One day I will move to the seaside and it will be good, and I will sit down by the shore and rest my head on something and feel peaceful...

... and go to sleep listening to the sound of the sea, and maybe never wake up.


by Chris Killen

I am about ten inches tall. I live inside an abandoned bicycle. I work in an office. They had to make me a special chair to sit in at the office. It is like a normal chair but smaller. I don’t have any friends. No one speaks to me. My job is easy. I just sit in the chair. Sometimes I climb up onto the desk and walk along it and onto one of the other desks, where there is an envelope. Then I lick the envelope and seal it. Sometimes there is nothing inside the envelope and the person at the desk has to throw the envelope away, and I feel bad and confused, but they never shout at me. Don’t worry. They never say anything. It is a good job.

I live inside an abandoned bicycle. No one would want to ride it, anyway. It has no saddle. I am incredibly sensitive. Sometimes things like the sound of rain or the feeling of rain touching my body feels very painful and I begin to cry. There is nothing I can do about this. If I want to look at myself, I use a mirror that I have made out of a crisp. Sometimes I think I look very handsome, and want to show my reflection to someone else.

I found the crisp inside the mouth of a cat. I stole the crisp out of the mouth of the cat. The cat chased me and tried to scratch me, but I scared it off by shouting things at it. I shouted rude things, cat-things, things I wouldn’t want to repeat.

When I get home I sometimes take off my suit and put on a dress that I have fashioned from an empty packet of hula hoops. I put the dress on and slink around like a lady and watch myself in the crisp. Sometimes I get an erection, but I am not sure what to do. It makes me feel confused.

Time goes very fast. I am like a dog or a cat in this respect (I think I read that once at work, on the internet, that dogs and cats live seven times faster than normal people).

In my spare time I read books from the library. I like reading novels by John Steinbeck the best. Even the small ones (Of Mice and Men, etc.) are very big for me to hold. Sometimes I crawl in between the pages and wrap them around me and go to sleep in them. Sometimes I wake up and find I have drooled a bit on the page and made a little window through to the next page, and sometimes I put my head through the window and say things to myself.

My days go very quickly.
I will probably die soon.
Don’t worry about me.


This story was written by Chris Killen and "bought" by Sara Crowley for the price of a packet of Hula Hoops. Sara, who decided to submit it, blogs at A Salted where you can read the bizarre tale behind this bizarre tale.