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Duston and Russell grew frustrated and tired missing or letting lizards slip through their fingers. They deliberately flattened their hands and began indiscriminately smacking the walls. They squashed one accidentally and were satisfied. Then Duston pinned a straw lizard against a hot brick.

The plane soared upward like a ballistic Phoenix until it was a splinter in the sun and everyone squinted and turned away. They missed it curl around. Then it swooped down to a choir of hoops and screams that lifted and fell when it appeared gravity would smite its cavalier defiance.

She sits alone by the coffee shop window. On her table is an espresso, a small beaker of milk and a clear glass of hot water that condenses around the rim. A cigarette in her right hand burns a silk scarf of smoke into the air.

Subsequently to asking the big question – Can I make a living entering internet competitions? To which I found the answer was definitively in the ‘No’ corner of the fight cage, I thought I should not let my work and words go to waste. So below is the script I intended for the Carlton Dry Legends of Dry competition.

One might easily think so given the recent, cumulative increases in visa application fees that went up again on 1st September 2013. Suborned by the lure of unfamiliar places, new faces and an untold story, I am always flying in and out of Perth in Western Australia.

Are high stakes/low loss competitions primarily for the desperate and weak? I don’t know – how many billionaires play Lotto? I would ask them but I don’t know any. I dare say the majority of committed participants in high stakes draws of luck and chance belong to the realm of the destitute, the disenfranchised and the hopeful (like me).

S.P. and I seemed to start going out because of some fucked up adolescent deference to symmetry. My older sister was going out with her older brother and when my sister told me she liked me we were inextricably yoked together as boyfriend and girlfriend the following day.

Gonzalos swims in the light sleep of morning. He dances in his dreams to a bolero of unrequited love Rosita is humming. She had started singing boleros the day before, with her head drooped over the starboard aft, her gaze lost in the shimmering water like she was singing to the ocean itself.

…before the foxes came I’m told wild areas still grew – before the foxes came and towns gobbled up the ground. Towns gobbled up the ground, bit by bit, stone by stone, building after building, till the wilderness was eaten – chewed, swallowed. Gone.

In an act of self-discovery, to figure out what the fuck is wrong with me I thought I should return to where it all started – my first date and my first girlfriend, which are indistinguishable, not because of a poor memory but because it was the early nineties and for some reason the two were hard to separate back then.

Let the clichés begin. ‘I thought I’d give internet dating a crack,’ explained one woman in my search criteria of 22-35 year old women seeking men, with a primary photo, living no more than twenty kilometres away.

George took the Patrol to pick his son Mark up from the international airport. Ordinarily he was very careful about its mileage and the Patrol burned gas a heck of a lot faster than the wife’s hatchback. But he was unsure how much luggage Mark was bringing back with him. George only got a call three days ago from Mark telling him he was coming home.

Suspicion is deceitful like the way of a serpent or a teenager. Cloaked in carpet camouflage it remains hidden, slithering silently in the back of the mind, hissing whispers of doubt. It feeds on ailments and weakness.

I resume my review of transferable skills otherwise forgotten, overlooked or omitted in a effort to strengthen my résumé and broaden my search criteria. This includes Public Speaking, Biology, Self Defence & Music followed by References. Again I ask if you currently have a job vacancy need filling I hope you might find this list of background qualifications suitable. Otherwise I appreciate any help to derive unconventional connections from my cumulative skills and recommend compatible jobs that I am presently unaware of.

Over the past two years I’ve agonisingly searched, tried and failed to elevate myself above the cliché of an obscure author and pauper artist to gain any real kind of employment. And I thought with the start of a new year it prudent to review my transferable skills beyond my vocational history in media production and hospitality to see if I could strengthen my résumé and broaden my search criteria.

At the start of November my girlfriend and I decided to do a Pisgah Weekender – hiking a multi-day loop around Shinning Rock. The confluent region of National Parks and Forests etched along the tri-borders of North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee offers a delirious range of hiking options.

Jerome deactivated his Facebook account at 19:03 because Facebook wouldn’t let him delete account, only deactivate it. It used to. Two months before Rich, his old bar manager said he deleted his Facebook account after a six week addiction, which involved vicarious searches for old girlfriends he’d invariably fucked over and inappropriately inviting them to be his friend. Rich said, Facebook told him his profile would be deleted in fourteen days.

He met another Lizzy in Manchester. He named her Anne. He first saw her between the Old House at Home and Lotus Chinese Takeaway. She walked past him on Burton Road outside the row of houses where he lived. She was skinny but naturally so.

Light swell slaps the wooden hull. Gonzalos, the Bolivian Vegetarian Mosquito stands shivering on the cleat at the pointed bow of the life boat. He has lost so much weight – the Vegetarian Mosquito is reduced to the sleek predatory design of his continental sisters and cousins.

I have never advocated ‘cute’ – I don’t even have a single sweet tooth (I’m not sure why I admitted that just now – it somehow seemed relevant). I eschew cuteness (and any sort of false aesthetic) like fast food chains and hipsters – the same way I avoid the high street shops, hypocrisy, sycophants and those prone to rhetorical questioning, pointing to make a point or idle whistling.