A small squeak accompanied the eruption, his Irritable Bowel Syndrome was playing up again, crippling him physically and keeping him from his sport and job-seeking effectiveness. His mind wandered to the moment when he would die and whether he would regret each stinking moment of sitting in that office. His was not a negative protest against office work, his mind had worked out that it was probably the best thing to do as he craved money and lifestyle. But he resented its inevitability, the bullshitting backbiting. Most of all he resented the client advisers for whom he worked - most of them were more stupid than he by far. He felt displaced and fantasised about resigning and in the inevitable departure email telling everyone that he had quit to become an academic or be published or become a hot-shot lawyer or advocate. Anything but a banker, where every spiv could make a go at it and make the most intelligent of graduates feel miserable that their potential was rotting like molten effluence in a sewage plant.

The Tube journey truly sickened him. A fat lady of about 40 with her shoddy Next plastic bag full of cheap treats to make her feel better about her essentially shit existence, answered her mobile. Like a timid mouse she squeaked into the phone irrelevant comforts to whichever poor amoebic entity desired to know the welfare of this sack of insecurity. I'm in the tube at West Brompton, yeah, about 5 minutes...suddenly, Howard lost it, he wrenched the phone from her fat paw and yelled 'CUNT' into the receiver, then bashed the woman in the mouth with it until the case broke and the battery went flying. She looked up in horror, arms flailing, mouth frothing with blood and broken skin...Howard started, as if from a dream. She was still there, piping 'hello, hello' into the useless contraption as the train went under the tunnel. One of these days, it would be hard to sort the fantasy from the reality...Howard was one of those sick people who murdered people in their dreams. It is impossible to stretch true morality in the dream world (though one's sexuality tends to) and Howard found that these last couple of years his dream world had become depraved beyond belief. Surely it would be a matter of time before the dream grasped the reality by the neck and demanded action...

Anon

The tube