Hi. Here's a twee little piece of not-so-tender horror which popped to mind yesterday. I imagine I'll be posting a fairly long series of one-offs for now. I don't have a series in mind at all. Anyway, thoughts as ever are welcome.

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There's about a hour when you don't want to get the train to work in morning. I try to shave on to the platform within minutes before this time. Sometimes I make it and get on the first train to come along - one I can still get my liver and lungs into. Other times I make it a little too late. Maybe I've lingered too long on the web over coffee or made a bacon sandwich for breakfast instead of a swill of corn flakes. If I get there a little too late, then I'm in rush hour and the horror that comes with it.

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It ticks in within a few minutes. If you don't get the first train, you might be lucky to get the sixth. People herd in queues three or four people wide, regimented in collective boredom of the waiting. From the thirty or so of us blocked at each arriving doorway no more than four get in each one - sometimes zero. A zero train I call it. Already so stuffed with human flesh and bones that not another molecule can squeeze in. The doors slide and the waiting crowd stares disappointed at the living Hieronymus Bosch painting in the carriage in front of them. A silent, but weighty sigh waves through us and we carry on waiting for the next.

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Usually, when you do manage to buckle your bones into one of them, the door grabs your arse or elbow as they slick shut. Then, for me, it's twenty minutes of precision holding of all organs, muscles and flab until I can exit and revert back to a certain normality after the journey's fierce spastication. Basically, nothing else to think about except survival - a sheer physical constriction. It should be an Olympic fucking sport.

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Yesterday a thought whimpered in me though:

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'This could be hell. The devil would play this kind of fucking trick. I'm fucking dead and don't know it. This train is never stopping. Here I am in this rocking, hurtling sweat box for eternity. Sandwiched by that stinky cunt's armpit and this woman's fat arse behind me. Jesus - this could be it for eternity.'

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Then it came to me that there would be only one way out - promotion. On earth as it is in Hell after all. I'd have to get spotted as a new talent by the boss. I'd have to show some real evil. I glanced at a short woman to the left and figured I could rape her in the arse, but that seemed a bit generic - stale, old hat - even the Romans had done plenty of that one. I needed to step this up. I could cut off that older guy's head, pluck out his eyeball and fuck him in the eye socket. The thing is I'd read something like this in a book before. Alright, there was a row of teenage girls sitting over on the right - I could line them up and fuck them round and round with any villainous object I could find. Even then I remember some guy I worked with telling me about how he'd paid for something similar in the Philippines. I thought of forms of bestiality, using human bones as sexual objects, and more and more.

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Finally, I drew a blank. I couldn't get more evil than I'd been told about before. There was not a single, original evil thought in my mind. All of it learned. Books, films, paintings, friends and acquaintances had tutored me on this.

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The train arrived at my stop. I got off. Went up the escalator. My mind felt quiet. It was simple disappointment that I couldn't be original. Fuck me - being original was more important than not being evil to me. Maybe that is my original evil.