The New Flesh

2011-10-13T09:28:00.000-07:00

“Bananahead has lost his appeal.”

So speaketh the AgraCon spokesman to the picketers and protesters gathered in the lobby. NOT IN MY FRUIT BOWL! YELLOW BASTARD! GOD HATES BANANAS! their poster boards read. Snarls and raised fists and arching angry eyebrows purvey the mob. The spokesman calmly straightened his tie, slicked back his hair and gave the crowd and the cameras a plastic smile.

“Ladies and gentleman, AgraCon wants you to know that your patronage is important to us. We would like to reassure you do have a voice, and that voice was heard, loud and clear. That said, it is in light of recent events that AgraCon Inc. will no longer be carrying the Bananahead brand. Our relationship with Bananahead over the years has been both illustrious and profitable, but providing you – the public – with delicious, family-friendly, produce and produce-additives has, and will always be, our number one priority. It is our hope that you will continue enjoying AgraCon’s diverse array of food-like consumables – from beef nuts to werepears – AgraCon, Let Us Put Our Yummy In You©.”

He gave the thumbs up.

The crowd let out a cheer. Bananahead’s 15 minutes of fame were up.

*   *   * 

Officially, the corporate bigwigs in their Armani suits claimed Bananahead’s particular type of ‘services’ were no longer necessary. Marketing wanted to take the company in a new direction – Can-Dee, the Can-Do Cantaloupe was testing well with both boys and girls, ages 5-12, and Rufus, the Skateboarding Say-No-To-Drugs Kumquat has been popular amongst the coveted demographic of male’s, ages 18-34. But being the mascot for AgraCon Inc. Produce Division was the role Bananahead was born to play. After only a few modeling jobs in several small, yet reputable, medical journals, it was those very same corporate bigwigs that came and plucked Bananahead out of obscurity, skyrocketing him to superstardom. And now they were just going to take it all away? Just like that?

It’s not fair.
.

*   *   * 

Billboards. TV commercials. A line of plush toys with his grinning, yellow face – Bananahead was more than a mascot, he was a cultural icon. His signature catchphrase ‘A banana a day keeps your demons at bay’ entered the lexicon, usurping the apple’s former throne as America’s favorite fruit-related idiom. His logo adorned t-shirts and lunchboxes. The official Bananahead Bananahead Hat was last year’s ‘must-have’ item, topping the crowns of trendsetters from Milan to Paris. The Adventures of Bananahead Saturday morning cartoon was lauded with a Peabody Award for Exc­­eptional Children’s Programming and his personal memoirs Beneath the Skin sold over a million copies during its first month on the market…

But then came his guest spot on Oprah, and in an instant, everything changed. 

He was to announce his recent engagement to teen-pop princess Misty Meyers. They had met during her recent European tour and had both hit it off immediately. During the interview, Oprah asked him how his relationship was going. Elated and in love, Bananahead couldn’t contain himself – he leapt onto the couch and took a huge shit, right on the cushions. He smeared his feces all over Oprah, her crew and the audience. He rolled around in it, giggling. He put some on his tongue and held it out for the world to see. We all looked on in horror, thinking stop, Bananahead, stop! What in god’s name are you doing?!? 

But it was too late. The backlash had begun. 
.

*   *   * 

The tabloids – the paparazzi, bloggers and sycophants – they just couldn’t leave Bananahead alone, could they? Always watching. Dissecting. Judging. And the greedy, spaded eyes of the over-caffeinated public, they just had to know every intimate detail. Every private moment. They had to keep digging, until they found that one brown spot on his otherwise perfect soul.

Beneath Bananahead’s thick, yellow rind, he is still a man, is he not? And a man has needs only a man could understand. And what goes on behind closed doors should be nobody’s business but their own, correct? What is normal anyway? It’s all very subjective.

Of course, it didn’t help that Misty called it rape.

But c’mon, she knew the deal when they met. She knew he had certain…proclivities. She knew the aesthetics were going to be a bit, uncomfortable. “It’s not my fault,” cried Bananahead, “It’s just the way that god made me.” But you can’t blame Misty for saying what she said; she needed to protect her own career. The tween crowd doesn’t need to know every kinky detail of their illicit affair, though I suppose everyone was just a little bit curious how she was able to fit his whole body up there.
.

*   *   * 

When the news of Bananahead’s ‘extracurricular activities’ broke, adulation turned quickly to disgust. “How could you do this to us?” the public demanded, “We trusted you, Bananahead! We loved you!” But the consensus was in. The population agreed:

“Keep your goddamn head away from our children!”
.

*   *   * 

Bananahead’s fall was meteoric. AgraCon canned him. His agent wouldn’t answer his calls. Larry King had him on to give his side of the story, but the interview quickly devolved into a bout of racial slurs and name-calling. FOOD FIGHT! the Post dubbed it. He was label a pariah. A sexual deviant. Scum. There was no doubt about it.

Bananahead was rotten.

After all, AgraCon’s most recent polls show that most mothers don’t want their children chowing down for breakfast on a bushel of makeshift dildos. And who can blame them? It’s hard enough to get your kids to finish their bowl of fake vaginas in the morning without trying to cram some nutrition down their throats.

"Bananahead"

-------------------------------------

Danger Slater is the world’s most flammable writer! He’s so flammable that he’s actually on fire as you read this! Seriously. Why are you still here? Go get help, goddamn it! He’s short fiction has appeared in online magazines, offline anthologies, and his poetry can be found on many truck stop bathroom walls across the country. His first novel, called Love Me, will be out in Summer 2011 from the Jersey Devil Press. For more disinformation please visit his website: dangerslater.blogspot.com

2011-10-10T09:44:00.000-07:00

The trees have been known to calm me yet they haven’t since that day. I was walking off a fit of rage when I came upon the shack. I stumbled into a hillside clearing and there it stood in all its wooden one room malevolence. A creek rushed silently beside it, the underwater blades muffling its flow. Demons and birds perched in the surrounding trees watching me silently with glowing eyes and rotted souls.

I would have walked away and sought my masochistic redemption in the thick dark of the woods except I heard the theme song from M.A.S.H. from inside the little structure. The song was sorrowful but the jokes immortal. Hawkeye could always cheer me up, and Klinger wore dresses my mother emulated. She never smiled as much as him though. Flower patterned funerals have a different taste. I pulled myself from my memories and pushed the door open without knocking.

My poor manner karma was instant and uncomfortable. Splinters dug in my fingers and squirmed under my fingernails. I thought of sweet January; naked flesh, bloody lips, shivering in summer time. The song changed and I found myself tapping my foot on the dirt floor to Rezso Seress’s Gloomy Sunday. A two song soundtrack for students of sorrow.

A demon stood on a step stool, the song emitting from his wide open mouth. He held a sign that read ‘gun metal tastes like cherry’ scrawled in black sharpie marker. I marveled at his musical innards reproducing such a haunting tune. A tear formed in my eye as the song reminded me of failures and aborted dreams.

“Why do you disrupt my bathing?” A calm deep voice asked from behind me.

I turned and noticed a man sitting in an old stand-alone bathtub with hooves instead of rounded feet. The man had two small horns protruding from his forehead and a bubble beard. Rose petals and eye balls floated on the surface of his steaming bath water. A black dog with mis-matched eyes curled up on the dirt floor next to the bathtub. I thought of sweet January again; her lovely scars and gnashing teeth. The horned man snapped his fingers. My memory vanished in the echo.

“Why do you disrupt my bathing?” The man asked again as his soap beard dripped.

The music stopped and I looked back to the demon. He glared at me and held a sign that read ‘razor blade rebellion’ scrawled in black sharpie marker. In the silence of the shack I missed the haunting tune. I shrugged my shoulders and mumbled an apology.

“Is there no common decency anymore?” the man asked.

The black dog raised his head and shook negative.

The demon started the song over from the beginning and my toes tapped along. He held a sign that read ‘the tighter the noose, the sweeter the juice’ scrawled in black sharpie marker. I found courage in the pit of my stomach where all the bad feelings swirl and used it to answer the bathing man.

“No,” I told him, “for everyone burns in the fire of life.”

The horned man splashed his bath water at me; flinging eye balls and rose petals all over the floor. The water hit my face and plugged my nose. My eyes burned but I told myself I’d never cry in front of strangers again. You never know if the strangers know we are all ghosts in the fog. So it’s better to not give them the chance to judge you.

“I see,” the man told me while applying more bubbles to his chin. “And what of forgiveness? Does it still pester?”

“No,” I told him, “for solitude is a cold flaming mistress.”

“I see,” He answered. Then he pulled a rag from the water, held it out to me and asked, “Could you wash my back?”

“No,” I told him, “for I lost my kindness when all my toys broke.”

He nodded sadly and lost himself in his own memories. I shuffled my feet and waited impatiently for him to speak again. The black dog stood slowly and stretched; one eye on my and one eye on my nightmares. Still his master said nothing. So I broke his concentration by snapping my fingers. The echo wasn’t near as impressive but still he looked at me.

“May I steal your demon?” I asked using the voice I employed when asking for the toys- now broken- when they were shiny and new.

The horned man leaned back in his bath and slid down into the water. He opened his mouth and swallowed up bathwater then he spit the water like a fountain.

“No,” he told me, “but you may take his sign if you wear it around your neck.”

“Fair enough,” I answered content to leave the humid room with my soul and a souvenir.

The demon handed me the sign with a small loop of barb wire attached so I could wear it. I put it over my head and bowed. The horned man waved me away. The black dog scoffed and spun in place three times before laying back down beside the bathtub. I walked out the wooden door into the night.

My eyes were glowing strange neons and they lead me home through the forest. Demons and birds squawked and chirped blasphemies at me but the words on the sign kept me strong. I held a sign for all to see that read ‘my emotions are zombie’ scrawled in black sharpie marker.

"The Devil's Bath Shack"

-------------------------------------

Jonathan Moon is the horrorcore author of Mr. Moon's Nightmares, the upcoming HEINOUS, and co-author of The Apocalypse and Satan's Glory Hole with Tim Long. You can keep one eye on him at all times by following his Monkey Faced Demon blog at http://www.mrmoonblogs.blogspot.com/.

2011-09-23T07:20:00.000-07:00

YEAR TWO

2011-08-11T14:58:00.000-07:00

Hey Weirdos!

Can you believe it? THE NEW FLESH turned 2 years old today! It seems like just yesterday I was giving her CPR and pushing the defibrillator to her chest just to try and keep her alive and now I can't even open submissions for a month without having to close them for another three months because of all the interest. Wow. We've come a long way, folks. Thank you all so much for your support over the years - to the readers, to the authors. YOU alone make this work. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

As a way of showing our appreciation, we've gathered up our favorite stories that were published on THE NEW FLESH within the last year and made them available to download for FREE! The ebook is called LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH: YEAR TWO and you can download it here.

A very special thank you goes to Mr. Brian Barnett for working his ass off to get this ebook ready in time. He says his fingers are still smoking, haha.

So there it is, folks - Year Two all wrapped up in a nice pretty package. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did publishing them. But don't spend too much time reading it, get out your pens and crack your knuckles... let's not waste any time getting started on Year Three.

Keep it weird!

III

2011-08-03T20:36:00.000-07:00

Everyone thought it was just an earthquake...

Eliot was only just holding off the intruding beef people with a large stick. The blasted wall of the sand castle was teeming with the greasy foe, and Eliot knew he wouldn’t last much longer. Surrendering his doorway in a momentary break of the enemy drive, Eliot rushed down the gritty sand hallway on his own beefy legs. He and his comrades, however, were raw beef, exuding a golden hue from years of sand mixing in their red hides. The intruders, on the other hand, were cooked nasty messes. They blew through multiple points of the sand castle at once, and were gaining ground fast.

Eliot caught sight of light down the hall. Suicidal berserkers had lit themselves aflame and were attempting to cook the residents out of the castle, thrashing through masses of soldiers, walls, and air alike. Unfortunately, the coupling of damp air and moisture in the walls seemed to be abolishing the fires with little effort from the defenders.

Surviving the trip to a stable roof, Eliot saw the entire scene. His allies defending their home with the basest of tools available to them: sticks, stones, bits of shell. The enemy boasted superior weaponry, the majority of them swinging long, weathered handles topped with gnarly hooks, caked in rust and grease. Some bore sharpened bones. Still others simply set themselves on fire and ran for a crowd.

And of course, they wielded the Nercobos: a colossal cow carcass that towered stories above the sand castle.

Eliot had never seen a more disgusting object in his life. The Necrobos was pulled toward him on a cart by an army of grease slaves. Hundreds more climbed about the decaying corpse itself, throwing various bits of vulgar and flaming debris towards the castle.

Movement on the staircase. Eliot poised to attack, but some of his own men ascended the stairs. Roger was in the lead, followed by Monty and another raw boy Eliot did not recognize. Behind them was a swinging hook, attached to an attacker around the corner. Monty tore at the ceiling from his elevated position on the staircase, and the ceiling dropped down on anyone in the hallway with the hook bearer. Eliot saw the section of roof fall victim to gravity from his vantage point.

The Necrobos loomed ever nearer. Eliot and his gang retreated further from the hulking corpse, past a toppled tower of muddy sand. Hooks and meaty limbs poked through the wreckage, but the group didn’t stop to identify the victims as friend or foe.

As the last of the standing walls and ceilings dropped, the shadow of the Necrobos passed overhead. Darkness was cast across the gritty rubble, save for the pockets of fire not yet extinguished by the exposed mud strewn about, as well as the glowing eyes of the Necrobos. The real eyes had been plucked out by some scavenger long ago, but ghostly energy still glowed from the sockets. Wretched forms amassed around the necrotic utter and dug their hooks into its taut skin as the monstrosity centered over Eliot’s crew of survivors like a UFO ready for abduction or destruction. The utter maggots screeched with laughter audible hundreds of feet down. They danced. They laughed. They pulled.

And a bombardment of rancid milk surged from the sky above Eliot’s head. The stench alone struck many of the riders clear off the Necrobos. The milk was gelatinous as it fell and exploded into a grotesque concoction resembling chunky chowder with bits of amoebic fat floating about. The mixture dissolved Eliot and his crew in seconds as they simultaneously choked on the thousand year old milk remains.

And only seconds after that, an even larger shadow was cast across Necrobos itself. A tsunami propelled by the earthquake that morning surged forward and tore the shore asunder. The Necrobos was flung across the sandy expanse then ripped back into the sea among assorted beefy debris. The initial force ripped its crispy head clean from its flanks, but the glowing in its eyes remained.

"Battle at Beef Beach"

-------------------------------------

Joseph Bouthiette, Jr. eats food and poops poop. His work has appeared online at The New Flesh, Staring At the Walls and In Between Altered States.

2011-08-03T20:08:00.000-07:00

So when Sir Mix-A-Lot decided to do a twenty-year anniversary remix of the 1992 hip hop classic “Baby Got Back,” he decided to accompany it with a remake of the video. The legendary rapper insisted that only the actors, dancers, and extras of the original video be hired to appear in the new one. Sure, if any of the original players were dead or physically or mentally incapacitated they would be replaced, but Mack Daddy wanted to keep things as original as possible.

Rick Peterson (casting director for the new video) and his assistants got on the horns, mailed letters, sent out emails. In about a month, they succeeded in getting ahold of nearly everyone from the old video, all of whom were enthusiastic to sign back on for the remake. Although it was more of a formality than anything else, Rick held auditions with each original performer at his Hollywood office, essentially just to make sure everyone was healthy enough to do the work. Because if it turned out, for example, that one of the original Big Butt girls’ rumps had grown so big that it now had to be wheeled around in a bariatric wheelchair, that could pose certain practical problems and justify use of a stand-in.

Luckily, every lady who was required to bend, gyrate, and jiggle her ass for the camera could still do so, even if their bending, gyrating, and jiggling was a little slower these days, a little harder on their lower backs. But any loss of youthful, sinuous movement on the part of these dancers was more than offset by the value of the extra poundage that twenty years had added to their rumps.

The only notable problem the casting team encountered during the whole roundup was in trying to locate “the white guy”: that nerdy white dude who briefly appeared in the original video precisely at the moment when Sir Mix-A-Lot uttered (to paraphrase and reword the lyric a bit), “Even white boys have to holla: baby got butt!” (thereby implying that every “white boy” is a socially awkward, yellow-haired, bespectacled, suited geek who, in a room full of big juicy female butts, wouldn’t know what to do with himself other than nervously fidget with his necktie).

Turns out this actor legally changed his name to “White Boy” back in 1993 and had been gigging on the national comedy club circuit ever since, dubbing his act “The White Boy from the ‘Baby Got Back’ video.” His act consisted of himself standing onstage—his geek glasses, monkey suit, and side-combed yellow hair all in place—while he fidgeted with his tie in front of a screen displaying a life-sized image of the Big Butt girls while the song played in the background. The guy didn’t tell any jokes. Never talked to the crowd. He just fidgeted with his tie and pulled a few jittery facial expressions. That was it. White Boy was frequently booed off the stage, yet somehow he still managed to eke out a meager living doing this—and had been doing so for nearly twenty years now!

Due to his itinerant life style, the man was difficult to track down. Last anyone heard, White Boy had performed for two nights at a club in Arkham, Massachusetts. When he’d checked out of his motel, White Boy had asked the front desk clerk for directions to the blasted heath, some sort of strange tourist attraction in the rural outskirts of Arkham. The clerk gave him the directions, but warned White Boy not to drive out to the place, that it was cursed. That had been over six months ago.

But just when Rick was about to give up on his search, just when he was about to hold auditions for the part, White Boy showed up in the doorway of his office. Apparently, the travelling performer had heard tell of the remake and wanted in.

“Um, Mr. Boy?” Rick nervously inquired as he sat at his desk, an assistant at each elbow. White Boy sat on the other side.

“Please, just call me White Boy.”

“We’re glad you came to us,” Rick said. “I thank you for that. But . . . oh, this is always so damn hard. I’m sorry, but we can’t give you the part.”

After a moment of silence, White Boy spoke, the indignation thick in his voice. “Now let me get this straight. You’re remaking ‘Baby Got Back.’ Sir Mix-A-Lot wants all the original players. I am the original nerdy white guy from the first video. So why in God’s name would you refuse me the part?”

“Well, White Boy, I don’t know if you’ve looked in a mirror recently, but you’re not white anymore. You’re . . . you’re the Colour Out of Space—a color of allegedly alien origin that defies any sort of description because it’s outside the visible spectrum of the human eye.”

“Call it what you want, Rick. I call it a skin condition that I contracted while motor touring the countryside outside of Arkham. And you know what else I’m gonna call? The Screen Actors Guild and have your ass nailed to the wall, buddy.”

“Sorry, White Boy. But both the script and the song lyric call for a “white boy,” and you just don’t fit the bill anymore. And frankly, you’re sort of freaking us out right now. You’ve left a trail of the Colour Out of Space on my carpet and ruined a very expensive leather chair. I’d like for you to leave now, sir. Please, or I’ll be forced to call security.”

White Boy rose abruptly, knocking that expensive chair on its side before whipping around and stomping off to the door. Before exiting the office and slamming the door behind him, he halted, turned his outlandish, indescribable, colorless-colorful head back toward the casting people.

“This certainly isn’t the last you’ll hear from me. Yo, y’all racist!”

"Even Colour-Out-of-Space

Boys Got to Shout: Baby Got Back!"

-------------------------------------

Clyde Baker recently remarked, “I have seen the future of horror and his name is Douglas Hackle.” Clyde Baker is the blind, homeless, illiterate crackhead who lives underneath Douglas’s dilapidated front porch--but hey, Clyde’s opinion counts too, damn it! Douglas reads and writes out of Northeast Ohio, where he lives with his wife and little boy. His short fiction has been published or accepted for publication in several online and print venues. Visit him at: http://douglashackle.wordpress.com

COMING SOON - The New Flesh: Episode One

2011-07-30T15:32:00.000-07:00

Table of contents:

Juan's Cranial Pregnancy
by Edmund Collel

Captain Crotch Hook
by Matthew Revert

Unfruitful Works
by Jordan Krall

The Never-Ending Halibut
by Josh Myers

Your Heart Won't Go On (A Jagger Serial)
by Eric Mays

The Continuing Adventures of Billy Van Krall
by Chris Bowsman

Dying Images
by Kirk Jones

Look Who's Fucking Talking
by Jason Armstrong

Hamartia: A Tale of Sister Merciless
by Garrett Cook

Just to Spite Your Face
by Steve Lowe

Power!
by William Pauley III

An Invasion of Privacy
by Robert C.J. Graves

A Professional Woman
by R.M. Cochran

The Cunning Liguist
by Jess Gulbranson

Lurking in the Dark With Mimi
by Joshua Dobson

Introduction
by Jonathan Moon

2011-07-26T18:30:00.000-07:00

Thomas turned his Ford pickup off the main road and onto a grassland area. The sun’s dark orange glow had lured him from his rented backyard apartment to the edge of the forest.

“Stay put, Rascals,” Thomas commanded his dog.

He stepped into the knee-high grass and shook his head at the sound of chainsaws buzzing like hyped-up bees through the foliage. He knew the forest would be gone in a few years. Every idiot in the city knew it, but no-one said anything.

Thomas continued to stare at the sun’s peculiar gloom – a mixture of nature’s beauty and an unfamiliar phenomenon. The sun’s murky, rotten-carrot-like radiance didn’t even hurt his eyes. He wished his wife and child were still around to see it.

The noise of chainsaws died.

Silence.

Rascals stood up against the dashboard and barked hysterically.

A new sound emerged from deep within the woods. A rumbling resonance akin to flowing water.

Thomas jumped at the sight of a dark figure running out of the woods and onto the grassland. In the shady light he couldn’t tell if the individual was in danger or looking for trouble. “Everything alright?”

The figure altered its direction towards Thomas and picked up speed.

Unsure of what else to do, Thomas reached into the back of his pickup and removed a tire iron.

With a strain in his voice he once again called out. His grip strengthened around the cold apparatus. His heart rate spiked and he picked up a large rock, tossing it towards his potential attacker.

His scare tactic didn’t work.

Another figure exited the woods. And another.

Thomas stepped back.

The roar of flowing water grew louder.

Thomas gasped when he realized his assailant was a woman. But it was what he saw on her face that almost made him drop the tire iron. A thin layer of skin appeared to be stretched over her eye sockets, nostrils and mouth. Like a watery, rubber-type skin pulled over her face.

“Stay back!” Thomas shouted as he picked up another rock.

A dozen more of them ran from the forest, most of them dressed as lumberjacks.

The woman was only a few yards away when he hurled the rock through the air and hit her against the chest. Her body evaporated in an explosion of water.

Thomas stumbled backwards and fell to the ground.

“Rascals,” he whispered as two figures charged his car. Their bodies burst into a shower of water that consumed his truck. Like melting ice it disappeared into the ground.

Rascals barked no more.

Hundreds of faceless people now swarmed out of the forest. A river of water followed their every step.

Two more of the creatures turned towards him. He threw more rocks, but his shaking hands refused to take proper aim.

A watery shape rose from the grass before him. It was the woman who dissolved earlier. Her naked body grew before him; first her outline, then her hair, and finally her clothes.

She was right in front of him, the others only feet away.

It was too late.

They were too close. So close he could see their jaws lower as they tried to scream, stretching the skin over their mouths to within an inch of tearing.

Thomas raised his arm and swung the tire iron with unrelenting force, sending the tool through both the woman and the second assailant.

Acidic water blasted over his body and into his eyes. It burnt through his clothes and into his blood stream.

Thomas screamed . . . then disappeared beneath the body of water that now flowed across the grassland.

Seconds later a figure closely resembling Thomas rose from the river. He looked at the thousands of water-creatures just like him and joined them in their sprint. The flood followed them on their journey towards the smog-laden city, and the polluted world beyond.

A muffled bark rose from the horde.

"A Simple Certainty"

-------------------------------------

Joe Mynhardt is a South African horror writer and teacher. His work has been published at Pill Hill Press, Dark Minds Press, Library of the Living Dead, Microhorror, Flashes in the Dark, Pages of Stories, Ghastly Door and many more. Joe is also a moderator at MyWritersCircle.com. Read more about Joe Mynhardt and his creations at www.Joemynhardt.com.

2011-07-26T18:18:00.000-07:00

June’s bright sunbeams failed to penetrate the blinds of the closed-smelling dorm-room. Brother Reynolds knocked hesitantly at the open door. “May I come in?”

“Lemmee the hell alone ... oh ... father Reynolds, I’m so sorry, I...” mumbled Eula, wiping the dried material from the corners of her mouth and rising groggily from bed in her slept-in clothes.

“Neither this,” Brother Reynolds said admonishingly, removing the empty fifth of bourbon from the floor to the leather bag he carried, “nor hiding in the dark is going bring him back... he’s in a better place now.”

Eula looked at him grimly, barely holding her tongue.

“You need to get out and do something with yourself, and I‘ve found just the thing.”

Eula winced as he drew up the blind.

“The Chicago diocese has a wilderness camp for inner city girls, north of Green Bay ... they need a wildlife interpreter for the summer. I said you’d take the job.”

“You, wha--,” Eula stopped short, his stern yet amiable look disarming her.

* * *

A month with giddy young teens, camping and rambling through the outskirts of the Nicolet National Forest, had muted Eula’s melancholy. Now, after a quick breakfast, they were moving campsites, a 7 mile hike to Drag Lake, over towards the Potawatomi Reservation.

“Eula, you’ll stay behind with Constance and Aretha...clean up the campsite...trailhead’s 2 miles down the road, at the sandy patch, turn left, follow the blazes...anyways, you’ve got the forestry map.”

* * *

“Great job finding the blazes girls, we’d have been here --”

“Eula, that you?” came a voice from back towards the sandy patch.

“This way.”

Three exhausted girls emerged from the underbrush, their breathless counsellor, Bea, in tow. “Eula ... praise the Lord ... couldn’t find the blazes ... kept on the trail ... swamp ... coming back ... Margie ran ahead ... said she knew where to go ... dunno where... gotta ... go ... back ... take the girls?”

“I’ll go, take Constance and Aretha, they found the blazes.”

“Thanks!” puffed Bea.

* * *

After a narrow stream the trail extending beyond the sandy spot split to right and left. After two hundred yards of the former revealed no signs of passage, Eula turned back and headed, as Bea had, up the left branch. The dark soggy soil was home to sharp sedges, tall Joe-pye weeds, and bushy tufts of willows and alders. Eula proceeded slowly, calling out and tracking up and down any branch trails.

Sitting on a dry tussock, she opened her pack, and scarfed down a messy peanut-butter sandwich. Taking a deep breath she pulled out a locket, opened it and kissed a clip of hair within it -- hesitatingly, she drew out and opened a waterproof packet. She rubbed her cheek against the man’s sweatshirt inside, drawing in the smell. She sat pondering ... it was nearly 4 o’clock, 10 minutes more searching and she would turn back.

Rising over a ridge the trail ended abruptly on a small reed and sedge-skirted pond. Tall bare trees adorned a hazy green background. The map showed a lumber road running from beyond the marsh, over a ridge and down to Drag Lake -- this would save hours of backtracking. Looking up, she noticed a trail of crushed sedges winding it’s way into the marsh -- had Margie wandered this far?

It took a full 3 hours of crossing beaver dams, hopping from tussock to tussock and ultimately slogging knee-deep through bubbling, foul-smelling mud to reach the shore beyond, but she had far overshot the road. The trail of trampled sedges continued, ending where the forest began.

Crossing a dried creek bed, her attention was drawn by movement beside a large beech. The grainy grey vision gathering twilight imposed left her more the impression than a certainty that a thin, dark man, beating winged arms, had processed reverently up the hillside and behind an outcropping. Confused upon reaching the tree and finding no sign of anyone’s passage, she still pursued that direction, as it would lead her to the Lake.

Reaching a ledge just below the ridge, she was briefly assailed by a smell of rotting flesh, along with that of a wood fire; still, oddly, she felt composed. Rounding a spur of rock, she came upon a wooded hollow which the setting sun bathed in a deepening orange glow. The trees housed a number of platforms, some tenanted and equipped with jars, dishes of food, fresh clothes; others, in a state of disrepair were empty. Silently she drew closer.

The man, who had removed his wings and placed them between a tenanted tree and a blazing fire, turned. Eula sensed rather than saw him beckon her. He silently climbed to the platform, unwrapped a tattered blanket, and exposed a skeleton to which a few tatters of flesh still clung. These he daintily yet respectfully picked off with his preternaturally long fingernails, finally descending to offer them to the fire. Climbing again, he drew apart the bones, placing them on a clean piece of coarse cloth, wrapping them, along with the few other objects the platform bore, in a bundle he tied together with a rawhide strip.

Descending with the bundle and extinguishing the fire, he paused, looking her over intently. She pictured than heard when he whispered: “You too have work to do here.” She understood. Climbing to the platform she laid Jim’s shirt across a remaining piece of blanket, placing the locket inside it, and folded the blanket over it, sealing it with her tears.

As she climbed down, the Indian had moved off the way she had come, but was pointing up the hill.

* * *

At the lake, a concerned Bea and Margie, were waiting. “I kin smell where you been, an’ it ain’t pretty,” said Margie indecorously. Reaching the middle of the lake, Bea and Margie suddenly tipped the canoe, sending a distracted Eula into the water. Surfacing she said: “I feel much better now.”

"Pick 'Em Clean"

-------------------------------------

Published in strong competitors to The New Flesh like International Agrophysics and Estudos de Literatura Oral, Georges Dodds has until recently kept his weird writing under mouldy cerements. His recent genre activities include textual resurrection for a publisher of Gothic novels, unearthing and presenting in an e-library some thematic precursors of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes, translating early French science-fiction to English, and preparing a collection of American dime-novelist William Murray Graydon's earliest adventure stories. Georges and his 3-species family (4 with the goldfish), lives in a former bus garage, on the now relocated site of an 18th century cemetery -- so far tilling the garden hasn't revealed its past.

2011-07-26T18:03:00.000-07:00

DIRECTIONS: Hold SEXUAL ORGANS upright, pull trigger back and spray the air in a sweeping motion until entire area is covered. For noticeably fresh SEXUAL ORGANS, spray all the rooms in your home.

INGREDIENTS: Odor eliminator, water, fragrance, nonflammable natural repellant, embalming fluid, quality control ingredients. SEXUAL ORGANS Contain no Phosphates.

CAUTION: USE ONLY AS DIRECTED. Intentional misuse by deliberately concentrating and inhaling the contents can be harmful or fatal. Help stop SEXUAL ORGAN abuse. Some surfaces may become damp when sprayed. Avoid slips or falls.

KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN. Do not point at face. If eye contact occurs, rinse well with water. If irritation persists, get medical attention. Do not expose SEXUAL ORGANS to heat or open flame, or store at temperatures above 120 degrees fahrenheit. Dispose of properly. Do not puncture or incinerate organs.

"Sexual Organs"

-------------------------------------

Dustin Reade has been published a bunch in magazines, online, and in dozens of anthologies. He lives in Washington. 'Nuff Said.

ONLINE SUBMISSIONS CLOSED

2011-07-20T20:34:00.000-07:00

Hey Weirdos!

So we're closing up submissions again. Anything sent in by the end of today is okay, but future submissions will be bounced back. We have received a TON of submissions since we re-opened to subs a couple of months ago, so much that I can barely keep up. So that's why it is necessary to close submissions at this time.

This does not mean that TNF will stop posting stories. We still have tons of weirdness to share and will be posting stories regularly. If you sent a story in to us and it was received by July 20th, 2011, then your story will be read and you will get a response from us soon. No worries.

Thanks so much for supporting The New Flesh! It blows my mind to step back and see how much it has grown over the past couple of years. Really, thank you so much.

Take care!

III

2011-07-08T16:29:00.000-07:00

There are forty-seven doors in my house, but only three windows. We are open and closed. Petey (my kid) says I should get a job in paradoxical philosophies. I hold his hand and go outside through door thirty-three. This is when I get hit by the falling expansion peach.

It is the size of a normal peach. Now it isn't. It bounces off my head and grows into a Peach-Planet. Petey and I are sucked away with its gravity and our home shrinks away and all the doors are closed. All the windows are closed.

Petey is holding onto my hand like I'm a balloon elephant with mild autistic tendencies. I say don't let go. He says I won't let go (we're sentimentalists like that). The Peach-Planet sucks into orbit and we can feel it shift, feel it suck, it sucks.

Massive worms grind their teeth and burst through the surface and send peach-pulp scattering. Peach-people, fully matured (yet no more than a day old), approach me and Petey and I'm not sure if they are peach-men or peach-women. Maybe they're neither. Maybe they're something altogether different. They say something I don't understand and I look at them. They say something else and I squeeze Petey's hand. They yell something and tie rope around my neck and around Petey's neck and tug us behind them, taking us back to their peach-town.

Petey says I'm scared.

I say me too, son, me too.

In the town the peach-people look at me and Petey and their kids play with pop-guns and make gun sounds with their mouths and wear helmets for hitting things and falling over and not getting hurt. Petey doesn't have one and a toothless peach-kid throws a grenade at Petey and it explodes into thousands of little birds that spray everywhere. The parent of the grenade-throwing-peach-kid smacks them across the helmet and stares at us. The peach-kid cries, then stops.

Petey and I are taken to a small farmhouse and tied up on the back porch. The peach-people say something I don't understand and I say something they don't understand. They go inside and play poker and Petey goes to the end of the porch at the end of his rope and does a little wee. I curl up and go to sleep and dream of bank loans skiing down mountains in big purple hats. Petey dreams of going to a peach-kid and showing the peach-kid his big gums.

The big peach-person (who kind of looks like a Ned) wakes me and Petey up and we see the earth rise. I miss the earth and Petey misses the earth. We miss the earth together. Ned touches my hair and says something and hands me a weird shape-tool and takes me out to the field. Ned takes Petey to the other side and hands him a smaller shape-tool. I stare at Ned and then at the shape-tool and Ned comes over to me and smacks me across the face. Ned snatches the shape-tool and starts moving it through the ground in a weird shape-motion. I take it back and try doing it. Ned watches me do it. I don't know if it's right. I do it again. Ned walks over to Petey and teaches him the same movement. Petey does a clumsy shape in the ground and Ned hits him and snatches the shape-tool off him. I yell out. Ned looks over and I go back to shaping. Ned does the shape again and Petey does another clumsy shape. Ned smacks him to the ground and I drop my shape-tool and run to him.

Ned yells something at me and I pick Petey up and hand him the shape-tool. Ned hits me. I get up and guide Petey through the shape a couple of times. I let him go and he shapes on his own. A little shaky, but good enough. I look at Ned and he thinks so too.

We stand in the field, just me and Petey, shaping it continuously each day every day and my back is sore and my arms are sore and my legs are sore. Petey is exhausted and he hasn't shaped a quarter of what I have. His little bones are turning to peach-pulp and bruising so fast. We sleep on the back porch and drink peach-seed soup.

Petey dies. He gets buried out back, behind the barn.

In the field I can feel myself dying too. A group of drunk peach-teenagers sneak into the back yard at night looking for things to destroy and they boot stomp me in my sleep and I dream I'm being eaten by jazz singers. I wake up and Ned is fighting off the peach-teenagers with his katana and they're falling apart at the waist and splattering onto the ground. The neighbours hear something going on and they come over with their own katanas and start fighting Ned. Ned dies and falls apart at the waist and some other peach ties me up and slings me over their shoulder. I forget where I am. Another peach-person kills the one carrying me and picks me up over their shoulder. I fall asleep.

When I wake up there is only one peach-person and we are on a hill and the peach-person says that I will no longer work the fields. I say I want to go home. The peach-person says I can't. I say how do you know my language? He says nothing. I say are there others like me? He nods and picks up his katana and walks away.

"The Expansion Peach"

-------------------------------------

S. T. Cartledge is a weird, surreal, experimental writer from Western Australia. He spent his childhood brooding around in a small coastal town and has since spent the beginnings of his adult life brooding around in a small coastal city. His greatest thrill in life is antagonising grammar nazis at every opportunity.

2011-07-08T16:18:00.000-07:00

So a few months ago I accidentally built a time machine. I don’t know what I was trying to make, but it wasn’t a time machine. A lot of people were very excited, but because I hadn’t set out to build a time machine I considered the experiment a failure. I was in all the papers for a while, and then one day I put the time machine in the garage and forgot about it.

Well, a few days ago, my dad was out cleaning the garage when he came across the Time Machine. He came up to my room to tell me about it. His face was red and he was angry.

“That doo-hickey of yours has got a hornet’s nest in it,” he told me. “I’m not gonna clean it up. You can do that yourself. You’re twenty-seven years old; I shouldn’t have to tell you to clean up after yourself.”

“Fine, I’ll clean it up,” I said.

Then, I said: “Jeez.”

I put on my purple windbreaker and my favorite pair of jeans and headed for the garage. My mother was in the kitchen, juggling bombs. They were round and black and all of the fuses were lit. One of them looked like it could blow up at any minute but she didn’t seem to care. I had to assume she knew what she was doing, but it seemed to me that my dad should have stepped in and done something. A bomb with a lit fuse was a heck of a lot more dangerous than a hornets nest in my crappy Time Machine.

I went out into the garage and looked at the Time Machine. It didn’t look like much, just a chair and some tinfoil, really. There was a little platform built around it, but it only went out about six or so feet. Looking at it, I still couldn’t figure out what it was I had been trying to make.

The hornets nest was under the seat, so I grabbed a can of spray paint and started spraying them. I had no idea how to kill hornets but I found out that spray paint doesn’t do anything to them. Soon they were buzzing all around me, and I had no choice but to kick the nest from the chair and use the Time Machine.

Everything went dark for a minute, and then I saw a bunch of rainbows. They were tiny, no bigger than my fingernail, and there were thousands of them.

After a few minutes, the rainbows faded, and gradually a sort of desert came into focus. My parents were standing there. Their faces were streaked with black and their hair was standing straight up on their heads. I looked around and realized it wasn’t really a desert, more of an impact crater. I could see bits of my neighbor’s houses, a few tires and other indications of a great explosion. Like, there was a tree up on the top of the crater that had been split in half, and there were body parts scattered all over the place.

My mother reached up and touched her hair. There was a spark, and she quickly pulled her hand away. Smoke trailed out of both of their ears.

“What the heck are you guys doing here?” I asked.

My dad brushed himself off. “Your dumbass mother blew us up.”

“Yeah,” mom said sheepishly. “I was practicing my juggling. My teacher told me that, if I wanted to get really good at it, I had to try juggling something dangerous. That way, I wouldn’t lose my focus.”

I threw up my hands. “Jesus, Mom! He meant to try juggling knives, or chainsaws, not bombs!”

She just shrugged.

“Sorry,” she said. “I just wanted to improve my juggling skills.”

“Well, I hope you’re happy,” dad said, putting his hands on his hips and staring at her. “You and your damn juggling have knocked us all into next week.”

I checked the time-o-meter on the Time Machine. It said we had, in fact, travelled exactly one week into the future. I was momentarily upset, because I had missed a couple of my favorite shows, but luckily I had the Time Machine.

“Luckily,” I said. “I have this Time Machine.”

They both looked at me.

“So?”

“So,” I explained. “We can use it to go back to last week, before any of this happened.”

They climbed on and we went back to our own time. When we got there, we walked into the kitchen and looked at the bombs mom had left on the table. None of them had blown up yet, so the machine must’ve worked.

My father sat down and put his elbows up on the table.

“Well, Marie,” he said. “Was it worth it? Do you feel your juggling has improved as a result of this accident?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Here, let me show you!”

She picked up the bombs, lit the fuses, and started juggling them. She really was quite good.

"Tiny Rainbows"

-------------------------------------

Dustin Reade likes old surrealist movies, Sangria Senorial Soda, writing stories and using his body for shock value. His work can be found in numerous magazines and anthologies. All of his stories are weird.

2011-07-08T16:07:00.000-07:00

Father McKinely had sat in the confessional, saying nothing, listening to the ditzy-voiced blonde recount her latest sexual debauches. She had spoken in a voice that was sensual, but cheap. Stupid, but arousing.

The poor husband, Father McKinely had thought.

"Now you have to understand, father, Joey's my husband. Burt he's his best friend. So one day Burt stops by when Joey is out working.

'Sorry,' I tell him. 'Joey isn't home.'

Father McKinely had felt tension go all throughout his body, muscles in his neck contracting, sweat beading down his priestcollar. This is better than Cinemax, he thought, as Mrs. Whitefield had started to get dirty.

Joseph Christopher McKinely had not always been like this.

A priest. In early adulthood he'd been many things. A coast guard, a prizefighter and even a disc jockey at a small-time college radio station. Becoming a priest had seemed like the thing to do back then--there was just no dodging it. His father had been a priest, his grandfather. Family tradition, family duty.

At first, stories like Mrs. Whitefield's had appalled him. He had been a firm believer in the sacraments of marriage: fidelity and the like. But ten years of being forbidden to so much as touch his penis had made things more difficult for him, unbearable.

On the eleventh year Father McKinely had started to do things differently, in his own way. Why not? The sinners were still getting absolution; he just needed to relieve his frustrations from time to time.

"...and then this Burt, he kisses me passionately on the lips, his tongue caressing both sides of my mouth! Oh, Father, it had felt so good, I just couldn't resist it."

Father McKinely could see Mrs. Whitefield through the screened-divider, knelt down on the bench, the sight of her perky, moca-colored breasts being more than he could handle.

Gently, and soundlessly his pants had gone tumbling down. There was a slight, barely perceptible sound of the zipper but Mrs. Whitefield didn't seem to have noticed as she kept on talking.

"And here I am, bent over, and Burt's really riding me good, you know? Showing me no mercy. And it was a beautiful day. A day like today. I could hear the birds chirping, barely a cloud in the sky and Burt he's just... well, getting me sore, to be honest with you. And then a couple seconds more he's finished. He zips his pants back up, real businesslike and tells me, 'tell Joey I'll call him tonight, all right?"

"Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh." Father McKinely had groaned.

He had tried keeping the noise under control but the story had just been too much on him. He had wondered, at the very second after climax if his father and grandfather had done these things he was doing? He had hoped so. This was great--better than even making it with those bikini-clad bimbos on the beach. They knew what was going on, this woman on the other side of the screen she hadn't the vaguest clue.

"Is everything okay, Father?"

"Ahhhhhhhh." He groaned. "Ah, yes, Daughter. It's just this time of year I sneeze like a banshee. Allergies."

And then he told her her sins were nothing. "Say twenty-three Hail Maries, and sixty-eight Our Fathers. You are forgiven."

* * *

As she was leaving the booth he had looked at the Roster. Three-twenty--Mrs. Crawford. He smiled crookedly. She was even better looking than Mrs. Whitefield. Long, creamy legs. Pouty lips and a set of knockers that would have given even Hugh Hefner a semi.

He gazed down into his wristwatch with dueling crucifixes, the short, stumpier one was on the three, the longer one on the two.

"Ten minutes." Father McKinely had sighed.

A guy didn't have much time to clean up around here.

"Father McKinely"

-------------------------------------

Jack Bristow is a cross dresser from Nova Scotia. He enjoys riding Harleys and intimidating old people.

2011-07-03T09:11:00.000-07:00

I wake up from a deep sleep. There is a lion lying beside me. As his face comes into focus he licks his nose and eyes me, much like my neighbor’s cat does. His mane is dull red framing a cat face of fine, tan fur that fills my entire field of vision. I’m between his paws, two on top of me two underneath, and I lay against his stomach and chest like an asteroid trapped in Jupiter’s gravity well. The body heat coming off of him is tremendous. I’m sweating.

I’m reasonably sure this lion was not there when I went to sleep last night. I don’t remember feeling my bed shift in the middle of the night. Strange. Being this close to a lion brings a bizarre mix of emotions.

I stare at the lion for a while. He yawns, sending a bubble of warm, moist air at my face. It doesn’t stink and it doesn’t help wake me up. It’s very much like cat breath. I like my neighbor’s cat. He has a cute face… Only likes to be petted and held when no one is looking… Maybe this lion wants to be petted and held now that no one is looking. I work my arm from under his paw and play with his nose with my index finger. He licks his nose again, getting my finger wet. It’s cute. Kitty definitely wants attention now, so I wrap my arm around his neck and dry my index finger on his mane. He licks my face with a coarse tongue as a humongous paw slides up my bare back, rests on my neck and hugs me tighter. I hug the lion back and pull him closer. His fine fur feels like a felt blanket on a cold winter morning. I want to wrap up in it and hibernate for a year.

This feels familiar… I start stroking the back of his neck through his mane. My hand slides down the length of his back and settles on his upper thigh. The lion seems to enjoy the contact and I wish I could get my other hand involved. He’s warm and soft, just like the stuffed animals I used to have as a kid. In a way I miss those things. I haven’t slept with a stuffed animal since I was six years old and it’s nice to have one in my bed again. I wish I could wake up next to lions more often. Waking up holding something fuzzy and soft is a comforting way to start a morning…

…this is how I wake up after parties. With a woman lying next to me and I’m so drunk I can’t even remember banging her. I must’ve been really drunk not to remember this lion. I don’t want to offend anyone I wake up next to and can’t remember going to bed with, so I kiss him on the mouth and snuggle closer to him. As my eyes close and I drift back to sleep, the lion’s hind paws draw me closer still and he tucks my head under his chin. The strong, cavernous sound of his breath is very relaxing. A warm, breathing, soft and muscular stuffed animal kitty. It’s even better than when I was a kid. I’m not sweating anymore. I’m grinning. This is cozy. It must’ve been a great night. I wish I could remember it. Maybe my mind will be clearer when I wake up.

"Lion in My Bed"

-------------------------------------

James Steele is a writer in Ohio. He is often asked to sum up his life’s story in a single paragraph. James is very depressed by how easy this is. He has been published in the Magazine of Bizarro Fiction (issue 3), Roar v.3, Different Worlds Different Skins v.2, and Planet Magazine. His bizarre action/comedy novel, “Felix and the Sacred Thor,” is published through Eraserhead Press.

His blog is http://daydreamingintext.blogspot.com

JOSH MYERS WEEK IS NOW OVER!

2011-07-03T08:16:00.000-07:00

This concludes our special Josh Myers week here at The New Flesh. We hope you enjoyed dancing around inside his brain for the last few days. More of his stories will be appearing on The New Flesh in the near future. As long as he sends them, I'll post them.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

*Editor probably altered the author's photo a bit.

2011-06-25T21:19:00.000-07:00

O! and they did burst into our homes with all fire and bleating, and O! did they tear from our arms all so merciless, the little things which we would hold dear! And it was a bad day, I think we seen it written, yes, we did sculpt it all into our memories, them cold awful bastards, them Devils all fire, did rip us asunder and tear to like ribbons.

And like they appeared all up in our homes like a bad dog all up from hell, they did vanish as quick and as gone without notice. And we was left there on our floors all bleeding in cold to piece back together some semblance on whatever that was what we had. We tried our best and we retained all our sanity and most of our organs. Some was privy to cough up all blood and stain our tattered carpet, but these things they became of such little consequence.

And we did clean it up and try to forge forward, remembering them treasured things what was lost and to patch up them holes in our minds, we did try.

We moved on, yes, we plodded on forward and told stories to cheer a fainting mind. We kept ourselves awake and alive in hiding our thoughts.

And it came that we one day I think we did forget them. We remembered, O yes, we remember what went on, the carnage they sowed and the things they did take, the treasures and things that they tore from us screaming, but then for the life of us could not remember just who what done did it. Them Devils all fiery came up from hell, but we couldn’t place it in our minds. Them things what ruined us turned faceless demons, we left out a name and left out a face.

We knew what did happen, we didn’t knew who.

Ha! Those were the days they were. But them Devils evidently they knew us and our thoughts and they took none too kindly to us all forgetting.

And so, while we slept, up from hell they come back.

Our world been repaired from previous torn asunder been ripped once again and burned to smithereens. Them Devils, they stood there before us and made us remember. They did ensure we could never forget. They did go and put nails in. They ensured in their silence we would always remember, and look back in terror forever and ever.

Them Devils up from hell did set us ablaze then. And like to carve their screaming image to our screaming flesh.

They did it all unspeaking the whole while we melted and formed like new creatures, detestable beasts with them in our skin. And to look on each and other was to see all again, and I think that we may have died then.

Surely though, this is not we.

This crispy burned and carved up flesh.

This thing crucified all on one another.

Cannot be, no.

And we do turn our heads and as crispy flakes off, we see Devils in our skin.

And we always remember them just as they stood there.

And sometimes we scream.

"Devils"

-------------------------------------

Josh Myers is one of them humans living in them hideous states, particularly New Jersey, specifically Lambertville. He eats and sleeps mostly, and writes like a good fishy. He’s too fat and is going to die probably. He is not him, though could be if he has to, though does he? We think not.

He is not, we repeat, NOT him.

He appears here on gracious loan from the A.B.C., thank you.

Please refer all complaints to the Consultant.

2011-06-25T21:14:00.000-07:00

Scattering about and looking like as chickens all what with no noggins. Searching all up and down we did, but no avail. All happiness and joy and not in our time.

Ground went thick and sloshy, yes it did, all squishing up and out ‘tween our toes and like staining our feets. It’s all and everything like they said it would, and we ache in our cringing. Looked all about and eyed us a rock which for us to climb onto and save us from this detestable mud what we done writhed about it.

And look at that, would you! What would be carved into that stone but words from our own majestic and all joyous savior, that Tim what we savor, him and that fat brother, him weepy all detestable Jim, for shame, for shame.

But alas, them words! We known them words by heart, we did! And carved in that rock there all ten miles high:

“Brave sun shines on me on my own it’s only for me

As cold as can be in and English sea

Which could mean something other…”

Says us to all and to other and it, “Say, I remember you!”

We climb all up on it and do we shake hands and pat us on our backs, remembering these words as we do
from another time, another more happier place in this land (and in the sea).

We trenched up our muddy footies all up on our rock and it did leave its mark, we tried to make it vanish but the filth just wouldn’t have it. So we offered instead our sincerest all sorry, to make them amends to our rock, our buddy, and to him our words from sweet, sweet Tim, living on out there, so we hope, in his house and doing so quite happily, we also do hope.

We love him so. We miss him all terribly.

O, and for shame, Jim.

He have an upper hand now, with Tim gone all struck down.

But we think he wouldn’t have it.

Jim’s too fat and is going to die probably.

And in this we find solace.

O, but it make us sad to think of him there…not knowing just where out there does he be, our sweet Timmy. Somewhere in his home, we hope, maybe making amends and fixing all up to save us all over.

We’d like to think so, and we do.

We weep for him in our thoughtful hearts and it does stain us unto our feet again.

But no, we wipe away our tears and struggling though, celebrating happiness and joy as he gave us, on land and in the sea. We take this rock to be a help of his hands, his sweet giving hands and we crawl up and lie down atop them to sleep now, O please.

And we thank him for it.

Once as is waking, we pitch about and start up with creeching as we see the sea from atop our great rock, all carved with his words. Our mud done all gone, and now here in this dim and dank time we see the sea all rising up around us and dispensing with the filth we crawl in!

(As crawling is my world, it dispense with my world.)

(And I thank him for it.)

All water comes rising, we hear it go sloshing, we hear it all there and of forever, might never stop. Could be we won this time. Is a very good possibility, but we’re all too bad ‘cause we just can’t remember.

Maybe, and likely, but possibly not.

And that sticky and shiny atmosphere it did change itself while we was dozing. Used to be it was all awful hot, what did melt at our skin and make us sweat it and leak down our faces, our backs, going dripping along in the filth and trace patterns on our dirty flesh. Was very hot, yes.

But now gone all cold, yes I should think so. Chilly in its worst way and blows now all freezing on our faces to wake us up while we slept.

So very cold now, a welcome change. And it stings on our sweated flesh, in glue in the muck as it freeze to our being.

And now we becoming all, as it does freeze so, we to become some like new creatures, and we take it as commonplace. These small little changes on us now and again, we take in stride and accept it as so. O yes, we scream some and like as to tear at our skin, but we accept it, yes.

And in our new flesh, we look all around and did come to agreement, we leapt from our rock with its beautiful carving and into the sea to live as we might. Our new freezing likeness does open up to the sea and let it in and we soak in it, accepting it as us and it take us up and take us down, and once and twice and all over again.

It turning all gorgeous.

And maybe…

Yes, this is very good at that.

We’ll be very content, yes.

Happy at that, yes.

O, praise him, do.

And our toes do scrape on the filth way down there, it squish through our toes.

"Up and Down Like Stupid Toys"

-------------------------------------

2011-06-25T21:03:00.000-07:00

And we ran so fast and so far, all feet going THUD on them smacking the ground.

They gone all THUDDING and crashy on the dirt, it was so hard, so thick and so very very awful. And like it we continued, on and on, so far and so good.

We did, we hid past the daylight and far from the night, we went running and THUDDING and CRASHING and CREECHING as our legs would not stop. We did try to convince them, but our heads was too quiet, our legs was too stubborn.

O, so fast and so far, and some of us like as to die, I should think. We couldn’t to stop and to save them, I shouldn’t think, for that would entail us stopping our tracks and to freeze on the spot, dead like a doornail, or walk like a loosefish.

We couldn’t remember, I shouldn’t think, what it was we was running from, not all entirely, maybe hideous noises or bastards then, probably.

O, but then…yes, I’m afraid it was, then. When the earth split wide open and we saw us reflected in his skin, it did make us turn and retreat, yes. All screaming and yelling, our feet going all THUD THUD THUD as we turned and beat feet.

O, and ha ha! We do try to forget these things, as they tend to so poison our mind.

We instead we do memorize cheerful happy tunes, good tunes with lots of fiddly bits and happiness and joy. We whistle them in our frightened heads and hum all long:

“When they who to the sea go down and in the waters ply their toil are lifted on the surges crown and plunged where seething eddies boil…”

It give unto us poor filthy retreaters and great and grand and magnificent comfort, them we words seen, what we heard written and passed down from such many generations, from fathers and so on.

We repeat them in our heads we do, as we kept on our running, our THUDDING of feet on the filth. And we did run, and it did cost us our breath.

We all to take pleasure in finding something pointier.

We hit upon a house out there in that distance, rose up on the horizon and shone out in the darkness like a silvery space-dog out amongst the constellations. We did though keep running so, and as we passed it and glimpsed him inside, a frowning little man, we made motion with hands to signify him to move on along like us there, the smart ones, but he couldn’t get it I don’t think.

Poor him, though let us never say that we didn’t try.

I think maybe the house and him, it may have erupted way back there where we left it, but then again, we hope not. He did seem to tired there, that little man and a house. Maybe it gone all quiet for him, the days all gone and his body retreated back home where it like to belong.

We tried to keep thinking like these things, maintaining a positive mental query and holding with both hands the neck of our sanehood.

And THUD THUD THUD THUD THUD gone our feet on the filth! O, I remember it as though yesterday, yes!

We hated it, O didn’t we? All full of fear, of course we ran. Any lesser soul would’ve crumbled right there on the spot, but we did beat feet and we kept right on running from there where it split open and up he done came, right down from heaven and up from hell.

We did run on, propelled like forward by them sights and sounds and knowing our reward should we reach it.

We did though, didn’t we?

Yes, and we like it very much thank you.

Our absolute freedom as we found it, all spectacular, yes.

And we found ourselves at the top of the hill, despite we probably didn’t climb it. We not to complain, as it was welcome change and what we had looked for. Down there at the bottom we saw our waiting salvation, the water in all its glory, beckoning with its dripping arms open, tossing itself all up and down and calling us to it.

And we came running down the hill, feet THUD THUD THUD, all aching gills, and did we collapsed into the sea, to our everloving joy to forget what we seen and what did done rose up out there, back behind that house what’s probably all gone now, poor thing. We ran straight there into the water and under the waves, drifting on down all lazy and soft like meadow-grass under the flood.

We went and we hid down there as we knew we should, maintaining a distance and joining the plankton.

"Loosefish and Fastfish"

-------------------------------------

2011-06-25T20:53:00.000-07:00

He come stepping through grass ever so slow as he does, passing over and granting indifference to a cluster of ants swarming in an ants’ nest.

He look up with face smiling all glistening solitude. All shaky hands and spittle resolving and lining his quaky foundation.

We hope on him to line his pockets.

He keep go along and we do watch him in silence. We to observe him and see what to repeat. His actions all glorious, though we do hate him. This bastard oppressor, he suck at our doors. He do not know what we feel out toward him and likely he won’t never will.

Our doors is all locked, we watch from out window. Him who does step through as slow as like snails, he so careful to never step and harm a small being.

Him ever so careful, he is. We seeing his hands as they jibber and twitch about his cold body, check now his cufflinks, check now his buttons. He wipe down his brow, he scratch at his nose, him to never let fingers a-come to a rest.

Though we may have mis-spake, for now once now or twice so he does stop his fiddling and bark out in sing-song syllables:

“3. 1. 18. 4. 9. 1. 3. 19.”

And we dare not to question it.

While in general we do as instructed and scrawl out scribblings about his behavior, in this we reject. It have gone now too far.

We do not write it down, we do not dare translate.

We been so mistaken.

Him out there, he checking all cufflinks and snappy lapels, he turn head and he eye us, he spy through our window and give us a grin.

It shake to our core as our day here is there and it lies out there with him.

As we sits weeping he out there is dancing and blasting his grin up there onto the sky.

Arms gone straight and fingers done twitching, he hold his face up and bark like a bad dog. It give us a scare and it give us a start. We to jump out our skin if we wasn’t sealed it.

He dancing and singing like it say he would do. We consult we do our scribbly scrawls and we search for a purpose. We quiver in our sick discovery.

And then here come Organ, down from heaven and up from hell. A blasting all screechy and beautiful noise it is, shaking our silence and to cheer a fainting mind. He make us all to wipe at our eyes, to stare out our window into the Whole World.

Now living out there is our Organ resplendent. He live and he breathes all same air as we do.

Everyone laughed we were all so happy.

Jim came running down the hill.

"Tattered Title in a Different Time"

-------------------------------------

2011-06-19T06:24:00.000-07:00

Glen Horn believed his mother was a portal for interstellar travel.

When she requested he remove his dirty socks from the rug or wash behind his ears in the tub, he could almost visualize the wormhole stretching from her tongue, threatening to crush him in her steadily collapsing words. He never argued with her. He feared she might accidentally transport him into a void of frigid space and dead stars.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said politely, but always kept a careful eye fixed on her every move.

On Saturday, he helped her make homemade chocolate moon pies. It was a weekly ritual they both enjoyed.

“You’re like addicted to them,” he mumbled and voraciously licked the rubber spatula clean.

“It’s the reason I stayed on this planet,” she confessed. “Our people love marshmallow.”

“You do know you sound crazy, right?”

Her red hair was layered in flour and cocoa powder.

“Only on this side of Orion’s Belt,” she chuckled and slapped her hands together.

As she was persistently peculiar, Glen attempted to switch gears.

“Can I have twenty dollars for the movies, mom?” He wanted to meet his best friend, Carlos in front of the theater.

“Paper money won’t do you any good.” There was a flash of light and the kitchen seemed to momentarily ebb from existence.

“It won’t?” He was perplexed and somewhat disoriented.

“No, son. A second ago it would have, but not in this new galaxy.” She stared at him, tight-lipped, rapidly blinking her eyes.

He scratched his chin and swallowed hard. “Well, I was really hoping to buy some popcorn and a soda while I was there.”

“Here,” she replied and dropped white sugar cubes into his cupped hands. “This will provide you entrance into the cinema and sufficient funds for nourishment.” She turned her back to him and began to wash the dishes.

He nervously slipped them into his jacket pocket and ran out the back door of the kitchen.

At first, he thought she had finally gone off the deep end. But later, when Carlos pushed a plastic bag full of brown sugar under the ticket booth window and used it to pay admission for both of their movie tickets, he was unquestionably spooked.

“Carlos?” He asked and took hold of the boy’s arm. “Have we always used sugar to pay for things?”

Carlos balled up his face like a paper bag. “Nooooooooooooo,” he said sarcastically and pounded his chest. “We cavemen used to use rocks and dry twigs.” He flicked Glen’s ear. “Weirdo!”

Maybe it’s not my mother after all, he thought. But it can’t be me, could it?

The answer came to fruition on Monday morning when the family car wouldn’t start. His mother calmly sat behind the steering wheel and whistled.

“I guess it’s time for plan B,” she said happily.

“Great! Now I’m going to be late for school.” Glen was stressed and didn’t know what she was talking about. He rubbed the bridge of his nose and slid his body down the length of the passenger seat. “And of course, mid-terms start today of all days.”

“Relax, son.” She took hold of his face, parted her lips and pressed them above his eyebrows. “I’m going to make it all better.” The gentle framework of her cosmos dripped over his head like warm honey. In less than a nanosecond, he materialized before the entrance of his high school in a completely parallel universe. Up ahead, a group of blue-skinned adolescent girls giggled and waved hello with their glimmering white wings.

He stood there dumbfounded, not realizing it was the chalky surface of the moon he wiped from his damp forehead, and not his mother’s parting kiss.

"Moon Pie"

-------------------------------------

Angel Zapata was born on Earth. His horror short story collection, The Man of Shadows is available in paperback or eBook through Panic Press. Visit http://arageofangel.blogspot.com

2011-06-19T06:09:00.000-07:00

My great-grandfather fell off a bridge on a horse into a river and drowned. The ghost of my great-grandfather caught a wasp in his bare hands and ate it. It stung him. He suffocated. His eyes bulged. The ghost of my great-grandfather became the ghost of a ghost and stared at his hands and refused to eat until eventually the sun burned through him like morning fog. The ghost of the ghost of the ghost of my great-grandfather turned into a mirror reflecting a mirror. The feedback from a microphone. Static electricity. The way your eyes ache when your teeth get cold. He told me if he had to die again his last wish was to see Anna Karenina naked in Heavy Metal Magazine. He told me he knew that wishing for things he'd never get was what ended up killing him last time but that he wouldn't put it out of his mind and that he also wanted the Dodgers to move back to Brooklyn even though that was out of any of our control. I told him I didn't think there would be any more ghosts of ghosts after this one so he better be careful. He stuck a fork into the toaster to prove me wrong. I heard the sound of rushing water. The lights flickered. The ghost of the ghost of the ghost of my great-grandfather smirked. His mouth was a Moebius strip. His voice was a lit fuse. He said he guessed he was here to stay and then popped like firecracker. He left a charred black stain like a star on the linoleum floor.

"The After After Life"

-------------------------------------

Shea Newton lives in Idaho. He doesn't return gifts. Sometimes he publishes in online. If you want to you can find him there.

2011-06-19T05:53:00.000-07:00

Allen was born blind. His childhood was spent nestled in Momma's overprotective bosom; he even slept in the same bed as Momma. This left the poor adult Allen unable to deal with the world and he became a severe agoraphobic. The one bedroom apartment he resided in was sparsely furnished with a television, love seat, twin bed and a lamp. His only connection to the outside world was the telephone and noise of the T.V. Allen was on complete disability and even had his meals delivered to him daily.

Momma eventually left him to fend for himself to begin a new marriage, but she still called him every evening to say Good night to her little boy.

“Come see Momma,” she would cajole to Allen. “You could take a plane and I will be right at the terminal to meet you when you land.”

Allen would shiver at just the mere thought of leaving his tiny apartment, let alone the entire apartment building. Momma set him up in this apartment before she left and Allen planned to stay put until death forced him out.

* * *

One afternoon there came a soft knock on Allen's front door.

“Lunch,” rang a cheerful female voice that sounded completely familiar, but Allan just could not put his finger on that southern accent.

“Come in,” Allen answered.

“It sure is dark in here!” the lady exclaimed as she stepped in the room with a tray of roasted chicken.

“Doesn’t matter to me,” Allen answered matter of factly. “I’m blind.”

“Light is not only for the sighted people,” the lady explained. “It is imperative for a healthy soul!”

Allen forked the chicken, “I suppose I can see it your way, No puns intended,” Allen smirked.

“I have a light bulb in my car. Let me fetch it for you?”

“Sure,” Allen shrugged and the lady left the room.

A few minutes later the lady returned and screwed the bulb into the lamp on Allen's floor.

“OK, this bulb can do something for you no ordinary bulb can.”

“Sure, lady,” Allen entertained her silly words and sipped his coffee.

“No, really. When you turn this lamp on the bulb will illuminate your world, interanlly and externally.. You will then see what the bulb has to show you.”

“Why give me this magic bulb?” Allen humored her.

“Because you are going to give me something small in return.”

“OK, take whatever lady. I don't have a single thing I would miss.”

“Thank you,” the lady clapped. “When you turn on the lamp it signifies the signing of our contract.”

With that the lunch lady left. Allen immediately switched on the lamp and just about fell face first into the floor, his brown carpeted floor. Allen could see! He spent the whole afternoon looking around his apartment, watching television and gazing out the window. He saw the world for the first time with new born eyes.

Allen called his mother that night and excitedly told her of the news.

“Impossible!” she exclaimed. “I am flying in this weekend to take you to the doctors, maybe a psychiatrist!”

Allen snorted at his mom and hung up the phone, he had television to watch.

The weekend finally arrived and Allen was eagerly waiting for his mother's knock on the door. It finally came right before midnight; Momma must have had a late flight.

“Come in!” Allen called eagerly with a huge smile, but that smile quickly faded.

“What? Not happy to see Momma?”

Allen finally placed that lunch lady's familiar twang. All Allen could do was babble nonsense as Momma bent over him with her eyes closed. Her skin was completely translucent and Allen could see hundreds of featureless figures emitting a doleful moan as their bodies circled the window of Momma's skin.

“I see you have not accomplished much with the present I gave you, what a shame.” The Momma beast finally opened her closed eyes and Allen could see his fate. “You see eyes are not only windows to the soul, but they are windows for the soul. Now turn out the light Allen; I don't want you to see Momma tear your soul apart.”

"The Light Bulb Collector"

-------------------------------------

Stacy Bolli is a single mother residing in the sun soaked state of Florida. She has several works appearing online and in written anthologies. Her most recent stories can be found in "Sins and Tragedies" with Panic Press and "DOA: Extreme Horror Collection" by Blood Bound Books.

2011-06-12T12:22:00.000-07:00

“Rita Ruth McKendrick, why you always talking to yourself?"

Talking to myself? Them damn fools, thinkin’ I’d waste time telling myself things I already knowed.

But the others saw her lips move and drew their conclusion: Rita Ruth talked to herself. One old fool claimed it started with grace at breakfast and she just kept going.

Rita Ruth did not say grace. Never in her life had she said grace. Or gone to church or read the Bible. What mattered was Rita Ruth believed in God, though the way she understood Him was murky. And she was proud of the murkiness. God is unknowable.

God had taken her baby. Now that was knowable. The why of it, unknowable. Even the man who thought he knew everything couldn’t say why God took Jimmy Jack, could not answer that one question. Yet he wanted her to answer his question. The man had “Doc” in front of his name. Thought that gave him the right to ask.

“As a child, Rita Ruth, were you ever mistreated by anyone, anyone at all?”

Never told him, not in the years she’d been there. This time, she was set to say. Had to, it was eating her up inside, the keeping quiet.

You ready, Doc? Well, there was ten of us, Ma, Pa, five boys and us three girls. Lived in the old Church on River Street at the time. Charity, thanks to them Methodists. ‘Course Pa was a big man and Ma just a slip of a woman. So she couldn’t a done a thing ‘cept what she did when she got sick of what Pa did. And I reckon that’s what you’re after, Doc, what Pa did, the reason Ma shot him. 

Doc closed his eyes, put a hand to his forehead. “Rita Ruth, you have to speak up if you intend me to hear what you’re saying."

Rita Ruth struggled her body out of the chair, walked across the darkened office, walked the empty corridors, walked and wondered what was wrong with Doc? She’d spoke up, loud. She’d screamed it, what Pa did.

"The Whisperer"

-------------------------------------

Margie Hamilton is a UC Berkeley graduate, living in Grinnell, Iowa. In between, she enjoyed her career as a technical writer during the exciting Dot Com era. She looks forward to attending the Iowa University Writer Festival writing summer class. Reading, writing and movies pretty much keep her out of trouble.

2011-06-07T10:54:00.000-07:00

Him all smacking and shake it against his little home, he beat it on the bars and cry out with injustice. Him there in his home, smack with his fat fingers, our dear little him, never dreadful and monstrous, him delightful him.

He lift up his little toy what we won him at the outside and he grin with his big shiny tooth. Him to hold it up with beaming sincerity and mumble a word what could very well be a great hearty thank you.

We do not and could not would ever reprimand him. Sweet sticky thing down there in his little home, scrawls on the walls some words we can’t fathom and can’t dare muster up.

We mumbles out words and our him he goes:

“Yes.”

We mumbles out more and more and he lift up his face:

”Yes!”

He show us in his damned fat fingers his precious what we won him. We grin all down on him and he hold it in abundance.

In nighttime him lie there, breathe silent and plunging off into that dream town.

We stand all around him and stare at fat body. The toy what we won him does fall from fat fingers and we each and all of us do so admire it. We scoop it up slightly and watch its sweet magic.

With sacred patience and a short silence, we retrieve our majesty from that little toy and we keep careful monitor that him does not awaken and see us as we do it.

Filthy fingers of ours slip over the toy and unlock the crying chorus that will sing us to sleep.

The sound what it comes out does lift us on high. It like nothing before and we weep as it sing us, with cosmic projection and sound of constellations spinning in time with silvery space dogs.

It will sing us to god, to sweet him if we are lucky.

“Holding these things in my hand, and I end up seeing everything.”

When him awaken he see us all smile, we stroke his fat face.

Him reach for his toy, what we won for him on the outside and he hold it near and dear. He grinning up and we spy a shiny tooth, slick with hours of timeless life living.

We watch him crawl around on all fours like a good dog and we praise him for it.

Him cuddle down in his little home and run fat fingers across the bars we put for protection.

Them, they may want him but we do protect it. Our sweet little him, we love him so, we do. They’ll never have him, for this him is ours. We found and we bore him, we made and shall raise him. We was it, yes, who won him that toy from out there on the outside, and with it shall we be, and through us shall it be to him. Our precious protection and the glory of the cosmos. We love and protect him, our sweet little Jim.

"Jim Parades a Toy"

-------------------------------------

Josh Myers writes things like a good fishy and he eats and sleeps mostly. He's too fat and is going to die probably.

2011-06-05T06:55:00.000-07:00

I’m trying to decide who to be. My floor is littered with faces I have torn from magazines. Most of these people are thin. It will be fun being a blade, being clear-skinned with thick hair. When I was Angelica, things got out of hand. I am naïve and too easily flattered, even when it’s all make believe, lies and come-on’s. Still I met him at the bar. Actually I’d been waiting an hour earlier than scheduled. He was fatter and hairier than his internet photos, but otherwise the same guy. He must have had an ear zit because he kept digging his finger in the canal and wincing. He kept looking around for me, looked right at me and onto the next one. That’s because he’d never seen the real me, the chubby chick was small boobs.

I paid the waitress a Lincoln to give him a note I’d written on the napkin, then dashed to the restroom. A hot Latina was applying lipstick. She nearly threw up when I screamed at her to get out.

I hit the light switch. My heart was hurdling. I felt as bloated as an unshorn sheep. He knocked first as I’d indicated. The door swept open. I pushed him against it. His mouth tasted like a fireplace, his tongue felt pasty. When he pushed me off and wiped his lips across the back of his hand, I should have run. Fire lit his pupils. He slapped me side-armed, nearly flinging me off my feet. I don’t know he could see me so well in the dark, but I guess even blind men would figure out a way to learn how ugly am I am.

On the internet, I had a stable of men. Stable. I like the sound of that. Drop the “t.” Sable. That’ll be my new name. I’ll use this picture of the brunette with the mink around her neck, the one with cobras for lips.

My goal this time around is to get each guy to fall hard. Then I’m going to cut their hearts out with a rusty knife, one by one. I want to see them beg and kneel on their Skype screens. I want to hear them squeal like piglets, which they’ll do, I’m sure of it. Oh, this is going to be fun, better than any bathroom kiss.

"Bathroom Kiss"

-------------------------------------

2011-06-05T06:44:00.000-07:00

“Hey, sweet-pea, comin’ on that bike trip after exams? Four-five days from Duluth to Lake Geneva, then par-tee all weekend at Gertie’s parents’ mansion by the lake. She invite you?”

“Yeah.”

"Her parents are outfitting everybody with new bikes, 10-speeds! sweet-pea, that’s 9 speeds mor’n that wreck o’ yours”

“My grandfather’s bike runs just fine — I told Gertie I had my own bike, an’ I’d get it to Duluth myself.”

“Jes—” he broke off, seeing her glare.

* * *

Having left the campground near Columbus before dawn on the fourth day, Jim, Eula, and three others who had opted not to be driven to their destination, were headed down Tri-County Rd., brashly boasting how they’d make it by suppertime. After Eula came to a slow halt on a flat tire, only a few scattered cows bemusedly watched them walk to the nearest farmhouse. Sitting down to a late breakfast, the family invited them in to ham and eggs, all washed down with cold milk.

Promising to follow the route they had mapped out, and catch up with them, Eula went off to the barn where the compressor was housed, while the others, thanking their hosts, took their leave — Jim rather reluctantly. Eula’s tire proving to be torn, a trip to a nearby General Store left her a good hour behind and some of miles off course.

* * *

Barring a few pit-stops, Eula had ridden hard all morning. By two that afternoon, she still hadn’t caught up. Emerging from the State Forest south of Palmyra, she stopped, dejected. From the hilltop she could see County Rd. H extending far across a rolling landscape. No one in sight — but on a second look — someone ... someone on a bicycle? maybe, or walking? just one — perhaps the others were hidden behind a ridge. She sped down the hill.

Her exhausted legs propelled her from crest to crest; sometimes the cyclist —yes it was a cyclist — appeared closer, then seemingly farther, and sometimes not at all. Fatigue drove away the sights and sounds around her, leaving the road’s white edge and the cyclist her sole, narrow focus. Only two short ridges ahead now — it was Jim, it had to be — it just had to be. Closer still, he topped the crest as she reached its base, she pressed on harder.

A car whizzed dangerously past, inches from her, frightened her and clearing her head. Reaching the crest, she saw the speeding car topping the next crest, but no sign of a cyclist — none whatsoever. She coasted down the slope doubting her sanity — nobody — but wait — amongst the reeds of a gravelly-banked ditch! Dropping her bicycle, she ran.

“Hey, sweet-pea, took the shoulder a bit hard,” Jim grinned through a wince. “Holy Mother of God!” she cried, ignoring the blood and holding him tightly. Under the now glaring sun it took a moment for her to take in the gash that ran from his eyebrow down to his cheek, and the bloody rawness, filthy with debris, down his left side to the knee. “Hey! nuthin’s broke.” “Hush,” she whispered, tearing a pair of T-shirts and beer cans from her backpack. Turning she found him standing unsteadily. “Sit the hell down!” she almost screamed, and more softly, “this is going to hurt.” Washing the muck and duckweed from his wounds with the frothing beer, she wrapped his wounds with torn up cloth. “It’ll have to do for now.”

No bikes or traffic — she managed to sit him on the crossbar, and ride awkwardly into Elkhorn. Quiet and drowsy, he only managed to whisper, “I’ll love you forever, sweet-pea,” when she left him outside the pharmacy. Witchhazel, tape and gauze served to clean and bandage him, and Coke to quench his thirst. Returning the bottle, she emerged to find him jauntily climbing the steps to a burger joint across the road. Running across, into the low, late afternoon sun, she couldn’t see him, but heard him at a distance: “I’m feelin’ much better, let’s have a bite.”

Three hamburgers, fries and a malted later, Eula, warm and sleepy, briefly dozed off. The waitress woke her, asking, “finished all that by yourself, did you?” Distractedly handing her a $10, Eula ran to door — Jim was outside with her bike and another. “Lookey-here Sweet-pea, borrowed this — gotta move, its late and a storm’s coming in.”

Rumbling, darkening skies first chased them, heavy rain and swirling winds then drenched them, and finally the lightning-streaked skies drove them to shelter in a barn which stood intact beside a farmhouse long ago wind-battered and lain open like a doll-house. Flashlight between her teeth, Eula helped Jim climb up to the hayloft. Some old feed bags atop a layer of disintegrating hay bales made for a place to lay out her sleeping-bag and Jim’s bed-roll. Turning, it took a moment to find him standing stock still in the gloom. Stripping him down as best she could, she wrapped him up in his blankets.

Peeling off her wet clothes, she sat listening to the rain, going over the day’s events in her mind — what he’d said outside the pharmacy. “Com’ere, sweet-pea,” she heard in the darkness. Bringing her sleeping bag, she curled up close to him. He touched her shoulder softly, and his hand slipped down to cup her breast. Eula whispered, “I love you too.” They drew closer...

A bar of sunlight woke her, and a moment’s glance confirmed Jim wasn’t there. She quickly climbed down; his bike was gone. Had her avowal and its consummation scared him off? — probably — who knew with guys?

The trooper pulled up in front of her by the “Welcome to Lake Geneva” sign, — he would take her into town, reunite her with her concerned friends. Climbing in the back seat, she heard him say, “Damn,” and stopped midway through tossing the morning edition of the Madison Capital-Times across the seat — “Cyclist victim of fatal hit-and-run.”

"Last Ride"

-------------------------------------

2011-06-02T12:35:00.000-07:00

[Author’s disclaimer: Ladies this is a sexist tale. It isn’t written for you, but for MEN, MEN, MEN. Stop reading right now or else . . . just don’t blame me afterward . . . ahem]

-----------

As the result of humanity’s losing the war with the Andromedans, all human women were stripped of their buttocks. Yes, those twin pads of fat which human men lust after were stolen by the alien fiends.

Earth’s men woke up the next day feeling strangely cheated, and yet strangely at peace with themselves, as for the first time in their lives they found themselves able to stare at female members of their species without any lust whatsoever.

Even more amazing, most men now began to view women as persons rather than sex objects.

If men were pleased with this state of affairs however, the female of the species most definitely wasn’t.

* * *

Fifty miles above the Earth’s surface, the ruling committee of the Female Emancipation and Domination of Man (FEm-DoM) society were deliberating what to do about this latest sex crisis.

“This is a total disaster,” the goddess Electra growled, “it’s almost as bad as when the feminist lobbies got equal pay for women in the workplace.”

“That was easier to resolve,” Athena interjected, “All we had to do to ensure we kept the upper hand was get the sexual harassment legislation passed through congress.”

“We’re about to lose the ability to use sex as a weapon to disorient men for good ladies,” Hera said miserably. “Six thousand years of work is about flushing down the drain because some alien invaders . . .”

“Er . . . mankind started the war . . .”

“You KNOW what I mean!”

“Girls,” Electra chided gently, “fighting will get us nowhere. This is way beyond any crisis we’ve ever faced. With the loss of buttocks, ass, tush - call it what you will, these damn Andromedans have unwittingly crippled femalekind. Of what use is it having sexes if sex can’t interfere with the smooth running of society, create endless unresolvable issues, perpetually fuck up the gears of the relationship machine?”

“Yeah, all men love ass,” Hera said reflectively.

“Gay men don’t.”

“Yes they do; they just love a guy’s ass!"

Hera’s two compatriots stared at her narrowly. “Try to be serious.”

“What about trying to shift the focus from back to front, to the tits instead?”

“Won’t work, it’s considered sleazy to look at a woman’s chest instead of her face when she’s facing you. When she isn’t facing you however . . .”

“Damn, I forgot that!”

“Think, sisters think. There has to be something men like as much as ass; all we need is to give every woman a set of those instead and the status quo is restored, ergo, we’re in control again.”

They deliberated on this awhile.

“Guys love money.”

“No, cash-butts will send inflation skyrocketing.”

“Cars?”

“Yes but . . . women won’t be able to get through doors anymore. I like the transport concept though - keep thinking along those lines.

Finally they hit on the perfect solution.

-----------

[A brief explanation of what the FEm-DoM goddesses were so panicked about.

Despite all their protestations to the contrary, women have ALWAYS dominated men. If you’ve any doubts as to this, remember accurately your mother’s relationship with your father, possibly before he left home never to return.

The average man doesn’t abandon his girlfriend or wife, he flees for his life.

It makes no difference however though, as whoever they end up with, they still end up in the same place.]

* * *

And so it came to pass that every Earthwoman now has a motorcycle in place of her stolen buttocks.

Things are more or less back to normal now. It’s routine to hear guys ogling girls saying things like:

“Wow dudes, check out that babe’s Harley Davidson! Man those rear lights. And those tires - just incredible,”
“That girl’s a Grand Prix Honda man.”

“Nooooooo, she’s a Confederate Hellcat.”

“I’ll betcha five dollars.”

“You guys talking bout Mary? Dude, save your money. She’s some low-cost Korean brand!”

Cocktail party conversation:

“You know personally I’m a 16-inch rim guy myself; give me too much tire and I’ve no idea what to do with it.”

“I know exactly what you mean. My last girlfriend was a German three-wheeler, really heavy duty, she kept leaving tracks all over my . . .”

And the ladies themselves?

“So I asked him: Do you wanna go freewheelin’ sometime?”

“No you didn’t girlfriend! That’s just nasty!”

“Well you know me! He looked like the sort of guy who’d be able to get a good grip on my handlebars.”

“Personally I prefer a guy who fits neatly on my seat . . .”

“And you’re calling me dirty-minded . . .”

And lawyers?

“Your honor, I propose to show that Mr. Mackintosh here twice attempted to oil Miss Blakeley’s gears without her permission while she was working as his secretary, and also tampered with her starter-keys . . .”

Fresh expressions have been coined:

“Dave’s such a pain in the motorbike Kate.”

“Yeah, I know. He’s a real exhaust pipe.”

Teenage girls now all have either BMX bike or skateboard behinds by the way; teenage boys are extremely content with those.

* * *

So Earth’s women are happy again, no they’re overjoyed, no - ecstatic. The man-domination business is booming better than ever before.

Earth’s men however, though happy as hell to have something to ogle and lust after and fight over again, still can’t help feeling screwed.

It’s like they were let off the hook for a few days, and just when they’d gotten used to the sweet scent of freedom, bam! The hook’s been rammed down their throats again. Only much deeper this time.

And they still don’t understand what went wrong.

To find out I suggest they pick another fight with the Andromedans.

"Behind Every ~~Successful~~ Woman"

-------------------------------------

Wol-vriey is Nigerian, and quite tall. He believes that there actually are things that go bump in the night.

2011-06-02T12:19:00.000-07:00

Since becoming wealthy enough to do so without fear of embarrassing myself, I’d liked attending the horse races. Since meeting Miss Carol Chang, I’d come to love them.

Carol was a jockey, see. Mad about horses. I was mad about Carol.

I bought a horse. Sorry ladies, it’s a normal guy maneuver - pretty woman loves horses, I buy a horse, I get to meet her. Works every time.

* * *

I hit my head.

I was walking through the stables looking for Carol, thought I heard her call me, turned about hastily, and knocked myself half senseless on a horseshoe hung on a nail by a stable stall.

After the resulting headache subsided somewhat I became aware of voices speaking next to me.

“Yes,” said a pretty mare stalled next to my horse, “Humans have no taste whatsoever; I wonder what he sees in the yellow-skinned chink neo-communist bitch.”

“Flat-chested slopehead slut,” my horse added.

The horses were talking?

This was too real for me. “Did any of you just say something?” I asked politely.

The horses gaped at me in shock equal to mine. “You can hear us?”

“Uh huh.” I made sure I had unobstructed access to the stable door in case of danger to my person.

“Okay, we’ll level with you,” my horse said. “We don’t approve of your sniffing around that slant-eyed jade.”

Bradley, my black chauffeur, came into window-view then. “Oh look, it’s the jungle bunny again,” another horse said. The rest laughed heartily in derision.

Horses talking was one thing, but there was something very disturbing about this now.

“Why’d you just call Bradley a ‘jungle bunny’?” I asked, suddenly certain great enlightenment was about to hit me.

“He’s black.”

“So, why not just call him a black man?”

“Where’s the fun in that? We’re racists - we’ve got to insult people based on their ethnicity, or if that’s in doubt, where they originate from.”

“Aaaahh. You’re joking of course.”

“Nope, we’re horses. All horses are racists - it’s inborn.”

“Are you sure you don’t mean racers?”

"No, racists. Conjugate the verb ‘to race’. Race, racer, racist.”

“Should be racest then.”

“Yes. Racist."

* * *

They were serious. I tested them.

Soon the crowd for the 4:00 began to arrive.

“C’mon guys,” I said, “you’ve got to love Mrs. Jackson’s hat, just dig those natty feathers. And those shoes.”

“Stupid fat-assed nigger bitch.”

“Stupid? She’s medical director of a hospital.”

“So? Damn ho must have got her med degree on her back.”

“Okay, how about Carlos Alberto? Check out that suit and Rolex he’s wearing, and his wife’s dress, just lovely.”

“Spic drug-runner . . .”

“He’s an investment banker!”

“. . . . yeah sure. His greasy ass came over the border hidden in a fruit-cart. I know so for sure - my cousin Dinky pulled it; and that wife of his - good lord, don’t Mexican women ever stop eating?”

A distinguished old Jewish couple were crossing the lawn towards the stands. The 4:30 race would begin in fifteen minutes. I pointed them out. “And the Goldsteins?”

“I thought you had some class, boss, please don’t foul the air of this place by mentioning kikes.”

* * *

They went on and on and on and on.

Greeks and Canadians were degenerate sodomists. Italians were all Dago Mafiosos. Australians all had kangaroo mothers. Blacks were uneducated lazy pimps and wife beaters. The French were frogs, snail eaters, and Godzilla-making nuclear degenerates.

The British? I’ll have MI6 after me if I repeat what they said about the Queen and Prince Charles, the late Princess Diana, and David Beckham.

For some reason horses really hate David Beckham.

It got worse. Poor Salman Rushdie’s ordeal prevents me from repeating what they said about the Shah of Iran, and Arabs in general. To the horses, terrorism was the least of the Arab’s crimes. And I think it wise not to even consider offending the Russian Mafia, the Chinese Triads, Japanese Yakuza, Africans in general - the list was almost endless.

I assure you I heard more political incorrectness in that stable than I’ve ever heard anywhere else in my life.

* * *

Finally they convinced me. I stared at the horses in horror. “You really are racists.”

“Yeah, that’s what we do, we race.”

But you’ve mixed things up. There’s racing and then there’s . . .”

“Race, racer, racist, boss.”

A black stallion nodded agreement. “Word, boss.”

My mind slowly wrapped itself around the concept. “Okay so why aren’t you insulting me? I’m Irish.”

“Health insurance policy boss. No one here wants to wind up as cans of dog food. We’ll wait till you leave.”

That was honest at least.

The 4:30 was over, I could see the board from the stables, Abe Goldstein’s ‘Golda Mare’ had won.

I finally thought I saw where this was headed. “So, if you don’t like Jews, or Blacks, or Spaniards, or Asians, or Greeks, or the British, or the Russians, or Native Americans or South Americans, or just everyday un-prefixed Americans, who do you like? The Germans? I mean Hitler must be your hero, right? You wanna set up the Pureblood Aryan Horse Reich?”

My horse looked at me in disgust. “Screw that damn Kraut punk and his entire country.” It groaned at me, surprised at my hardheaded lack of comprehension of this most simple of equine principles. “We’re just racists - we don’t discriminate. Unlike you humans, we dislike everyone equally. You’re all to blame for the state of the world.

"Worse still,” the pretty mare in the next stall added, “You all ride on our backs.”

* * *

Chastened, I left the stables and walked slowly back to my Rolls.

I haven’t had any stomach for the racists . . . sorry I mean races, since then.

I sold my horse. It had already served its purpose. Miss Carol Chang now comes over to the house to visit me instead.

"A Day at the Racists"

-------------------------------------

Wol-vriey is Nigerian, and quite tall. He believes that there actually are things that go bump in the night.

2011-05-29T22:31:00.000-07:00

The man in the adjacent apartment used to listen to sitcoms all night long. The noise pollution of weak storylines and canned laughter bled through the prefabricated walls like noxious gas into a death chamber. I didn’t sleep for days. I have always suffered from severe insomnia. The tenant’s name was Pharat and he was from Istanbul. I knocked on his door once and asked him to turn the television down a few notches. He gave me a morose look and puffed on the cigarette dangling under his thick moustache.

“Yes, yes, I will turn it down,” he said in a heavy Turkish accent.

The noise continued for about a week. I became convinced he was trying to get rid of me. My days became miserable and groggy and I considered breaking into his apartment to seal his cable outlet with calk.

Once I finally put in a noise complaint, everything stopped. I didn’t hear anything for a few days. It was wonderful catching up on my sleep. On a Saturday afternoon, however, I saw the door to his apartment was open and Chester the maintenance man was vacuuming the bare carpet. Pharat’s things were gone.

“Is he gone for good?” I asked.

“Afraid so,” he said. Chester was smiling. “I didn’t much care for him. Strange man. Thought he owned everything.”

I caught up on my sleep and continued to live my life as usual until a young girl named Cynthia moved in. Cynthia was a college student and enjoyed having loud sex with her a revolving cast of equally loud young men. It wasn’t quite as annoying as Pharat having the sitcoms on at full blast, but overtime I started losing sleep again to the blare of her nightly escapades. She liked to knock on my door and borrow things as well. I never did see my broom again once she was finally gone.

I had a good rapport with my landlady: Mrs. Gonzalez. She sent me home with tinfoil trays of hot tamales or huevos rancheros sometimes when I stopped by to pay rent or just talk. She always said I was her favorite tenant. I think I reminded her of her son, if she ever had one. The Hispanic children in the neighborhood spread rumors that she was an Aztec witch. They’d dare each other to sneak into the apartment complex on Halloween. Chester normally kicked them out.

I knocked on her door with the check in hand.

“Steven,” she said. “You look awful.”

“That’s what my boss said.” I had bags under my bloodshot eyes and a permanent headache that congealed into a nasty scowl I couldn’t help. “Here’s the rent.”

“What’s going on, Steven?”

“Remember Pharat?”

“Of course, he violated his lease. I still can’t find the deadbeat.”

“Well, the college student next door isn’t much quieter,” I said. I felt like a crotchety old man having to complain about my neighbors, but I was getting tired of the 4 a.m. hallucinations and dosing off for brief intervals at work.

“I’ll tell her to be quieter.”

“I appreciate it.”

“I was looking at putting sound proof barriers into the walls but the cost of installation is ridiculous.”

“Honestly, I think the walls are too thin for a sound proof barrier.”

Cynthia became quieter and didn’t renew her lease after a few months. Once again the apartment was empty, and I lived in general peace. The family below me had a rambunctious Dalmatian, but, unfortunately, the dog drowned after getting tangled in the tarpaulin covering the pool. I was the one who found it and pulled it from the water. It was difficult watching the children cry as they realized that Lucky wasn’t coming back.

“I figure he was chasing after a possum. They scavenge in the dumpsters ’round here,” their father said. He was probably right. I often saw the raggedy little demons as they hung upside down from tree limbs by their naked, pink tails or scampered across the concrete like giant, mutant rats. The South was infested with them.

* * *

The day after Saint Patrick’s Day, three hard knocks hit my front door and rousted me from the depths of my hangover. It was Chester.

“What’s going on?”

“There’s a leak coming from your place.”

“No way,” I said. “Show me.”

He stepped into my apartment with his leather utility belt on. It looked heavy and uncomfortable. “There’s a dark sludge leaking out through the Belmonts’ bathroom ceiling. Smells like hell. I hope to God it’s not the plumbing.”

We checked the pipes underneath my sink and did a preliminary check around the toilet. There was nothing leaking through the floor.

“You know I’m not exactly above the Belmonts,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“They’re apartment is bigger than mine.”

“What are you suggesting?”
“Could the leak be coming from the next apartment over?”

Chester stroked his beard. “Let’s take a look.”

We stepped out onto the balcony and he searched his enormous ring of keys. The door opened with a long creak and we stepped into the barren foyer. There were stains of every color peppering the better part of the rug. Chester flipped the switch but the lights had been disabled, naturally. It was morning but the apartment was still fairly dark even with the front door open. He turned his flashlight on and we headed down the short hallway into the bathroom. There was something sinister about a room illuminated only by a flashlight. Sometimes total obscurity looks more inviting than the tunnel vision of a single fluorescent bulb. Chester set the bulb down on the ground and lay inside the cabinet to check the sink pipes.

“All in order here.”

I took the flashlight and looked around the toilet. “It doesn’t look like anything is leaking,” I said.

He checked the tub. It was dry as a bone.

I heard something in the living room. It was the voice of a man, a high and jovial cadence.

“What the hell is that?” said Chester.

“It’s a TV.”

The living room was empty but the sound of a television was coming through the walls. “My TV must be on,” I said. I walked back to my room and shut it off.

Chester was able to patch the Belmonts’ ceiling after the leak abruptly stopped. A couple of weeks went by and a new tenant moved into the “problem apartment” as I had come to call it. He was a guy around my age who played guitar in the evenings. Inevitably, his practice sessions started taking all night long and once again I found myself losing sleep. I slammed my fist against his door at 3 in the morning and threatened to have him evicted. I had finally reached that point of no return. I was a cranky old man now, a cranky old man thirty years before my time.

“I’m a professional musician, man,” he yelled back. He unplugged the Fender that time but his tunes continued the next night possibly just to spite me. Once again, I made the journey to Mrs. Gonzalez. She didn’t appear surprised to see me.

“Is it the knew guy?”

“What else would it be?”

“I’ll talk to him,” she said.

The apartment was empty the following week. It could not have been a coincidence. As soon as I found out, I raced down to Mrs. Gonzalez’s apartment. The door was already open. I walked into the kitchen where she sat at the table in her flower-patterned apron, filling the corn husks with polenta.

“You startled me, Steven. What’s going on?”

“Every time I complain about a tenant, they’re gone a few days later.”

“I take the comfort of my reliable residents seriously, Steven. I tell deadbeats to shape up when they’re a problem. Normally they just leave. It’s how they refrain from paying. People hop from place to place you know.”

“It can’t be a coincidence,” I said.

“The real coincidence is why you keep getting noisy neighbors,” she said. “You should be thankful I’m looking out for you. You’re one of my favorite residents.”

I laughed a little. “I guess I shouldn’t be complaining.”

“Of course not. I’ll knock on your door sometime tonight with a fresh batch of tamales.”

“Thank you.”

I walked upstairs and thought about everything: Pharat’s television, the dog‘s drowning, Cynthia’s dates, the leak from the empty apartment, and the guitarists midnight practice sessions. I was probably over thinking things. Even so, was it so bad to have a guardian angel making sure I was comfortable where I lived? A lot of people my age were stuck with awful roommates. I was lucky and I needed to appreciate being lucky. I went back to my room and sat down on my couch thinking about the tamales I would eat for dinner. I didn’t need to know what kind of skeletons Mrs. Gonzalez had in her closet, under the floorboards of unused apartments or hidden inside her cooking. What I didn’t know couldn’t hurt me, and I certainly wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.

"Noise Complaints"

----------------------------------

Connor de Bruler has been published in Yellow Mama, Dark Anima Journal, Micro Horror, Glossolalia Magazine, PEEP, The Horror Zine, PJM's Southern Gothic Shorts Anthology, Death's Head Grin, and Lit Up Magazine. He grew up in Greenville, South Carolina. He is currently 20 years old.

2011-05-26T11:19:00.000-07:00

God, it was just one date, and not a good one at that. A so-so dinner and a horrible movie...something with a train in it. At the end of the evening I gave her a kiss and said, "See you around."

That night it began. Phone call after phone call. "I love you...I can't stop thinking about you..." She was like one of those annoying pull-string dolls that say the same thing over and over.

She began showing up everywhere. Outside my apartment. In the parking lot where I work. At the bar where me and my buddies hang out. I told her to stop. Keep away or I'd call the police. But she didn't listen. The night I found her in my kitchen preparing our one-week anniversary dinner I just snapped.

I carried her out into the garage, grabbed an ax, and chopped off her legs so she'd stop following me. But she dragged herself back into the kitchen like a trained seal, blood trailing in a wide smear. "Don't worry, I'll clean that up," she said with an adoring smile. She blew me a kiss, balancing on one hand.

So I took a meat cleaver and hacked off her arms, but she merely wriggled about like one of those air-breathing fish that crosses dry land to get to the next pond. The smile remained. "Time for dinner!" she said.

At last, I lopped off her head and set it on the counter beside the tuna casserole she'd made. To my dismay she kept right on smiling and her vocal cords worked just fine. "I love you," she cooed, scrunching her nose.

Now, I know what you're thinking. Cut out her tongue, poke out her eyes. But I got to tell you, she was beginning to grow on me. I think this one's a keeper.

"The Keeper"

-------------------------------------

2011-05-23T21:30:00.000-07:00

Roy thought of himself as a deep thinker. His thoughts trekked across the great expanse of the cosmos, through the intricate highways of parallel dimensions, around the big head of God, and back again. They were sometimes a bit confusing, and suffocating, because they came at him so quickly and randomly, but he loved the pure seismic energy of thought.

He didn't think of himself as the smartest being on earth, but he strove to achieve this lofty goal. And if he didn't achieve it, so what. Didn't a great man once say, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step."? He wasn't sure if that was the true quote or something like it. He couldn't quite remember if he read it, heard it in a movie, or met the man who said it. All he really knew was that he liked thinking and the human nature of thought.

The things he thought about were about as random as a fluttering butterfly. He could be easily sidetracked with one thought by another, but he would eventually find his way again, with a moderate amount of concentration.

Today he thought 696,024 thoughts, and this is a fact because he always counted his thoughts. When he thought back on these thoughts, they were like old faded pictures. Obscured, cracked, and black and white. Almost useless, but thoughts none the less. There were two thoughts today that stayed vivid and alive. They were better than Technicolor. They were Lucas Film.

The first was a hitchhiker he picked up on highway 24 going into Topeka. He was a normal looking fellow that you would find hitchhiking the highways and byways of America. Shaggy beard, slightly torn and outdated cloths, with the fine familiar smell of road funk that's been simmering in unwashed pits and ass for days on end.

“Hello, need a ride?" Roy asked after pulling over and rolling down the window.

"Yeah man, I sure do. Thanks."

They drove through Topeka heading east on highway 24 with a uncomforting silence that made them both think of thoughts of dread, survival and fear. Roy thought that he might have met his even change. This man was a thinker too. When he took his eyes off the road and onto this vagabond, the hitchhiker's eyes were upon him. He thought about this, and he surmised that he's seen these eyes before. As the road laid out before them, Roy thought about the man sitting beside him. He thought about his eyes. Killer eyes. Was this man a killer? He wasn't quite sure, but as they drove, and looked at each other with the knowing, the thought of familiarity, he was quite sure that this was no ordinary man.

"So, what's your name?" Roy asked to try and ease the tension.

"Roy." The hitchhiker answered.

Roy was stunned silent. How could this man have the same name as his? It could be a coincidence, but as he has learned through the years, coincidences are as rare as lightning bolts hitting your forehead. They happen, but not often.

"Dude I gotta piss. Can you pull over?" Roy asked Roy with a seriousness of a man who has to piss.

"Yeah... sure." Roy answered Roy with the uneasiness of a man who is scared enough to piss his pants.

Roy turned right on a gravel road, in the middle of nowhere. His occupant opened the door and said "Don't leave me out here man." got out and started to piss. Roy thought about everything that led up to him picking up this man. His thoughts were running wild because he couldn't think of why he would pick up a total stranger, because he was too busy thinking of things he couldn't remember. This really bothered him because now he was about to lose count of his thoughts that he thought of that day. He started to shake and sweat. He raised his hand to wipe the sweat off his face, when Roy got back in the car with a nine inch serrated Bowie knife. And then Roy really began to shake.

Roy shook so hard and violently that he lost his train of thought. All the thoughts he thought that day tore away along with his human form. He didn't like his true form because there was only rampage and chaos. No reasoning. No thought.

"Jesus Christ!!!!" Roy said as Roy's talon's reached for his knife and his throat. Roy firmly gripped Roy's throat with his right talon, and his knife with his left. He grabbed the knife by the blade, reared back, and jammed the handle into Roy's eye. And when Roy's blood projected itself onto Roy's demonic face, he started to get his thought back, along with his human form.

He changed back into Roy. Or was he always Roy? Was he Roy the killer, or Roy the demon? Every time he killed, he'd have the thoughts of the life he took, so it was hard to tell. He could have been a Roy that killed a lifetime ago, or he could have thought he was the killer because he picked up a killer named Roy. It was confusing, but Roy was a deep thinker. He thought about all of this on his drive, and he also thought about his second vivid memory.

When the victim Roy screamed "Jesus Christ", the demon Roy thought about him. He remembered a time of frustration and confusion. He remembered when Jesus asked him his name, and he answered "Legion". He wasn't thinking too much back then. It was impossible. He wasn't many in one, he is one who is many. It took time to figure that out, but he did. He just had to give it some thought.

"Fleeting Thoughts"

-------------------------------------

2011-05-23T21:02:00.000-07:00

The pregnant man screamed and flailed as they rushed him through the maternity ward into the O.R.

Bill Kressler looked up from his magazine. He glanced around the waiting room to see if anyone else had seen what he just saw. The expressions on the faces ranged from shock to confusion. All except one: a strange man sitting across from him. The man was dressed in a long, grey raincoat and matching hat. A shiny black box sat on his lap. His stare was wide-eyed and unblinking. A disarming smile occupied his lips. "Expectant father," he said quite unexpectedly.

Bill couldn't tell if it was a question or an observation. "Yes," Bill offered, still disturbed by the screaming man hurtling down the hallway.

The strange man nodded, his face as inanimate as a department store mannequin.

Across the waiting room, a heavy-set woman cried out, "My God." She pointed to the television set mounted in the corner by the ceiling. "Can somebody turn that up?" A teenage boy nearest the set reluctantly stood, reached up and increased the volume. On the television, a reporter stood outside a hospital Emergency Room entrance. The words News Bulletin scrolled in bold red letters along the bottom of the screen.

"Hospitals in Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Boston are all reporting similar cases. There are now five confirmed births and two related deaths as a result of these male pregnancies. While the medical community remains baffled, the CDC has stepped in to investigate. We will stay with this story as it develops throughout the day..."

"Mr. Kressler?"

Bill turned. A nurse stood in the waiting room doorway.

"Congratulations. You have a baby girl. You can see your wife now."

Bill stood, his mind numb from all the events occurring around him. The strange man also stood; he partially blocked Bill's path to the door. He held the black box in his pale hands, the lid now open; inside it was a row of cigars. "Congratulations," the man said, eyeing Bill from beneath the brim of his hat.

"Uh…thanks," said Bill, grabbing one of the cigars. It felt soft and chalky in his grip. He stuffed it in his shirt pocket.

Bill brushed past the man and stepped out into the hallway to join the nurse...and was almost hit by another gurney speeding by. On the gurney a man lay beneath a bed sheet writhing in obvious pain, his belly distended. The orderly continued on, pushing the gurney through the double doors into the O.R.

Bill stood in the hallway dumbfounded. He turned to look at the strange man in the waiting room. The man stared back at him, rocking gently in his seat, his fingers tapping the surface of the black box on his lap. Bill was suddenly struck with a nightmarish realization. He reached into his shirt pocket for the cigar, only to find lint. A momentary tightness gripped his chest, followed by a sudden forgetfulness.

"Mr. Kressler…you're wife?"

The nurse stood before him, her smile strained.

Bill shook his head. He then remembered he was in the maternity ward of the hospital. His wife had just given birth to a baby girl. He followed the nurse as she led the way, mistaking the feeling in his stomach for joy.

"Have a Cigar"

-------------------------------------

2011-05-19T05:46:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, there was a man with an offensive face. What the man’s face looked like depended on who was doing the looking. Someone who was offended by black people, should they chance to pass this man on a crowded street, would see a black face. Folks offended by white people saw a face that was country-club white. Misogynists saw a woman’s face. Misandrists beheld a man’s. People offended by happiness might see a smile, pure and true as a baby’s. Those offended by sadness might behold a frowning visage stained with glassy tears.

And if you offended yourself, you saw you strolling down that crowded street.

If Santa Claus offended you—well, guess who.

This man had no family and, for obvious reasons, had difficulty making friends. So he wandered the earth, travelling from country to country, from city to village, searching for anyone who was not offended by his face.

One chilly evening near the close of winter, the man was hiking along a country road. Ahead of him he saw another traveler approaching, a middle-aged man with long yellow hair and a luxuriant beard. The two men simultaneously halted when they came within ten feet of one another.

“Evenin’,” the bearded traveler said. A bulky canvas sack was slung over his shoulder.

“Evenin’,” said the other. “If you don’t mind me asking, friend, are you offended by my face?”

“No. How could I be? You don’t really have one.”

“Come again?”

“All I see in the place where your face should be is, well . . . an oval of nothing.”

“Do you mean . . . an oval of blackness?”

“No, not blackness. It’s an oval of . . . nothing. Sorry, but it’s impossible for me to describe.”

“But are you not offended by this, this oval of nothing?”

“Not at all. I’m not offended by anything. I and my two friends squat at a campsite just down the road from here. My friends aren’t offended by anything either. That’s why we travel together. Hey, wait a minute. Are you . . . ? Are you The Man With The Offensive Face?”

“I am.”

Dropping his sack in the dust, the traveler came forward and clasped the man’s hand in his own, a broad smile punching through his beard. “We’ve heard of you, man! We’ve always wanted to meet you, in fact. You must come back to camp and meet my companions.”

The two men then continued down the road as the night grew darker and colder. A short time later, they abandoned the open road to follow a footpath that led off into the thick wood. The orange glow of a campfire flickered in the distance. Soon they reached a clearing where two forms sat around the campfire. One was an elderly man. The other was a young woman—mohawked with a face full of piercings.

The old fella stood up from his log. “Find some more of ’em?” he asked the bearded man.

“Yes, I did,” he said, dropping the heavy sack to the ground. “And that’s not all I found. I found The Man With The Offensive Face."

“You’re friggin’ kiddin’,” the wide-eyed woman blurted, perking up.

The celebrity guest shook both their hands. They too, when they looked at his face, saw only an oval of nothing.

“Any luck?” the bearded man then asked his friends.

“Nuttin,” croaked the old man. “Maybe we’ll git lucky wit’ cher new batch.”

The bearded man turned to their guest. “We’ve been burning piles of the book Fahrenheit 451 and roasting marshmallows over the resulting fire,” he explained. “It’s said that if you do this long enough, eventually the marshmallows become magical eggs from which tiny clones of Ray Bradbury are born. ’Been trying for three nights now, burning thousands of copies of the book, but all we’ve done is make a lot of ash and cook a lot of marshmallows. I myself have just returned from stealing and buying more copies of the book.” He pointed to the sack on the ground.

“My friends,” said the newcomer, “you’re slightly misinformed. To obtain what you seek you must not burn copies of this book. Instead, you must burn stories written about people burning copies of the book. I’ve seen it done myself."

“No shit,” marveled the punk woman just before she scurried over to her backpack to grab a spiral notebook and some pens.

The fabled guest sat down, warmed himself by the fire, waited quietly for his three hosts each to scribble a story on the sheets of paper passed out by the woman, stories about people incinerating piles of Fahrenheit 451.

When they finished, the three campers each speared a marshmallow on a stick, crumpled up their unedited, unsubmitted, unread stories, tossed them into the fire, and stuck their marshmallows out over the momentarily augmented flames. Not half a minute later, a tiny man tore out from each of the browning, softening marshmallows. And at that exact moment, the hearts of the campers exploded in their cages. Still clutching their sticks, all three fell dead into the fire, the flames rapidly enveloping their twitching bodies. The diminutive hatchlings jumped safely to the ground from their marshmallow-eggs, just barely escaping the blaze.

They were not miniature clones of Ray Bradbury. The man with the offensive face had lied.

He scooped up his three little offspring, licked them clean of sticky-sweet marshmallow goo, and cradled them to his bosom like a good mammalian father/mother. But the man found that his parental joy was tempered by grief for the three dead campers—those three souls who were offended by nothing. But nature was often cruel, and the man’s praying mantis-like act of reproduction was no exception.

He looked down into the tiny nothing-faces of his brood. His boys looked just like their old man. And the man loved each one of them unconditionally, even though he was slightly offended by their faces.

"Offensive Face"

-------------------------------------

Clyde Baker recently remarked, ‘I have seen the future of horror and his name is Douglas Hackle.’ Clyde Baker is the blind, homeless, illiterate crackhead who lives underneath Douglas’s dilapidated front porch--but hey, Clyde’s opinion counts too, damn it! Douglas reads and writes out of Northeast Ohio, where he lives with his wife and little boy. His short fiction has been published or accepted for publication in several online and print venues. Visit him at: http://douglashackle.wordpress.com

2011-05-17T20:18:00.000-07:00

Cold-blooded sidewalk-slugs are attracted/addicted to the heat that permeates the concrete. The streets are a vast snail orgy. The roads are rivers of slime. Cars constantly swerving and spinning out of control. Even with slug-chains on special slug-tires most roads too slick/slippery with slug-slime to safely drive on. Tennis-racket-like slug-shoes are required to walk on the sidewalks.

In all the penitentiaries and jails guards with gas-guns and trained rape dogs make the convicts jog on treadmills for twelve hours a day. The prisoners wear special orange rubber suits that harvest their sweat and separate/filter out the salt.

The water portion of the harvested convict sweat is sold to rich ladies in the form of perfumes and aphrodisiacs.

The sweat-salt is loaded into the back of big orange government dump trucks with slime-plows on their fronts. The orange government trucks plow the slug-slime down the slime-sewers and spread sweat-salt on the roads to kill the fornicating sidewalk-slugs.

Flocks of birds fill the streets feasting on dying slugs. Wild horses lick sweat-salt from the roads.

Sweat-salt rusts the slug-chains and the undercarriages of all the cars. Oxidizing metal attracts rust mites who hasten metal’s decay. Drivers fall out of their cars through the rusty holes the sweat-salt has eaten through the bottoms of their vehicles; the bones of the fallen crush/smash against the slimy concrete. Driverless cars scream down streets and sidewalks. The broken boned crawling on the roads are slimed and devoured by hungry sidewalk-slugs.

"Salt Trucks on the Highway"

----------------------------------

2011-05-14T06:18:00.000-07:00

Shooting ice is like swallowing stars. Not real stars, not burning suns, but the wintry diamond kind of stars, like you see in clear skies in January. Or like you imagine you'd see, anyway. There aren't many clear nights these days.

You freeze, but not like water freezes. You solidify. Everything in you decelerates. You feel minutes, hours, days (could be years, decades, centuries) whiz by like so many insects, but you hardly even notice them. You are clear and impassive. You are an iceberg, drifting for cold eons on arctic seas; you are crystal, unborn and undisturbed in the belly of the earth. You are slow life.

Naturally, after the first few times it‘s harder to get frozen. You keep getting pulled back to the present, to the pathetically organic body you inhabit -- flabby and frail and mewling with perpetual infant need, threatening to decay at any moment into its various putrid messes, blood and pus and piss and spunk and slime. You start to wonder why we bothered with evolution at all. You begin to disgust yourself.

The need to get frozen out consolidates in response, and almost before you've noticed, it's a settled part of you, like breathing and checking your inbox and one-and-a-half spoonfuls of sweetener in your coffee.

One morning, dressing, you notice a patch of hardened skin, on the inside of your elbow, maybe, or the back of your leg. It is smooth and glassy, not rough like the bottoms of your feet. It doesn't strike you as unpleasant. You get quite fond of it. The texture reminds you of an amber necklace your mother used to own, the fly trapped inside it lifting its limbs in a final and useless struggle.

Fly didn't know how lucky it was. Sometimes, you think that you would like to be preserved in amber. To opt out of life. You would like to be petrified, lifted for good out of the whole sorry cycle. Yes, you would like to be perfect.

* * *

She was the first one you saw, and you're still a little bit in love with her.

You weren’t supposed to see her -- you can kind of understand why -- and that’s why they kept her in that roped-off side room with the bored attendant by the door. But he had to go to the toilet sometime, and that was when you snuck in, a quick check that Ms. Feinberg wasn't looking and a dart round the corner.

She was like some old religious icon, mounted cruciform on the wall, eyes blank, face impassive, clear as glass. You could see the filigree of veins and the light that throbbed through her, regular and faintly blue, like an electric pulse. You'd never seen life that clear before, and you were mesmerised.

You didn't know what she was, at the time. You found out later. They sell for millions.

* * *

You set down the syringe and settle back, as best you can with these stiff limbs, onto the sofa. Ten minutes, maybe, before you need to make the call.

A last look around before you go. This room's depressing. Mangy carpet, threadbare furniture, nothing personal on the walls, a blur of light through the window and a clatter of noise outside. Not exactly where you expected to be at thirty. But it doesn't really bother you, not anymore. This, soon, will pass.

After a few moments or hours -- this being frozen time, you're not sure how many -- it occurs to you that you should probably dial. A little later, you decide you must have done so, because a tinny little echo of speech is somewhere in the room with you.

"Which service do you require? Ambulance, police or fire?"

"Can you hear me?"

"Hello?"

You don't need to answer; they'll trace the call. They'll want to phone someone, probably, but you've sorted all that our too. There's a single number programmed into your obsolete mobile, a creditor's, entered as 'Dad.'

The operator's voice grows smaller and flatter, as though it is being pressed out of the world by a big fat silence, and then it cuts out, replaced by another voice that is smaller and flatter still -- a recorded message. It repeats in Spanish, in Chinese, in Esperanto, the same forced perkiness evident each time. You ought to find it depressing, or at least blackly amusing, but it does not seem to matter much. The room is blurring round the edges.

You are almost perfect now. Clean slate; new transparency; all debts paid off.

"The Jewel"

-------------------------------------

2011-05-14T06:08:00.000-07:00

My neighbor stops screaming long enough to punch the Power Guy in the mouth. Watching from my living room window, even I am surprised by the sudden burst of violence. The Power Guy just sits there on the sidewalk, holding his clipboard to his chest, crying like a child.

My neighbor is still angry. He jumps up and down, screaming his head off. When the Power Guy doesn’t respond, he runs into his tool shed and emerges a few moments later with a pair of gardening shears. The Power Guy climbs awkwardly to his feet and tries to run away. My neighbor chases him around the house a few times, brandishing the shears like a sword. His bathrobe flies open, exposing his beer belly which droops a bit over the elastic of his dirty white underpants.

The Power Guy is screaming for help. I can see several of my other neighbors watching the chaotic scene from their living room windows. Most of them are smiling, except for Mrs. Bradley. There is a multi-colored parrot on her shoulder and she has a phone pressed up to her ear, talking excitedly to someone, probably the police.

Way to ruin it for the rest of us, Mrs. Bradley.

"Power"

-------------------------------------

Dustin Reade likes old surrealist movies, Sangria Senorial Soda, writing stories and using his body for shock value. He is obsessed with The Manson Family, and his work can be found in numerous magazines and anthologies. All of his stories are weird.

2011-05-09T12:08:00.000-07:00

I hate the way he breathes, the heavy nasal wheezing keeping me up through the night. And I hate the way he smells. But most of all, I hate the way he eats.

People tell me that over time I'll get used to it. "He's only been alive for three years. Give him time. Give yourself time," they say. But I know the truth. I know the little fucker's been waiting inside me my entire life. I could feel him just under the surface, waiting to scratch his way towards the light.

People don't ask me who the father is any more. They know what I'm going to tell them, what the doctors confirmed for me several times over. There is no father. And when people hear his muffled cries during the day, they look the other way.

I'd let him starve if I could, but every time it gets hungry it claws at my now sagging breasts. There's nothing there for it. I'm not lactating because this isn't a child. As I reach down to spoon another small heap of gruel into the gaping, toothless maw protruding from my waist that somehow uses a part of my stomach for its lungs, that somehow belches and screams in flatulent utterances, I realize what my body knows: that this malformed tumor growing out of my body is somehow me, has always been a part of me, and never had any intention of leaving. And if it dies, I die with it.

"Immaculate Conception"

-------------------------------------

Kirk Jones is the author of Uncle Sam's Carnival of Copulating Inanimals, published by the New Bizarro Author Series, an imprint of Eraserhead Press. He reviews classic works that could, in retrospect, be considered bizarro on Retro Bizarro at www.bizarrojones.com. Forthcoming work will soon be published in Unicorn Knife Fight.

2011-05-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

Greeting Eula as she entered the kitchen the morning after Thanksgiving, Jim’s mom said, “Links and scrambled eggs are on the stove, honey -- kettle’s on the counter.”

Measuring dried leaves into a teacup, Eula, anticipating grandma Laidlaw’s question, explained -- “willow bark and feverfew to clear the head.”

“You young 'uns oughta take them kids for a walk, fall air’ll cure your head sure as shootin’,” added grandma.

Turning to Jim, Eula continued, “Looking at old state maps on your dad’s desk last night --” She glanced apprehensively across to Mr. Laidlaw who just smiled. She continued, “Back in 1903 the S&E railroad ran across the ridge up here an’ then past a big cluster of buildings just before coming out, where the shopping-center is now -- but ain’t hide nor hair of track or town in 1920. Took a gander this morning, grade’s still there, nice an’ wide to walk once you get a hundred yards in.”

“The buildings -- Army depot -- closed down ’bout the time Roosevelt went galivantin’ off to Africa -- mighty queer goings-on from what I heard tell,” grandma interjected.

Eula and Jim navigated his in-laws and three nieces through the roadside brush to the open grade. Fascinated when Eula pointed out a cardinal feeding on highbush cranberries, by lunch time the girls had been introduced to woodpecker-bored trees and a pair of white-tailed deer browsing on corn stubble in a nearby field. When a crossroad offered the in-laws am opportunity to return home -- though Jim and Eula were encouraged to continue alone -- Sadie, Jim’s eight-year-old niece, begged her way into continuing with the pair.

“Auntie Eula, did you know I was blonde? an’ it turned brown after I had the measles! stupid measles!” said Sadie, tucking her hair under her hat.

“Well Sadie, when you get older, you can make your hair any color you like -- now let’s go.”

Entering a forested area, their progress was soon interrupted by a massive iron gate -- an illegible rust-consumed warning hanging crookedly from it -- supported by two crumbling concrete pillars, sitting with a Daliesque incongruousness halfway across a crumbling concrete bridge spanning the narrow creek gorge.

“Don’t worry, we can cross on that old tree, down there,” Eula reassured Sadie.

The grade continued through a quiet mossy forest, the leaves carpeting the floor quickly melding their autumn colours into an even brown. As they progressed the banked grade rose above increasingly grassy, then marshy land. They went on, and soon drew up short: the grade fell away abruptly, the convulsed remains of a concrete culvert and a plume of clinkers testament to a long-ago structural failure. Sadie insisted they continue, but she was obviously tiring by the time they had climbed back up.

A growing earthy, spring smell and coltsfoot brightly flowering on the grade slopes were the first things that hit Eula as being odd. Farther, greening maples, whose canopies rose to the level of the grade and bathed them all in an unsettling pale green pallor unsettled Jim. Eula silenced him, whispering: “Don’t upset the child.” As they pressed on, picking up their pace, the grade descended into a grassy field, then a stand of tall mature forest. It was warmer, all was in full leaf. “Why’s it summer here, auntie Eula?” enquired Sadie. Eula bent over, picked up one of hundreds of chestnut husks which littered the forest floor. “Sadie, listen, remember how Dorothy got all mixed up and went to that funny place in Oz? I think we’ve gone somewhere like that, so you be brave, and we’ll all get home.”

Jim having glimpsed the highway and some buildings to the north, they decided to leave the grade and bushwhack to the road. The sun was rapidly setting behind them, and in the gathering gloom they soon questioned their choice -- they seemed to have been walking far too long. Scattered like a crazy icefield, fragmented concrete slabs made progress arduous. Still the hum of traffic and the appearance of bright lights encouraged them. They emerged on a large paved area, littered with rusted vehicles, and buckled by a number of saplings. The hum and light came from a number of large open rectangles in the brick facade of a turn-of-the-century industrial building.

Jim said “probably private property -- let me talk, people around here know me.” Reaching the large doorways, the whine of engines rose, but they remained unchallenged. Multiple train tracks entering and exiting the building along with the patina of its steel structure and brick facade testified to its age, yet all inside was immaculately clean.

Drawn to the hum, they advanced to find a battery of twelve locomotive-sized electrical turbines mounted on a ceramic base. Heavy gauge copper cable issued from each and entered, at points symmetrically scattered over its exposed hemisphere, a large riveted ball of iridescent metal, ensconced in an oversized ceramic eggcup. As the turbine’s whine rose, the ball appeared to peel off translucent sheets of visually perceptible but physically intangible blue netting. Sadie had climbed upon the ball, basking in the freshly emanating material, and was beaming as if in sudden comprehension. Jim hastened over, grabbed Sadie, and along with Eula -- as the whine of the turbines rose to a near inaudible pitch -- they ran, and ran, and ran, until they tumbled out of the woods into the bright sunlight, behind the Montgomery Ward.

“Why, how you’ve grown Sadie, they boys will be after you in no time,” said Mrs. Finch, a family friend who had met the haggard trio at the shopping centre, and was dropping them off at the Laidlaw’s house. Just then Sadie’s parents and the other inlaws came up the road. “How the he-- did you get here before us?” Sadie’s mother asked, but she stopped short when a tired Sadie pulled off her hat and, shaking out her blonde ringlets, said, “Mummy, look, I must have had the measles again.”

"Stupid Measles!"

-------------------------------------

Published in strong competitors to The New Flesh like International Agrophysics and Estudos de Literatura Oral, Georges Dodds has until recently kept his weird writing under mouldy cerements. His recent genre activities include textual resurrection for a publisher of Gothic novels, unearthing and presenting in an e-library some thematic precursors of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes, translating early French science-fiction to English, and preparing a collection of American dime-novelist William Murray Graydon's earliest adventure stories. Georges and his 3-species family (4 with the goldfish), lives in a former bus garage, on the now relocated site of an18th century cemetery -- so far tilling the garden hasn't revealed its past.

2011-05-05T20:42:00.000-07:00

My name is Jim and I am the Antichrist.

You may be sitting there thinking, “Oh, this guy’s cool, he’s so hardcore and evil and shit” but that just isn’t the case. I’m not the type of guy you hear about when people mention the Antichrist. I’m not all pentagrams and inverted crossed. I don’t have a “666” birthmark, although I did have a mole removed that some folks used to say looked like Tchaikovsky. I don’t even wear black that often. Sure, I have a couple suits, and a big black overcoat I wear when it’s really cold out, but so do lots of people. So if you’re expecting I’m some Marilyn Manson-esque crazy-looking dude, I’m not. I try to look nice when I go out. I am 250 pounds with balding grey hair and a droopy face. I live in a little house and I go to work every day.

I live my life just like anybody else, and one day I suspect I’ll die just like anybody else. At least I hope so.

You might still be thinking it’s cool to be the Antichrist. Well, yeah, I guess it would be if it really meant anything. I don’t have any special powers fueled by the fires of hell or anything. I’m just the Antichrist and that’s that. I’ve known my whole life. So has my family, and my friends, and many, many therapists.

See, when I was very young I just felt like I didn’t fit in anywhere. Something was always missing. I kept to myself, I would cry at very small things. When we realized that I was the Antichrist, it didn’t make my psychologist very long to figure out what was wrong.

The trouble is there’s no God. And as there’s no God, there’s no Christ. And as there’s no Christ…

But here I am. Nobody can figure it out. By all standards, I shouldn’t exist. I’m an opposite of a nonentity. That type of thing doesn’t really work in a world where physics and reason are major factors. But reason and physics took a short break for one moment in time, and I guess I’m what leaked through.

An Antichrist to a nonexistent Christ.

And that’s why I never felt like I fit in. It’s because I don’t. My place in existence is moot. There’s no point to me. I’m not being melodramatic. I’m not striving for attention. Far from it. There’s just no reason to me. You can’t possibly imagine what it’s like to wake up every morning knowing that you literally have no purpose in the world. It crushes you, every instant of every day.

I shouldn’t exist.

And yet, I do.

Oh, sure, I tried to kill myself. I tried it a number of times. But I could never really do it. I eventually gave up on suicide and decided to try and live my life as best as I can.

I got a job in a bookstore. I’ve worked there for twenty years. It’s not much, but it’s a living. I read a lot anyway, so it’s not a bad fit for me. Every once in a while somebody will come in who might recognize me from the occasional cable documentary. You know, the metal-heads or faux-Satanists who think it’s so “brutal” that I’m the Antichrist and want me to sign their demo-tape or drink their blood. Sometimes I’ll give them an autograph if they seem like sane enough people. They think it’s cool, and if it helps them get by, hey, why not? But never the blood stuff or anything. I very politely decline those offers. I don’t think those folks really understand that I’m a human. Yes, I’m the Antichrist, but I’m also human. I’m not a bad guy, I’ve got feelings, and I don’t particularly enjoy getting offers to host sacrifices or “drink a chalice of virgin blood”. In fact, a few times when the people proposing these things seemed a little too sincere about it, I’ve notified the authorities. I think it’s the least I can do, particularly if these folks claim to have been inspired by me.

That stuff really weighs on my conscience.

And while most of the people who approach me knowing who I am are Goths or metal-heads or whatnot, there are the very rare philosophers who think they know all the answers and want to know all about me because they think they can solve the mysteries of the universe through me. Honestly, sometimes they piss me off more than the blood-donors.

But once, just once, there was someone who actually seemed to genuinely care. I don’t know who he was. He didn’t stay around long enough for me to ask.

It was normal day, I was arranging books in the new arrivals display when I hear a man’s voice behind me ask, “Jim Smith?” and I turn around and there’s a tall man maybe a couple years younger than me with short, wild white hair and glasses, wearing a big black overcoat with a white dress-shirt and tie underneath.

I say, “Yes, can I help you?” and he steps forward and hugs me and he whispers, “I’m so sorry.” When he lets go and steps back he has a sad, concerned look on his face. He nods at me and walks out of the store.

Like I said, I don’t know who he was. But I felt like he understood. He could’ve been anybody, a crazy person, I don’t know. But it made me feel a little better for a little while.

And so, I keep going. I know there’s no purpose for me. And it’s still a terrible feeling, every day. But I push past it best I can and live my life for what it’s worth. It doesn’t feel like much, because it isn’t much, but I’ll live with it as long as I have to.

Hell, I’m too fat and going to die soon, probably.

"Poor Jim"

-------------------------------------

Josh Myers writes things like a good fishy and he eats and sleeps mostly. He's too fat and is going to die probably.

SUBMISSIONS CLOSED for THE NEW FLESH: EPISODE ONE

2011-05-02T10:38:00.000-07:00

Hey weirdos!

Since submissions opened for THE NEW FLESH: EPISODE ONE (print), my inbox has been flooded! I already have more than enough stories on my shortlist to fill two books, so the next step for me is to close submissions. Thank you so much to everyone who sent in a story! If you didn't make it this time, don't worry, hopefully there will be an EPISODE TWO sometime in the future. I guess we'll see how this one goes.

Also, just to give you all a heads up, subs to the online edition will most likely be closing soon, too, so send in your stories!

Alright... until next time...

Keep it weird,

III

2011-05-02T10:16:00.000-07:00

Sitting on a park bench, he watched the faceless, two-dimensional people scramble past one another, moving thoughtlessly through the streets. His lunch break was almost over. It was time to join them.

He placed his hands on the bench to lift himself, when he realized his legs were gone. Reaching down to confirm what his eyes told him, he noticed the lower half of his body on the ground. He grazed his underbelly to make sure all his vitals were in tact, expecting to feel the moist warmth of blood. Instead there was only a cool, smooth surface, what he thought a cauterized wound might feel like. Then he was gone.

Miles away his eight year old son Billy carefully rendered a picture from black coloring pencil. He ran to his mother to show her his progress.

"Mommy! Mommy!" he said, handing her the picture. "Look!"

She held the picture at a distance, straightened her glasses. "What is it?" she asked, though she recognized the crude stick figure rendering of bifurcated and beheaded bodies.

"It's a picture of daddy. He's dead."

"Peter, why would you draw something like that?"

"I'm almost done with yours," he said, running back to the other room. "I just need to find the blue marker, for your dress."

She looked up from the picture and towards the window. Faceless, two-dimensional figures walked aimlessly on the unlined pavement. She rolled up her blue sleeves and started for the water in the sink, when she realized she no longer had arms. She called to her son as she tried to think of a way to stop the bleeding. But there was no blood.

Billy ran into the room with his new picture. "Mom?" he asked. "Have you seen my red crayon?"

"Death by Limited Palette"

-------------------------------------

Kirk Jones is the author of Uncle Sam's Carnival of Copulating Inanimals, published by the New Bizarro Author Series, an imprint of Eraserhead Press. He reviews classic works that could, in retrospect, be considered bizarro on Retro Bizarro at www.bizarrojones.com. Forthcoming work will soon be published in Unicorn Knife Fight.

2011-04-29T16:55:00.000-07:00

Lee stumbles down the street in a daze, arms pleading outward, revolver dangling from a limp finger. The blood on his shirt matches the blood on his face, the mess in his hair. Words form and escape from his passive lips with no one outside yet to hear them.

A neighbor catches sight from within his home. He sees the gun, sees the blood, and calls the police.

The officers arrive and gently remove the gun. They lead Lee to the back of the car. With humans in range, Lee’s words are heard, softly, slowly, with dignified purpose and careful confusion:

“I have killed god.”

Lee makes the headlines while he sits in a cell. The lawyer appointed has given up hope. Lee says, “I did good” and says nothing else.

The people outside, the people in the country, put Lee’s words onto t-shirts, emblazoned on lighters, collectable handguns with laser engraving. Lee gets mail from his newfound admirers.

The people out there, the people on TV, feign shock and point fingers in the other direction. The people read Lee’s notes:

“They said I could, so I thought I would.”

The outrage on TV is Lee’s best defense.

Lee doesn’t get it. Lee is bought for interviews. Lee opens his mouth, looks up, says, “I did right.”

The kids don’t get it. They wear Lee on their t-shirts. The hungry and scared quote Lee to feel strong.

Lee tried to feel strong, and Lee felt accepted. Lee saw the faces and Lee heard the words.

Lee was condoned and Lee pulled the trigger.

His head exploded, and Lee became real.

Lee gets the news that it’s time for a transfer. Lee is in handcuffs, head down, and led away. Guards open the van and Lee steps out between them. They make their way through the crowd to the door.

Jack steps forward, holds his gun to Lee’s belly. Jack pulls the trigger and speaks in Lee’s ear:

“I have killed god.”

Lee dies in acceptance and Jack goes to prison. Jack is a monster with delusions of grandeur. Lee is a martyr, a sign of the times.

"Acceptance"

-------------------------------------

Josh Myers writes things like a good fishy and he eats and sleeps mostly. He's too fat and is going to die probably.

2011-04-27T20:05:00.000-07:00

The last of the group made their way up the three steps and onto the bus. Thomas shut the door and studied the happy faces behind him from the rearview mirror. Like kids on a field trip. He hoped he could still summon that kind of excitement at their age. The youngest of the lot was 75.

The Sun and Fun Retirement Home had chartered this trip up the mountain for a day at the casino on the reservation. Thomas would earn time and a half as their driver. Maybe a few tips as well. He really needed the money but, after a restless night with little sleep, he didn’t feel well. In fact, the pleasant greetings from his passengers annoyed him. Nothing was fine about today, as one old woman had remarked. Nothing was fine about his life, when it came right down to it.

The gears ground as Thomas shoved the old bus into first, pulling away from the curb with a slight sway and shudder. As they made their way up the hill, he tuned out the excited chatter, turned his thoughts to Jenny instead.

The bitch didn’t deserve both house and alimony – she was the one who left. Normally, he didn’t spend time dwelling on the inequities, but for the last few days he couldn’t seem to think of anything else.

The dark mood started right after the accident in the store, when he got the stitches. Thomas brushed his fingertips against the bandage gingerly, although it didn’t hurt. He still had a headache; nothing seemed to touch it, not even the pills the doc prescribed for him. He hadn’t told his employer either, since the bottle said “do not drive.”

None of that had anything to do with his present state of mind. On any given day, Thomas could stuff his depression into a dark corner, ignore it and move on. Not so for the last four days, when an unfocused revenge dogged his every step.

As the bus wound around the last steep curve to reach the top, clarity breached Thomas’ thoughts. He knew what he had to do. The bitch wouldn’t get any more alimony out of him.

Laughter gave way to stunned silence in those first few moments. The bus jerked hard to the right. The tires left the pavement. Then the screaming started.

Thomas watched the view change from clouds to rocks as the bus nosedived on its way to a flip. His mad grin widened. He thought about the time he executed a belly flop in much the same way. It had been painful, too. Then his head hit the wheel. Thomas missed the rest of the action.

The bus didn’t make it all the way to the bottom. It landed on the road some 1500 feet below the top. No one lived to give thanks for that small mercy. The resultant explosion took care of that.

"Wild Ride"

-------------------------------------

Laura Eno lives in Florida with a very tolerant husband, three skulking cats and an absurdly happy dog. She has a pet from the Underworld named Jezebel and a skull called Mr. Fluffy who help her write novels late at night. Please visit her strange imagination at http://lauraeno.blogspot.com

2011-04-26T08:43:00.000-07:00

‘It’s a suicide note you can dance to, baby,’

I woke up this morning to fog drifting through my living room and a song stuck in my head. In a world where words hurt, these ones strangely soothed me and set my scars a tingle. My toes tapped air and I broke my own rule by getting up before noon.

‘It’s a suicide note you can dance to, baby,
that pain that gets us through.’

A smile found its way onto my face, it was weird, but I decided to just go with it. The forward momentum of motivation jerked me into my morning routine. The smile itched and I almost lost the song to a random thought about blood stains-how they taste and fade.

‘It’s a suicide note you can dance to, baby,
that pain that gets us through.
When you’re bleeding, you’re never alo-oo-ne.’

I stood in front of the mirror naked so I could berate myself out loud. I keep track of my failures by carving X’s on myself; I look like I’m wearing a fleshy plaid bodysuit. I traced the heart-shaped scar on my chest with a trembling finger and pondered the future.

‘It’s a suicide note you can dance to, baby,
that pain that gets us through.
When you’re bleeding, you’re never alo-oo-ne.
A pound of flesh will pay your dues,’

Next I felt hope, I think, because my normally steady fingers were jittery as I removed my razor blade from my necklace. I dug the blade into the scar and dragged it along the heart shaped outline as I had so many times before. Maybe this time would be different, maybe this time I could feel. The unscarred flesh inside the heart turned red as the disfigurement burst open in the razor's wake. The cut was perfect and I felt my blood-warm and sticky-flowing down my stomach. I felt nothing inside. I failed, yet again, but I have no more room for X’s. My smile did nothing but mock me. Good thing I can sing without lips.

‘It’s a suicide note you can dance to, baby
that pain that gets us through.
When you’re bleeding, you’re never alo-oo-ne.
A pound of flesh will pay your dues,
Oh, yeah, baby, it’s the self-mutilation blues.’

"The Self-Mutilation Blues"

-------------------------------------

2011-04-22T15:58:00.000-07:00

Ruth Mason walked into the dentist office fifteen minutes early, even though she dreaded the appointment. She was early for everything. Her husband joked that she’d be early for her own funeral, but Ruth liked to think that she was punctual.

The bland beige office with its bland beige sofa did nothing to relax her tension. Neither did the two-month-old magazines she now flipped through without really seeing. Soft elevator music played in the background, but it annoyed rather than helped.

When the assistant finally called her back, 20 minutes late, Ruth jumped at the sound of her name. She wouldn’t be here at all except her tooth had really been bothering her for the last several days. There was no getting around it. She needed it fixed.

The assistant carried in a tray that the dentist would need, setting it on the small table beside her. The sunlight glinted off the metal array, making them look like dangerous weapons. Ruth’s hands began to sweat and she closed her eyes.

“The doctor will be with you shortly,” the assistant said and left the room.

Ruth was glad to be left alone. The girl was excessively cheerful, blending with the elevator music to create a nauseating experience.

Ms. Chirpy came back to take x-rays and left again. After what seemed like an eternity, the doctor arrived.

“It’s a good thing you came in before the tooth became infected.” Dr. Jessop examined the upper molar in Ruth’s mouth, comparing it to the x-ray. It needed a root canal without any further delay. He injected the lidocaine in several spots.

“The upper teeth are very close to the sinus cavity, which is a direct pathway to the brain. We wouldn’t want an infection to work its way in there, now would we?”

Ruth grunted her assent, wondering why dentists always chose to ask questions when their patients couldn’t answer. Maybe they taught that in dental school. Still, overall he was a kind man. She’d been coming to him for years.

Left alone in the chair while the anesthetic took effect, Ruth studied the same plaques on the wall that she’d seen a dozen times before. She never remembered to bring something to read in with her, although it’d be a blur since her nerves were always on edge here. A visit to the dentist wasn’t on her list of favorite outings.

Dr. Jessop came back in with another tray, covered in a white cloth. He set it down on a table behind Ruth’s head. After inserting a bite block into her mouth, he asked if she was ready.

Ruth gargled a response that made no sense and squeezed her eyes shut, just as she always did. That was why she missed the power drill with the 1/2” bit.

“I’ve often wondered just how close the sinus cavity really is to the upper teeth so I brought my own tools in this morning to experiment.”

The doctor hummed along to the song of the drill, adjusting angles to compensate for the lolled head of his patient.

“Thank you for being such a quiet patient, Ms. Mason. It makes the job so much more pleasant.”

"Bits and Pieces"

-------------------------------------

2011-04-20T18:34:00.000-07:00

Edgar was on a collision course with destiny. He just didn’t know it yet. Which is not unusual, if the scientific research on destiny is to be believed. In fact, according to an article by Caflisch et. al. that was recently published in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, a statistically significant majority of people who are on collision courses with destiny rarely, if ever, have any inkling of what is about to befall them. And so it was with Edgar.

When he woke up last Saturday morning, the world to Edgar seemed about as normal as it had seemed the Saturday before that, in addition to being as normal as the Saturday before that one and even more or less as normal as the Saturday before the Saturday that seemed as normal as the Saturday before the Saturday that found him waking up and finding the world pretty much as normal as ever, which puts us more or less right back to the Saturday that we started out talking about in case you got confused in there somehow. So Edgar got out of bed, fed the cat, lit a cigarette, turned on the television and started the coffee maker.

And that, my friends, is when destiny came knocking on his door. Now, in Edgar’s case, this particular destiny took the form of one Gertrude MacFarland, an attractive, blue-eyed, fair-haired young thing with the cutest little dimply cheeks who, it so happens, had just moved into apartment 2B across the hall. Not that destiny always takes the form of Gertrude MacFarland, mind you, nor does it necessarily come with blue eyes or fair hair or dimply cheeks, and in most cases neither does it live in apartments that are conveniently located right across the hall. It’s just that, in Edgar’s case, it did.

“Gee, I wonder who that could be,” mused Edgar upon hearing the knocking on his door. “Perhaps, if I’m lucky, it might be someone like the Publisher’s Clearing House Prize Patrol, complete with cameras and tv crew and a great big oversized check for millions and millions upon millions of dollars.” He took a step toward the door.

“Though I suppose it’s just as likely that it could be a squad of IRS agents come to arrest me for making some obscure, innocent mathematical miscalculation on last year’s tax return, and they’ll want to make an example out of me by throwing me in some cell block in a remote prison somewhere that nobody’s ever heard of, and I’ll find myself sharing a cell with some sort of unseemly criminal type who doesn’t bother to shower or bathe or brush his teeth, and the next thing you know, I’ll never be seen or heard from again.” Edgar took a step back.

Meanwhile, out in the hallway, Gertrude MacFarland was becoming impatient. She could hear the television playing. She could smell the coffee brewing. She could even hear someone muttering. Certain that somebody was home, but that perhaps they just didn’t hear her the first time she knocked, she rapped on the door a second time. For destiny, it seems, has a way of being persistent like that when it’s on a collision course with someone.

“Oh my,” said Edgar upon hearing the knocking for a second time upon his door. “Whatever it is, it’s not going away.” And so, he walked over and opened the door, because to continue putting off his encounter with destiny would be foolish in a story of this length, especially when you consider that the whole thing is supposed to be about Edgar being on a collision course with destiny, and if he never gets around to opening the door, then we’ll never get around to seeing how it all turns out in the end, and the story might as well end itself right here. Not that that would be a bad thing, necessarily. It’s just that, at this point in the story, Edgar has not yet collided with anything even remotely resembling destiny. So, while you may be starting to feel like there’s something else you’d rather be doing right now – you know, instead of sitting there reading this story – well, we’re not quite done yet, okay?

“Hi, I’m Gertrude,” said the vision of loveliness standing before him. “I just moved into apartment 2B across the hall, and I was wondering if I could borrow a cup of sugar.”

Edgar felt his heart skip a beat. A twinkle glistened in Gertrude’s eye. The two of them fell hopelessly, helplessly, impetuously, and immediately in love, and they were married the very next Saturday.

They did not, however, live happily ever after. In fact, their happiness only lasted but a few hours at best. For it was on their wedding night that Gertrude revealed to Edgar that she had had a sex change operation a couple years back, and that, while her name was now Gertrude, she had started out life as a boy named Gerald.

“Gerald?” said Edgar in disbelief. “No, that can’t be. Please, Gertrude, please say it isn’t so.”

“I’m sorry, Edgar, but it’s true. I used to be a guy – a guy just like you, in fact.”

“Oh, Gertrude, if you only knew. You see, I used to have this twin brother, but somehow we were accidentally separated at birth. All I ever knew about him was his name. And his name was … his name was … Gerald!”

Fortunately for Edgar, the following Tuesday a squad of agents from the IRS showed up at his door, placed him under arrest, mumbled something about making an example out of him, and whisked him away to an undisclosed prison located somewhere in New Mexico.

They say he was never happier.

"Who's That Knocking at My Door?"

-------------------------------------

2011-04-20T18:23:00.000-07:00

Jessica took the cookies out of the oven and set them on the counter to cool. Five special Valentine’s Day cookies, each six inches across, one for her and each of her friends to eat together. It was a of hers to bake elaborate cookies and have all her friends over for Valentine’s Day. They looked forward to it every year. It kept them all together no matter what circumstances tried to nudge them apart.

A few hours later, the cookies were cool enough to decorate with icing and candy. Jessica picked up one of the five pans and turned to take it to where the toppings were. The pan slipped from her hand, flipped over in mid-air and landed facedown on the kitchen floor. The cookie shattered, chocolate chips flew everywhere, some rolled under the refrigerator never to be seen again.

Jessica bent over and carefully picked up the tray. The cookie was upside down in a hundred jagged pieces. She knelt on the floor, crossed her arms and pouted like a little girl. All that time she spent on those cookies, making them just special for all of her friends, even resisting eating them herself. Her friends would be here in less than an hour and now she was a cookie short and she didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by leaving them out.

She had to kill one of her friends.

But which one? William? No, he had given her rides to work for a week when her car was broken. What about Alice? Jessica couldn’t remember anything Alice had done for her except watch movies and go to bars. She supposed that was enough to let her live. Then there was Andy. She liked him and wished for the love of God he’d make a move on her but he never had. Then again, he did like the same music as Jessica. That left Sally. Sally was the drama queen of the group, but that’s exactly why everyone liked her.

Jessica sighed and sank deeper to the floor, staring at the broken cookie. It was going to be a difficult choice. All her friends were redeeming in some way. How could she choose just one?

Then it occurred to Jessica: what about herself? There were still four cookies left. If she were dead, then no one would know what had happened and none of her friends would have to be left out! Perfect!

Jessica swept up the mess and took the trash out so there’d be no evidence for her friends to discover later. She set the remaining four cookies on plates, iced and decorated them beautifully, took a step back and admired her work. She turned around and chose a knife from the wooden block next to the microwave. She decided to use one with a smooth edge so it wouldn’t grind against any bones. Then Jessica stood in the middle of the kitchen and shoved the knife through her heart. She dropped to her knees. Then to her face... She felt better now... Now there were enough cookies to go around... No one...would be...left out... She smiled and closed her eyes for the last time.

"Cookie"

-------------------------------------

James Steele is a writer in Ohio. He is often asked to sum up his life’s story in a single paragraph. James is very depressed by how easy this is. He has been published in the Magazine of Bizarro Fiction (issue 3), Anthrozine (issue 18), Different Worlds Different Skins v.2, and Planet Magazine. His bizarre action/comedy novel, “Felix and the Sacred Thor,” is published through Eraserhead Press.

His blog is http://daydreamingintext.blogspot.com/

2011-04-17T19:51:00.000-07:00

When Aaron Taubman walked through the front door of his one-story stucco house, he‘d never been more excited in his whole life. He peered across the living room, at his wife Diane sitting at the dining room table, and felt an electric current raise the hairs on the nape of his neck. She’d had that same look on her face that all men fear; the look that all men try to avoid. He’d better choose his words wisely.

“How was your day, honey?” He asked, letting his briefcase slide out of his hand and fall onto the couch.

“I’d like to say it was good but then I’d be lying.”

The glaze over her sharp, dark eyes set a fire to his chest that he thought was indigestion. The lines around her temples and along the corners of her mouth were as noticeable under the chandelier as if they were moles.

“What happened?” He asked, walking around to her side of the table to lay a kiss on her forehead.

“Sit down and I’ll tell you.”

He did as she asked. She slid a white envelope from under the salt and pepper shakers sitting in the middle of the table, opened it and slid out a colorful 4x8 photo. She put it facedown on the table and slid it across to him. She watched him look at the photo, watched the mystery on his face bloom into a mask of anger and disappointment.

“What the...the...”

“Don’t worry she’s gotten enough slack from me today.”

“Well she hasn’t gotten it from me.” He said as he stood up from the table.

“Just relax.” She said, waving her hand at him. “She doesn’t need it. Not now, anyway.”

“I told you.”

“You told me what?”

“I told you to send her to boarding school but you said ‘she wouldn’t like it there’. That’s what boarding school is for.”

“Excuse the hell out of me if I see a problem with my daughter being ten-thousand miles away at some boarding school in Sweden. I do love her and I do want to see her on a daily basis.”

“That’s what the Internet is for.”

“Don’t tell me that Aaron.” She said. “Look what happened to Jeff.”

“What about Jeff?”

“He’s...” She stumbled, then regained herself. “he’s...It doesn’t matter. What would she have learned in boarding school that she can’t learn here?”

“They send kids to boarding school for a reason, honey.”

“Your parents never sent you to boarding school.”

“That’s not the point, Diane.” He said.

“It’s not like she killed someone.”

Diane stood up from her seat and opened the wooden door behind her. Aaron’s heart pounded against his chest; sweat beads broke out across his forehead as he walked toward his daughter’s bedroom. The short distance between the other end of the table and her doorway seemed to stretch on forever. When he stood in the doorway of her bedroom, his rapid heartbeat ceased to a regular rhythm. The room had white walls and beige carpet with a small lamp sitting on a miniature white table.

All of this was familiar to him. The same thing had happened to Jeff before the truth came out and that farmer in South Dakota shot him in the chest.

In the far left corner of the room, a young brunette girl was sitting on a small mound of hay and twigs. A small television sat before her, spreading a muted blue glow across the wall; on the screen Clive Owen jumped off the ledge of an apartment building, leaped into a red Convertible and drove down a wet gray street.

“Hey, gorgeous.” He said, walking into the room.

“Hi, Dad. I guess you and Mom are really mad at me, huh?”

“No, honey. It’s okay. These things happen all the time.” He spoke in a reassuring tone. “Your mother and I are going have to get through it but don’t you worry. You have our full support.”

“Oh, thank you Daddy and don’t worry. I’ll go to school and do my homework and take care of it. I swear.”

“It’s okay. We love you no matter what.”

“Daddy, I love you.”

When she hugged him, he looked at the picture Diane had given him and compared it to the mound of hay and twigs sitting under her. He could also compare it to the three-foot pearly-white egg sitting inside of the nest, waiting to meet its mother and bring a new member to The Taubman Family.

"Unexpected Pregnancy"

-------------------------------------

Brian J. Smith has been featured in Drabblecast, Darkest Before The Dawn, The Forbidden Zone, New Voices In Fiction, Crooked, Postcard Shorts, The Horror Zine, The Flash Fiction Offensive, Thrillers, Killers and Chillers and Withersin Magazine. His story “For Rachel” was featured in “And The Nightmare Begins…The Horror Zine: Volume One. He currently lives in Chauncey, Ohio with his mother, brother and their six dogs.

2011-04-13T20:57:00.000-07:00

I saw my neighbor outside trimming hedges and walked over our property line.

I asked, “May I try?”

He said, “Sure.”

So I took the hedge trimmers and started trimming his hedges.

“I like doing this.” I said.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Sure,” I said.

“You want to switch lives?” he said.

“Sure,” I said.

We switched lives. Now I’m wearing a hard hat, on a steel beam way up in the sky, connected by wires, constantly fearing death—with no other skills or motivation to obtain them. He’s sitting at a desk in a blue suit and white collar, trying to figure out what it means to hedge, in the financial world. His newly acquired analysis skills compel him to search the meaning of it all, though he’s always coming up short.

I sleep with his portly wife missing part of her nose in a boomerang incident, and he puts up with my hot wife’s perpetual bitching, smelly farts, and lack of pussy output. I hold contempt for his juvenile delinquent children who steal my beer and cigarettes. He’s left raising my developmentally disabled son, with his perpetual drool, who can’t wipe himself.

Next June, I’m out trimming the hedges.

My neighbor crosses our property line.

He says, “May I try?”

And I say, “Sure.”

He takes the hedge trimmers and snaps the blades around his throat. His head drops back like a PEZ Dispenser, dispensing a fountain of blood. I take the hedge trimmers and do the same thing he just did.

"Trimming Hedges"

-------------------------------------

2011-04-13T20:48:00.000-07:00

Why you’re here, you’ve got no clue.

“Someday,” Sari the landlady said, “You’ll be back. Begging for rooms. ‘Hey, Sar,’ you’ll say, ‘anything available? My old place, maybe?’”

You’d die first. Back then you had to get out fast.

Still, here you are, outside the old building. Waiting for . . . who? An hour ago, you were on a plane. A tiny, empty Bacardi bottle’s still in your pocket.

The old street’s changed. Punks in baggy jeans trudge by. Fancy new buses stop at the light, barking out route numbers for the blind.

You smell smoke, like leaves are burning. But it’s January. Before that plane took off, they de-iced the wings. Maybe a fire. But . . . where?

How sad the building looks. Like an old barfly, needing a drink.

And, speaking of which . . .

In the foyer stands Felice, half-cigarette in mouth, peering at you. In a stained pink robe and fuzzy-wuzzies.

Damn, she got old, you think, as she opens the door. Older. Chestnut hair more gray at the roots, skin like that leather jacket you stole at a garage sale. Even her hands, clutching her mail, look gnarled.

“Nicky?” she says, in disbelief.

“Sari around?” You can’t believe you’re saying this. “I want my old place back.”

She should look delighted. Back then, you were pals. Shared jugs of Carlo Rossi, cold cuts, and stale Wonder bread.

She flicks the cigarette onto the steps. “I think it’s for rent.”

Now you smell Tide, from the laundry room downstairs. Felice was always washing clothes. Once she got crabs from fucking all the guys at the bar. That was the last time you used the washer.

You smell Tide, with smoke underneath it.

“Gotta see the super,” she says.

“The super?” Back then, there was no super. Sari was too cheap. When it snowed, she paid some neighbor’s kid to shovel. If your toilet broke, or the heat ran out, you were fucked.

“Walt,” she says, “In 4-A.” She pulls her robe tighter around her. “He takes care of us.”

In the foyer, the smell is acrid. Like burned pizza. Back then, it meant one thing. “You pass out with the oven on?”

She smiles. “Ya think?”

In the hallway, you realize you forgot to check the mailboxes. See who still lives here, besides Felice. Maybe the Puerto Ricans who always fed you.

“Raoul and Nayda?” you say. “They still here?”

Felice doesn’t answer. If they were still here, you’d smell pernil. And not burned, either.

Was the hallway always this creepy? Like in those Japanese Grudge movies, where the dead fucking walk. The walls and stairs look waxy, runny. And the floor . . . If you dropped a quarter, you’d leave it.

“Yo!” yells a male voice from upstairs. “Ya comin’, or not?”

“Fuck off!” Felice says.

And these stairs. Were there always this many? Your legs ache from climbing them. First, sitting on that plane for hours. Now all these damn stairs.

On the third landing, somebody passes you, on his way down.

“Mist—” You have to look twice.

Same messy hair. Same plaid shirt, ripped at the elbow. Mister Bowman, the retired teacher, who always trudged by, like the world had fucked him over, twice. Who always got your mail for you, when you were away.

Mister Bowman, who was . . .

“Heard he was dead,” you whisper to Felice.

She smiles. “He’s real quiet.”

The way you drank, you mixed up lots of shit. You could’ve—you must’ve— been wrong about old Bowman.

“Finally!” You’re on the top floor.

Outside your old flat, 4-B, stands a guy . . . in white shorts! Sandy-haired, lean, and tanned, yet. Like he just left Miami. He checks you out good. “Sari said you’d be back,” he says, leering. Like he knows you.

“Maybe I’m not.”

They both smirk. It’s you who rushed back on a flight that should’ve been cancelled. With no luggage. Just that empty Bacardi shot.

But why? Your new place was palatial: high ceilings, hardwood floors. A fucking doorman. What brought you back?

“Maybe,” Walt the super said, “You’re homesick.”

With a sly smile, he unlocks your old door.

Suddenly, you’re terrified. As he holds it open for you, you back away, into the hallway.

At once, the other doors open. Silently, tenants walk out, past you: a bleary-eyed old guy, a husky young guy, a redhead with a mulatto toddler . . .

That smoke-stench is overwhelming, now. Your nose and throat feel raw.

In your old doorway, Walt beckons.

You expect the place to look like you left it: mismatched furniture, secondhand fridge, classic rock posters on dingy walls. But you’re wrong.

Everything is charred, shredded. From the couch and mattress, springs protrude like corpses’ guts. Rugs all soggy. Floors squishy. Some walls black from smoke, others just . . . gone. Only steel skeletons holding these rooms in place.

“Gotta cig?” Walt asks Felice, in the ruined kitchen.

You gasp. The right side of his body, face down to shin, is black, blistered. Wisps of sandy hair project, like a cowlick, from his skull.

Felice’s skin sizzles. “You should quit,” she says. As she shakes out a cig, her finger breaks off. “Things’ll kill you.”

They laugh, as you run out.

In the hallway, black smoke fills your lungs, keeps you from seeing the stairs. From all over the building comes insistent beeping: fire alarms that rang too late.

“Help!” You choke on the word.

As you sink down, you recall screams, the world rushing past you, that wild, spinning feeling as your plane plunged to the ground . . .

No, you think. It can’t be. It’s got to be a dream!

Slow, hollow footsteps, as something putrid trudges up the stairs.

Mr. Bowman, who’s been dead the longest.

You scream.

Worms crawl through what’s left of his face. For the first time ever, he smiles.

And hands you your mailbox key.

"Homesick"

-------------------------------------

Cindy Rosmus is a New York textbook editor by day, a hardboiled Jersey female by night. Her fiction has appeared in Black Petals, The Beat, The Cynic, Red Fez, Zygote in My Coffee, Hardboiled, NVF, MediaVirus, The Monsters Next Door, Out of the Gutter, Devil Blossoms, 13th Warrior Review, Mysterical-E, A Twist of Noir, and Beat to a Pulp. She has four collections of stories out: Angel of Manslaughter, Gutter Balls, Calpurnia’s Window, and No Place Like Home. She is the editor of the e-zine, Yellow Mama. She is also a thrill seeker, a Gemini, and a Christian.

2011-04-10T08:41:00.000-07:00

Frank Peodius was pounding away at his keyboard, frantically searching for the best dating site. So far this year, he's registered at five costly ones--Yahoo Dating and Plentyoffish--searching for that special somebody.

He had just finished entering his credit card information into another site when the cell phone rang. He picked the cell phone up and held it to his ear with the aid of his right shoulder as he continued filling out the required information for membership.

"Hello," he said into the cell phone.

"Frank. It's me, Dennis."

Dennis was Frank's shrink and best friend. They'd known each other since childhood, both spending the majority of their childhoods in the same orphanage.

"Frank," Dennis scolded, sounding more like a psychiatrist than a friend, "You're not wasting all your money and time on another dating website, are you?"

A pause. Frank was pissed. Why was this bastard speaking so patronizingly when he wasn't even on his couch? Finally, after his anger and shock had finally subsided Frank said, "No."

Dennis knew his friend was lying.

"Frank, how many hours, how many sessions have I spent saying it isn't healthful for you to meet women online?"

Silence. Dennis had waited for a response, but nothing came. Then he continued.

"That's why tonight I've decided to set you up with one of my clients, Rosemary. Beautiful woman--she's a good fifteen years older than you; but I know for a fact that that shouldn't be a problem, considering how you've always liked your women a little older than you."

Which wasn't exactly true. Frank had liked them a lot older than him. He was an avid collector of mature pornography featuring women in their sixties, seventies and eighties getting plowed by men young enough to be their grandsons.

At first Frank had protested, but Dennis had finally talked him into it. "Do you really want to get better? Do you want to, if not entirely forget how fucked up your childhood was, start living a semi-normal life? If so, you're going to have to learn how to cultivate normal relationships like everybody else. You must learn how to not fear intimacy; to accept it as a way of life." A pause, then Dennis continued, "Not everybody will abandon you like your parents did, Frank."

Ouch. Frank had gotten the point.

He ripped a piece of paper from out of his printer and then he asked Dennis, "Okay, Mr. Know-it-all, where the hell am I supposed to meet her?

* * *

The place was a cozy little Italian eatery. Every table was draped in red-and-white checkered design tablecloth, and at the far end of the restaurant, near the restrooms and bar area, stood a middle-aged man in a blue pin-striped suite singing Sinatra via a cheesy little karaoke concoction.

"And now, the end is near, and so I face, the final curtain..."

He noticed an elderly woman, of about sixty, sitting alone and expectantly at a table in the middle of the restaurant.

He approached her.

"Rosemary?"

"Sit down, hun." She smiled pleasantly. Her voice had seriously aroused him, having a gravelly-yet-sensual sound to it--like Lucille Ball, when she got really old.

They sat there for two hours--talking, drinking wine, and having an all-around good time.

It was ten o'clock, and three tall glasses of White Zinfiendel later, when she suggested they take a cab back to her place.

"Why not?" Frank beamed.

* * *

The second they got in the apartment she started kissing his neck, and then biting at it; he pushed her on the bed and then he jumped on top of her.

Giggling ensued. "Oh Rosemary; Rosemary!"

They went at it three separate times that night, then one time in the morning. After the fourth serving Rosemary lit a Virginia Slim cigarette, puffed at it and then she passed it over to Frank.

Frank, for the first time in his life, was content. I am truly blessed, he thought. The next time I see Dennis I'm going to give him a big hug. Bless that man and his sound advice; bless him to hell!

As he fumbled his left hand carelessly on the nightstand for his glasses he accidientially knocked something over. Crack.

It was the sound of grass breaking.

"Sorry, I'll get that," he said. Then he said again, "I'm so sorry!"

"Don't worry about it," she said, exhaling smoke.

It was a framed photo of a young boy--wait a minute! He looked oddly familiar.

"Rosemary--who is this?"

Rosemary sighed, looking a little sad. "That's my boy, Frank. I was forced to give him away for adoption when I was seventeen and--"

Frank, red-faced and crying, collapsed to the floor.

"What's wrong, lover?" Rosemary had said.

"Peodius Complex"

------------------------------------

Jack Bristow, an all-out weirdo from New Mexico, has written for several online magazines and even one print one. Follow him: @Jackbristo

2011-04-08T17:00:00.000-07:00

A monolithic structure juts abruptly from a vast and isolated wheat field. An entire population of miniscule creatures screams in unison, driven mad. Insects move in suicide cult lines to dive into and explode upon the structure. Guts and yellow stains soon turn the Monolith into a violent eruption of modern art. The contrast is shocking and sudden.

The Old Farmer can’t believe it.

The crops become safe, no longer the victims of thousands of gnawing maws. They grow fat and stooped with the heaviness of their bounty. The Old Farmer becomes a rich man. He dies with pennies lining his pockets years later.

Everyday more insects fly into the Monolith, adding splatters of expression to the hulking mass. The Children of the Old Farmer find themselves locked inside of cars on the interstate, driving home to shove their father into the Earth. They move in from all directions to cover him in dirt.

A grasshopper batters its head against the structure. Soon its body lies inert at the base, its brains adding stain to the stones. The Children’s feet crunch over gravel in long forgotten driveways. They trample over weeds and dirt, old steps, creaky wooden farmhouse floorboards, matted carpets. They breathe in heavy aromas of cigarette smoke and senescence. Windows rimmed with dust allow a dim view of the Monolith.

A daughter moves a finger through the dust, swirling designs into the panes. Swirling fingerprints. The Monolith grabs at her attention.

“What’s that?” she asks, pulling two brothers from their reveries.

They look.

In the space of ten seconds countless ants dive from the structure. Their bodies erupt in unseen bubbles as they return to the Earth, adding gore.

One brother breaks the silence that is not silence so much as it is mourning.

“The Monolith,” he says. “Dad told me about it a few times. He said it was just kind of there one morning.”

The daughter asks, “Did he paint it or something? It is incredibly colorful.”

“I don’t think so. If he did he didn’t mention it to me.”

A Praying mantis flies into a protrusion of hardened stinkbug intestines, impaling herself through the thorax and dying without unfolding her arms. She is forever fossilized in this moment of supplication.

The other brother says, “The color is bugs.”

“Bugs?” Swirls settle into the glass, crop circles on a window.

The other brother nods. “Yeah, that’s what dad said. He said the day that thing showed up in the field, all these bugs started killing themselves on it.”

A collective shaking of heads.

“I guess he went pretty crazy there, near the end.”

A millipede and a centipede spend the better part of an hour eating one another’s legs. They bleed yellow pus onto the structure. Caked wings, brittle as old Bible paper, flap languidly in a passing breeze, long since removed from living bodies.

The Children sell the farmhouse. Each child grows and withers, becoming bent old men and women. Soon enough they too are returned to the Earth and covered in dirt, a portion of their father’s pennies handed down to their own Children.

The Diaspora is no longer reserved for insects and arachnids. The long arm of carnage now reaches to include rabbits, rock chucks, weasels and raccoons.

Fur mats the base of the Monolith, pasted with blood and entrails. The farmhouse settles into itself, until finally it collapses. The wheat dies, untended, the blades heavy and rotten. A nearby town has faded to ruin and memories.

There is no life to be found for hundreds of miles.

The Monolith stands immobile in the desolate field.

A mindless pillar of death without purpose, without end.

Then, the people come...

"The Color is Bugs"

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Dustin Reade's fiction has appeared in the magazines "Encounters", "Golden Visions", "Nerve Cowboy", and "Sideshow Fables", online at "The New Flesh", and roughly two dozen antholgies for Static Movement, Pill Hill Press, Living Dead Press, and Lame Goat Press. He is an Atheist and a staunch Bigfoot supporter.

2011-04-04T10:49:00.000-07:00

The old man walked among the flock gathered in his makeshift church, taking stock of their nubile, barely legal bodies, comparing them to his own withered countenance… when he heard a sharp scratch and saw a dark shadow moving at the speed of illusion across the candyglass window depicting a well-hung Christ dangling his manhood before a flock of salivating children… before he could blink the shadow repeated it’s whip-like movement… there was no way in hell that was a flying squirrel (hell, the word repeated in his inner monologue… hell).

Days before, two men had come to the deepest part of the jungle, where the treetops were so thick that even the African sun, whose ego boiled the droplets of filthy water in distended bellies could not penetrate, where she, Sekhmet, once Hathor, cow now lion had lived in solitude, so much so that she did not even think to hide her bared breasts from the first men she'd lain eyes on in years. Sekhmet pulled her razor-edged Ida, emasculated them in every sense of the word, returned it to the sheath and sped off into the realms of legend, while as the men lay bleeding, her sister Bast masturbated in under a blanked of misanthropic shadows, far removed from the African sunscape. 

 Sekhmet had refused the peace offering they'd brought on the old man's behalf, knowing the difference between a virtuous man and a hole in the world. Her sharpened teeth shinier than the shoes of selfmade archons, her conscience as clean as a gas station lavatory in Quito, the War-Goddess stalked across the Atlantic, moving in on the homeland of her chosen target... New York City.

And there she was, outside the old man's window, a shadow bouncing just out of sight, to let him know that all that he had built died tonight.

The old man could smell the blood-warm scent of his fate even before the candyglass shattered and She stood black furred and tall before him, smiled and pulled a small hunting knife from a tight leather sheath (this was not the wide sword blade of her Ida, but a smaller crescent tool, meant for pain of a more delicate nature), but the old man looked back to his naked flock now shivering in the rush of a Manhattan winter, brought on he the broken window, and stood his ground, saying only, in a betrayed warble, "Never trust a God who throws out his heart."

Though the old man thought he would find peace, he found instead that his grey matter was shifting, writhing, transforming into something else, his mind filled with warm, decent thoughts, fathers having ice cream cones with their children, monks chanting words of gratitude to a world they knew was imperfect, orgasms not paid for with money or deceit, great acts of anonymous altruism, hope, goodness, life that was life, the raw juicy electric bittersweet burning truths of the human potential that he had never realized and lived to vanquish were there where once his rotten porcine brain had been.

SHE was making him feel these things, and as he began to cry she handed him the knife... he felt guilt for the very first time in life as he slit his own throat before his sheep, and perhaps, in the end, it might have served to him as come small comfort that his funeral was vigorously attended... that is if you counted the maggots.

"Of Mice, And Men, And Cats"

Copyright: © 2011 Garrett Cook & Ash Lomen

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* The authors would like to mention that this story was created using Alan M. Clark's word tech, as shown in his new book BONEYARD BABIES. 

2011-04-01T13:38:00.000-07:00

“Shit man, why’s the money bleeding?

Gold stuttered, clearly embarrassed. “I, uhh... it’s the only shit I could snag.”

“You’re telling me that menstrual fucking money is the only shit you could get your filthy fucking hands on?” Frankincense threw down his cards. “Fuck this. I ain’t playing for no bleeding money.”

Gold got a hold of his stack of soggy, pungent bills. Myrrh sat there, cards still in his hand. His smooth, featureless face could show no sign of understanding the card game was over, but he must have heard the bickering. He still had ears. Frankincense popped the cooler across the dim room open and removed a forest green syringe. The smell of sulfur dominated that of menstrual blood as Frankincense pumped the Nitro into his veins. The rush dilated his pupils. Myrrh turned his face towards the commotion.

“Ohhhh shit, I need to get moving now!”

Frankincense kicked the door down, and ran outside. He tackled a car door, broke the window. Gold watched from his busted door, leaning against the non-jagged side of the frame. Myrrh continued sitting at the card table, but he put his hand; a straight flush stared at the ceiling.

Frankincense ran back onto Gold’s porch panting. “Shit, I got the craziest idea ever. Let’s shoot up a school. Let’s shoot up a fucking school.”

Gold looked over his shoulder to Myrrh, who gave no response, nor any sign of hearing the statement whatsoever. He turned back to Frankincense’s grinning face. Gold sighed, then smiled back.

It was decided. They would shoot up a fucking school.

* * *

Frankincense’s Nitro-fueled ass brought down the front door of Stanley Timpleton Memorial High School. His rifle swung in arcs as he belted out screaming laughter from behind his Spider Man mask. Gold, always more serious and somber, donned a killer clown mask and jumped into the turmoil as they both shot panicking teenagers. Even Myrrh wore a mask, a rendition of an anime school girl. Gold would never admit it, but he thought Myrrh looked kind of cute with it on.

The bullets tore through the crowd, and each student struck shattered into thousands of fragments. The shards created even more wounds among the students, these ones burping blood. The crowd quickly lessened, leaving behind a casserole of broken glass and liquid rubies.

Gold flew up the stairs, picking out stragglers. He was thankful that the rubbery mask deflected most of the debris from his victims.

Frankincense shot up with some more Nitro, then ripped through the cafeteria, where much of the student body thought they could find shelter under the tables and in the kitchens. Automatic fire made quick work of them. A cornered lunch lady screamed when his gaze fell on her.

“That’s right, squeal like a piggy!”

He squealed in ecstasy himself as he blew her fragile brains into the wall behind her. Growing tired of the glass rounds, Frankincense loaded his rifle with jelly shots. He raced towards the window, and unleashed squishy hell on the runners. Soon, the back lawn of Timpleton High was smothered with mounds of red jelly.

Ninety seconds into the assault, and Myrrh had not fired a single shot. Standing just inside the front door, he was the first to hear sirens.

Gold’s boots crunched over remains while he looked for survivors. Around a corner, he saw Frankincense; he was pumping in more Nitro. He caught sight of Gold.

“Ha! You think you’re really fucking funny, huh? Really fucking funny?! I’ll show you funny!” He brandished a large bolt in his hand. “I call this one the motherfucking Midas touch! Think you’re real funny, fucking clown, fucking funny... You’re not fucking funny!”

Gold was shot dead center in the back in his attempt to flee. His second to last thought was how the fuck Frankincense loaded the gun so fast. His last thought was of cats in Myrrh’s sexy mask licking bloody glass clean. Before he hit the ground, he froze solid. Gold returned to his namesake.

* * *

Evidence of a fire alongside the shooting was what called the fire engine to Timpleton. Myrrh sat in the driver seat of the truck, precisely steering it away from the massacre. Reports from the radio informed him that the first responders found one shooter dead, the other idly screaming obscenities and kicking doors down. His gun was discarded, useless after a large caliber shot wrecked the barrel. The next report stated that the second shooter was shot dead after he turned on an officer screaming, “You’re a fucking joke!” and attempting to grab him. No word yet on the number of casualties, but it was believed that there were no more shooters.

Myrrh drove silently away, the thought of the menstrual money he was about to pick up for seeing those two bottom feeders dead arousing him immensely.

"Frankincense, Gold & Myrrh"

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Joseph M. Bouthiette, Jr. is a young writer of surreal and bizarre tales, previously published on Staring At the Walls ezine.