Apparently in some parts of the world, the clocks go back tonight (here in the UK, we have 3 more weeks to go) so it seemed appropriate to snippet from my tongue-in-chee time-travel short story, Back From the Future.

Our narrator Marty is house-sitting for his friend Bill, who has (perhaps unfortunately) warned him about the upstairs neighbour:

It wasn’t until the third day that I had an encounter with Bill’s neighbor upon the stairs. I was going up; so was he, but more slowly, being weighed down with a carrier bag that clinked loudly and enticingly.

Although the clothes, I was saddened to see, were somewhat tragic—he looked as though he’d been dressed by a mother with a penchant for particularly dimly lit Oxfam shops—he was, I would have to admit, not bad looking. Attractive, even, in a sort of fragile, androgynous, slightly tipsy way, if you like that sort of thing.  Which obviously, not everyone does.  It’s a matter of personal taste. I’ve even met people who claim not to like chocolate. Or martinis, or tiramisu, which is just criminal.

“You’re the weirdo?” I blurted, then clapped both hands to my mouth to stop any more little faux pas exploding out like farts in a parfumier’s.

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Back From the Future (short story)

Ever since his one-night stand with big, butch, bisexual Bill, Marty’s been in the hopeless grip of a passionate, yet seemingly unrequited love.  House-sitting for the object of his affection, all he can do is cry on the scaly shoulders of Bill’s exotic fish—until he meets the tipsy time-traveller who lives upstairs.

Arthur Prefect (not his real name) is a refugee from a dystopian time, and he’s pining too, for the man he left back in the future. Over the course of a drunken evening, Marty dreams up a plan to reconnect the lonely young man with his lost love—but he’ll need to do more than dream to fix up his own future with Bill.

Available in ebook – JMS Books | Amazon