“The android was making them all uncomfortable with its Zelzer Stiff eyeing them from its hip.”
Read more of “A Zelzer Stiff.”
“Between two trees exploded into boulder stumps, Elemmírë raised a fist. Behind him, ten figures, barely visible above the gloom and bloom, dropped to their knees and scanned the street.”
“There’s always that one friend who sticks to the group like a discount sticker on a used book…”
My pieces “And We Who Never Died” and “Scarabaeidae” were published in the Spring Issue of The Tishman Review, a well-respected quarterly magazine devoted to prose, poetry, and people. Behind the paper’s philosophy is the idea that literature’s “value to humanity is beyond measure.” Editors must “remain open to the possibility that an individual work may take us beyond the boundaries known today.”
“And We Who Never Died” began as a metaphysical conflict. What if when we die, our souls don’t abide the afterlife, or face annihilation, but transfer to the objects around us? What horrors would arise? What fears? The story—about a mother sending her children to search the house for their dead father—is one of many scenarios that might result.
“Scarabaeidae” is an ode to my wife, to us. I try to write without goo, mush, doggerel, singsong, cockamamie, and all those wonderful descriptors of poor poetry. But then, “Scarabaeidae” does have a line that begins with “shall I compare thee to.” Maybe it works since it ends in “a dung beetle.” Glimpsed here is the failure and mundanity of the struggle to love another.
You can pick up a copy of The Tishman Review from their website or order it from the source on Amazon.
“Grubbs wasn’t the first to use an EMP, but he was the first to use a plasma cannon.”
Read more of “Another School Shooting.”
“The first thing Grandma did when she found she had super powers was beat up her son.”
“The child dragged his mom to the shop to look at the latest line of earths…”
Theme of Absence just published my comedic take on extraterrestrial nihilism (the story’s called “Spheres“). The digital magazine is devoted to speculative flash fiction, and primarily posts original fiction on Fridays. These pieces are accompanied by a Q&A with the author, which I think is a really smart move on the editor’s part because then readers can come for writing and/or writing advice. And if that’s not enough for the literary enthusiast, the editor and owner of Theme of Absence also runs Write Good Books, a blog dedicated to producing useful writing resources and articles.
“I have a feeling,” she whispered to a decapitated paratrooper enthroned in his chute, “that you were like an upside down map.”
“And you weren’t made of sticks,” she told his member, which was suffering some pretty normal rigor mortis. She cocked her head as if judging the time from the sun, but you couldn’t see the sun right now. It was blocked.
She judged for a mo, checked her watch, then clamored up a B-52 stratofortress lying in a tilt. Evelyn climbed the wing casually, ignoring the billows smoking from heaters, engines, dead bodies. She danced over a guttural rotor blade slowly winding itself to a premature death, then looked at a man split in thirds.
We could have been, she fluttered. One happy swell before the wave.
Between two trees exploded into boulder stumps, Elemmírë raised a fist. Behind him, ten figures, barely visible above the gloom and bloom, dropped to their knees and scanned the street. They relied solely on the ghostly green readouts from their face masks, as their actual sights would have been distracted by the feral tapestry of flowers, the result not only of civilization gone wild but the biodegradable ammunition being used in the War. Inside each bullet was a gene seed which, when struck by fire, would sprout by day’s end into a single flower. It’d been the only agreed-upon convention between the elf factions—a way of turning war zones into gardens, of reducing the carbon imprint from endless shelling.
For a heartbeat, Elemmírë’s Sight picked up a cracked skull, lilac seeping out like purple brain. Then he was Focused on the lights of armored cars bouncing across perforated rock-wake. A set of hand signals and the Ten disappeared, their gaudy red-and-gold camouflage blending with laceleaf and marigold. What Elemmírë’s scouts were about to do was an ugly thing; an undignified ambush of a supply convoy. But in another way, a way beyond the soulless tactical hell of battle, they’d be returning motorized death-cannons and plated mercs wearing the ears of enemies around their necks to the serenity of nature.
Published at Rune Bear Weekly on September 27, 2018.
[The follow is a drabble, or 100-word short story.]
There’s always that one friend who sticks to the group like a discount sticker on a used book, and who is tolerated by necessity because any removal might leave behind a sticky residue. Among Skye, Keith, and Kim, this was Lames, whose Mom had long admitted to being high when she tried to write “James” on the birth certificate. When Skye, Keith, and Kim came upon the Cube, without hesitation they excluded Lames from the Pact. And they didn’t care years later when, at Lames’s 89th birthday, he glared bitterly at their youthful bodies. They could wait a little longer.
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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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.
Desmond, Write 