The Cornerstone Read Free

of a man and woman locked in an unconvincing embrace, both of them decked out in billowing white clothes.
    The intent of this picture was no doubt to capture the concept of a love as old as time itself. Sadly, the drawing quality wasn’t good enough and they just looked like two people who’d been out in the sun too long and didn’t have adequate access to a dry cleaning service.
    Max wrinkled his nose, checked to make sure nobody had seen him holding this embarrassing little novel and stood to put it back in the shelf.
    In doing so, he caught sight of some of the other books on this particular rack. Most of them looked deathly dull, but there was one that did attract his attention.
    It had a plain white cover, and the title on the spine in a basic black font was:
    ‘Read Me If You’re Bored by Clive Bonnet’.
    It sounded perfect .
    Max took it out and looked at the cover. It featured the cartoon of a man in a shirt and tie sat at a desk, head propped up with one arm. The expression on his face was one of utter misery.
    Below the picture it said:
    ‘A collection of short stories for the hard of thinking!’
    Aah… this is a comedy book.
    Max was well aware this type of thing existed, but he could never get his head round the idea that something full of just words could ever be considered funny .
    He was of the absolute belief that anything worth a laugh involved people getting hurt in a variety of interesting and unexpected ways. Hours spent on You Tube had only confirmed this.
    Other patrons of the library seemed to agree. When he looked inside the front cover, he saw that the book had only ever been taken out once – six years ago.
    Another communication with his brain took place:
    ‘Come on brain, this is silly. I know we’re bored, but we must be able to find something better to do than read this stupid thing.’
    ‘I know it doesn’t look like the best book in the world, but if it isn’t a heavy read and the words aren’t too long, let’s give it a pop for ten minutes, eh?’
    ‘Oh, alright… I’ll give it a go. But the first time I read anything remotely romantic or even slightly historic, it goes back on the shelf and you’re getting Halo-ed good and proper.’
    Max flicked through the first few pages.
    There was a lot of white space, the print looked quite large and no horrific long words were in evidence, so he sat in the dusty chair and started reading.
    Clive Bonnet favoured short, punchy titles for his stories like ‘Cat Pause’, ‘Potty Problems’ and ‘Juggling Hot Coals’.
    All of which sounded terrible.
    In fact, there was only one story that looked worth a punt called ‘I, Zombie’.
    Max loved zombies.
    He loved killing them in video games, watching them in movies and dressing up as them at Halloween. There was a half finished costume hanging in his wardrobe back home for just such a purpose. It was the third iteration of the same get-up he’d been wearing for five years now. The smell alone was terrifying.
    You couldn’t go wrong with zombies, as far as Max Bloom was concerned.
    With a mild glint of hope in his eye, he started to read.

    It was pretty standard fare. Written in the first person, it told the tale of a deceased teacher who wakes up in the morgue as a zombie with his mind still intact – which was an original spin on the idea, if nothing else.
    The story was quite graphic and Max enjoyed the descriptions of the bodily functions the title character still experienced despite being dead. Bonnet went into these at some length. This suited Max down to the ground, as there’s nothing funnier than a farting zombie when you get right down to it.
    Things took a turn for the worse about halfway in though, when the zombie storyteller started to talk about his wife; moaning on about how she wouldn’t love him anymore because he was a monster, and he’d never be able to hold her in his arms again.
    Blergh .
    Max feared there was a sappy moral of some kind homing into view and