Tuk-Tuk for Two

by Adam Fletcher

Now, we’re slingshot around the globe in winged toothpaste tubes and land dazed and confused, blinking up into suns and seasons to which we do not belong. Yesterday, it was winter. Today, the world scorched, shimmered, and stalked.

How had I ended up in yet another city I didn’t know how to spell?

Circumstance owed me an apology. Or an explanation, at the very least.

wide, toothy smile ripped across his face. Most smiles are warm and inviting. Most smiles trigger chain reactions of happiness. This was not one of those smiles. This was the bottomless-abyss grin of the sadist. A smile that said I’m going to enjoy this precisely because I know you won’t.

“Things work differently here. When they work at all.”

Chaos! I shouted through the caverns of my interior. Anyone in here order chaos? No, was the emphatic answer.

A beautiful stranger and I were about to get into a tiny, three-wheeled, motorised shed and race it across a growling, slobbering India.

You know those white lane markings on the road? They’re there because we had some spare paint lying around.” He chuckled, enjoying our rapt attention.

I intend to spend most of the next week drunk and laughing at you all,

Together, they looked like an ill-suited crime-solving double act.

In India, they’re usually called rickshaws or autorickshaws, but I’ve always known them by their much cuter South East Asian name.

Pamir was as large as regret is long.

The dark bar was very good at what it did, which was to look like it was doing absolutely nothing at all. That it was here for itself, not you. Did you want something? Well, it would try its best, but it wasn’t going to make any promises.

It had been a great day for several weeks straight.

I wish that for everyone reading this. :)

You have the sense that life is not happening to you, but you’re happening to it. That it’s a TV and you hold its remote.

She seemed to have her own light source, and it flooded the dingy bar in fifty shades of loveliness.

Yes! BEST "50 shades" variation!

She stopped time and then laughed at it.

She was just committed to doing everything, all at once, without help.

I showered in it for a moment and then reached for imagination’s tap and turned it off. Real life is not a romantic comedy. Real life is a Greek tragedy in eighty exquisitely underwhelming parts.

Nothing to it—just a matter of throwing words into the gaps between us until they’re bridged and we can walk across into each other’s minds.

The wink—the mullet of facial expressions—was

If I had a euro for every time I’d had this conversation since I went bald, I’d be able to afford enough acting lessons to become Stanley Tucci.

it had been upgraded at check-in and now sat sipping champagne, eating caviar, and swinging its flawless legs amid the ample leg room on offer in genetic first class.

thick lines had been cut under her eyes by the scalpel of lost sleep.

She’d been floating on this Titanic of an idea long before the rumours of icebergs. I’d hopped the railing at the last minute—after

she had the hair of seven women combined and then lightly electrocuted.

He looked at her as if she’d asked how he knew Tuesday followed Monday.

“I hate this. And we just started this. And there’s so much more this left.”

“I’m vegetarian,” I said, which was news to me, her, and all the animals I’d put in my mouth recently.

I seemed to have developed alien tongue syndrome. I was becoming jealous of the person I was pretending to be.

we jumped off the pathway, ran through a bush, tumbled down a hill, and came to a stop before the high fences guarding humanity’s Theme Park of the Absurd.

“Wow. Those things are lethal.” “Like cheating at cards with Saddam Hussein.

She was an open book; I just wasn’t sure of its genre.

It’s difficult, it takes great concentration, you have to be really, really quiet, but I think, in moments of inner strife, you can hear the different parts of yourself arguing.

It kicked the door down. Think me then say me.

I don’t think I’m saving the world or anything. But politics is how you fix the most things for the most people. I enjoy going to bed knowing I tried to nudge things a tiny bit in what I hope is the right direction.

was a pipe dream. Or a pipe nightmare.

Starting the dead? With Toast?

Her engine yelled in protest, and an angry black cloud of exhaust was spat up into my face.

the moment in a martial-arts movie when the protagonist realises things are about to get serious, perhaps even montage-serious—I

Take the next fifteen minutes to get all your aggression out. Don’t come back without having had at least one crash.” Evelyn shuddered. “Drive like maniacs! Go!”

Up ahead, the howling Australians were gunning straight for us, their tuk-tuk driven by a giant. All I could see through the windshield were two thick arms and a formidable wall of chest. He looked like an American footballer riding a tricycle. Riding a tricycle right at us.

looking whiter than a poltergeist in a blizzard.

driving their tuk-tuk as though it were both invisible and invincible.

Raaawrrrr!

The didn’t landed so firmly it sprained its ankle.

“I saw a lot of idiots out there. It’s time to get out on the road.”

Aarav added a new storey to his grin. “LET’S DO THIS!

I said, playing what I hoped was cool.

I tried not to let that sway me, which was like a hammock trying to remain still in a tornado.

Fishing didn’t suit her; she was the catch.