10 Things That Never Happened (Material World #1)

by Alexis Hall

But in an ideal world Karl Marx would have better hair and Christmas wouldn’t be a soulless spectacle of conspicuous consumption. Sometimes you just play the hand you’re dealt.

In any case, even by rented flat standards it’s a bit spartan—okay very spartan, so spartan I could probably hold it against a whole army with just two hundred and ninety-nine other fellers.

I don’t think she thought he was that sort of serial killer. More the “oh, I should’ve known” sort of serial killer. But I’m not sure I want to be sitting here at midnight discussing the finer points of mass murder.

“That’s not cooking, it’s desecrating a corpse.”

And for a while we sit there, silent like. It turns out that shooting the elephant in the room just leaves you with a dead elephant, and a dead elephant takes up as much space as a live one, and has a tendency to smell.

I protest again, increasingly aware that protesting is something you can do too much of.

“Y’see”—now she’s drumming her nails on the dashboard, tapping along with the rain—“that’s the problem with modern, late-stage capitalist society. It denies people the conceptual framework to imagine an alternative, so even people who are excluded or disenfranchised by it can’t imagine an alternative system, only an alternative version of the same system where they have a larger share of the wealth.”

It’s kind of the worst thing someone can say to you. Because you can’t hurt someone unless they care. And you shouldn’t if they do.