Fiction

All We Need Is Matching Overalls

By Michael Edwards

All We Need Is Matching Overalls

Yeah, wartime prisons, they ain’t gunna shoot you a smile, they ain’t gunna give you a banana sandwich. They aint got niceties. But you can’t deny wartime prisons for their unwavering support for the fundamentals of manual labour.

And as a child who was born in the bins, I now pledge elegance to the slate overalls and dirty spade flag.

I have seen manual labour harbour fruits. I see it every day, my mansion now fair pay for my years of hard work. But many don’t consider my mansions roots.

People have their own theories of how to get enough dollar to no longer live in squalor.

Of late, some people have ignored the protruding slab on the sidewalk because it’s simply too much work to knock it back into place. They think: there’s no point, I’m from the slums, I ain’t ever gunna hit those big sums. I need to be born in the executive suites with lots of treats, with mummy and daddy knowing lots of peeps.

Some want to strike the bulls-eye with ease, pointing their pinkie to the sky like an antenna to make people jealous. To make them think they’ve tuned in to a better frequency.

But think about it, if you were told to dig ten feet with a spade in a simple, slate overall, and that if you did, you’d reach your pot of gold. I can see you jumpin’ in spade first.

But imagine if your tailor wanted to have fun. He tied ten kilo bars to your overalls. Would you still dig if you were handed that overall, and others’ were not tampered?

Most of y’all are gunna wanna stretch your necks at some point. Take a little look at the other digger’s snags. You see their digging with no weights dragging them down. Welcome to the messy birth of polotickin’.

Soon you’ll be stealing other people’s weightless overalls and be parading round the trenches like a model, dragging those needy eyed diggers out of their craters like a vacuum cleaner. Soon everyone forgets to dig.

That’s what brings me back to how it’s done in labour camps. You get the same overalls, and you dig, and you never know, you might go big. But if you slip, you get the whip. Life’s simple when we spin like cogs, not envy others as Gods.

In this day where each ab is a trophy, documented shopping sprees, 6 second movies, sniffing trippies and where plastic barbies are gods of our societies, the dirt has truly turned into shampoo. The pot of gold is now a bald head. There is not as much work to do.

***

About the author:

Michael Edwards is a 23 year old writer from London and for seven years has been writing many short stories, the occasional poem and has even tried script writing with varying degrees of success. He likes to write stories that explore the inner working of people’s minds, but has a habit of creeping into the surreal or just plain bizarre, depending on how you look at it.

Show More

Flashes

Created in 2014, Flashes is a privately owned literary website. We publish short stories, non-fiction, flash fiction and poetry. Our goal is to give talented writers a platform to showcase their creativity, with an emphasis on original voice, innovative style and challenging plots.
Back to top button