Tag: Absurd

Fantasy, Life

ZeroFlash — “There Would be Warmth”

Posted on by Desmond White

Zeroflash, a flash fiction magazine that features many, many great interviews with writers and publishers alike, has a monthly competition series. The winner receives an original illustration of their winning entry, ten pounds, an interview with Uprising Review, etc., etc.

I submitted a story to the February competition (judged by Alex L. Williams) and lost. My story didn’t even make it to second or third. It wasn’t featured on the list of honorees.

S’all good, though. Rejection is a step toward success. Sometimes rejection’s a success all by its lonesome. And if that’s even remotely true, I’ve made it.

The February prompt was this draconic kaleidoscope with granite blues and pinks and a hidden zero. And it was the caption: “I’m asking for the trippiest, freakiest, most surreal piece of prose you can concoct. Let your mind roam and your words dance.” 300 words minimum.

by Jon Stubbington (2018)

So here’s my loser’s piece. I went for Paracelsus meets the goblins in Twilight Eyes meets skin made out of asbestos. You be the judge if it works or not.

There Would be Warmth

by Desmond White

Now the mediæval men knew a thing about doomsday. They scribbled its steps in codices long-brown, although none of them were excited about cityside basilisks and resurrected gods, content with pulling gold from menstrual blood. Not me. All my years I burned to clear the crust of life from this planet. (Humans, dogs, the yellow cities, trees, all that color.) So I studied the works recounting the Vulcani, those lizards that grow in fire like fishes in water, what some call salamanders. If you grow them big enough they’ll survive outside their element—bigger and they’ll turn the elements into char.

I get a fire going until the flicker-roots are blue and the smoke thick enough to climb, then I step between logs glimmering like sticks in a stomach. The lizards see me and run and die in the cold, so maybe, I think, I must accustom the new hatches to my scent. The eggs are easy. I find a clump of black logs glowing with a thousand eyes and there I find them, small, angry. I raise one to see if the fetus is kicking in the ash, but I take the egg too close to the air element, or maybe wind blows out of jealousy, and the egg turns to coal in my boiled fingers. The fire is kind enough to lift my tears. The next egg I push down my throat, placing it by the heat of my liver, wrapped motherly in blood-web, and now I’m running out the tipi, running for the lake to wash the blackened scale of my skin, to feel the living stone inside my belly, to finish what the mystics never started.

Writing Process

Rune Bear Bios (Attempt One)

Posted on by Desmond White

Stuart doesn’t like the bios I’ve written for Rune Bear.

Desmond White

Although currently facing execution by gas frogs (he’ll be dropped into a stank pit in April), Desmond White used to be the fearless leader of the Resistance until he took a bearbolt to the back and was captured. (A bearbolter is a fully-automated turret that launches American black bears.) This is his only known photo because he’s too ugly for full lighting.

Brandon Patterson

Having hacked more corporations than you can count on a calculator, Brandon Patterson has retired from a life of cybercrime to pursue his true passion: building websites for the Resistance against Gressian rule. Brandybuck lives in Dallas, New Texas, just outside the Omega System, with two servitor-skulls and a shapeshifting croissant named Cindy. He enjoys long walks on computer-generated beaches.

Stuart Warren

Stuart is an artificial construct compiled from discarded Rembrandt paintings and a dump of data-files removed from the Galactic Library because they were considered useless to intelligent life—literary criticism, mostly, and an eccentric medium called the “comic book.” Stuart currently serves the Glessian Majesty as a royal flusher, although he hopes to upgrade to a showerhead or sonic toothbrush.

Alyssa Warren

Alyssa Warren was Queen of the Solar Centaurs until she fell in love (some say it was an arranged marriage) with a dashing artificial toilet. Now, Her Neighness lives in a tiny apartment filled with books and a baby and an actual baby that she produced through sheer force of will (the toilet helped a little). When she’s not conquering minor planets with her braying legionnaires, Alyssa can be found at the farmer’s market sampling local honeys or knitting bad ass dog sweaters.

Here’s what Stu wrote for himself:

Stuart writes fiction and magic realism and lives in a tiny apartment filled with books and a wife and baby. Occasionally he reads a book and writes about it on Sequart.org, but mostly he shouts from his blog stuartjwarren.com about life and the books that he authors.

I’ll only accept it if he adds:

He also writes really boring bios.

Satire

Fiction — “Duck Marston”

Posted on by Desmond White

This is a little dark comedy about a husband who just wants to be loved.

Duck Marston ran home and kissed his wife and patted his daughter’s head and asked them both: “Be Mine?” It was Valentine’s, that nasty holiday of love making, and despite all the chocolates and flowers Duck had brought, his women gave him little attention. The wife turned away so he kissed her by the ear, inhaling an orange grain of wax. His daughter took his pats like a surly dog and bit three of his fingers. The chocolates they threw away—“We’re dieting, remember?” The flowers went in compost. The girls were too disgusted by this desperate mewling man to explain that flowers were just twenty dollars to watch something die, and they already had front row seats—free of charge—to his life.

[Click here for “A Few Valentine’s Day Literary Cards.”]

[Click here for “everything you need to know about my love life in haiku.”]

Fantasy, Life, Satire, Writing (Published)

Published — “An Old War Hog”

Posted on by Desmond White

c4ca2-anoldwarhog

My paragraph piece “An Old War Hog” just published in Ghost Parachute, a magazine devoted to “fresh and vibrant imagery,” to “unleash[ing] the spider behind the rose.” The piece is small so I won’t ruin it with a summary. Just know that Ghost Parachute has an interesting format—every story is paired with an original image created by their artists. Credit for the picture above goes to Felix Sanchez.

Writing Process

Filler

Posted on by Desmond White

We needed filler content for a literary magazine we’re creating, i.e. stuff of no consequence that will be deleted once we publish. So I wrote this.

“The Robot” by Botswana Brokeball

There is a girl who is a robot. She wakes up in the wastelands but doesn’t remember who she is (actually she’s a secret human). All the humans are dead but she doesn’t know until she meets communists called the Rainbow Riders. Their symbol is the rainbow. In my story all robots are rainbow stripe colors. The girl-robot-secret-human is named Eve, the first human. She’s actually the first human cryogenically frozen by Adam to be awakened when the technology has developed to de-freeze cryogenically frozen women. Eve decides to rename herself Even Stevens. After a lot of walking in the dust-broke wastes, her CPU glitches, and her hard drive crashes, and her URL is hacked. She was a robot the whole time! The story ends with a vulture digging a nest into her brain and finding pink gummy brains to its delight and surprise. She was a human the whole time too! In the end I show up in the book to congratulate the reader on finding the secret, then I tip my fedora and walk off the page. I was the monster at the end of the book!

Author Bio

I am from Remdonesia which is a small independent nation-state in the offshore drilling waters of California, America. Don’t be alarmed if I send you intimate details about my body via Facebook. I am only testing the ability of humans to communicate over long distances via Facebook. Shout out to nail clippers. Y’all the real heroes.

Life, Satire, Writing (Published)

Published — “An Obituary for the Coolest Christian”

Posted on by Desmond White

The Higgs Weldon was a humor site run by Los Angeles stand-ups Robbin Higgins and Paige Weldon and others (sorry to cut you short, others) that did everything from comedic credits to caption contests. The folks over there published my satirical panegyric, “An Obituary for the Coolest Christian,” teasing Christian youth culture (sans the tight pants, iphones, and XS plaid shirts—that’s Christian youth Starbucks culture). Sadly, the site is now defunct, so I post the piece below.

He was the coolest Christian at St. Rutabah Baptist Academy High School: he said phrases like holy bullwhiz or that’s the goshdarn truth (promoting a more conservative, Bible-approved profanity, because you never know if there’s an angel listening), emphasized the screw in Screwtape, cultivated a beard on his neck, brought a bully to Church and then beat him in the parking lot, tore a page out of the Qur’an and ate it, wore a cross on a chain even in the shower. He was Varsity football chaplain.

By six, he’d broken someone’s nose with the Summa Theologica. By twelve, he’d indexed all the Christian symbolism in Lord of the Rings. By middle school, he disagreed fundamentally with C.S. Lewis.

He was the coolest one. He read books like The Consolation of Philosophy and Paradise Lost and claimed Milton was of the Devil’s Party. It was rumored that he kept cigarettes in his fanny pack, that his flip flops weren’t dress code, that he was stoned on Jesus but Buddha gave him a bad trip, that he’d been married at 16 and divorced that summer, only to remarry her and have five kids, that he had a tattoo of Jesus in Ray-Bans, and owned an American Flag made of mixed fibers.

Faster now. He could burp the Lord’s Prayer, kissed a teacher while she was sleeping, tasted his Dad’s ginger beer, snuck into a faculty meeting and wasn’t discovered for the full two hours, could make a paper airplane out of anything, anything, spent a summer in a monastery, hooked up with a nun’s pillow, carved his initials in sixteen pews, refused to learn the order of the months, didn’t believe volcanoes existed, tripped Buddhists on the way to the prayer room, told his Japanese pen pal that tsunamis were divine farts, ate a Jehovah Witness, could justify the War in Iraq, recited the Fox’s Book of Martyrs with a 78% margin of error, drew mustaches in his textbook even when those images didn’t include people, and finally died doing what he loved—running remote-controlled drones into small dogs (the heart attack was incidental).

Fantasy

Fiction — “Sam Spayed, Private Eye”

Posted on by Desmond White

Tried my hand at noir-style monologuing but from the pov of a cat detective.

It was the kind of day that made you want to lie around and wait for a belly rub. A breeze was slinking about the neighborhood, and the welcoming scent of McAlister’s Pet Friendly Kitty Chow was wafting through the window. But I had to be on my paws. Trouble could come scratching my door at any minute.

So I sat at my desk, playing with the blinds, waiting for my nine lives to run out. On my desk were a few toy mice and a ball of yarn I’d bought at a flea market to relieve stress. Whatever effect the yarn was supposed to have was being negated by the fleas. I used to have a pot of catnip, too, but I gave that stuff up.

That’s when she sauntered in. A domestic long-hair, although tame is the last word I’d use. She was a tall bowl of milk, white and fluffy with cream on her shoulders like she was wearing a second fur coat. Soft blue eyes. The type of dame you wish hadn’t been declawed.

“You stalking anybody?” she asked.

“No,” I purred. “You got something for me, or are you just looking for the litter box?”

“I might have something,” she said, cool as a calico. “See, there’s this fancy cat I’ve been nuzzling. And he’s gone missing.”

“You check the pound? Maybe he rubbed someone the wrong way?”

“Mittens always keeps his address on his collar. See, he’s forgetful sometimes. I’m afraid something’s happened to him, Sam.” Her whiskers twitched pathetically and I was string in her paws. She went on to describe her plaything. A Himalayan long-hair, blue-gray, googly eyes. Not the sharpest claw on the paw. More like the type who’d run out of an open door and drown in the pool.

“You armed?” she asked. “This might get fuzzy.”

I opened a drawer and pulled out my Ktaxon 5mm laser pointer.

“So you’ll do it?” she said luxuriously. “I should warn you, I can only pay in Purina.”

“Salmon?” I said. “Or Chicken and Liver?”

She looked sheepish: “Chicken Gravy.”

“Hmm.” I thought about it. To be honest, I would have hissed my mother out a window for a spoonful of Meow Mix. “All right, I’ll be your puss-in-boots.”

She rubbed against me in appreciation. “Thank you, Sam,” she said. “Now, please, find my Mittens.”

Fantasy

Fiction — “The Kolache Kid”

Posted on by Desmond White

My take on a gingerbread man-style story with some crumbs of Wizard of Oz.

He was back, wagging his pasty pastry butt.

“You can’t catch me!” he shouted from the hill up ahead. The little tart did a cartwheel, then a back handspring, and then a series of side to side feints to make it harder for opponents to track his centerline. Mesa ignored all this. Well, at least she tried. She had pulled out a book on goblin kings while she rested, but her attention was less on Emperor Rikrak the Instigator and more on the dancing dough.

There was something in that pipsqueak falsetto that thwacked the nerves. And the tart had some tasty morsels, too. “Come on, smelly face, why don’t you pick up the pace!” was almost his catchphrase, and his litany included such classics as “Catch me if you can, pimple pan,” and “See you in a while, bile pile.”

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Satire
Posted on by Desmond White

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