Anyone want to play again? (Page 1 of 3)

Alas, Claude was hardly the man of her dreams, but she had no other options now, so she'd try to make the best of it.

It was grim alright. Five years in development. Patents in nine countries; but if sales of the Hover-Table didn't pick up, Françoise would never be able to stop stuffing her shoes full of tissue-paper.

I hate holodecks

Not for the first time Éléonore cursed being French. It was Saturday night and 1984 for Christ's sake. Across the Channel in London, Spandau Ballet were playing the Hammersmith Palais whilst she was stuck here next to Charles Aznavour's fat brother Jacques as he farted out his fifth attempt at a rendition of ‘Au clair de la lune.’

Bathe a Wookie?

I don't know, Seabrass, she doesn't look green to me. Maybe after a little more absinthe...

In what demonic paint store did they make you work in? Green and blue make white?

The absinthe kicked in to galvanise her thoughts as Ellen hoped it would. She made her best choices whilst blind drunk.

Her fashion business venture; designing indistinguishable hats and frilly socks was going nowhere and it was time to face up to that. Marcellin might be right; maybe she should shave off the stubble of her five-o’clock shadow, don a pair of pantalon pour hommes and embark upon a new career as an Elton John impersonator?

But Eduoard lit one of his little cigars and the establishment emptied.  Madelaine was left, once again, with no companion but her glass of absinthe.

She looked ahead to the years to come, to days filled with tea and toast and he with the stained yellow fingers and sullen lower lip, how it collapses over his teeth as he talks of rain and roads and yesterday's headlines, and she wanted to kill him. She thought with detachment how funny that would sound if she said it aloud, as if she could disturb so eloquently.

No eye contact, but his words finally came as she’d known they would. Those words, mumbled and barely distinguishable; he exhales them like a semaphore via the bobbing pipe-stem clenched in his teeth and set a’dancing by his lips.

The lewd words of the proposition and then the price… the offer. Direct words lent diffidence as they filter through his soiled moustache and catch like detritus in his grimy beard before spilling onto the table as the grubby proposal is laid out before her and she hates him. She hates them all. 

She’d accept of course. No question. The money was already her landlord’s, it belonged to her tab in the café and she winced, not for her debts, but for his wife, his children, because it'd be for them to suffer the cost.   

She considered the Pernod, languishing green and sullen within its misty glass. She could do with it now, to dull what was to come, but she’d leave it with Pierre behind the bar.  A hearty glass of absinthe, she mused, was better employed to remove the taste of a man than to preclude one.