Kitten Invades Alaska!

Kitten was sighted in a Barnes & Noble in Fairbanks Alaska!  Special thanks to Sarah Shaw.

It won't be long until Kitten finds it way into coffee houses in Iowa (I mean, if they've got coffee there, I have no idea), preschools in Utah, churches in Missouri, houses of ill-repute in Wisconsin.  It's all the r(amp)age. 

Have we forgotten what R.A. Harris had to say about G. Arthur Brown's Kitten so soon?

"One part a nightmarish family saga, and one part a fantastic, surreal voyage of discovery for a kitten. It's a seriously fun mix of grotesque humour and sombre existential horror."

That it is, R.A. That it is. 

R.A. Harris Interviews G. Arthur Brown

Okay, this happened a while back. (Another attempt to sell my New Bizarro Author Series book Kitten.) But in case you missed it, R.A. Harris interviewed me, and here's a sample of his witty question techniques (patents pending):

LeakyLibido: ....Tell me, young squire – if you were at the point of a sword and the hand that held the other end was attached to an arm that was attached to a torso that was attached to a head, via a neck, and on that head there was a mouth and that mouth did move and sounds were elicited in that movement that formed the words, “sum up your life philosophy in five words”, what, pray, would you say?
Simulacrum: Mind your own business, man.
LeakyLibido: Oh, ok. Well… erm… how do you take your coffee?
Simulacrum: I prefer tea. But if I must have coffee, sweet and light.


Check out the full interview at Leaky Libido!

And Kitten is also available for Kindle!

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 

Before the Last Object is Thrown by R.A. Harris

Tomlinson spun the ultra-pink neon bulb, the final piece of the puzzle, on his finger before tossing it into the mix. It flew after the other objects in a beautiful choreography that only a professional meta-fictional juggling troupe could achieve. Between Eric, Gavin and himself, they now juggled twelve emperor penguins, thirty laptops, tension, the human genome, an orange so moldy it was turquoise, an old Swiss lady, a rabid pregnant television set, a television executive with a gun, smaller versions of themselves juggling even smaller versions of themselves (ad infinitum), a mobile phone, a couple of young spirits, a fluorescent green dildo with a pot of honey flavored lube and the ultra-pink neon bulb. The only thing that was missing was a woman with flaming nipples.

Tomlinson was shocked when the turquoise orange metamorphosed into a miniature dragon. After consideration, he realised that this may well have been a full sized dragon as he hadn't actually seen one before. It wasn't such a surprise to him when its razor sharp wings tore a hole in reality, letting in a collective of parasitic logicians, as he always suspected his world to be made of flimsy material stitched together with frail premises. The logicians flew in like locust, latched onto the soft membrane of reality with terrifying ferocity and immediately began draining logic from its virtual metaphysical processes.

Eric got bored with juggling, which was at odds with his very raison d'être. But given that his entire consciousness would otherwise revolve around juggling, it came across as a development that gave a previously unfathomed depth to his character. It was probably caused by the case of Praxis Illogica brought about by the parasite logicians collected on the membrane of reality like so many ticks, rather than any intention on the part of a Creator-entity. He yawned immeasurably wide.

“When you open your mouth wide like that I can see a black hole where your soul should be,” Tomlinson told him. “Maybe you should get that checked out. You're not supposed to be able to see black holes.” He juggled the pink bulb towards Eric.

Eric stretched his mouth wider, trying to get a glimpse down his own throat. He took his eye off of the pink bulb and it sailed down his gullet. His interior burnt a brilliant neon pink as the sphere imploded into its own negative state just before passing through the black hole.

Once the dazzling light had dissipated Tomlinson risked another look down Eric's throat. “Would you look at that? The black hole's gone.” His voice echoed around Eric's gaping mouth. “But you, my friend, are soulless.” And then, without really knowing where it came from, he added, “Merely an empty vessel to facilitate a world of events far removed from the mundane reality we inhabit here.”

“I'm blind,” Gavin said as he groped around for the soft membrane of reality that held him in place. “It's all pink.”

Tomlinson couldn't help but think that their existence was a mere formality now. No longer able to really call the three of them a meta-fictional juggling troupe, he set about dismantling the dimensions that had been constructed to house their essence. A flat packed Tomlinson cursed it all to hell.

“All this cursing makes me want to go boil a witch,” said Eric.

Tomlinson briefly pondered on the implications of his thoughts being projected so that Eric could comment on them, but just shrugged it off as a glitch in the mechanisms guiding their world, most likely just another symptom of the ontological virus represented by the plague of logicians. He held the deconstructed dimensions out at arm's length because they stank like rotten egg. He pinched his nose with his other hand and hop-stepped over to the tear caused by the dragon, where he tossed them out into oblivion.

Without a structure, the soft membrane of reality cascaded over the troupe like a collapsing circus tent, little bubbles of paradox silently rose from the mess and then popped, spilling antithetical notions and conclusions into one another, making their enunciation redundant. Tomlinson and the others swirled around in eddy currents, transient pools of liquid similarity, before descending into the depths of irreal virtuality like waste down a plug hole.



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R. A. Harris 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 

Houdini Gut Punch! by R.A. Harris

“Houdini gut punch!”

Gavin's soul's clenched fist thrust through the sac of fermenting fish flesh Eric had become. He over-extended though, and clipped a buzzard flying overhead. As it fell to the ground like a feathered brick, it became clear that it was actually a glass trinket designed to look like a weeping logician.

“Another needless casualty,” Gavin was heard to remark as his face, smeared with the telltale pink taint of libido, emerged from the hole his fist had created in Eric's bloated belly.

Eric slurred some words back at him, but to all intents and purposes their meaning was lost. Jets of photo-voltaic foam spit from his wide open maw arced in strange patterns, criss-crossing and blending into each other as they danced in the potential gradient, before softly tumbling to the ground like feathers in a vortex. Or maybe a million feathered logicians made of irreal glass, massless and almost symbolic more than anything.

Gavin's soul felt itself disintegrating into tangents as it unwound from Eric's being. Apparently a soul can't exist without some kind of binding to the world. Gavin didn't mind, he would rather un-exist than stay bound to a rotten fish pile.

Eric murmured that it was the man with the gun what did the thing that made that other thing that he did to Gavin happen. The last twist of fabric that constituted Gavin's soul was able to form a final thought, “Damn it, I should have known... zombie bullets,” before a wave of Cartesian logic excrement pulsed across the room like a single strobe light. He didn't think, therefore, he didn’t was.

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R. A. Harris 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 

 

Featured Flash!

So I'm doing this FEATURED FLASH thing now.  Posting stuff by other writers whom I like, some of whom are young and new, some of whom you may have heard of.  Sometimes it won't be "proper" flash but poetry or prose-poetry or even song lyrics.  Sometimes it will be dark and serious, light and zany, surreal and mystical, gross and obscene.  But it's all stuff I like and that I think is worth reading and spreading around.

Up coming work from R.A. Harris, J.W. Wargo, Justin Grimbol, CV Hunt, Andrew Freudenberg, Sean Tigert, Shawn Blair, Eric Stoveken, Karl Fischer, Laura Lee Bahr and John Edward Lawson, amongst others.

Not to mention S.T. Cartledge, Mr. Nihil and Edmund Colell whom I have already featured on the Strange Edge.

And my stuff will be sprinkled in there, too. Because I'm selfish and prolific. 

Keep checking back.  I'll be updating a whole lot.