Warren Ellis wrote a pretty fantastic short short story called Jack Baby that I saw yesterday:
I dipped the old jar down into the creeping slurry and scooped a pint
of shit-water out of the Thames, down where the sewers meet the river.
It’s come to this, I said to no-one: making jenkem rather than seeing
the Jack Baby.Seal up the jar, watch it ferment for long
sleepless days, and then inhale the gas off the top. Jenkem: ghetto
drugs. An hour of laying like a corpse and seeing dead things instead
of the orgasm-jerking and spacewalk day of a Jack high. But I couldn’t
afford Jack, and I didn’t want to think about the Jack Baby.
There’s a lot of atmosphere, character, and story wrapped up in the 200 words or so that make up the entire thing, and I had to read it twice to fully absorb it. It was totally worth it.
When I manage to wring fiction out of my brain, it will be because I am inspired by stories like this. I mean, how in the hell can Warren come up with stuff like — well, just go read it, and see if you don’t have the same reaction.
