Bread

by Stephen Brown

CASEBOOK OF GEEZA VERMIES

  A strange job, I’ll say that much. Some mad professor nicking peoples’ food, ties and shoes. No obvious connection, but a hunch told me he would have headed down South and as the Moon was nearly in Her full face I followed him.

  It wasn’t long before I realised my hunch was spot on. The guy I’d hitched with had stopped at a transport café for a break. I bought myself a cup of tea and had a herbal Pipe to try and get a trace on things - to see if I was heading in the right direction. And lo and behold, when I stepped back outside of the dingy place, wiping the grease my hands had picked up from the door handle onto my trousers, I spied a piece of stolen merchandise on the opposite side of the car park.

  There was a young and unnecessarily rotund woman was sitting in her frozen foods delivery van with the door open, about to eat a piece of flapjack. I might have missed it, but at that moment the Pipe kicked in and I noticed traces of a strobe light still dancing between the oats that made up the base. I strode across the broken, pot-holed tarmac and confiscated the aforementioned confectionery item, telling her it must be taken to be used as evidence.

  She looked at me with cold blue eyes and said nothing. She didn’t look convinced though, so I began to explain a bit more about the circumstances involved as I felt I owed it to her. She listened to my speech impassively and then, slowly extracting herself from her tatty vehicle, she stood and faced me.

  She blinked once and when her eyes opened again I was staring straight into a pair of swirling, baleful pits filled with all the fury of the Seven Hells. She held me like that, rooted to the spot for several moments before speaking and when she finally did her voice cut through me like a chainsaw. I was forced to shut my eyes and clasp my hands to my head in order to stop it being sliced apart by the words which tore through my mind like a dentist’s drill.

  Eyes still shut and ears suddenly inoperative, I read what she was saying as angry lines on the blackboard of my mind. The exact words are insignificant, but were to the effect that should I fail to hand back her flapjack - which she had apparently been given by a well to do businessman she had met yesterday. He’d bought too much and otherwise it would only be thrown away - she would ram the king size Twix lying on her dashboard up my anal tract and also punch my face to the back of my head.

  I considered it was more important finding that I was on the right trail than in collecting every scrap of evidence which came my way, so I handed the item back without pursuing the point any further and made myself scarce until Joe – my ride - was ready to go again.

  Once Joe had finished his English brekkie we continued Southwards, only this time, thanks to my Pipe, I was aware that we were being watched by the beady little gaze of the thousands of Gnomes that dwell within the cats’ eyes, lining the roads. They weren’t for letting on what they were looking for – kept disappearing whenever I tried to catch their eyes’ – but for them to take an interest there must be more to this than meets the eye.

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