Good evening fellow wasters. This is the second in a collection of short stories, written by myself and other slackers whilst at work. The original idea was to get people in the office working together by e-mailing everyone the beginning of a story and then asking for a suitable ending.

This one is my latest effort. I tried to write a story about love, sensibly, but it didn't quite work out. Set in 1985 ...

He found himself sitting by the window, thinking about her again. It was a rainy day and it looked like the colour had been washed out of the world. His world was silent but for the constant tick of the clock and the muffled sound of children splashing and laughing in puddles outside.

“I wish I were in England,” he said to James, “things always seem better there.”

James didn't answer, but turned around and went outside.

It was all so crazy. Falling in love with someone he'd only really talked to once. It was like being at school again. Feeling all fuzzy whenever she walked by, stealing little glimpses of her, it made him smile. When he was in love he felt he could do anything. Sometimes he thought he was just in love with being in love and wasn't actually feeling what he did. Everything was so complicated.

Which brought him back to the problem at hand. He always knew what to say when he imagined encounters between them in his head. Everything was executed with cinematic precision. No-one ever fluffed a line, or ran out of things to say. He found himself drifting into that black and white movie world.

They were sitting in Central Park, talking and giggling over something that had happened a few minutes earlier. Whilst pretending at being spies, organising a drop of a top secret file, a tall man in a trenchcoat had asked them the way to the Soviet Embassy. It was silly but it was funny. And then an old lady had walked past and looked at them strangely for laughing so hard, and that set them off even more. Nobody understood what was going on because it was their world. He leant over to kiss her ...

James jumped in his lap and he was brought back.

“For Christsakes James, you almost gave me a heart attack!”

He looked at the trail of muddy pawprints leading from the kitchen to his room and sighed. It didn't matter. Nothing else mattered when you were in love.

Bloody hell - I'm a walking cliche, he realised. Do you start behaving like a weedy fool because of the bad movies you've seen, or are people just like that? It's a fine line between wuss and wonder. Sometimes when he saw her walking, he'd casually mosey up behind her and travel in her perfumed slipstream for a while. My word. If she could read his mind, she'd think he was a total weirdo.

He'd always been just on the outside of the circle. Sometimes he liked this, other times it hurt like hell. He wouldn't say he was odd to look at, but he was no Tom Cruise. He longed for the past age of film, where people like Bacall and Hepburn fell in love with ordinary looking guys. She wasn't classically beautiful, not the sort of girl to stop traffic in the street, but to him she was as lovely as an autumn sunset.

I'm starting to think about her too much. It hurts to be in love, he was going to say to himself, before he gave himself a mental slap. Don't be so dramatic, you're starting to sound obsessive. Bring it back, now. It was the time to do something about the whole thing. He was going to tell her and he was going to do it today.

A knock on his door awoke him with a start.

James raced to the door barking excitedly. “Number 2323, are you in number 2323, open the door quickly, this is an emergency.” He leapt to his feet, and sped to the door feeling the call of duty programmed deep within him. In his doorway were two bulky figures.

“Are you research citizen 2323?”

He sagged in the doorway, knowing that the inevitable was coming.

“You have been reported on suspicion of having made illegal emotional attachments to an animal, and 8762 has informed that you were laughing in a public place with a unit now identified as 7324. Do you have anything to say in your defence, before biochip termination?”

But he wasn't listening, and as the last moments of his existence sped past, a smile lit up his face. He knew her name, and it felt like that gave his existence meaning. This must be love, the kind they talked about in books, the kind that people used to die for, this must be how it would have been to be human. And as his processing came to an end he whispered “7324” out into the universe, the cold lonely universe, where the very last of the romantics was shivering in fear and isolation behind her door, waiting for the knock of a cold unfriendly fate to claim her.

by John McIver and Laura Higgs.

Have you got any stories you want to share with the rest of the civilised world? Send 'em to toast@sabotage.demon.co.uk and we'll cram them into the next issue.