Tag: Flash

Writing

Fiction — “Where was Freud at Pompeii?”

Posted on by Desmond White

A train stop and three occupants. The benches look like grills for our asses. I’m cooking. Temp is what? 99? 103? You can see the swelter in the air. It reminds you of the word “billowing” which is a ridiculous word. The heat’s cooking these benches, prepping my ass to be put on a patty. Train. In the distance. Tiptoeing towards us like bare feet on hot pavement. The blue rocks next to the tracks are shaking. The word clang comes to mind, which sounds like an ethnic slur.

INT. TRAIN

I’m huddled between a chubber in a tie and the meanest blonde I’ve ever wanted. The power lines and electric boxes zoom past – the industrial zones – the other trains – I could be the future. A mound of shatter zips past. Ragnarocks! I imagine a universe constructed with jigsaw pieces most of them lost. A blue spot here, a smiling red there, and gaps in the teeth. I wish the stars were a tapestry, the sun a boiled egg, this train the moon. I want to get out but I can’t (I’m stuck between animal and fiction). Instead barn doors swish, toilets go plunk!, and finally, finally, finally the next stop rolls up.

Creativity isn’t a disembodied head mulling through the multiverse: coldly indifferent, logical, wilting. Creativity isn’t a spade in hand, a pot the other. It can assimilate, steal, kill, and certainly rape. A square is a rectangle, but not. However, we forget that the circle is more natural, a pagan beauty. Creativity itself is not creating. It needs arms, legs, torsos, abdomens, stingers, hair. It’s not freedom, not prison. It walks behind your eyes, away from prying thoughts, below moving blades – where shadow is light. Creativity can be in the stocks and still be stronger. A shopkeeper who doesn’t sell, a werewolf who won’t bite. A rose that listens to the road and makes no sound.

Where was Freud at Pompeii? This train’s taking me to death.

Writing

Fiction — “Kervani”

Posted on by Desmond White

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

We can’t tell. There are too many Orders in the way. Too many black-and-white cloaks crinkling like choppy seas of newspaper.

The Orders go as follows: the Nine Apostles, the Elite Select, the Elite-Lite, the Demi-Elders, the Mystical Ring, the Phytes, and finally the endless serfs and smurfs and their bare-chested children and cattle. The Orders follow Kervani. We follow them. We, being Doug and Armani and myself, chafed and sun-scratched and willing to tour Hell just to get a snap of Satan.

They call us Iconoclasts but really we’re photographers, with every news outlet from here to Timbuktu willing to pay us the—eh? Doug just informed me that Timbuktu is two nations over. From here to Jakarta.

I’m thinking the sun’s fried their brains. If I said the world is flat, the earth is the center of the universe, sins build up in the pancreas, we should be bled from our livers to balance the humors, a little man operates the brain, animals compete to reincarnate into ghosts, blood makes the grass grow, I’d be locked in a padded closet. But the masses follow Kervani’s farts like they’re heralding a new age. They save his sweat in vials, listen to his speeches on audiobook.

Tourists, too, in faded green buses. Taking pictures of the shaking girls, skeptical, scandalized, complaining about the heat. The guides lead them in spiritual songs, trying to connect fanny-packed brains to the Order of Things. But mostly they can’t wait to return to five-star mattresses. Can’t blame them. Sometimes I’m tempted to follow along. Get a cheap hotel, a cheap girl.

Other times I have dreams of a different sort. I receive ‘the Cosmic Call.’ So does Doug. And the others. We all do. It’s like a whisper and an itch and a boner, and it’s supposed to be Kervani. The six-armed, twenty-headed sex cow.

We dwindle. I’ll find a camera, smashed, dust on the lens. Another convert. Those of us who remain hope to sneak the Vanguard, to rush the tent with the golden wool. An exclusive interview, a photo-op, a Q&A with Kervani looking like a mystic hobo in his sack robes (or her, lovely, in her coral pink scarf; or it, bleating sagely).

And maybe we have other reasons to make the hajj.

Instead, I take pictures, and wait, and wonder if God grew sick of Moses.

Satire

Case of the Key Espy

Posted on by Desmond White

From The Santa Barbara Hounds Case Files

Case File #1 #86

Agents Involved: Wilder, Percipheles and Reeves.

February 18th.

Wilder found a key #1203-16 on the grass near Storke Tower. On its head was printed University of California Santa Barbara: Duplication Prohibited. Attached to the keychain was a bottle opener with the word Bathroom taped on the side. Wilder took the keychain off and attached it to his own set of keys. After consulting Reeves and Percipheles about Case #86, he then sleuthed campus trying the key on different doorways, to no avail. HOUNDS!

February 19th.

During an interview with the campus newspaper The Bottomline, Wilder overheard mention that the key to The Bottomline’s handicapped restrooms was missing! He said he didn’t know anything about it. HOUNDS!

February 20th.

Wilder and Percipheles checked The Bottomline’s handicapped bathrooms. The key worked! After relieving themselves, they went back to The Studio and closed the case. They were going to celebrate with victory wine, but a fly had gotten into their bottle of Barefoot Sauvignon Blanc.

“What a buzz kill,” quipped Percipheles quite successfully. Reeves drank some anyway. They decided not to return the key as Wilder wanted to keep the bottle opener.

Case Solved

Writing

Fiction — “Rue/Ruin”

Posted on by Desmond White

Autumn:  I like to be a cynic

Spring:  a professional mood killer

Autumn:  life’s funny to the emotionless

Autumn:  yeah, but the truth is ur pretty sensitive

Autumn:  u cant fool me

Autumn:  im not just a hat rack my friend

Spring:  guess the same could be said of you, though you put on a good show

Autumn:  i do my best…

Autumn:  why do we do that?

Spring:  maybe something’s wrong with the world, something’s wrong with us, and the interactions in between really hurt.

Autumn:  im not sure if i like that

Autumn:  i just did something really dumb

Autumn:  i have no idea where i put my band aids and i cut my hand, so i decided to put nail polish on it to stop the bleeding..

Autumn:  it worked but it hurts like a bitch

Autumn:  very funny but it hurts

Autumn:  im laugh moaning

Autumn:  like ow ow hahahhahahah oww

Writing

Fiction — “Plain Boxes”

Posted on by Desmond White

I dated Miranda (a fake name but not a fake person), the little swashbuckler, respondent to the slightest touch, a child in every conversation except for the one in which she broke it off, when her face froze with a look of sweet pie, her freckles spattered, that Pomeranian hair, those steel-white eyes like a photo in grayscale. “It’s you, not me, really,” she said. And she said it without laughing, without a huge plastic smile, without Barbie. She said it with a storeroom empty of guilt.

“What?” I asked, as sweaty as a basketball player in a Gatorade commercial.

“We’re done and you’ve got to get going,” she said. And just like that.

Writing

Fiction — “Tea Maps”

Posted on by Desmond White

As I write this, she’s waiting for the red eye. I wish I could say that she’s leaving me forever, as Dad used to say about my Uncle in jail, “out of life, out of mind.” But nothing’s definite, definitive, finite on this annoying planet. We might be fucking in a week.

We looked at each others’ hands before we left, mine flat and ready-to-be crinkled, like a new map, hers rough as a shark fin. She called me a new soul. She said she was a teacup that’d been broken over and over again, repaired each time, never truly whole.

We never talked about the old man. Why music made us sad. Sex, about us and sex. Forbidden fruits. I never told her what she meant.