Tag: Weird

Fantasy

Drabble — “Baby’s on the Wall Again”

Posted on by Desmond White

A story in exactly 100 words.

Mother put down baby, avoiding kicking legs, all twelve of them. She wrapped a diaper around baby’s waist, whispering gently. Baby giggled, his mandibles clacking. Mother smiled. “He’s putting on weight. The diapers are getting tighter.”

Underwear secure, baby scurried up the wall.

Father was releasing torrents into the sink. “Another bite?” she asked. Father groaned, hurled, didn’t reply, raised an arm. Gauze barely hid where baby had bit freely. Mother came to the kitchen to hold her husband, to let the sense of wrong invade her, before the fog returned, before she pulled baby back down from the ceiling.

Scifi

Fiction — “Elegy of Entrails”

Posted on by Desmond White

This is a story I wrote about faith, cosmic horror, and how sentient species of our intelligence might be nothing but germs to the Eldritch, but aren’t without some cunning.

The gray ape scurried across circles, spins, and spirals, the feral geometry of a temple that once gave her the shakes, once reminded her of mournful teeth.

Now the architecture was as familiar as her mate, although there was no time to admire the fractals, to run her hands over the pillars. She was in a hurry.

She was expected.

Before the statue of Ezum, the ape kneeled, said a well-practiced prayer, and unsheathed fifteen arms, revealing parchment and bottles and green-yellow feathers from her sleeves. Every circle priest wore the robe. It was useful for implements and unflattering bodies.

Ezum would arrive. Somehow, someway, through its temple effigy, Ezum spoke, and the priests listened, and replied, and scratched the words into the Elegy of Entrails.

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Scifi

Fiction — “Once there was an empty classroom”

Posted on by Desmond White

Weird fiction about an empty classroom that develops a taste for the people inside.

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.

Fantasy

Fiction — “The Artist’s Wife”

Posted on by Desmond White

This is a Lovecraftian story about an artist who discovers that the price of greatness might be the creation itself.

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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Satire

Fiction — “New International Villains (NIV)”

Posted on by Desmond White

A quick fiction about an anti-bible, as inspired by Grant Morrison and Jorge Borges.

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.