Make a Better Brody by G. Arthur Brown

In this canoe, adrift at sea, I do not feel truly secure from the bites of sharks. The Ocean of Shame is just half a channel away.

"Open boats be damned!" Shaking your fist at the canoe doesn't help, I can tell you with more assurance than I have that I will not be eaten by sharks. For a moment I think I see a huge sausage just beneath the surface of the briny deep. It is just a dead manatee. I poke at it with my spear and it bursts open, oozing decay that bubbles up and forms a foul smelling pool. The sea here is incredibly calm. I grab the locket that hangs around my neck and hold it tightly in my fist. "Veronica! Why did I ever leave thee?" I pose the question in a deliberately melodramatic fashion. In my mind I see her Victorianesque visage, not bothering to open locket and look at the portrait that has been emblazoned on my mind's eye.

An albatross squeals overhead. I convince myself he's lamenting Veronica's distance from here. She should have been in this canoe. I fall in love with the oozing corpse of the sea creature now floating well behind me. I name the canoe Later. I pat the leg, that appears to be attached to me, and I say, "They just don't make canoes like they used to. I bet you a shark could snap this thing in two. I saw that movie. I think Paul Newman would have made a better Brody." The albatross squeals her agreement. I sample the fine wine that is the sea. Blurriness ensues.

Copyright G. Arthur Brown
Artwork by Salvador Dali

The Green Room: 3rd Iteration of The Meta-fictional Juggling Troupe by R.A. Harris

The thing about virtuality is that it really isn't that different to normaluality. Oh sure, there's the dizzying array of lime green processes that have no meaning, and cut and slice and mate with and engulf one another in an attempt at, what they call, “affection”, but to any normalized observer it is clearly the murder and appropriation of energies that look a little tasty or might go well with the furniture in an alternative home. But aside from that slight divergence in superficial appearance, there really isn't much between the virtual processes that produce phenomena and the phenomena themselves, which is considerably less exciting news than many speculative theories on the nature of being and everything put forward in the past few centuries, but such is the nature of existence.

Tomlinson kicked a stone, only to discover it was a frog, and what's more, it was a frog that when placed just where it was prior to his kicking it, provided key structural support to the entirety of being. Red lights swam through murky water and yellow tape criss-crossed over every surface.

After a moment or two everything simply vanished.

Then it re-appeared as it was, with just a subtle difference, everything was now a slightly lighter green, even bordering on yellow in parts.

The parasitic logicians were gorging themselves on the logical foundation of the virtual reality support system. Beeps from hidden speakers and oscillators showing a fading heartbeat signaled that the world's heart was still kicking, or punching - it couldn't be certain given that it only had ghost limbs, and wasn't sure which way its up was. To what end, and exactly what kind of fluid, this heart still pumped was up for debate.

Tomlinson and the troupe must've twisted and folded into at least twelve thousand different species of Ideas, their limbs rotating and splitting and bending through hidden dimensions, before settling on their current forms. They still felt like jugglers, though more amateur than before. Tomlinson even had a badge on that said as much. Gavin had goat legs but instead of hooves he had waffles for feet. Eric didn't have any legs at all, but as he was particularly lazy this was not an issue and was in fact a rather moot point to bring up.

Tomlinson was a professional at heart (even though that was where the amateur badge had stuck) and so began a new routine by throwing the dragon and the two young souls in a conceptual manner towards Eric. Eric sat in a boiling tub of water, screaming about how he wasn't a witch, Eric was the witch. Then the bath was in Eric. Then Eric was in the bath again.

Still, the dragon and the two souls were in a flight that could have rivaled Jesus' ascension to Heaven it looked so darn good, heading towards Eric, who was ranting and raving in the bath full of now luke-warm water, now frozen solid, now evaporated, when Gavin, being blind as he was, walked right into the path of these mythic projectiles. They struck him on the forehead, bowling him over. He folded into origami pseudo-dimensions until he was one-dimensional, which was an achievement considering there were no dimensions for his one dimension to exist in.

Tomlinson became Gavin. It wasn't a choice on his part, but given the circumstance, he wasn't about to complain. Gavin had a far better body anyway. The new combined being felt like his name was Tomgavlinson.

The three juggled objects became one, became a soccer ball, became a hot potato, became Tomgavlinson's own stupid sense of self. He bicycled kicked the conceptual iteration of his own stupid sense of self over his head towards and away from Eric in an impossible movement. It spread into a triptych piece of art that critics would refer to as “a shoddy use of imagination” and then unanimously slam as a feeble attempt at “weird for the sake of... well it's not even apparent what the point is, but the green is giving me a headache”. Thankfully, the shitty art then de-materialised just as Eric reached to catch it. His hands had become black-holes again.

“Eric,” Tomgavlinson mumbled through a mouth hidden somewhere under a roll of fat that grew around his face like a bubbling tumor, “Didn't I tell you to get that checked out?”

Eric blushed a deep blue. Then he started screaming about which witch would eat his sandwich. Tomgavlinson squashed a logician beneath an Idea of a toaster and a smattering of logic  caused him to diverge into Tomgav and Lininson. At least there were two of them again, they both thought, though not in unison, that would just be daft.



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R. A. Harris still lives in England, a merry land made up inside his head. He writes bizarre fiction and some of it gets published. Go here: www.leakylibido.wordpress.com to see some of his famous flash work.

Copyright 2013 R.A. Harris 

Artwork Giorgio de Chirico 

Funereal Disease by G. Arthur Brown

I felt embarrassed to be at my own funeral. Time travel created these sorts of faux pas. I had trimmed my beard earlier in the day, from my reference point, or many years in the past. But I still felt out of place.

The mortician, his three strands of hair plastered to his scalp, gazed at the body in the open casket, shaking his head. “I can’t get the bones to stay in,” he kept saying by way of apology to everyone gathered. Most people ignored him, pushing forward to flamingo pink chairs. No one wanted to stand the whole time. If the awkward flapping of the carrion birds wasn’t enough, there were low parlor ceilings to contend with.

So they all huddled in, crouching if they could not find a seat. A man was forced to remove his ten gallon hat and a woman to undo her beehive hairdo. I noticed a crunching under my feet, as if someone had dropped pretzels everywhere, but the lighting was too dim to see. I regretted attending; time travel wasn’t cheap. Deliberately I crushed something under my heel. “Chicken bones,” said the homely lady in furs next to me with a wince.

“No, no. Bones of the deceased, I’m afraid,” the mortician said. “Just so many and so small, I couldn’t keep them all in the cada—the body. I’ll give everyone five dollars back at the door as you exit. I’m just so sorry.” But none of the guests seemed to care. I hunched over, grabbing for a bone. The one I snatched did look like a chicken bone with some dried up meat left on, though it was distinctly greenish.

“Our bones are green on the inside,” said a rugged gentleman in front of me. He handed me his business card, reading: In the Business of Crying. It listed twelve different email addresses. “Are you the deceased’s grandson?”

I’ll be forty-three years older when I pass. The attendants assumed I was a relative, but no one seemed to realize I had time traveled from the past, despite my name tag giving my true and full name. I did not answer, so he simply nodded with a sad smile, adding: “Glad we could both be inside him here, with the bones.”

I was very upset with the whole affair, and I hadn’t yet been to pay my own respects to myself. “I’ll travel back and get myself a better funeral,” I fumed.

The woman in furs turned to me and said, “Don’t waste your time. It won’t work.” Then I noticed the woman was actually me, a few years older, in disguise. It was not the look I was meant to sport.

“Instead, I shall simply die right now to save myself the embarrassment.” So I marched up front, pulled the future me from the casket and lay down in it. Everyone clapped as I forced myself to die there. Some of them were me, so they knew how much it meant to us.

Copyright 2010 G. Arthur Brown

Artist, Genius, Sorcerer by G. Arthur Brown

The cover of the text appeared to have droplets of water on it, so, using a napkin, I made an effort to wipe them away. I was shown to be a fool, for these were not water droplets at all, but merely an effect of the cover painting. I flipped through the internal notations, finding the artwork credited to one David Caldwell. A painting this convincingly three dimensional requires a considerable amount of skill. One of two conclusions would explain this:

A)    David Caldwell is a genius.

B)    David Caldwell is a sorcerer.

This is not an exclusionary disjunction, I decided. He might be both a genius and a sorcerer. But I was forced to consider that, although I did not know much of sorcery, it could be presumed that a work of three dimensional art is not an incredibly difficult thing to create by sorcery, so I deduced that if he were a genius, he was likely not also a sorcerer.

But upon formalizing this note I reconsider. As a hypothetical sorcerer operating in a society that does not readily acknowledge the existence of said black art, perhaps it would be ill-considered to commit acts which could only be accounted for by sorcery, thus giving up the game and revealing the true nature of his powers. It would then seem that an intelligent sorcerer may use his arcane abilities to produce three dimensional works of art that might otherwise be assumed to be created by non-sorcerer geniuses. If this is correct and he is a sorcerer, then he is likely a genius.

A conclusion would require further research.

His small terrier dog was harder to apprehend than I had presumed. Presumption has shown itself, once again, to be my undoing. In the process I was bitten numerous times. It becomes far more difficult to retain one’s composure when one is bleeding into the flowerbed of a well-known artist, possibly also genius and/or sorcerer. The prospect of climbing back over the fence was more and more daunting after each dog bite on either my hands or ankles. Surprisingly, the dog was able to lull me into a false sense of security in several instances, at which point I would bend over and try to snatch up the small creature. This is when he would occasion to bite my face.

The dog could be the familiar of a sorcerer. Conversely, it could be a rambunctious terrier dog attacking an invader of its home territory. It was, without a doubt, the most cunning animal I have ever encountered during my research. But could this be accounted for by mere innate animal intelligence? A conclusion would require further research.

Upon eating the dog’s heart, I was unable to come to a confident conclusion in the matter. It had taken considerable time to light Caldwell’s grill, and shortly after I had worked out the organs of the tiny beast, someone had alerted the police to my presence. In my head I am marking the case as open until I can complete the necessary investigation. As I fled the scene, I wondered if Caldwell also had a cat or a parrot or, possibly, a large lizard like an iguana. Hamsters and the like have such small innards that I have never found them useful in my scientific inquiries.


Copyright 2013 G. Arthur Brown

Where Babies Come From by G. Arthur Brown

I want to kill this baby, but I’m in the middle of making spaghetti sauce and I really feel the need to get it right this time. Earlier in the week I’d attempted spaghetti sauce, but the failure was so miserable that I pretended it was chili.

Another failed attempt could spell the end of my self-esteem. It’s been a hard couple months.

The baby’s mother doesn’t understand. She gets her sauces out of a can or a jar. She doesn’t think we need to kill the baby. I’ve explained it to her. She nods but then a few minutes later she asks, “Do we have to do this?”

The phone rings. I answer it. “Mr. Thusandso? The pictures of your child are ready.”

“I don’t recall taking photos to be developed.”

“Well, they are here. You should come get them.”

I hang up and tell the baby’s mother I need to run down to the photo lab. I explain how she must stir the sauce every fifteen seconds with the wooden spoon. She doesn’t want to do it. “You don’t want to do anything, do you?” I say. “Back in 5 minutes.”

The photo lab is operating out of the back of a Winnebago. I hadn’t noticed that before. I knock on the flimsy, aluminum door. It creeks open to reveal the startlingly aged faced of a female photo developer. “Come inside,” the old woman tells me. The chemicals have made her even more prune-like.

The interior is decorated like a palm reader was the prior occupant. The lamps have beaded fringe, the lighting is dim, there’s an icon of a saint with four hands, palms facing front. That kind of thing.

“Sit at the table,” she tells me, calling from the kitchen area. I sit. It’s a small, round, wooden table, like a fortune teller might use. She strides in, her shawl waving wildly about her. She tosses a packet of photos onto the table. “Seventy-five bucks,” she says.

I open the packet and examine the photos within. They are of a teen boy, his Bar Mitzah. From the looks of the clothes, this happened some time in the 1970s. “I have a daughter. She’s still an infant. And we are Roman Catholic.”

“Oh, some people are very picky,” she says. I feel uncomfortable not taking the photos. She has clearly gone to a lot of trouble, making a dark room in an RV bathroom sink. I hand her an eighty dollar bill. “Keep the change,” I say.

When I get back to the apartment I show the pictures to the baby’s mother. “Oh, this might be the future! Do we have to kill the baby?”

I explain again that the baby is a girl, but she shakes her head and rebuts, “What about the semen?”

I don’t know what to tell her. I had noticed something strange about the baby. It happened the day before. The baby was crying. The teardrops were too thick and cloudy to be normal tears. She was leaking seminal fluid, impregnating herself. They won’t let us spay her until she’s six months old.  I fear that she’ll birth a litter of subbabies, and I’ll have absolutely no time to make spaghetti sauce. And, on principle, we just can’t have that kind of thing going on in this day and age. Bisexualism is only suited to the invertebrates, a relatively well-known scientist told me once.

“She’s still a girl,” I say, but the baby’s mother doesn’t listen. “We are also not Jewish,” I point out. “These photos look like they are someone else’s past, not our future.”

The baby is crying. And I notice that the sauce is burning. The baby’s mother has been stirring the sauce every twenty to twenty-two seconds.

I huff. The day is not starting out how I envisioned it. Now the baby’s mother is crying.  She picks up the baby and shushes her. “Okay, okay,” I tell her. “We can kill the baby tomorrow.” 

Copyright 2013 G. Arthur Brown

Band of Bass by G. Arthur Brown

Mal surprises me by turning around quickly and saying, excitedly, “I pulled your mother’s pork!” 

At the time, I’m kind of in love with the idea of making a surreal tele-dramedy starring Anna Friel as a sultry dream thief and Crispin Glover as a glove-maker with the ability to read gloves like gypsy ladies read palms.  But a person would have to wear the gloves long enough to break them in, to give them creases.  Oh, and they’d have to be leather gloves.  And then, I guess, he has to put the gloves on to get the full feeling.  The premise still isn’t finalized when I’m shocked out of my reverie by Mal’s declaration.

I am horrified, to say the least. It is the worst thing anyone has ever said to me, and yet I have no idea what it means.  “What? What the hell do you mean?”

I should describe Mal to you because you’ve never met him.  He’s shrewd and cagey, and he collects jam pots, which are things that British people put their jelly in.  Mal is British. 

He doesn’t normally speak of pork, and not of my mother, either.  When he speaks, it is of lifts and lorries and gunless coppers.  He sings in a band, of course.  College radio loves him.  Can’t stop playing that first album over and over.  You have to be in college to like his band’s music.  A sophomore described them as “a Beatlesque Gang of Four with three bass players.”  Everyone in the band plays bass.  But they have electronic apparatus to make the basses sound like other instruments.  The band is the “complete opposite of the Doors,” according to one stoned poli-sci major.

Mal, with some kind of juice dripping from his chin, chooses to simply reiterate: “I pulled your mother’s pork, mate.”

“Them’s fightin’ words, Mal.  Take it back.”

“Have it your way.”  He shrugs and goes back to fiddling with his HAM radio.  “Technology won’t save us.”

“It has surely saved your band of bass.  Otherwise, you guys would sound like a retarded Claypool masturbation session.”

“Are you sure you don’t want one of these pork sandwiches?”  He motions to the plate sitting on the desk next to the radio. 

“I swore to the Jewish g-ds that I would never eat my mother’s pork, nor be stewed in her milk, though the latter is getting harder and harder to avoid.”  I peer out the window at the milk drenched landscape.  Global warming has really pulled a doozy.  You can’t go anywhere without smelling the stench of spoiling dairy.

“That’s your mother’s milk, mate.  Have some bloody respect…. Oh, hello!  Lord, is that You?  I have finally got You on my HAM radio!”  Mal is clearly excited as he speaks into the microphone, but the Lord isn’t speaking English in reply, so I have a hard time making out His end of the convo.

“First of all, Lord, I’d like to let you know we need a wet cleanup on aisle Earth,” Mal says, and then chuckles at his little joke.  “Second of all, Lord, I do want to do the live studio session.  The other lads are quite excited about it.” 

The Lord doesn’t offer to produce many bands for live radio broadcast.  Mal is honored, and he should be.  But strangely he hadn’t accepted the offer on the spot when it was first proffered last Wednesday.  He wanted to play it cool, I guess.  I think the Lord understands that sort of thing.  I get that feeling from the way He says His words, because I can’t actually divine their meanings.  And I’ve used an online translator and everything.

Suddenly the transmission is interrupted with a commercial for Rectal Assassination 8, starring Anna Friel and Crispin Glover as anal saboteurs who attempt to prolapse the rectums of five not-so-lucky college girls. It takes place during the Cold War, and there are Soviet agents embedded in the linings of their colons.  

“I can’t wait for RA 9,” Mal says.  “That one takes place during the American Revolution.  Tricorne hats abound.  John Paul Bones has his spy glass up a sailor’s porthole right in the magazine advert. Which reminds me, mate.  I pulled your mother’s pork!”

I have to assume the Lord hears the homicide over the HAM radio.  How could he not?  The murder weapon was the HAM radio.   

Copyright 2013 G. Arthur Brown

Stone Sex by Meg Sefton

Unfortunately, there is nothing to be done about the coupling of tombstones. First of all, their copulations are deafening — how they grunt and sigh! — and secondly, the sparks spewing from the friction — blue, green, yellow, and purple sparks — ignite fires in the dry season. (And when the fires erupt, corpses awaken and are enraged. They must be put down by truckloads of cool, damp earth.)  But the biggest problem with stone sex is this: A cemetery of newly formed stones.  And no one has managed to escape the certain pairing between death and a stone.

One time, a stone cutter, ambitious that his town should live, fashioned the tombstones into paving stones, stones for the fireplace, the threshold, the garden, thinking he could circumvent their original purpose. When he disappeared they only found a pile of stones beside the cemetery where he had been working.

What was convenient about the situation, however, was that the stone pile was a nice place for the townspeople to eat their sandwiches, so they stopped asking questions and began hanging out. Also, what was good about it was that the smooth stones made nice little ledges for their beer. So when a man did not return home at night, other women would relay this information to his frustrated wife: “Oh, he's still on the stone pile.”

One night a man materialized across the cemetery where they were sitting and drinking.

“Are you a ghost?” said Jacob. He had begun driving them crazy with this idea of diverting the creek so it ran next to the graves. They could sink a barrel of ale into its cool body, he said. It would be woman for them and they could be like the man, filling her vessel, and together, they could make cool beer. He was always wild with his crazy metaphors and his stupid ideas. His horny talk was probably inspired by the horny stones they had subdued for the season by anchoring them to the ground with chains.

“I'm not a ghost,” said the man.

“Are you a newcomer?”

“ This implies I'm staying.”

“Are you God?”

“Would God do this?” and he reached into one of their sacks, grabbed a beer, popped off the cap, and guzzled it down.

“I don't know,” Phillip said. He was the town tombstone engraver and he was a philosopher of sorts. Engraving the dash between the dates of birth and death made him shaky. What did the dash represent? It was all so ordinary. Were they all so alike? It made him depressed. “Jesus ate even after he rose from the grave.”

“Stop being morbid,” Jacob said. His wife Tatiana said the same thing. In fact, he sometimes wondered if they slept together. They said many of the same things, in exactly the same way. It made him angry, then it made him depressed and he couldn't do anything about it. He couldn't even prove anything definitively.

“Well I can assure you I'm not God. Excuse me, this is underfoot,” and he picked up a long-handled scythe they had not noticed before. Apparently it had been on the ground. He leaned it against a tree. “I hate it when stuff like this could bean you in the head any moment if you step on it wrong.”

A scythe, what a cliché, thought Phillip who expected more from the grim reaper. Did even religious clichés have to come true? Were there no surprises?

“I've had sex with your wives. They're all very good. You are lucky men.”

Was this guy nuts? Phillip thought. They would kill him, all together, with their hands around his throat. There were about twenty five of them. But he wasn't a cliché in this: He was pretty buff for the grim reaper.

“While you guys have been yucking it up on the pile, which by the way, is the grave of a dead man, I've been enjoying life. Your women are very lonely and very receptive. I've learned how to knit, how to dandle your children on my knee. They gave me tea and gossip and practically talked me into their beds. I love this town. I love this place. I think I'll stay.”

“We've got to get rid of him,” said Jacob when the man had wandered off into the misty fields with his scythe. “Our women were fine before he got here. We're screwed.”

“We must have interfered with the balance of things,” said Phillip. “Maybe that's why we're being cursed with this maggot.”

And so that's what they did. They released the stones so they could couple, except at night, when they wanted to drink, they cooled them down with water from the creek and it was quiet and peaceful again and the men got drunk and the women went back to their creative, secret occupations which involved, among other things, ruling the world. 

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Meg Sefton lives and writes in Winter Springs, Florida at the edges of suburban sprawl. In fact, keep going down her road a tad and you hit the east coast where, in her mind, she is frolicking in the surf. She blogs her original stuff, some of which have made it to publication: http://blackshattered.wordpress.com/.

Copyright 2013 Meg Sefton.

This Year's Exhibition

Barley was a beautiful middle-aged woman with hard Hs all over her face who could barely get the horses to stop trying to eat her. She presented the exhibit after the horses had been drugged with a derivative of a flower that only grows in a three foot square plot of the Amazon. It blooms but one night a year. The drug synthesized from this flower had a value of one million dollars per dose, but it was worth it to get the horses off her, Barley reasoned.

She presented the exhibit well, but this exhibit was not nearly as impressive as the one from last year (hardly any mutilates, only one amputee) so all the Einstein-haired scientists scowled. This should have been their big day. Instead, it ended for many of them in the same manner as sex. They left weeping and clutching at their wild, white hair. Barley wished the exhibit would have been better, and bit her nails, and fixed her hair, even though all the scientists had left and even though none of the scientists were even remotely attractive men, nor did the scientists have time for sexual relationships, not with this year's dearth of brilliant new specimens.

"I wish I would have chosen a different career path," Barley said to one of the specimens in the exhibit. It nodded politely and requested to be released from its cage, as usual. As usual, Barely ignored the response and pushed the button that supplied electrical current to the grid beneath the specimen's feet. The specimen screamed and jumped monkey-like around the cage. Barley barely heard the cries. The other specimens cowered and whimpered in a very pathetic fashion. "I wish I would never have become a presenter of perverse mad science experiments."

She was serious. When the horses woke up they ate her.

Copyright 2010 G. Arthur Brown

The Stop by Mr. Nihil

A flaming bus speeds through the night. Inside it are two men. One is Jack Friendly, a man in his late 50′s with an Ernest Borgnine somatotype, blonde hair, and one eyebrow, black. His other eyebrow had vanished, mysteriously, a few years ago. Jack Friendly is the captain of this ship.

The second man is Fred Mindy, who is clearly on the phone with his wife. “No… ye… no, baby, what I said was… no… no… yes, of cours… no, yes, when I said you looked pretty in that i… what? Yes! Baby, of course i… no… no… but you… yes…” make up, in various assortments, the extent of the dialogue coming from Fred Mindy. Jack Friendly can hear all of this and wishes he couldn’t. If only his hearing had disappeared instead of his eyebrow.

“Yes, dear, I…”

Sighing, Jack Friendly leans forward and glances upward, through the windshield, at the flames licking the roof of the bus. As the fire spread, maybe it would burn off his other eyebrow. He hated having just the one. Jack Friendly thought of himself as being like the Batman villain Two-face, only he had just the one face… and the one stupid, black eyebrow. That would technically be a unibrow, wouldn’t it? An off-centre unibrow…

Jack Friendly was glad that the bus was on fire. Then, he remembered being a kid, at a specific point in time when another kid was telling him that people with unibrows were werewolves. He knew another kid named Rafael, who had a unibrow, but was not a werewolf. Maybe Rafael hadn’t had the right kind of unibrow… looking into the large overhead mirror, Jack Friendly smiled to himself at the thought of being a werewolf.

“Honey, I wasn’t looking at… no, I…” intoned Fred Mindy from his seat on the bus. “I can’t do that right now… I’m on a bu… ye… yeah, yes… yes, ok… ok, fine.” Hanging up his phone, Fred Mindy tugs on the little cable that lets the bus driver, in this case Jack Friendly, know that a passenger, in this case Fred Mindy, needs the driver of the bus to stop the bus.

Jack Friendly hears the little bell, and looks back at Fred Mindy via the mirror mentioned earlier. For a moment, he just stares. Finally, Jack says to Fred, “Sir…” but Fred Mindy interjects “I have to meet my wife…”

Jack Friendly continues, “We can’t stop here, this bus is on fire…”

To which Fred Mindy replies “I know. She’s waiting for me at a gas station.”

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You can find much more of Mr. Nihil at his infamous website http://nihil-and-rat.com

Copyright Mr. Nihil 2010

When Television Ends by G. Arthur Brown

There’s nothing on television, especially when it’s off.  My television is always off now that there’s no power.  Aggie is bored.

“Make something happen, Daddy!”

I grab my screwdriver and go to work on the set.  It’s not like we are going to be plugging back in.  The parts I can’t get out with the screw driver, I pull out with pliers or knock out with a hammer.  Until all that is left is a box with a clear glass screen.  Now I can do some puppet shows.  Aggie should like that.

But I’ll level with you.  This television really isn’t big enough for a good puppet show.  My puppets, likewise, are not made for a stage this small.  But I do have a large window in the front of my house and plenty of spare lumber. 

Construction on a big television-set-style stage takes over a week, but that’s because I frequently stop to eat cheese.  Aggie also needs assistance from time to time, being only four years old.  There’s only so much food I can put in her bowl at a time before it just goes bad.  I get the giant set finished by Thursday night, must see TV.  All the neighbors gather round to peer in my window that is now a screen. 

I’ve made the backdrop look like a coral reef.  But I hadn’t thought that through at all, and I don’t have any puppets that really make sense on the seabed. 

“Just pretend this clown is a clown fish!” I shout before I begin.

I enact a very poor rendition of Finding Nemo, without most of the jokes because I’ve forgotten them.  They never find Nemo in my version.  I’d decided it would be better if he is eaten by a killer whale, played by a polar bear puppet that I call Mokito.  The audience is really touched.  There’s not a dry eye in the, well, I was going to say house, but they are in fact in my front yard.  My yard is full of wet eyes.

Luckily there is a theater critic in the audience.  He approaches me after the show, holding a torch to light his way because it is dark at this point, and I remove my puppets to shake his hand.  Then he fiddles with his mustache and says, “I can’t say the script was good, but your casting decisions were tremendously bold. I really think you managed to poignantly lampoon the military-industrial complex when you had the mermaid rape the crab.  In honor of your success, I’m giving you a hickey.”  As he sucks on my throat, I think that this will be awkward to explain to people.  They will look at my neck and see what looks like the marks of a night of passion, then I will have to vigorously explain to them that it is, in fact, an award bestowed upon me for my successful puppet show.  I have ten different puppets!

Once the critic relinquishes his suction upon me, he totters off awkwardly into the night.  Bearing a lantern with green glass that gives an eerie glow, the local schoolmarm approaches me shortly thereafter and suggests I come to the single-room schoolhouse and do a puppet show to educate the children about the dangers of swallowing bees.  “They can sting your stomach,” she reminds me.  It had been some time since I’d seen a puppet show about not swallowing bees, and I had frankly forgotten the risks. I tell her that they will have to come to my house, because I would never be able to get a giant television set into that small building. She agrees and compliments me on my hickey and offers to show me her tits.  But I am a gentleman, so I never look upon the female form unclothed.  I tell her to meet me behind the milk barn in an hour wearing a burlap sack to obscure her naughty bits.  She rushes off at a gallop, and I call after her, “For I am a gentleman!”

Then I remember that I’ve forgotten all about Aggie.  I had put her in the oven three hours ago.  Surely she is overdone at this point. 

New for Earth Day

Writing news:
I submitted "The Story of Job" to Cafe Irreal, a site which specialized in irrealism, something in which I'm pretty sure I dabble in most of my work, esp. my philosophy and politics. Keep your fingers crossed for me. (For those of you who are new to irrealism and take the time to read the essay, keep in mind that when the author refers to physics, he is using the term very broadly to encompass all natural laws, even those in the soft sciences, including psychology, sociology and economics. So, a story where everyone walks around in bright blue Speedos, talking about how they love the smell of feces, purchasing houses for $5, would not meet the test for realistic physics simply because gravity still applies.)

Recommended listening:
I was cleaning my house today, and listening to Mekanik Kommando (terrific tech-obsessed industrial new wave from the early 80s) and Ramases (wacky Space Rock by a Sheffield salesman who believed himself to be the reincarnation of the Pharaoh/god and started a cult).

Something New (Story of Job)

I got an idea for something new while at work the other day. I've nearly completed it and hope to have something to submit by the end of this week. When the muse comes upon me, I can write so quickly that I'm glad I took a typing class in high school. I can't imagine how hunt-n-peckers can possibly write anything longer than a drabble.

But here's a little slice of "The Story of Job," tale of a 'Mongoloid,' that I'd like to share:

“Hi, Job,” I say with as much false enthusiasm as I can manage at eight in the morning. I try to scurry to the produce department too fast for him to take a real interest, but he’s predatory in that regard. My scurrying makes him hungry for my attentions. I pray to my heathen gods that he doesn’t want to touch me. But he’s coming my way and holding up his crusty, reptilian mitt because he wants to do a combo high-five/shake. Whatever grows upon him will come in contact with my flesh, but I don’t want to be rude, so I make direct, skin-on-skin contact. And I imagine the birth defects that I am liable to pass along to my future offspring, assuming my seed one day finds purchase (only $9.99 at my website).

“Hey, Leary!” he says with a warped grin. “Guess what?” And he doesn’t give me time to guess; he comes right out with: “I laid more eggs, and I hope they are going to hatch this time. The shells are still real leathery and scaly but I’m keeping them warm. When they hatch I won’t call them abominations. I will call them beautiful babies! ‘Cause, you know, I got compassion for them, ‘cause when I was a baby my mommy tried to throw me back.”