Photo by Regan Dsouza, Pexels

---

by J.W. Wood

.

Martin began to gain power. And power, as we all know, is the greatest narcotic – or hallucinogen. For instance, the high-powered Simon Tickley invited him to a shooting weekend. This consisted of people dressing up in clothes from the nineteenth century and blasting away at defenceless ducks and geese which died in agony from their wounds. Martin had never wanted to kill anything and the sight of dying birds made him feel sick. Especially if they weren’t that bastard pheasant.

He went anyway because he’d been invited and thought it might be good for his career – a word he’d recently learned to attach to sitting in an office and doing as he was told for eight hours each weekday. He also remembered the other meaning of the word “career” – to run around wildly and with no apparent purpose.

“career” – to run around wildly and with no apparent purpose.

That Christmas, Simon Tickley sent him an expensive bottle of brandy from an upmarket store in London as a gift. He didn’t mention that he’d put it on expenses – effectively, the taxpayer gifted Martin the brandy.

As Martin’s power in government grew, so he became aware of his ability to affect change. One time he decided taxing condoms would be a great idea because he didn’t like using them. So he fed the opposition parties bogus statistics about the need for better family planning. He built an argument from “evidence” stating that funds for this should come from the user base for family planning. The government caved in, and the world’s first “Pay as you Come” legislation was born.

However much his power grew, he had still done nothing about the pheasant. He celebrated his first work anniversary over lunch in Nuneaton’s most exclusive eatery. Fenella, his new inamorata, gazed at him across the table, her passion for him at its fullest flower. Amid such happiness, he remembered the pheasant back at the office and frowned.

As he perfected his own life, so the pheasant’s existence became more of an affront. Soon the very idea that this bird would have the temerity to squawk and shit where he worked was offensive to him, and he swore he would remove it, come what may, by any means necessary – fair or statistical.

---

.

Click to read an interview with J.W. Wood

.

---

.

Captcha This!

£15.99

“J. W. Wood’s stories evince a gift for the quotidian, employing brilliant conceits and mischievous turns of phrase which enrich the writing at every point. Capturing the frustration of curtailed lives and the grim horrors of the corporate world, Wood presents a meta-fictional universe in which the rich realise their folly and we control computers, not the other way round.”

—Julian Stannard, award-winning poet and author of The University of Bliss (Sagging Meniscus Press, USA, 2024)