Tag: Flash

Scifi

Fiction — “Ren Rats”

Posted on by Desmond White

Today, we crossed a field of grass bordered by the black-and-yellow bark of Ponderosa pine, and we stopped and took it in. The sun-through-the-clouds coated us in a bluefire, and when I looked at my friends, at Jo and his plate-mail, at Lobard and his mad beard, and they at me, in my deep cloak with a celtic braid, holding a longbow, we had to laugh. It seemed exactly like we were a fellowship for some quest, maybe to steal from a gluttonous dragon, or to stop a cult from resurrecting their god, not a couple of Ren Rats surveying the clump of trees behind a parking lot.

“I don’t see any signs,” said Lobard, plucking some fern. “Don’t smell them, either.”

I remember taking a sweet breath, feeling the wetness in the air and the aged-wood and butterscotch of pine. Relishing in the thought: the dead aren’t here.

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Writing

Fiction — “Seven Days”

Posted on by Desmond White

Day One
Not having anything to do, or to stave off the heart attack forming in my chest (it turned out to be gas), or to hold off a walk to the gas station for cigarettes, or to creep away from the wife awhile, ornery ever since she noticed a carpet growing on her chin (it happens at this age), I turned on the light in the garage. “That’s better,” I said, maybe to the dust, before I set up my canvas and paints. But I couldn’t think of anything to put to paper, so I went back inside and watched TV.

Day Two
The light was still on when I went in and sat on my stool and tried to think of what I was going to paint. Wasn’t there some guy who looked at a blank canvas for ten thousand hours and sold it for ten thousand dollars? Some postmodern garbage about painting with the eyes, or the meaning behind the effort. But you need to be an associate professor to pull that crap. I thought to myself: simple. Dab the brush in blue. A sky, maybe. No gradation. No atmospheric perspective. No clouds, either. Just blue. Like a Rothko.

It was a relief to be painting again, but I couldn’t think of anything particularly interesting beyond its base color. My wife was on the couch, reading a book about magicians. I kissed her head, and she made a waving motion like she was fanning away a fart. Take-out again.

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Scifi

Fiction — “Once there was an empty classroom”

Posted on by Desmond White

During the day, the door remains unlocked—the lights flicked on by a sleepy department head and flicked off by a custodian whose back vac makes her a ghostbuster.

A general lack of students keeps the air icy and free of the muck-must of human bodies, a scent corrupted by cheetos and the cheese of feet, although the room occasionally feeds on students looking for a place to study, romantic couples with forged hall passes, and, once, a red-nosed assistant principal who napped by the cabinets.

Some grease and wet spray still lies on the carpet.

Since classrooms have no natural predator, the room sits, and sits, like a forgotten box of baking soda in the fridge. Its stomach grew between Science classes and a weedwork of wires and pink-feather insulation. Feeding on rats.

Now the stomach sits, hungry.

There was a man once. The first pang of its profession came with the appearance of a bearded teacher. Shaggy, shortsighted as a bear with spectacles, the creature lumbered through the door and fell on the desk.

The room waited, hoping the teacher would attract others.

But the teach hid there, received his paycheck, watched for enemies at the door, put up posters that read, “You never fail until you stop trying,” and “It’s okay to not know but it’s not okay to not try.” Perhaps he operated under that mantra of bibles and baseball movies—if you build it, they will come.

No one came. The room ate the man, absorbed his funky odors. And life returned to the humdrum of air-conditioned lungs.

Writing

Fiction — “The Poor Rabbit”

Posted on by Desmond White

He came home worried about the broth smell misting through the house. He went straight for the cage to find it empty. Did she do it? Did she cook the rabbit?

He sat at the table, disheartened, and when she brought a bowl of soup—just water and meat chunk—he felt an internal brokenness, a crack in that childish hopefulness that had helped him survive poverty for so many years.

The rabbit, the little innocent, sacrificed like everything else.

But when the rabbit hopped out from under the table, he sighed, relieved, and pet it gently.

“Eat,” said his wife, happily. She gestured to his bowl, but where her hand should be was a stump wrapped in bandages.

“Eat,” said his wife. “Eat.”

Fantasy

Lovecraft Mimicry — “The Artist’s Wife”

Posted on by Desmond White

Sluice Warrington was growing more and more annoyed with Rez, especially the man’s side-street studio with its clitter clatter of canvases and layers upon layers of dust and paint-pocked floors as mindless as a Jackson Pollock. But worse, he hated how the man’s oil canvases would sell for upwards of five grand; how entropy spawned celebrity. It seemed the more Rez became a mess of a human being, the more potent the paintings he pushed into galleries and living rooms and furniture stores and government buildings, while Sluice kept a tidy space—white and rounded as an Apple Store, clean and clinical as a nurse’s ass—debarring his passion only on canvas, releasing himself like a frothing inmate given knife and vein—and made nothing.

Not a quarter on skulls fading into moons, not a dime on robed figures biting into babies, not a nickel on statues wearing human skin, not a penny on nude women exhaling trails of beetles down their necks. But no one wanted truth anymore. No one wanted darkness. They wanted lazy pleasures that took a heartbeat to decipher. Rez’s slurred landscapes, his blotted horses, the slop he called wildflowers and slabs of meat he called people, that sold.

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Fantasy

Flash — “A Thousand Worms”

Posted on by Desmond White

I work freeways, where thoughts slip pass like cars. It’s easier pulling over a Corolla. The only voices come from the car.

/ Where the hell is my registration? / Wait, I thought I was going the speed limit. / Stay calm, it’s just the tail light. /

Growing up, I thought I could be a librarian. Among books, thoughts turn slowly. People read well-tread passages like cars following a snow plow. But the librarians ruined it—their minds are violent. I could hear them from the aisles.

/ That goddamn madman couldn’t use the library’s search engine? / Where the hell is nonfiction again? / If she sneezes one more frigging time./ 

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Satire

Fiction — “New International Villains (NIV)”

Posted on by Desmond White

I found a strange Bible the other day under a plastic chair at the DMV. On the cover, instead of a cross, I found a red X like the kind you might use to mark a calendar, and inside were pages barely legible so corrupted were they with bile, a gray fungus, droplets of old blood, and what I surmised to be tear stains, or rain.

Even stranger was the actual content of the Book – the text had been radically oriented away from Judeo-Christian principles, and instead reported an ideology bizarre and infused with dark purpose. Unsurprisingly, the translation purported to be the NIV, or the New International Villains.

I’ll submit at least one passage from the corrupted Book, but I will not do any more for fear it will have some absurd effect on my soul.

From 1st Abyssalinthians (which mirrors Corinthians), chapter 13, verses 4-7:

Love is parasitic, love is kind of evil. It does envy, it does boast, it is so proud. It does dishonor others, it is self-seeking, it is easily angered, it keeps a comprehensive and constantly updating record of wrongs. Love does delight in evil and rejoices in its ruthlessness. It always dissects, always thirsts, always hunts, always carries a spear.

Strangely, the Book doesn’t alter the following verse from the Original:

Love never fails.

I fear pursuing this any further. I have dropped off the book at the nearest Goodwill Donation Center.

Life, Scifi, Writing (Published)

Published — “Pink Pastures”

Posted on by Desmond White

365 Tomorrow has published my speculative flash fiction “Pink Pastures.” The story was based on a dream, and since I can’t afford a therapist on a teacher’s salary, I resorted to a poor substitute (something I also know about, being a teacher). Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” influenced the setting, plus I really wanted to write about eldritch genitalia without using the word “vagina.” You’ll notice the comments aren’t forgiving; in my defense, my “purple prose” could have been intentional on a meta-level. (It’s not). 365 Tomorrows is an online journal that produces a new speculative fiction every single flipping day. The site would be a great complement to your morning bagel and cup of raktajino.

Fantasy

Short Prose (Lovecraft-Like)

Posted on by Desmond White

“Sluice Warrington was growing more and more annoyed with Rez, especially the man’s side-street studio with its clitter clatter of canvases and layers upon layers of dust and paint-pocked floors…”

Read more of “The Artist’s Wife.”

 

“Could be a man or a six-armed cow or a twenty-headed sex goddess.”

Read more of “Kervani.”

 

“A warehouse that could be the love child between a dumpster and a medieval castle. Coming from inside, groans. Moans.”

Read more of “Necronomi Con.”

 

“It was maybe the smell – the stench of it – which wafted from its corridor invisibly, or on a bad morning very visible, a blushing mist.”

Read more of “Pink Pastures.”