Free Jack Tumor by Anthony McGowan

factors working to undermine his authority. The first was that he was outside the school gates, and as the darkness was to orcs, so the school grounds were to Mordred.
    The second was that he was standing in front of what could now without equivocation, doubt, or uncertainty be described as a Colossal Knob.
    Yes, the shape emerging from the wall had now clarified itself into the unmistakable outline of a ginormous willy. It was like when you see someone coming towards you from miles off, and at first they’re just a smudge, but then they become human, and then you begin to recognize them, or at least begin to find something familiar, even if you can’t say for sure who they are, and then you think you know who they are, and then you definitely know them. And okay, so sometimes
then
you realize that it’s not who you thought it was, and you have to take the stupid grin off your face, or freeze that wave halfway through, or pretend you were looking at someone else behind the baffled stranger who’s now staring back at you, or perhaps you try to pass off the gesture as something else altogether, say maybe that you’re cleaning a huge sheet of glass which happens to be proppedacross the footpath, or you pretend that you’re just doing a bit of stretching, that’s it,
reach
to the left and
reach
to the right, one two, one two.
    Where was I? Yeah, the knob. We were all used to seeing them scattered around the place: kids would scrawl them on your exercise books or etch them with compasses onto the cubicles in the bogs. They would turn up in odd places, like on the ceiling in the library or drawn in lipstick on the security-glass panel in the headmaster’s office door.
    And the interesting thing about all of these cocks—well, actually the
boring
thing about them—is that they all looked exactly the same. Short stubby cylinders aimed upwards at the stars like a 1940s comic-book vision of a rocket, complete with the two side boosters.
    But this one was different. It was, in all, about two meters long, and painted about three meters from the ground, so whoever it was must have had a stepladder. Or a brush on a stick. Or very long arms. The medium appeared to be white emulsion, although the delicacy of the shading created the illusion that other colors had been used. The most striking aspect was the clever employment of perspective to give a lifelike three-dimensionality to the phallus. It seemed to curve out at an angle from the wall, as if its owner had half turned to face the viewer.
    And rather than the cold, metallic lines of the traditional knob, this one was soft and yielding and organic. Almost vulnerable, in fact, despite its heroic dimensions. So in a world filled with pricks (and I don’t just mean of the illustrated variety), this one truly stood out.
    Yes, it was a masterpiece.

MOrDred, the
GlaSses, the Girl
    A nd it was this masterpiece that confronted Mordred now, making his usual Nazi act entirely ineffective.
    Someone started to giggle. There was some jeering, which gathered force as it turned into a cascade of laughter and jokes, and then the pushing started, but not in a vicious way, more a way of getting someone else to lurch into Mordred, and then suddenly all you had was a mass ruck with everyone diving on top of each other, and I saw Mordred crawling away, but without his rimless specs. And then he stopped crawling and turned around to look for them, feeling about like some kind of cave creature because he was blind without them.
    That’s when Jack Tumor said, NOW, and I knew what he meant, and I started to move.
    Somehow I’d already made my way to the front of the crowd, where Mordred was crawling and feeling. I saw the glasses there, just out of his reach. And then, without pausing, I walked up to them and . . .
    Crunch.
    It was a satisfying feeling, and a satisfying sound. It felt like a large bit of machinery sliding into place, notch clunking into