J Slinger

1.In a Morrisons mini supermarket, 2026 . There’s a tall bald man in the queue ahead of me. Have you got Benson and Hedges Gold ? I’ll have a look .  The shop assistant slid open a cupboard door. Everything behind the counter looked overstimulating. No, sorry.  The tall bald time traveller shook his head.  Why does no one have Benson and Hedges Gold? I can only find them in garages for double the price.  The ones we sell are on the sign on the glass. The shop assistant gestured to a hand written sign taped to the plexiglass dividing them.  I’ve smoked Benson and Hedges for years, they’re  the only ones I like. 2.In a caravan park in Ireland, 1990. Niall smokes Benson and Hedges Gold I smelled them in the packet In secret pockets and with peerless pressure I smelt the smoke on him from sleeping sighs on the bottom bunk And then auntie Deidre bought him 20 Benson and Hedges Gold in a caravan park in Garret’s Town Cork Because auntie Deidre ...

I opened the oven door as I took a swig of cola  and the hot air swam above the sweetness on my tongue, meeting like a commuting suit of hot dust huffing hunched over virgin ice, looking back  at each other thinking what the fuck was that?

Someone has created images of a past Slough using AI and the Facebook nostalgia group feels a collective warmth for seeing a past they remember, even though it isn’t. Someone points out that these images aren’t real, and a mob surrounds him. This is exactly as it was, they say, yes - just as I remember it.  One part of me thinks, fine - what’s the harm in this collective self deception? but another part of me sees harm in this utopian vision of the past because there has to be a reason to explain to them the confronting truth of the unutopian present. “That utopia doesn’t exist today and because I believe it did yesterday, something had to have changed.” Foreigners - they say - the floodgates opened. And now we are imagining people whose actions have undone an imagined past.  Again, maybe there’s no harm in someone thinking this in an armchair in a living room. But when we start to imagine who is to blame for an imagined wrong doing, we start to make decisions about p...

He spoke with haste and obscurity. Phrases cut and pasted onto a blinking screen like a business school bill burroughs.  I know these words but find no meaning in their phrasing - just a hollow row of letters executing a fraction of a second.  This man demonstrates an educational and professional lineage that can only communicate with its own. I take more from quiet, from broken speech with sleepy umms. Sentences that finish half way. Words that take a moment because their shared understanding is intimate.

Today i met a wise man. I sat in the passenger seat of his pick up truck which had a name like an energy drink - my sorry silver tin can car strapped up on his trailer - and he told me about his work. He’d  recover people’s cars at any time, even with a sleeping child cosy at home. He prided himself on hearing his phone at 4am even on silent and going out to earn £100. It’s my hobby, he said. He owned the garage we were heading to. See I was a naughty kid, he said, his hands off the steering wheel to gesticulate quotation marks, before speaking about chances - the ones he was given and the ones he now gives.  Every time I thought to speak, it occurred to me that it was a question of why he did what he did, why he thinks how he thinks - and my questions felt like viruses infecting a healthy mind, so I left them unsaid.  This is perhaps a man Zeus made

the sirens tell you the world is out there beyond this silent kitchen with its tap dripping that rumble is cars, car radios, conversations  the wind carries other lives to the closed window each droplet a breath each leaning blade of grass a thought each one hitting a wall, an ear or falling to the ground

the lady with the large upper arms and legs like short stilts held out her phone on speaker and said  yea we had a catch up - an old deja vu down memory lane deja vu? I mouthed to the man behind her who carried on walking 

Dad went into the ward with my Guided by Voices  tee. Our very own jack flying over the cuckoo's nest. A bankruptcy and divorce led him to a car and a hose pipe, but it was the wrong kind of fuel, he said. I had bought that shirt with cash made from carving off bits of hash from my ounce - wandering through the surreal nighttime dusts of a summer festival with a teenage mind chewing acid. You have a singing voice like Don McLean said Mike, high on smack as I cut him off some pot.  Dad liked how it looked to be wearing the shirt in the asylum. The knowingness. Mad enough to be kept in, but sane enough to think he was in control of staying.

the neighbour with the window display of st georges flags and a ‘vote restore’ sign  has put a swing in his front garden to dry his pants

so it worked? she smiled back its  you? of course - and you - look at you! she manoeuvred his head to see each angle how do i look? younger - definitely because I was hideously old?  no - come on!  so what do you think? she curtsied  my hands - I hadn’t noticed how much my hands had changed the skin was milky and opaque I didn't know this you no - we were strangers well we ought to meet as strangers he held out his hand wow, madame, you’re beautiful, what’s your name? she snorted  no!  what? wouldn’t that have worked? she danced in front of him god - I hadn’t noticed how tired i was. let’s dance! whose energy do we have? who cares - so what if our time runs out and we return to two dead old bodies he smiled and started dancing from his head downwards at least we will have had this - now dance with me!

the sky is a yellow milk a lost post bag dragged through the dirt summers ending fuck - did I make enough of this one ?

S designed houses - housing estates in fact. He liked the principles of Le Corbusier and built shopping centres and tower blocks out of raw concrete. It wasn’t long before his buildings lay sick and abandoned and he became obsessed with dereliction. He lost hours in empty rooms with broken windows. He didn’t believe in the paranormal but he felt the life and death of a place at the same time. Standing in the shopping centre he’d designed many years ago, he could feel the energy of the hundreds of lives that passed through and felt their absence like an emptiness in himself. S became a grandfather and he entered his third life of playgrounds. His first had been as a child jumping off swings onto concrete. His second was as a dad terrified his sons would do the same. His third was as a grandad and he knew this would be the last spoonful of this meal. He admired the climbing frame. This tiny metal temple gate in flood water, snow and the dust of summer.  And so S spent the remainder o...