A fiction piece I wrote upon waking up in the middle of the night, giggling like a child.
…
You awake and look to your watch. It’s 4:27 PM. Your last memory is of opening your seventh magnum of champagne and screaming at the waiter that “no, sir doesn’t want another 11 glasses, this is all for me” before trying to aggressively fuck a cheeseboard that someone put a lot of time, effort and expense into.
What happened between then and now, and why there is Fortnum and Masons Green Tomato Chutney smeared across your tits, is a mystery very much secondary to the fact you appear to be upside down in a vending machine. A fact brought home to you by the angry traveller repeatedly pressing “D5” causing the whirring machine to attempt to corkscrew 3 cans of monster energy up your arse.
Your overtaxed bladder releases and the stream of hot, and somehow still fizzy, piss cuts through the grime on the glass of the vending machine to reveal two things. The first is a crowd of people gathered around a massive video ad screen, which has been repurposed to show news footage of a new viral video. The video appears to be you, attempting to check in to an open vending machine believing it to be a capsule hotel, generously tipping the attendant refilling it, climbing inside and closing yourself in. The view counter currently stands at 2.4 billion. The second thing is the unmistakable, albeit inverted, outline of the Mirai Tower.
You do not have a visa for travel to Nagoya, or indeed any part of Japan, so this is concerning. Gathering your strength you inhale deeply, clench your entire self, and erupt through the glass of the vending machine, brutally lacerating the vendee and launching a can of monster at near hypersonic speeds into the head of an innocent bystander who (were it not for this event) would have made the developments in material science necessary for the creation of a functioning cold fusion reactor.
As three security guards, a member of the royal Canadian mounted police, and Hachimaru (mascot of the city of Nagoya) chase you, trousers-less, down the street, you consider your predicament. Air travel will be difficult in your current condition.
You escape your pursuers by causing a tanker full of industrial lubricant to overturn, rendering everything within 130 feet “thoroughly lubricated” and thus unsuitable for high speed pursuit.
Sprinting through the city streets to the nearest dockyard, you hide yourself in a shipping container bound for England. For six weeks you subsist on only dry noodle bricks, snorted flavour sachets and rainwater. You wile away the time fashioning an impeccably tasteful suit out of the foil noodle wrappers.
You arrive just in time for London Fashion Week, where you win several awards, before being hospitalised due to a case of constipation so severe that the tattered remains of your anus go on to grace the cover of the British Medical Journal.
So begins 2024.