Excerpt from short story collection

Excerpt from a short story written by me. It will be part of a four story collection (illustrated by Andrew Godfrey) which you will be able to buy from me for £1.50 if you come to the Bristol Comic and Zine Fair on the 25th.

" After paying for their room, they seem to forget about sleep and invite me in to share their alcohol. They have a lot of stories and they want someone to tell them to. There was doing coke in a Memphis jazz club, where they were later thrown out for trying to sing along to the trumpets. There was passing through New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina and trying to communicate with the dead that they truly believed still haunted there. There was running out of gas halfway through Tennessee and having to sell Jenny’s vintage clothing at the side of the road for gas money. They picked up a stray kitten there, which they later gave away to some kids. They regretted the decision now. ‘Those kids were evil’, Steve says. ‘Tough little shits. They probably burned the kitten alive for kicks. But we were too stoned at the time to realise’.

The road stories keep on coming but I hear nothing about who they were before they started driving, whether they are married or having an affair, what they do for a living, not even their ages. It’s as if the past doesn’t exist for them, as if starting up that car erased all that had happened before. And in fact, the absence of past does not seem like an absence at all because it’s all about now, right now. What others might call absence is only irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. I wonder if that is what freedom is; having no past and not even noticing that you have no past."