3 A. M. MAGAZINE welcomes the submission of short-shorts of less than 200 words.

Most of the time he spoke of horses and women (in that order of preference), but I could never tell which. He would say things like : "Mark my words, sunny jim, they should have strong quarters, a solid second thigh and a spanking rump." His advice always left me saddled with an embarrassed smile.

ANDREW GALLIX

Hey, baby. Don't do this! Don't shrink my world. I need space. Room to spread out, room to grow. You understand, don't you? I need to express my pain. That's what you're about, isn't it? Empowerment. All of a sudden you're shutting me in. I'm disillusioned. I don't like these walls closing in on me. Please.

Get your hand away from that mouse.

Delete me! Delete me!

No! DON'T!!!

VINCENT ABBATE

My sister once made a gaggle of gingerbread men I imagined to be destined for doughy, doughty deeds so gallant were they. I simply could not bring myself to eat them, had neither the heart nor the stomach to do so. A moratorium was declared by sisterly decree and the spice boys remained in battle formation on the kitchen table pending mum's final verdict. You could smell the sensuous, exotic aroma from my bedroom, even behind closed door.

That night, I had this vivid dream in which the gingerbread men rose from the baking tray Galatea fashion. Still under the influence of the self-raising flour, they legged it upstairs to gang-bang the Play-Doh model of the Girl Next Door I had lovingly sculpted and kept secretly beside my comics and sensible shoes.

Breakfast, the morning after, was a truly religious experience. I binged on the randy homunculi, biting off their heads with sheer abandon, tearing away at their limbs ravenously and washing them down with enough glasses of Ribena* to incarnadine the multitudinous seas.

* Ribena is a children's drink made from blackcurrants which is very popular in the UK.

ANDREW GALLIX

Mrs Ramsay, looking very strict indeed with her hair up in a bunch, wielding a knife à la Lorena Bobbitt. The knife is poised ominously above a melon posed precariously beside a guillotined carrot and a circumcised cucumber on the work surface. It trembles there for a few nanoseconds, catching the wan evening sun. Then the knife comes crunching down with the inevitability of tragedy.

ANDREW GALLIX

Far-fetched you say ? Think about it. You are bathing in low level radiation from your monitor. Sitting on your ass in front of the computer all day puts unnecessary pressure on your prostate that can't be good. You have no social life : how are you going to to get a date if you spend every waking moment surfing the web ? Not to mention that constantly jerking-off to online porn lowers what little sperm count you have left. Finally, there is the sheer soul-sucking banality of 99% of content on the Internet.

I'm not sure how that last one can contribute to impotence, but I felt compelled to point it out. In fifty years' time, the internet will be noted as the world's first successful eugenics programme. With all the geeks, losers, and outright twisted fucks who spend several hours a day glued to their computers no longer peeing in the gene pool, we will have a marked global improvement in skin tone and hygiene. Spelling will improve tenfold, with nobody tempted to write kewl things using lame misspellings and 1ns3rt1ng numbers in the place of letters, and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome will be a thing of the past.

Unfortunately, once the lure of wasting away in front of a screen gets bred out of us, we will be forced to actually speak to each other. The ensuing misunderstandings, animosities and wars will wipe out all life as we know it.

FOOG

He wandered, he roved; he shuffled, he roamed; he pounded, he expounded, he strode and he strolled. Perry Pathetic, we called him, this peripatetic poet who paced the streets of Paris, flogging his verse to all and sundry. "My work I have costed," he told whoever he accosted, "and I'll spin you a rhyme if you slip me a dime," or words to that effect. Now his walking does the talking, it has no rhyme nor reason - he is poetry in motion.

ANDREW GALLIX

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