Updown

By Simon Haynes

Social services have come to take 10-year old Daniel away from his home and family, but his best friend Danny has other ideas ...

A 1600 word Science Fiction story

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You don't know me, I'm Daniel and me an' mom live in a updown south of Titan City. You've seen vids of carnival rides. There's one what's a big pole with a flying saucer thing going up and down, up and down and spinning round and round. Well our house is like that, only there's just two of us in it and it doesn't spin else we'd get sick. Mom says Saturn pulls us up the pole and makes electric, but Danny says that's shit. Danny uses words like shit when there's no grown-ups around. He says the updowns work off big electric motors, but I asked him why they all go up at the same time and he looks at me strange like I'm the nutter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon Haynes
• Release date: Nov 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465817921

Simon Haynes

Simon Haynes lives in Western Australia, where he divides his time between herding deadly spiders, dodging drop bears, and making up wildly inaccurate sentences like this one.By day he's an author. By night he's also an author.He loves wry, dry humour, and his hobbies include daringly inserting the letter U into words where -- in some parts of the world at least -- this simply isn't the done thing.As for his genre-spanning novels, they include epic fantasy (with robots), scifi comedy (also with robots), middle grade humour (featuring robots AND the wanton use of the letter U), as well as a series of historical mystery novels set in 1870's London. (No, of course there aren't robots in those. He's not completely out of his mind.)When he's not writing Simon is usually renovating his house, sim-racing online, using twitter (@spacejock), gardening, tweaking his book covers, pondering the meaning of the universe and reading, and if you think it's easy doing all that at the same time you should see what he can do with a mug of coffee, a banana and a large bag of salt.When he's not making outlandish claims he likes to count how many novels he's written, and how many genres he's written them in. (Lots and too many.)Finally, if you want to hear Simon reading one of his award-winning stories, you'll find an enticement to join his newsletter here: spacejock.com.au/ML.html

Book preview

Updown

A Short Story

Social services call on ten-year-old Daniel, intending to take him away from his home and his mother.

Danny has other ideas.

© Simon Haynes 2011

All Rights Reserved

Bowman Press

Bowman Press

Stock images © depositphotos.com

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Updown

You don't know me, I'm Daniel and me an' mom live in a updown south of Titan City. You've seen vids of carnival rides. There's one what's a big pole with a flying saucer thing going up and down, up and down, and spinning round and round. Well our house is like that, only there's just two of us