Socialist

An idiot lit a barbecue outside his flat last Saturday night. He sent smoke through our window, and the windows of the flats above his own. We complained to our management company. They wrote back saying that they couldn't find anything in our leases forbidding barbecues. Which was odd because the previous management company did, and sent reminders out to us all.
 This mob suggested we go and talk to our neighbours amicably. We didn't want to do that because we don't know him. We didn't know how amicable he would be. Would he try to stab us? Put excrement through our letterbox? Or be forever afterwards spying, to see if we'd transgressed the regulations by, say, having a cat?
I sometimes feel like I'm letting myself down by not engaging with people, but I'm sick of them turning out to be antisocial or even downright mad. The socialist in me says that we're all human beings, we all breathe the same air, we are all mortal...Citizens of the world ought to be allowed to go around with machine guns if they want to. The everyday cynic in me sees bloodbaths everywhere. And if someone is stupid enough to start a barbecue on a small strip of grass outside a block of flats, with tendrils of ivy hanging over the flames from the park next door, well, it's a small step from that to the whole estate going up.
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I submitted a flash fiction to Paragraph Planet. I combed through all the ideas which I hadn't used, then wrote a 75 word story. I didn't feel all that inspired. I began it mechanically. I didn't bother writing character biographies. I know that the word count was low, but I felt afterwards that I should have done this. The more care you put into your story, the better it will be. I simply wanted to write something with a beginning, middle and end, then submit it, purely to feel like a storyteller again. I wanted to do something other than endlessly planning, or scraping around for new ideas which never seem to come.
I thought that writing fiction in the council's time might add a shot of adrenaline to the writing, but it didn't. I thought that, maybe if I began a story, my muse might join in. It didn't. Still, I suppose I could put it all down to practice.

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