Now Get Back To It, You F***ing Baby

Six New Stories

The Date

She arrived for their date with a burn on her cheek. She said it was because she’d been feeling tired all day and had made the error of napping against the door of her logburner. He told her not to worry. “I’m not worried,” she said. “I’m just explaining how I burned my cheek.” He began to speak about his two bands and the novel he was working on. She talked about her hopes for the future, including the one that more people would begin to speak out and raise awareness about how awful it was to drink a glass of water directly after eating an apple. He seasoned his conversation liberally with quotes from songs in the hope it would validate him in her eyes as a person of complexity and taste. She recognised and ignored them and talked about her favourite conspiracy theories, such as the one that JFK’s head had done what it did in the open-top car entirely on its own. Though his sense of smell was weak, he thought she looked like a person who would be effortlessly fragrant. She thought he looked like someone who had once had a moustache: it was something about the blank desert nature of his face, the way it seemed to yearn for someone to grab a crayon and hastily colour it in. He overpopulated his anecdotes and told her a prolonged story about someone she’d never met which made no sense if you didn’t have a prior knowledge of its central character’s weak points. She enjoyed spontaneously fabricating a past for herself, including the unfulfilling autumn she had once spent composing call waiting music for orthodontists. 10pm rolled around and she told him her train was due to leave soon. He insisted on accompanying her to the station and discovered she had not lied. “How old are you?” he asked. “27,” she replied. He was amazed that someone so young already owned a train.