GAFFER TAPE MAN

Email:

Hi. If anyone has borrowed the brown parcel tape gun from reception, could they please return it.

Many thanks.

Short story idea: Keith Kettering, a teenager working in a stationery shop in Milton Keynes, gets caught up in the middle of a plot to take over the world, devised by Biron, an evil ruler of a distant galaxy, who is slowly stealing all our pens, taking over the factories that make them, with hostile acquisitions, and threatening to subdue humanity by disabling our technology. With no pens, the world is poised for the taking! Meanwhile, Keith Kettering tracks down a brown parcel tape gun missing from his inventory, to Biron's lair and gets caught in its radioactive beam of tape, suddenly giving him amazing, super sticky powers! In his quest to stop Biron, Keith discovers how to use those powers for good, defeats the enemy (using his sticky powers, an array of stationery products, and a creative approach to blu-tac and hole-punching), and amidst a volley of a ticker-tape hero's return, he becomes... Gaffer Tape Man.

He's not the hero the world needs or wants... unless the world wants to stick some stuff to some other stuff, and Spider-Man isn't available.

I know, right. You're thinking - why isn't Matt working in Hollywood already with that kind of dynamite?

Well. Closer to earth, I've been staring at a Mars Bar for half an hour. I nipped over to get it from the café a while ago, and I'm now using it to practise self-control.

You should see it: 960KJ of chunky chocolate and caramel, glistening under the plasma lighting, just waiting to be eaten. No-one would stop me! There's no reason I couldn't or shouldn't; I could just rip into that thin wrapper and feel the delicate milk and nougat crack between my teeth as I chomp into its soft skin. Yet there it is, unbroken, wrapped. I resist.

I'm a terrible writer! Aren't we supposed to scoff biscuits and type off the back of empty whisky barrels? "I can resist everything except temptation," said Oscar Wilde, famously. "I can resist Mars Bars," I replied, peering across my desk, just now. Whoop-de-do. 

I reckon the last sentence of Gaffer Tape Man, Volume 1 ought to be something like this:

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As the laughter faded, she stopped and turned with a puzzled look, and gazed at Keith for just a moment, a new thought forming on her lips.

"Why didn't we all just use pencils instead?" she said.

The End.

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They have Mars Bars in California right? Sign me up!