LONG PIG

I see you long pig. Head down. Hands in pockets. Negotiating an Edward Hopper meets Mike Leigh landscape. Another round fought to another split decision. You're going the distance but what a distance. You make eye contact with a weirdo who thinks you're a weirdo. You find a tenner but you lost twenty. There might be something on the telly tonight but you know that there probably won't be. The telly's broke anyway. Dieter and Annabelle have invited you to dinner but you're not going because they sound pretentious. A friend texts you to tell you that you're a 'miserable bollocks'. You text back 'so?'. Somebody asks you what time it is and you tell them that it doesn't matter. You'd arrange a protest march against the indifference of the Universe but you know that no one would show up. The Universe wouldn't care anyway. All that can be said has been said except for all the stuff that should be said but never will be. This is getting repetitive. But what's that noise from above? Everyone is standing in the road. Look up long pig. There are crosses in the sky. It's the end of the world ...again.

BUSINESS IS BUSINESS

No more need for costly medals, uniforms, and specialist training. Warfare is now considered unskilled labour and is fought for minimum wage. Our operatives are no longer in the field. They are in something that resembles a call-centre, staring at consoles, operating drones. The dot reaches the centre of the graph. They press the button. Ka-Boom! It’s a piece of piss.

From the ‘About Us’ section of the Ground Control Solutions website: ‘Vibrant. Dynamic. Supportive. G.C.S. (Ground Control Solutions) takes pride in meeting your defence or foreign intervention needs in a professional and accommodating manner. Our friendly and conscientious staff members guide the latest unmanned aerial hardware to desired locations with speed, efficiency and an agreeable degree of accuracy. G.C.S. is a combat system control industry leader and two time winner of the Sir Arthur Harris Memorial Award for Remote Pilot Precision. Why not take advantage of our current two for one package? Offer must end soon.’

My brother worked for G.C.S. when he was just eighteen. It was summer work. He didn’t like it much. The shifts were long and the wages shitty but it was the only thing going and he was saving for a drum kit.

He used come home exhausted and slump in front of the TV. The news would be showing some North African kip being turned to ashes. ‘I wonder if that’s our crowd’, he’d say. He wouldn’t know and asking was a sacking offence. It was said that G.C.S. often worked for both sides in a conflict. Business is business. Things got a bit hairy after our own country got mixed up in a bit of international tomfoolery and G.C.S. was reportedly bombing the very cities in which it operated but, like I said, business is business.

A moral argument for this form of warfare is that it cuts down on casualties, for one side at least. Unfortunately that argument didn’t hold true when G.C.S. was contracted to take out its own centres. To refuse to do so would have resulted in legal action. A survivor said it was my brother that actually operated the drone that blew him and his workplace to bits. He was looking at the graph and commented on how the topography seemed familiar. He pressed the button. We never found his body. I’ll say it one more time, business is business.

THE END.