Category: weird fiction

Penny does not expect to hear the roar of an invisible dragon on the path on the edge of a potato field. It takes a moment for her to think to look up.

The hot air balloon passing above her head is too low and too large. Its white sphere stands out sharply against dense black clouds.

Should it even be in the air on a day like this, with a gale blowing up and rain beginning to spot the cracked soil? Penny misjudged the weather for her walk but is dressed for it in waterproof trousers and hooded jacket. Perhaps the pilot of the balloon also misread or ignored the weather forecast. Or has a deathwish.

The wicker basket beneath the balloon is only a few metres above her head. She stops and waits for it to go by, and to progress beyond the line of red-studded bramble bushes ahead. She knows very little about balloons but understands that they have little control over their direction, being at the mercy of layers of wind at different altitudes. She hopes this one, this colossal pearlescent object, will avoid the fourteenth century tower of St. Leonard’s Church which lies a mile or so ahead.

As the balloon moves ahead she expects to see its pilot come into view above the edge of the basket. This does not happen, though someone must be there to trigger the burner, which turns the pearl orange for a second. The balloon does not rise.

In fact, even as the wind whips at the synthetic fabric of her waterproofs and pulls strands of her dark hair across her face, the balloon seems to slow. Then it stops altogether, fixing itself in the air, as if a pause button has been pressed. The hawthornes to Penny’s left are shaken by the growing gale and lurch forward. A torn cement sack tumbles across the field to her right, a tangle of white, brown and blue. But the balloon does not move, at least not forward, because, yes, like an elevator, it is descending gently.

The basket rolls slightly on contact with the pale brown earth, rights itself, settles flat. The structure of the balloon sits solidly, neither sagging nor swaying.

Penny takes a few steps and calls out in her high, nasal voice: ‘Hello? Is everything okay? Do you need help?’ She can barely hear herself and knows that her words have been lost.

The balloon waits.

Rain comes harder, tearing across her rucksack and back. She moves instinctively towards the balloon hoping it might offer shelter, skipping awkwardly over ruts in the ground, stumbling in her sturdy boots.

Close by, the balloon has the bulk of an office block. Its perfect white shell throws out a soft internal light, as if the sun itself has fallen, weakened, from the sky.

The burner exhales flame and it sounds like a weary sigh, or an exhortation. Penny is overcome with a sense that to ignore it would be rude, or hostile. The rain lashes her forward as she hurries to the basket, throws her rucksack over the worn leather of the rim, and climbs in after it.

The basket is empty. There is no pilot, no flask of hot tea, no warm blanket. Here, though, the wind is diminished, and the rain cannot reach. She feels like a child in the arms of a great mother.

Flames rise above her head. Mother sighs. The balloon begins to rise.

Do you get the urge or is it just me? You’re walking along and you see a half-eaten sandwich lying on the ground, covered with bits of grit and crawling with ants, and you think: I want to eat that.

You don’t, obviously. But you think it.

Like how you consider throwing your wallet into the river every time you cross the bridge in town. Or feel your hand edging towards the emergency brake on the train during your commute, specifically because there’s a sign telling you not to. That’s exactly what it’s like when you see a plastic glass half full of cola sitting on a wall and you think, I want to drink that, and eat the chunks that are floating in it, whatever they are. Do you really never get that? Really? I do. All the time.

You don’t do it, as I say, obviously you don’t do it, but it’s touch and go sometimes. When nobody’s looking, when you’ve had a really bad day and everything’s turned to absolute shit, you think, if I eat something I’ll feel better. And if you’re going to eat something, why not that scoop of ice cream that’s been dropped on the pavement and is still mostly solid, even though it’s sent out sticky brown runners towards the gutter? Imagine just scooping it up in your fingers and sticking it in your mouth in one neat move. If you get it right you could leave behind the bit that’s been in contact with the pavement and just get the good stuff that’s probably hardly even been licked. You get so you don’t mind a bit of lick, anyway. People snog strangers all the time – how is a bit of lick on an ice cream any different?

It started when I was a washer-up in a chain restaurant as a teenager. The stuff that used to come back uneaten! Chicken nuggets from the kids’ meals, they’re the ones that tempt you the most, and cakes. Imagine throwing away good food like that and then going home to an economy burger, oven chips, and frozen peas. So, yes, you do eat the odd bit here and there, when they look fairly clean and intact. Nobody notices and nobody cares. It’s like a little bonus, a little treat, and all for free.

One particularly bad shift, though, when the manager had been snippy with me, and I knew it wouldn’t be much better at home, I confess that I did once give myself an extra treat and eat some gristle left over from a steak. It had been chewed and spat out. I chewed it again myself, like gum, while I used the extendable hose to rinse gravy from a pile of plates. You chew and chew and eventually it softens up. That’s why people chew gum, because it’s calming and meditative.

Licking ketchup and melted cheese from the insider of a discarded burger wrapper, that’s another good one. It’s like you’ve eaten the burger without having eaten the burger. Sometimes, when the wrapper’s been out all night, blowing round the retail park car park, it’ll have picked up crunchy bits of glass or splinters of wood. You clear the paper with your tongue and it leaves you feeling clean, too, like you’ve groomed the dirt off your own body.

Nobody eats the salad from a kebab, have you noticed that? On Saturday and Sunday mornings you can pick up all sorts: trampled iceberg lettuce salad, pickled chilli peppers, pitta breads soaked with grease and garlic sauce where the bread has become like a sponge in the morning dew. Get your five a day.

A bit of mold doesn’t even do any harm. You eat blue cheese, don’t you? They say it’s good for you to put bacteria into your gut. There was a whole bag of shopping once, hanging on a railing. A pack of pittas gone blue all over, a cucumber rotten in its plastic sleeve. You can slurp that like an ice pop. You can’t just leave it hanging there. You can’t just walk past, letting good food go to waste, even if it does leave you feeling too full to move. Beats feeling empty inside, that’s what I say.

Or what about those full plastic bottles you find in the gutter? It might be apple juice or beer, it might not, but waste not want not. You’ve got to scratch the itch sometimes, you’ve got to give into the urge.

Some people take roadkill home and cook it. They have freezers full of the stuff. I say, why go to all that bother? The good stuff is like jerky, dried naturally in the sun, seasoned with engine oil and brake fluid. Does your mouth water when you smell petrol? Mine does. Chicken wings, too – it’s like eating chicken wings. Lots of little bones to chew the tough meat from. You really feel as if you’ve earned your meal.

When people feed good bread to the ducks, that breaks my heart. There’s kids starving and they’re throwing bread into the pond in the park – are you serious? It’s not even good for ducks to eat bread, is it? If you have a small net, it’s easy enough to fish the bread out out, or you can just use your hands. The texture is like nothing else. Municipal caviar, I call it.

Dregs from drinks cans, too. Lots of variety, a little dribble of lots of different things, cider or Fanta or whatever, and you can always spit out the cig ends and the insects.

I like a mystery, a blind taste test. You don’t always know what’s in a holdall you find dumped on a verge, do you? There’s no way to be sure if it’s been there a while. You just have to get stuck in and enjoy it for what it is, all of it, pounds and pounds of raw, sweating meat. Almost enough to fill the infinite empty space inside you – not quite, but almost. The only problem is that sometimes you worry you might have helped to dispose of evidence, when they start talking about that holdall on the news, but how are you to know?

I find there’s really no need to go home at all these days, or to go to work, not when you can eat three square meals a day out and about for free. You just need to have a good eye and a strong stomach. And your stomach gets stronger, too, the more you do it. What’s at home, anyway? Much better to be in the fresh air, enjoying all of nature’s bounty.

Oh, see there, under the brambles – a yoghurt pot that looks to be, yes it is, almost half full. Now, don’t you get the urge to eat that? Don’t you? Is it just me?

If you enjoyed ‘Do Not Eat’ check out Intervals of Darkness, my most recent collection of weird stories, which is available as an eBook and paperback.

• UK eBook | UK paperback
• US eBook | US paperback