Beyond the Rabbits by Jeremy Maddux (Random Title 25)

The rabbits of Sage Hollow were a fickle bunch, falling in and out of love with each other as well as whatever fads and sensations they brought back from their travails on the outside.  Ian Arbutus had tapped into the secret of his species by ingesting timothy-grass and pulque which he’d brewed from the maguey plant’s sap.  With the body temperature driven to dangerous levels, the rabbit collective of Aztec mythology, Centzon Totochtin, shared their secrets with him.  As the fever broke, Ian waited for a sign of Two Father’s arrival.  He clenched his lucky rabbit’s foot (his own, which he’d lost the previous summer to a tractor blade) and meditated on it, intoning the vibrations that permeated his body.  He thumped his tail with urgency as he awaited the next communication.

    Ian thought he saw movement from the furthest burrow, but it was just his shadow which loomed large to swallow up every sunbeam that reached into the leparidae’s earth.  It hadn’t been his imagination.  Something was approaching through the warren in digitigrade form like most rabbits did mid-run.  Two Rabbit greeted him with detached reverence.  Ian gave the slightest dip of obeisance in order to receive the newest sacred communication.  As many times as Ian had summoned his cryptic visitor, he didn’t get the impression that Two Rabbit was physically incorporated into the environment.  Instead, he seemed to move like fog or condensation against the glass of the humans’ automobiles.  Something else which he frequently noted:  Two Rabbit’s faces, married by inches so that everything to one side was the mirror image of the other.  Despite this, Two Rabbit’s multiple visages never moved in absolute harmony.  One set of eyes would flinch or squint as he used the other set to peer into the nature of the communer.  Two Rabbit unraveled a human fist and furtively dabbed out the latest secret into Ian Arbutus’ waiting paw.  The rabbit god walked backward as shadows pooled over him.  When the rolling blackness lifted, Ian observed only weeds.

    The secrets always came in the form of walnuts which he cracked open with his teeth, then he would let the information coalesce over him as a season of genetic memory.  As he broke the nutshell, a stick figure with the resemblance of a bipedal humanoid performed a lethargic dance in the center of his paw.  He stared for so long at the vertigo swaying that he’d lost the need to blink.  He had to will himself to breathe again.  The stick figure bent itself backward and tumbled as if trying to pass under a limbo pole on the lowest rung.  Then it collapsed.  For a split second, he was sure he saw the gloss of tiny wires compelling the movement of the tulpa.  He waved his hand above it and found no such wires.  That’s when they became separated.  The stick figure tulpa waved goodbye as it slid down his arm into another reality.

    Ian was beyond the rabbits of Sage Hollow.  He savored the transcendence, moving through stages of enlightenment and ennui, then moving beyond that as well.  It was like having his own genus.  That was the only way he could describe it to the others later.  He baffled himself as he realized he’d already codified his current situation to the rabbits in the past tense.  He already had the words stored away in his mind for what he was now experiencing.

    After he became human, he found himself busking on a street corner.  There was a new walnut in his hand.  Failing to break it with his human teeth, he dropped it to the ground and crushed it under his Doc Martens.

    At his feet, there were two stick figures like the one he’d seen earlier only these were made from folded paper like little origami men.  He could definitely see wires controlling their movements.  He gazed up from the lively origami to find a sea of people transfixed on his spectacle of Siguijor.  Somewhere in that crowd, Ian could see Two Rabbit trying to reach him though he was visually absent.  He squinted until he could see his way back to Sage Hollow.  Closing that pair of eyes once again, Ian used the other pair to cajole the paper puppets into the nutshell.  The wires resisted his pull at first but the tulpas eventually settled in for transportation.  They did finally release their tenuous hold after a short struggle.  He thought he saw more wires glistening over his head, hanging there like ominous floss, but he waved his hand overhead and found no such wires.  A disturbing thought occurred to him then that made him stall in his transition back to lagomorph.  That thought was this:  What if we’re the stick figures, and there are enough wires for all of us?


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Jeremy Maddux is Co-Editor of Surreal Grotesque magazine and hosts the podcast of the same name where he interviews authors on the cutting edge of underground fiction (Horror, Bizarro, Slipstream).  He served two years as Vice President of a local writer’s group and has a story forthcoming in the Fireside Popsicles anthology this spring via Fireside Press. He may or may not look like Blanka.

Surreal Grotesque Podcast Interview

This is how I always picture Jeremy Maddux, despite having seen several pics of him.

Jeremy Maddux interviewed me for the Surreal Grotesque podcast. It's a pretty solid podcast, even when I'm not being interviewed. You should probably check it out.

I talk a bit about my book Kitten and give some teasers about upcoming projects. I tell you the secret rules of the universe. And Jeremy says some stuff, too.

You should probably check it out.

Bizarro Bizarro Anthology and More! A Brief Update...

Yes, that's right. Here's a great anthology full of bizarro fiction by veterans and newcomers alike, from Bizarro Pulp Press. I've got a story in there called "The Pitfalls of Modern Gardening." It has nice neighbors, including pieces by RA Harris, Jeff Burk, Wol-Vriey, MP Johnson, Alan M. Clark, Bruce Taylor, PA Douglas, Andrew Wayne Adams, Edmund Colell, Daniel W. Gonzales, Gabino Iglesias, Tony Rauch, Dustin Reade, Michael Allen Rose and like a dozen more! It's pretty damn cool. Available in paperback and Kindle versions. BUY IT HERE.

Also in the not too distant future, you can expect my story "The Balancing Act" in the Vertigo Schisms anthology from Surreal Grotesque, and my story "Harbinger Master" in the Axes of Evil heavy metal horror anthology from Chupa Cabra House. Expect lots of other great names included in those anthos as well.

A Blank Slate by Jeremy Maddux

Dear Peeing Boy Fountain of Pacebrook Park,

I know you are terribly busy these days, what with Mr. Weiss who jogs through your vicinity every day and stops to rest on your cusp, and Roma Wheeler who brings her rotten children to your park to play every day while she scoops the coins from your basin. Who can forget the old men who gather to play chess on the bench just beyond your reach, as if using their activity to compete with your own spectacle.

With that being said, I am soliciting your attention for two reasons, which I will now outline:

1) I have spent the better part of my adolescence in your spectrum of being. It was with you that I was first exposed to the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, even Bukowski. The sensation of yellow banner of sun falling over us as I engaged the poet with a sailor’s temperament has never left me, nor the whirlpools of shade that swallowed me as we watched the day end, together. I knew it was where I was supposed to be.

2) Have you seen her? You know exactly who I’m referring to. The woman with the whimsical wardrobe and the tear-shaped buttocks that spurns on animal thoughts in my swelling humanity. I first met her while feeding ducks gathered at your monolith’s bedside. Nothing sets me so firmly on the path of championing animal rights as a woman whom I fear unattainable otherwise. I know she used to traipse through your territory every Sunday afternoon and sometimes Thursday and Friday. We enjoyed many multi-faceted discussions, about the universal consciousness, experiential theory and even capitalism’s best laid trap of corporatism.

I had many chances to ask her name. I could lapse into tangents about unspoken inner narrative, illustrate with laconic precision the critical dilemmas of declaring war on drugs

in a free republic, but I couldn’t be bothered with what her mother called that tangle of windblown, strawberry blond hair, that space between her shoulder blades that impressed upon me the urgency of active living whenever I watched her walking away.

Now, she hasn’t visited you in approximately two months, since the end of January. That’s exactly fifty nine days, sixty by the time your custodians and attendants have had time to pore over this document.

Something has happened. No need to tell me I’m overreacting. I know something has gone wrong with the cosmos. Yesterday, while feeding the fowl at your feet, I observed a peculiar anomaly as the sun fell behind its rotational curtain. I noticed strange shapes emerging from the dusk, funnels of shadow which fell on the ducks like oil slicks with teeth. Their reaction was to hiss and clap their wings at one another, liberally excreting waste as they snapped at even their own young. I don’t have to tell you how upsetting this phenomenon was. I still can’t believe the children nearby never took notice.

She must have come some time after I last saw her, unless she only exists through my seeing her. I’m still puzzling over the implications of implied existence versus accepted existence, and it is too late in the game for anyone to write a textbook or manifesto about such musings. I want to love her, but I can’t do so without first conquering the inevitable gender anxiety (which endures with great consistency) between male ego and female form.

If her existence is merely implied, then she is a blank washboard for me to project any number of phobias, philias or habitué onto, until or unless her existence becomes accepted.

The moment her existence is accepted, either by myself or through you, she can then begin to effect me and project onto me the memes which populate her own reality. I could be her friend, her father, her lover, a father/lover hybrid per Freud or even (Fountain Forbid) a threat to her physical safety.

Surely you can relate to this plight, seeing as how any number of individuals project meaning onto you each day, until you have no choice but to accept your own existence, regardless of whether you are accepting an implied existence or an accepted existence. That too, is for us to determine.

Please, tell me her name. Why hasn’t she been to the park in sixty days? I kept my hands to myself, even if I can’t say the same for my eyes.

Yours Truly,

A Blank Slate

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Jeremy Maddux lives in Blountville, TN where he serves as Vice President of the Night Writers’ Guild. He was recently voted Talent of the Year by his peers. Jeremy’s work has been featured in Surreal Grotesque, Connotation Press, Literary Orphans, Garbled Transmissions, Red Fez, Dream People Magazine and The Glass Coin. He recently had a story published in Aliens, Sex & Sociopaths: The Best of Surreal Grotesque. He is also Co-Editor of Surreal Grotesque.

Copyright Jeremy Maddux
Artwork by Max Ernst