Kitchen. I'm in one. There, you've got your setting. What else do you want, blood?

Kevin. If he was really little.

Image via Wikipedia

It's wet outside. Sitting in the kitchen, drinking some tea, I reflected on that. You may think it's boring, but they were my thoughts, and you have no claim over them. If you're so upset, why not fuck off, back to your fascist thought factories, you scum.
 "Anyway, now I've insulted my readers, I can move on at last." I quipped smugly.
 "Yes. That is often the way" Kevin the snail replied.
I wondered, briefly, why he was now living in my house. I wasn't surprised though - whenever I meet any character with certain odd traits, they seem to move into my house. I guess its the same for everyone, yes?
 "Do you have anything profound to say?" I asked Kevin over my refreshing peppermint tea.
 "No." He replied. "I'm feeling a little under the weather, to be honest."
I nodded.

Kevin was right, of course. High above him, the weather continued to do its thing. I was despondent though - between us, we had nothing intelligent to say. And that severely damaged my ability to be pretentious.

Return of the prodigal me.

Yes. It was based on my life, you know. Cover via AmazonI'm home now. The train, kindly, pulled up right outside my house. I say kindly - I expect the council are going to be pretty pissed I encouraged rail workers to build a railway line down my street. But anyway, I'm home. A worrying fact occurred to me as I collected my luggage and circumnavigated my duckpond - I'd left Max alone in the house. I mean, I locked the doors and opened the window a little before I left.
 Besides, he had the soup. And probably some tramps in there. I really must pay more attention to what's happening in my house before I lock it up...

I steeled myself at the door, as I've done so many times before, and prepared myself for some new and absurd horror.
 The house looked normal. My pictures were straight, the rug free of urine - which was certainly good, I can't afford another Big Lebowski-esq adventure - and my microwave was free of play-dough. Max was in the kitchen, stirring what I assumed to be soup on the hob when I found him. There were no tramps around, and even better, nothing indicating he'd hacked up tramps and made soup out of them. I greeted him, and slumped into a seat by the table. Max, stirring with his right arm, turned to face me,
 It was then I noticed his left arm, previously blocked from view by his body.
 It was made of wood.

Seriously. There was a dazed woodpecker on it and everything.

"Did you see, Peru's president revokes civil war atrocities amnesty"...

A man can dream though... A man can dream. Image via Wikipedia... Is today's headline?"
Max looked up from his coffee.
 "No." He replied. I noticed that he was reading a print-your-own-headline novelty newspaper. It wasn't really surprising he hadn't seen seen any modern news, he was reading an article on how he, Max, had been elected President of Space.
 "PERU?"
A feeling of dread spread like water across my body, sinking into my clothes and dripping liquidy dread into the carpet. Putting down his newspaper, leaning on his fists as to shake his miniature coffee mug, Mr. Potato pushed his face closer to me. "PERU?" He demanded.
 "No. Poland. You misheard." I yelled. "Please don't start again."
But Mr. Potato was off. He'd met the foreign furniture guys in the dungeon yesterday - still holding, by the way - and had given them a good going-over, until he realised they were Venezuelan. Still, here we go again.
 "Bloody Peruvians!" He yelled. "With their trees! And Llamas! And those hats! Bloody hats. I want to deep-fry them! All of them!"
I sighed. Mr. Potato was really a very angry man. potato. man-potato? He has a little hat, that must count for something...
 Anyway, I'm off to look for a potato peeler. I've left Max in the kitchen, being lectured about how Peruvian water was far more lazy than other water. I could always boil them both. That might work.

I took another look around the kitchen. There was no point denying it, it was a mess: The bin was overflowing, the sink was full, and my expensive marble work-surfaces had been replaced with what looked like a sheepskin rug. Max was staying.
 "So, any news about your house then?"
Max shook his head despondently. Last week, Max had returned from his annual week trip to the bus depot - where he impersonated a bus driver and stole as many packets of coffee granules from the staff kitchen as possible - to find his house had been stolen. He seemed pretty certain it was taken by a "goth and a homosexual woman". He had no evidence, and indeed, no reason to suspect anyone. However, he refused to listen to reason. Now, he was sitting in his (my) underwear, watching game-shows and shouting abuse.
 "So, want to do anything?" I asked.
 "No." He replied, anticlimactically.
Not everything in life is interesting.