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Archive for the ‘Fiction’ Category

It’s a small town

18 Jul

and every­one knows everyone’s business.

There was crack here. Not the good wet kind. The hard, fiery ter­ri­ble sort that leaves you shorn.

She was eigh­teen. She was enjoy­ing the Fourth with her fam­ily, her mother and half-​​sisters and –broth­ers. She ran out­side her house, scream­ing, and the 9mm bul­let hit the back of her head and trav­eled through, a pop she never heard, a flare she never saw.

She thought her mother was being murdered.

She was.

She wanted to go into nurs­ing. Women she might have worked with in a few years held her as she died in the ER. She was wear­ing a white top and blue shorts, and the red was from her —

The red, it was from her.

They got him, as they often do, but they got him in a weird way, wan­der­ing dazed around the coun­try club. He didn’t have mem­ber­ship but he was white. He almost wan­dered away because he was white.

Almost got away.
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Snarglepoop!

09 Nov

Frachitty fa la coonilio brifta gar­gly­blast! Hoody-​​doo fgfarella noogy bliflepurst! Poodlynarf nikky­will­ing sum­matathng con­tes­teo balla lalla ward want­i­ngscarf, ammatty meany fur­ble foo! Gartgledyblip pooly foonting voitvoid mes­sa­natilly hoomtoing.

Now that we’re clear.

Batteries not included, some assem­bly required, results not typ­i­cal, bitches, so don’t think that swal­low­ing a pill a day and sit­ting on your fat ass will make you look like a some­thing­teen girl. In order to get really hot, the only known solu­tion is to get men really, really drunk, because BEER GOGGLES ACTUALLY WORK.

That’s right, fuck him while he’s drunk, fuck him till you’re preg­gers, and THAT MAN WILL BE YOURS! The SOUTH SHALL RISE AG — UM, SHALL CONTINUE TO RISE UNTIL — UM, SHALL CONSIDER THE POSSIBILITY OF — AH FUCK, THE SOUTH IS GOING TO SPEND MOST OF ITS WEEKEND LOOKING AT CHEERLEADER PORN AND MASTURBATING SADLY ON THE TOILET BOWL. BUT THE SOUTH SHALL DO IT AGAIN, IF IT DOESN’T HAVE A BAD CASE OF WHISKEYDICK!

Rated M for mature content.

(Oh, did I not men­tion that?)

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Thaer

01 Nov

To the mar­ket, I say to you, only to the mar­ket.
There we will buy only the things we need, and then we will return home.
And, know­ing your eyes, I know the lie in my remon­strance;
for I have never been able to resist you
in your puppy looks as you plead silently after sweets
and caress with quiet long­ing the blister-​​packed toys.

We are not rich but we have soap,
which you hate,
as all boys do.
It is a small lux­ury I can afford, an easy price
to see you gleam.
The one penalty for going to the mar­ket
you accept with lit­tle grace,
but some tol­er­ance, show­ing me you have washed
and I remind you that Allah loves the cleanly.

Then I must be very beloved indeed, you say.
Such truth in your complaint.

Dressed sim­ply, fra­grant with soap, my wealth,
you wait beside me for the bus,
your eyes bright but tainted with the fear
reflect­ing from my own furtive watch of the neigh­bor­hood.
It is not as it was, and I can no longer say
with the surety I once held
that our lives are bet­ter now.

But some­day, son, I know
this will cease; you will one day be happy again,
your life — sim­ple now, even still, even amid this —
filled with the sim­ple tri­als of school
and girls and, one day,
mar­riage and grand­chil­dren for me to relent­lessly spoil,
and you won­der a lit­tle at my smile as you see it,
and smile back, ten­ta­tively, your hand slip­ping into mine.

So lit­tle you know.
So few heart­beats you have had.

I say I love you.
Then, you insist, with the logic of the young,
you must buy me a —
No, I say. No treats this time.
You didn’t wash up prop­erly after sup­per last night
and you are still being punished.

We both know this means nothing.

Grunting along the patched, rough­hewn macadam
the bus growls up its gears, and there is a crack and shud­der
a blis­ter­ing flash of time
scin­til­lat­ing around us as life becomes shat­tered,
glass dia­monds glint­ing cold,
rubies bright across my eyes.
Your hand, in mine, loosens.

And I can­not hold on to you.

I wanted to say, I wanted to say —
so fast, you were away so fast, your eyes fright­ened, and I wanted to say —

How many nights did I hold you thus as your heart beat so fast
and rock you as you wept, com­fort­ing you, eas­ing your child­ish fears
of the dis­tant cracks of doom,
whis­per­ing into the cup of your ear that we were safe
within the walls of our home?

It has, it has ceased.

I can­not hold on to you.

Bathed now, cleaned now, safe now from any more harm,
beloved,
I leave you to move once more, numb, into the world of light
and sweets and toys,
and if only I could, my son,
I would buy all of them for you
just to feel your hand stir once more in mine,
your puppy eyes aglow.

==

Inspired by; in ref­er­ence to.

 
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Posted in Fiction, O, Pine With Me

 

The Project

07 Mar

This is a short story I wrote, mostly to illus­trate to a pupil I was tutor­ing how read­ily imag­i­na­tion could catch fire. The con­test was to write a quick story in less than half an hour, so I did some­thing brief and intense, a sketch. That’s what short sto­ries are, and in many ways they are much harder to write than nov­els. You just don’t have the time or space nec­es­sary for intri­cate devel­op­ments; you have just a thumbnail.

The tech­nol­ogy is hypo­thet­i­cally fea­si­ble; quan­tum entan­gle­ment might allow us to cre­ate two rings in space which are entan­gled and slowly sep­a­rate them, allow­ing a kind of worm­hole to form between the rings, a sort of tun­nel that can be more or less instantly tra­versed by a body pass­ing into one ring, then emerg­ing more or less intact on the other side. Of course the engi­neer­ing is well beyond our cur­rent tech level; but this has been one means pro­posed by which we might make “tun­nels” to other stars. We’d just have to wait a long, long while before the egress, pro­pelled at sub­light speed, emerged at our destination.

It’s clas­sic quasi-​​dystopian cheese, some­thing done in the voice of the 1960s era à la Asimov. Hope you like it.

The Project

Ladies and gen­tle­men of the com­mit­tee, thank you for this oppor­tu­nity to address you this after­noon on the mat­ter of the events of the last year. I real­ize your time is valu­able, so I’ll sim­ply present a sum­mary of the inci­dent, fol­lowed by our cur­rent recon­struc­tion of the aftermath.

It’s never easy to talk about death on the scale that we’re dis­cussing here; the mag­ni­tude alone is so vast as to beg­gar the imag­i­na­tion, and when the scale is at last under­stood, the response is always stunned shock that goes well beyond horror.

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Supreme Court: US Government in Violation of Antitrust Laws

28 Feb

WASHINGTON — In a land­mark rul­ing today, the Supreme Court found 9–0 that the United States fed­eral gov­ern­ment was in vio­la­tion of antitrust laws and ordered it bro­ken up immediately.

Writing for the major­ity, Antonin Scalia had this to say. His words are offered with­out fur­ther comment.

====

The def­i­n­i­tion of a monop­oly is well-​​established and has been noted by prece­dent in this and other courts. While it has been argued — elo­quently — that the United States fed­eral gov­ern­ment is an elected body which has been cho­sen by the peo­ple, we find to the con­trary in sev­eral impor­tant respects.

To begin, the insti­tu­tion of the Electoral College effec­tively bars indi­vid­u­als from directly choos­ing a chief exec­u­tive. Furthermore, this exec­u­tive is insu­lated from con­se­quences of his or her own actions when fur­ther elected rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the peo­ple refuse to act on the inter­ests of those whom they puta­tively rep­re­sent. Thus we find that the claims of rep­re­sen­ta­tive gov­ern­ment by the United States fed­eral body are spurious.

Furthermore, as has been argued per­sua­sively, monied inter­ests have become the dom­i­nant fac­tor in United States fed­eral deci­sions, most notably in the last half decade, but on an increas­ing level for more than fifty years. This puts the government’s actions out­side pure claims of rep­re­sen­ta­tion; in truth it seems that more than half the time the United States fed­eral gov­ern­ment is act­ing solely in the inter­ests of agen­cies in pos­ses­sion of eight and more fig­ures in money assets.

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Posted in Fiction, Snarks

 

Prayin’ In the Land Down Unda

20 Feb

TOAD SUCK, AR — Cloyd Jackson is just like any other Arkansan who’s felt the hand of God: He’s a man with a lit­eral — and lit­er­al­ist — mission.

Founder and First Pope of the Righteous Church of Fosterology, Jackson appears to be a more or less unas­sum­ing man liv­ing a mod­est life just beyond his means in a twelve-​​foot Airstream sin­glewide that lost its new house smell some­time between the years 1947 and 2003, dur­ing which time some­thing on the order of fifty var­i­ous lit­ters of hounds inhab­ited, defe­cated and uri­nated in the con­fined space with him. But behind his five teeth and freshly-​​deloused beard there twin­kles an eye nearly as bright as a Federline dissertation.

Preaching what he calls the Gospel of Paul, Jackson’s the­ol­ogy is muddy but con­sis­tent. He claims the soul is like an Aboriginal boomerang, cast from the hand of the Almighty (or pos­si­bly by His rep­re­sen­ta­tive on Earth, Paul Hogan), intended even­tu­ally to return to Heaven unless met with temp­ta­tion — what Jackson calls “The kan­ga­roo head of Satan”.

In weekly ser­vices he shakes a rain­stick — why, no one can say for cer­tain — and bran­dishes a hand-​​made PVC didgeri­doo. During his meet­ings — which have had an all-​​time record atten­dance of one other than him­self — he becomes strik­ingly artic­u­late, per­haps even pos­sessed. “I am the Bullroarer of Him Who sits on high and Looks Down on the World, lo, even as unto one who sit­teth upon the Rock of Ayers, which is called Ayers Rock!” he warned recently. And, “Do not give in to the temp­ta­tion to fol­low the Doctrines of the Bruces, for lo they are most sin­ful and will clasp ye down into damna­tion, yea, even as like unto the Saltie doth clasp his prey into himself.”

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Posted in Fiction, Snarks