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    Unlost
    Unlost
    Unlost
    Ebook134 pages2 hours

    Unlost

    By K L Gillespie

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Unlost is an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories with a flamboyant sense of the absurd that dips into the lives of masturbating surrealists, blind fantacists, sadomasochists and provocative pickpockets.

    One by one they explore life, death, sex - lost minds, lost love and lost ways. In one breath macabre and relentless but also wildly funny....

    Revelling in the sense that life is stranger than we can imagine, this anthology will delight and unsettle in equal measure.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherK L Gillespie
    Release dateJan 20, 2012
    ISBN9781465881281
    Unlost
    Author

    K L Gillespie

    K L Gillespie writes about masturbating surrealists, blind fantacists, sadomasochists - life, death, sex - lost minds, lost love and lost ways...In the dead of night she cultivates orchids...At dawn she talks to birds...Her work has previously been published in 3AM Magazine, TANK, The Erotic Review and several award winning anthologies.

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      Book preview

      Unlost - K L Gillespie

      UNLOST

      Collected Short Stories

      K L GILLESPIE

      Unlost

      K L Gillespie

      Copyright © 2011 K L Gillespie

      All rights reserved.

      Smashwords Edition

      ISBN: 1466240970

      ISBN-13: 978-1466240971

      For and because of Ian.

      CONTENTS

      1 Obsequy

      2 Bloodsuckers Incorporated

      3 Sometimes

      4 Another Assignation With Charles Bonnet

      5 The Bickering

      6 Bob's Midlife Crisis

      7 The Great Masturbator

      8 Datum

      9 Dominoes

      10 God Is Dead

      11 The Solo Sadomasochist

      12 Her(His)Story

      13 Dinner Date

      14 Golden Hand

      OBSEQUY

      Pam’s body was found wedged behind the door of a public toilet at 10:31am on Monday morning. She had cut her wrists open with a broken gin bottle and bled to death. The lacerations ran up both arms from the wrist to the elbow and there was no doubt that she intended to die. This was no feeble cry for help; this was the only way she could escape the nightmare her life had become.

      It had started off well enough with a happy upbringing; both parents were always around, she did well in her lessons, even secured a place at college. She was a bit shy if anything but all that changed when a friend introduced her to Rollo at a disco and he in turn introduced her to the delights of alcohol. She couldn’t remember which she fell in love with first but for the last thirty years they had been the two most important things in her life.

      Pam and Rollo never got married, it just never occurred to them, they were always too drunk or scraping together enough money for the next drink. Children were never an issue either, Pam only managed to menstruate a couple of times a year and most of the time Rollo had trouble in that department too, although he would never admit it. Rollo was like that, he used to say he was born an alcoholic, that way it wasn’t his fault, nothing ever was. When he battered Pam it was always her fault, when he stubbed out cigarettes on her skin, that was her fault too and when he locked her in a room and raped her she was asking for it. Always asking for it. Luckily Pam was usually too drunk to remember the next day but the scars and bruises were always there as witnesses. She could have forced the memories if she wanted but she knew it was better to leave them unremembered.

      By 10:33 a.m. a crowd had already gathered, an ambulance had been called and the toilet attendant had fainted. Someone threw a coat over Pam’s corpse, a shred of dignity in the circus of death.

      Four minutes later at 10:37 a.m. Pam’s soul rose from her body.

      Thank Christ for that, she said as she counted her fingers and checked her toes, which hovered above the heads of the crowd at that point. She was relieved to say the least, suicide had been the biggest gamble of her life and she was ecstatic to find that she had managed to pull it off. She finished checking herself over and surveyed the scene below her with astonishment, she barely recognised her discarded, lifeless body slumped around the toilet. She felt uninvolved and removed from it all, like she was watching television. The crowd on the other hand lapped it up and like tragedy junkies they shuffled round, nudging each other out of the way for a better look at her corpse. The pensioners were the worst, hungry for a glimpse of death they pushed to the front, desperate to de-sensitise themselves to their own inevitable demise by familiarising themselves with someone else’s.

      Pam couldn’t believe the interest her body aroused because in life she was used to being invisible and ignored. The last time she had been the centre of attention like this was in 1963 when she won the fancy dress party at the local church. She went as a mermaid and could remember it well, she was only eight and had collected milk bottle tops for her costume for months. The tail was too tight and she could barely walk in it so her proud Dad carried her up for her award and set her on the podium, she felt like a princess, a real little princess. She couldn’t believe it when she won, nobody could to be honest, but win she did. It was the last thing she ever won.

      Pam hadn’t wanted to cause this much fuss in a million years, she had just wanted to disappear, shuffle off – not exist anymore. She didn’t want anyone to miss her or mourn her and she didn’t want their sympathy, not now anyway. Maybe when she was alive it would have come in useful but not anymore. Now she was just glad to be free of her sorry body and eager to put some distance between her and the piss stinking scene of her death so she doggy paddled through the air towards the exit sign, expecting to just float away, like a bubble on the breeze. But nothing’s ever that easy.

      Inches from the door she came to an abrupt halt and suspended in mid air she was unable to move any further. Try as she might she could not reach the exit and when she looked back she saw a translucent silver cord, pulled taught like a guide rope, committing her to her dead body. It was almost ten feet long and shimmered in the fluorescent strip lighting of the toilet.

      What the bloody hell is this? she wondered as she tugged at it gently, the cord was soft but had the strength of steel and it was not budging no matter how hard she pulled.

      Suddenly Pam felt trapped. Panic set in and she was frightened for the first time since passing away. She wished that she had some sort of guidebook for the recently deceased like they get in the movies. Or a least a guardian angel to answer a few questions but when she checked over her shoulder to see if the Angel Gabriel was waiting there was only a young policewoman trying hopelessly to disperse the crowd on the ground.

      The toilet attendant regained consciousness and the crowd grew, news of the suicide had spread like wildfire. Pension day insured a steady supply of coffin dodgers and in their shadows came the kids in their Death Metal t-shirts who swarmed on the toilet from miles around. They reminded Pam of ants in the back yard when she was a child. Her Mum used to pour boiling water on them. Pam knew exactly what she would do if she had a giant kettle. Vultures, she mumbled to herself.

      By 10.54 a.m. Pam had been dead for almost an hour and an ambulance had still not arrived to collect her body. She wished they would hurry up because she was bored with the crowd and sick of the sight of the toilet but she knew she wouldn’t be a priority. They would have worthwhile lives to save elsewhere so she counted the minutes as they passed one by one until the ambulance eventually arrived and the crowd parted to let the paramedics through. Pam was overjoyed when she saw them. She didn’t know what else to look forward to now so she celebrated like it was New Years Eve and turned several cartwheels in the air, only stopping to disentangle the silver cord and check out the handsome paramedic who was leaning over her corpse. Pam whistled admiringly, shocked at her own forwardness and still giddy from her aerial acrobatics. She would never have done something like that in real life but things were different now, she was different now and instead of being high on life she was high on death.

      The paramedics lifted her corpse onto the trolley and she was taken aback by a bizarre sensation creeping up her arms and legs. She could feel them touching her lifeless body as they picked it up and it felt strange, really strange, as if a layer of water separated the surfaces of their skin and dampened the sensation. But the thrill of contact set her nerve endings on fire and her body and soul tingled with desire. All of a sudden Pam wanted to kiss the ambulance man hard on the lips. She wanted to feel the warmth of his body and be held in his arms. She felt exhilarated and for a moment she was lost in her fantasies but when she opened her eyes and looked back down at the ground he was zipping up her body bag.

      Pam shrugged her shoulders, it was obviously not meant to be and it would have never worked anyway, not with her being dead and all. Nevertheless she couldn’t remember the last time she had felt like that and the experience left her dazed and breathless. Death however allowed her no time to dwell on it. Within seconds her corpse was wheeled into the back of the ambulance and the doors were slammed shut, catching her cord between their cold steel teeth and segregating her from her body. It was the first time Pam had lost sight of herself and a hard ball of panic rose to her mouth, she was about to swim after her corpse but she didn’t get the chance. The ambulance lurched away and she was dragged unceremoniously behind it like a kite riddled with holes, struggling to gain height and make up ground.

      When they arrived at the hospital Pam’s body was handed over to a waiting porter and as she was wheeled through the automatic doors she caught a glimpse of another hapless soul being dragged along by a silver cord. It was the first dead body, and soul, that she had ever seen, apart from her own and she would liked to have taken a better look or perhaps say hello but before she had the chance she was yanked down the corridor and into a lift.

      Pam perched on the end of her gurney and watched the porter pick his nose all the way up to the third floor. When the lift stopped he wheeled her body into a clinical operating theatre and she was laid out on a steel table just like the ones she had seen on the TV with the in-built drainage system for the blood to disappear down when they cut her body open. The coroner arrived and her body’s nylon cocoon was unzipped.

      Pam was fascinated as the coroner prepared her cadaver for the autopsy. She watched him cut her clothes

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