Exclusive Member Story ‘Shelf Life’ By Santino Prinzi

Nick was standing in the Romance section of his favourite bookstore, and he wasn’t sure what he was looking for – but that’s where he met Lisa for the first and last time.

She was standing in the Science Fiction section. Her almost obsidian eyes scoured the bookshelves, and her scarlet nails slid across the spines, searching. Scratching a single spine, she teased out a colourful edition of a Kurt Vonnegut and absorbed the blurb. Nick and Lisa locked eyes and she smiled. The way her mouth curled at the sides kept Nick’s eyes glued to her. Her curves ignited his imagination. Nick looked down at the Fifty Shades of Grey he was holding and then returned her gaze with a grin that implied only one thing.

Nick shelved the questionable novel and strolled from Romance to Fantasy. Lisa put Vonnegut away and wandered into his fantasies. They stood shoulder to shoulder in silence. He could almost feel her warmth. He picked up a clothbound edition of The Lord of the Rings. Lisa exhaled deeply and moaned; she knew he’d be the one man to rule her heart.

Their fingers twisted together, and their lives became Poetry for a moment. Lisa knew she and Nick were diving head-first into the abyss of lyricism and imagery but, as the excitement of internal rhyme wore off, she wanted something less fictitious, more concrete.

CROCODILES by Matt Harris

Once there was a very happy little girl who lived in a village between a jungle and a river. The little girl was so happy that she smiled all day long. She smiled when she woke up in the morning, smiled when she saw there were noodles for breakfast, smiled on her way to her school lessons, smiled when she came home for lunch, smiled as she spent the afternoon helping her mother with the laundry and cleaning, smiled and laughed while she played with the other children in the evening and went to bed smiling and looking forward to happy dreams. Life was good for the happy little girl.

But not everyone liked to see the girl smiling so much. In fact almost everyone in the village disliked seeing her smile all the time. This was because life in the village was very hard. The reason it was hard was that they lived between the river and the jungle. The river was full of crocodiles and the jungle was full of tigers, so the villagers had to scrape a living from their thin strip of land. At night they stayed indoors, fearful of the rustling sounds from the jungle where the tigers crept, and the sloshing sounds from the river where the crocodiles surged slowly through the brown waters.

The Biter Bit By Helen Holmes

Whichever way you cut it, Property In Transit Services deals with crap: dumped crap and lost crap. You can tart it up all you like with a fancy moniker, but at the end of the day Left Luggage is humping heavy bags and Lost Property’s dealing with idiots. So where exactly is the job satisfaction that Vanessa from Human Resources keeps banging on about? That’s what Kirsty would like to know. Kirsty wanted Ticketing Services. Everyone says TICKS is the launch-pad, the passport to promotion. Without TICKS experience, there’s not a prayer of getting a job in Customer Support. CUSS is a doddle. PITS is the pits.