Window in the Wife by G. Arthur Brown (Random Title #16)

Before Ralph installed the window in his wife he found her quite hard to see through. Say, for instance, she stood in front of a beautiful flower arrangement. Ralph was unable to see that beautiful flower arrangement—before she had the window. Now, he could easily view all kinds of beautiful things through the pane of his wife.

She was quite quiet after the installation. She hadn’t been very talkative before, and replacing her head with a single panel of glass had just taken the wind out of her entirely. But she was good to look through, and he’d often call up his friends and have them come and look out of his wife at all the wonderful landscapes and creatures of God’s green earth. If his wife knew one thing, it was where to stand for the best tableaus.

It was dangerous to take her to public parks where children were tossing balls and running about carefree, so the couple went out less and less. But it did happen that, after a few short years, her pane did become cracked when an arrant Frisbee struck the wife on a beautiful summer day. And after that point, Ralph would always notice other men looking in at him through the window in the wife, their faces distorted by the broken sheet of glass. Their expressions, hard to discern.

One day he boarded up the wife, moved to another town and bought himself a new family, with a wife that was quite opaque and he found that, despite the lack of pretty views, his peace of mind was increased six fold. Though he did install a camera in the son, to live vicariously through the boy’s antics.

 

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.

Hell Block by G. Arthur Brown (Random Title #6)

You scan the shelves at the back of the Waltonbauer’s for a simple, cheap solution to what ails. Ricky had told you that you could find something there to help with your pitiable condition.

You had always considered yourself smart, and, DAMMIT, you are smart. That doesn’t mean you had not been up to a particularly damnable level of folly. Dating the daughter of gypsies is always a tricky avocation. So what--she found a red hair in your underwear? It could have come from literally anywhere. It didn’t have to be semen gluing it there, either. It could have just been a random hair that floated through the air and down into your crotch, glued there by snot that you accidentally spat inside your drawers when you were on the toilet. But she jumped to conclusions, and she happened to be right, and she said that her mother could see it all in a crystal ball and that her father was good with knives. But if her mother had seen it in a crystal ball, then why did she think the red hair belonged to a cis female and not a transsexual? Gypsies don’t know everything. And luckily for you, her father died in a tragic roofing accident shortly after she found that little scarlet traitor hiding in the fabric of your tighty-whiteys. Weird part is: he wasn’t even a roofer. And since he would not be there to slice you bow to stern, her mom put some kind of curse on you.

You ran to Ricky, and he had some great weed, and you guys smoked it and you sat in his Green Room for like an hour. He calls it the Green Room because the whole thing is lighted by weird fish tanks containing no actual fish but plenty of algae. When you get really high, you can totally imagine you are in a low budget sci-fi horror movie from the early 70s. It’s so dim that your vision actually seems grainy like cheap film stock. And sometimes you imagine that clumps of the green slime are moving, coming to life, developing appetites that might give them cause to exit their watery prisons and seek out blood-filled flesh on land. Kind of like a low budget sci-fi horror movie from the early 70s. But where were we?

You got high and you told Ricky your woes. And as he always does, he offered you the solution to your problem. And as you always do, you wrote it down on a slip of paper torn from mail that was probably very important. And as it always is, your handwriting was barely legible, so now you are standing in a drug store, gaze locked on various products intended to cure supernatural maladies. One claims to treat lycanthropy, another is specifically for “witch tit,” whatever that means.

So, you bite the bullet and ask a girl who works there.

“Um, hi. Do you have something called… Heil Black?”

“No, we have no such thing as Heil Black,” she says, not looking up from the box of alien pregnancy tests she’s merchandising.

“Oh, shoot. My friend told me I could get it here.”

“Lucky for you,” she says, looking at you with bright eyes, “we do have Hell Block, a fine product to alleviate damnation by voodoo, gypsy curse, Lord’s name in vain, and many other causes.” She points to the product on the shelf. It comes in a weird bright red box with pictures of cartoon devils all over it.

You pick it up and look for any signs indicating how it actually works. “Is it effective?” you ask her.

“Can’t really say. No one ever comes back from the grave to let us know if they escaped Hell or not.”

“It’s only $3.99. That seems cheap.”

“I got this pen for free,” she says, pulling it from atop her ear, “and it works.”

You frown. “But eventually, you know, that ink is going to run out.”

“Not really a glass-is-half-full kinda guy, are you?” she asks.

“My glass is half full of poison. Does that make me a pessimist or an optimist?”

“I hope it makes you an optometrist, because I really need some new glasses.”

Of course, you are an optometrist. How could she know that? You look into her eyes. Her glasses are a bit out of date. They aren’t too huge for her face, which is how you know they are at least five years old. But even so, you can see beauty in those pale green eyes and you are in love.

Luckily, she turns out to be a tranny, and the two of you live happily ever after. Until you die and go to Hell, because all those kind of products are totally bogus. You shouldn’t waste your money. 

The Weeping Consort by G. Arthur Brown (Random Title #1)

This probably happened in a palace, or a manor, or a chateau. It was certainly the olden times, when the royalty had really opulent crowns, with every kind of precious stone encrusted in the solid gold spikes that surrounded a dome of purple or red velvet.

My father was there, I think, and he kept taking pictures of everyone with one of those old fashioned telephones that you have to crank. The pictures were black and white and grainy. It was the olden days.

When we got to the inner chambers, we saw a man in a pink satin suit, cape draped about him, rapier on his hip, powder in his wig. He leaned his face into his hand and wept. It was very moving, so I tried to be discrete as I sidled up next to him for the snapshot. Father cranked the handle furiously. Perhaps the best photo of me and a nobleman yet.

“I am the queen’s consort,” the man confided in us, though we told him we had no interest in protecting his feelings or his privacy. “She has cast me aside now that she has clockwork cats. Give them a winding, and they chase clockwork mice or they hop up on shelves and break dishes all day long. A real cat breaks fewer things, but these are mechanical engines and the art is in its infancy, though the Turkish men who design them are certainly very skilled. They are now working on a clockwork consort and I feel that I must challenge them to a duel, though I fear they will abscond to a secret place where I cannot track them.”

“That’s a sad tale,” my father said. “Whenever I hear a tale like that, I say so.”

“Yes, I am moved by your weeping, sir, and I would like to say that if you do challenge these artisans to a fight, I would watch and cheer for you,” I told him.

“Thanks, sirs, but it would be unseemly to have a cheering section. It is better that I do this alone.” He departed the hall, still weeping, and we could not help but think we would never see him again.

We never saw him again.

Hotdogs were being prepared in the kitchen, so we went there, seeking to dine on these fine meats. The members of the kitchen staff were engaged in scuttlebutt, thus we overheard that the consort had indeed challenged the Turks. As he battled them, he showed superior skill in fencing, but the Turkish men were of course made of metal, and every blow to their body did no real damage to them.

They then sent a clockwork swordsman after him, which finished him by sticking its blade all the way up his nobody’s-business. The clockwork swordsman was given a special award and married to the queen promptly.

“Sometimes, I am sure that life isn’t worth living,” I said to the sous-chef.

“Tell that to the mechanical consort,” he replied, making sauce.

My father took a picture of what it was like to be there in that magical time. The print is still on display, probably in a museum or a gallery or an installment of some sort. He was not given a major award, nor was he married right away to the queen, and my mother was glad of this. When we got home, we had snacks and remembered our encounter with that weeping consort, as if it were an episode of a cartoon show, though I’m fairly sure the man was actually live-action. That was just how we chose to spend our days at that time.

It was the olden days. 

Copyright 2014 G. Arthur Brown

Artwork Remedios Varo

What it Means to Mow by G. Arthur Brown

The eyes of Balkan Sam, carrier lunatic, were duple. What this means for future generations is still uncertain, but binocular vision was a particular skill of his. A few people admired and wrote about that. But I’m not one of them. I just mowed his lawn.

I mowed his lawn enough times to really get good at it, and he paid me in lengths of velvet ripped from the robes of long dead chamberlains. Balkan Sam, he’s the left side of heaven, my dad used to inscribe on vans.

I think it was already August. I was mowing and not just for vanity’s sake, but to protect the innocent from the armadas of dangerous tick terror cells that were rumored to be spider-holed betwixt blades of too-long grass hidden in respectable lawns owned by crazy men like Balkan Sam.  Being a hot summer, he brought me a glass of poison lemonade. I didn’t drink it, of course, because I’m not a fucking moron. But I thanked him and I continued my mow.

Mowing is a manly art. Man against Nature in the most primal form you can find in contemporary society. It is man with a large mechanical tool telling nature how to behave, what to look like. The mower I use is a riding mower, but it’s not a tractor. It’s the kind that drives like a tank, the kind that can do a 360-degree rotation. I’m at war with these weeds. And Balkan Sam can see that, so he brings me a lemon-grenade, but I’m not a fucking moron and I know it’s poisonous, so I don’t pull the pin and throw it to blow up the tiny arachnid enemy, who may or may not be couched tentatively under a leaf of clover, waiting to suckle the capillaries of some unsuspecting dachshund who certainly doesn’t belong on Balkan Sam’s lawn, but who tends to end up there when his owner has had far too much mead at the Renaissance Faire. 

It’s like hunting. There is a part of the male mind that needs to sit in silence and fight nature, destroying something living, or at least cutting large bits of a living thing away and leaving them to shrivel and die in the sun. Plants have a whole different kind of existence than do animals. It’s hard to say when they are alive and when they are dead, when they are the parent and when they are the offspring. Balkan Sam comes out and cuts off one of my fingers. He wants to create a rhizome that will grow new hunter-mowers, and you can sell that kind of shit on eBay now.  I’m not a fucking moron, so I don’t care that he cut my finger off because that was my poison finger and I’m not a fucking moron. I’m an adventurer, riding into the thick of a very tiny jungle, as far as five gallons can take me.

Balkan Sam rushes back out, those two googly eyes just googling at me, and tries to fill the tank with poison gas. “Save it for the Texas chambers!” I shout over the sound of some of the best mowing the East Coast is likely to see this summer. It’s already August, I think. I should be done by Christmas. 

Copyright 2013 G. Arthur Brown

Artwork Max Ernst

His Blind Friend Daniel by G. Arthur Brown

My blind friend Daniel claws his way in the corners, as if in search of food, but he is just vetting the tile work.  I shouldn’t leave it to him; he’s blind and vetting is what I’m paid to do.  But I’ve got a jelly donut.  I didn’t tell Daniel that I had anything good to eat and he’s not exactly a blood hound.  I take a big bite and my lips smack.

Daniel’s head shoots up.  “What was that?  Are you eating?”

“No, Daniel.  I’m blowing kisses to the ghosts,” I say as I dust the confectioner’s sugar from my chin, as if he might see it, finding me out.  “Place is full of them.”

“I can feel them, too.”  He slides his greasy, gray finger tips along the grout.   An ecstatic expression squirms on his face, his hard-boiled egg eyes locked firmly on me.  “I know I am inside a ghost when I feel suddenly cooled, like an AC unit just kicked on. But it is also like you’ve been immersed in gelatin of some type.  You get the fear, like you’re going to drown.  But it happens so fast that you don’t have time to panic.  Sometimes, if you are lucky, they leave you a little bit wet.” 

“I know I am inside a ghost,” I kid him, “when I am at the nursing home.”

He nods gravely, pensively.  “Their tiles need much work.”  He brings a filthy pinky to his nose and sniffs. “A dead person ate fenugreek here.”  He utters this in such a way that I have no doubt he is correct.

It is then that I notice that the jelly is not jelly at all. It is a green fenugreek custard.  I can taste it now. It was never even sweet.  “Do old people get pudding?” I ask.

“Yes, of course they do. You know that.” He runs his fingers along the edges of the sheets, tucking me in.  It’s comforting to hear his voice.  It is so dark and cold here.

“Tell me a story.”

“You know all the stories. You invented the stories.”

“Tell me one that I have forgotten.”

He clucks his tongue.  “Do you remember the story about your blind friend Daniel?”

I shake my head.

He clears his throat. I imagine what his face must look like while he composes himself. He begins, “Your blind friend Daniel claws his way in the corners, as if in search of food, but he is just vetting the tile work.”

Copyright 2013 G. Arthur Brown
Artwork Remedios Varo

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!

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

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

Transsexual Meth Addicts with Marshmallow Eyes by G. Arthur Brown

On the fifth afternoon on Mars X we were attacked by three transsexual meth addicts with marshmallow eyes.  This was my tenth encounter with these bizarre creatures.  Glegman, our science officer, had struggled to explain why they had marshmallows for eyes.  But we had come to accept that, though there was probably an interesting back story there to make some sense of it all, we would probably never know. It was more important to identify their weaknesses.  They averaged 6.75 feet in height, 200 pounds, with astonishing strength for long term drug abusers. The marshmallow eyes seemed to function like an insectoid composite eye, gathering a wide spectrum of input, but not particularly good with fine details, so we were fairly sure they could not read our names printed on the top left of our shirts, above the Space Force insignia.  I felt our anonymity would remain to our advantage in this skirmish.

Jackson’s head was wrenched from his shoulders before I could say, “Holy Hell, Sergeant Thomas K. Jackson, that big transsexual meth addict with marshmallow eyes is coming right for you, probably to rip off your relatively normal-sized head!”

Jackson was the last one with a functional lazerzap.  The rest of us, in the off hours, had jammed our barrels full of dirt as we made sketches in the topsoil.  “Art is for fags,” Jackson had said, and even at the time I knew he was making a wise decision in not using his weapon as a drawing stick. On the other hand Leon had done a rather good likeness of Pope Lexander the Fabulous, the first openly gay man in the papacy.  Everyone seemed to really enjoy gazing at this work of art, save Jackson, who merely shook his head at the image and polished his long, hard gun.

Now, Jackson’s headless corpse heaped itself conscientiously well clear of the action. Out of other options, this left only Jarro’s ass bees.  While shitting in the woods a few weeks prior, a strain of alien rape bees had decided to make a nest in his ass. Luckily, Jarro was psychic, using his uncanny telepathy to communicate with the tiny bugs.  He learned to unleash them at will. But they were generally horribly pissed off about the whole matter.

Pulling down his trousers, a line of ass bees fled the man’s rectum like they were sick of being cooped up in his fleshy shit tube.  The largest transsexual meth addict, whom I presumed to be their queen, swatted at the bees with both nail-polished man-hands and her horse tail, causing his/her DDD breasts to bounce about uncontrollably, crushing Leon’s skull. And I had just warned him about standing too close to trannies earlier in the day.

The skinniest of the transsexual meth addicts with marshmallow eyes, using his/her incredible erection, hoisted Jarro into the sky and catapulted him in a massive arc. The body landed with a crunch, bouncing limply before coming to rest.  I wanted to cry out, but my voice had left me.  Then his body exploded in a giant ball of flaming, sentient robotic dicks, capable of fucking anyone--male, female or tranny--to death in a matter of seconds.

“I’d just like to take this moment to say that I always knew space exploration was a bad idea.  I suspected that I would wind up dead at the hands of horrible creatures, the likes of which are never seen on a sane and rational planet like Earth.  If only I would have had one last chance to kiss my mother,” I didn’t have time to say before I was swallowed into the queen’s glistening anal gape.

He/she was fucked to death in a matter of seconds by the flying mechanical fire dicks as I suffocated, vindicating me once and for all.


Copyright 2013 G. Arthur Brown
Artwork Remedios Varo

The Story of Geordio's Rooster Flock by G. Arthur Brown

Geordio had a whole flock of roosters. This is not something you find all the time. You can find whole flocks of hens.  Mostly in the trees, which is where they sleep. Easier to find when they are sleeping. Craftier than you might think in the day time.  Seems crazy. Foxes and raccoons are out at night. 

“Fuck our eggs!”  squawked one rooster!
“We don’t even have any fucking eggs!” squawked two roosters!

Geordio, as I said, had a whole flock of roosters.  This was because he was a homophile.  He couldn’t relate to women, even chicken women.  He even got rid of a poinsettia that he thought might be a girl.

I totally told him it wasn’t a girl.  He still gave it to a homeless man, who was very happy about it, until he realized it wasn’t cannabis sativa. 

But the point is, you see a group of chickens, you assume that most are hens.  This was not the case when you came around Geordio’s place.  First of all, he just had them inside, like dogs or cats.  There were nearly twenty of them.  And the shit was caked into his carpet, which wasn’t good to begin with, so that I wouldn’t wear my nice shoes in his house for fear of fucking them up. 

I was at his place one night. 
“Fuck our eggs!” a rooster squawked.

And yeah, roosters can’t lay eggs, but they were laying something that was sort of like golf balls.  If you boiled them down, and then crushed up the residue and snorted it, it got you super fucking high.  We even gave some to that disappointed homeless guy.  He could fly after that.  I’m not sure if he could fly before that, but he did have large wings.  

Copyright 2013 G. Arthur Brown
Artwork Remedios Varo

Grape Will Be Fine by G. Arthur Brown

 My father had already been slipping into the murky mire of senility even before my mother’s death sixth months ago. As I went through a gray pantomime of motions to keep him, and myself, alive and, more or less, clean, I ignored most of his advice. Why would I take heed, especially at a time like this?

“You need to find yourself a strong woman, Clark. Like a horse,” he tells me. He sits with a bowl of lentil soup in front of a muted television, screening a clips episode of Designing Women, 5^th season.

I’m preparing a soufflé by my mother’s recipe, wishing I had paid more attention to everything she told me about cooking. The simple instructions on the note cards do not convey the intricacies that are needed to appropriately cultivate something as refined and French as a cheese soufflé.

“Those waffles smell delicious. Been a long time since I ate a cheese waffle.”

“It’s a soufflé, Dad.” I begin to cry into the dish, torrents of tears and mucus. This doesn’t look like my mother’s soufflé, even less so now that I’ve waterlogged it. Waterlogged, like my life.

“I ruined the soufflé, Dad.” I wipe my face and yank myself back together.

“What are you going to do now, Clark?”

I have no idea what I’m going to do. My last hopes of getting my life back on track sits gloopily in front of me, mocking me with its inedibility. Defeated by food. But I need to say something, so: “I’m going to buy more cheese, I guess.”

He shuffles into the kitchen with a mostly empty soup bowl that he tucks into a sink brimming with dishes. With a hand on my shoulder, he says, “Oh, Clark. Sometimes cheese isn’t the answer.”

For a minute, I listen. Perhaps he’s got a point. My life is not as simple as a ruined soufflé.

I ask, “Do you think there is an answer?”

He wanders over to the stove. “If you are going to the store for cheese,” he says, as if he didn’t hear my last question, “can you pick me up some Pepsi?”

My heart slouches a little. “Sure, any particular kind of Pepsi you’d like?”

He arranges some dirty dish towels on the handle of the oven. He smacks his lips and says, “Grape will be fine.” 

Copyright 2013 G. Arthur Brown

Painting by Carlo Carra

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

The Laura Lee Bahr Valentine's Spectacular

Laura Lee Bahr is the amazingly talented author of Haunt, a novel steeped in both "cognitive dissonance and emotional resonance™"
(see: My review of Haunt). Not only is she amazingly talented, but she's also amazingly talented. In other ways than just fiction.  (And she's got great taste in lit, too, giving Kitten a 5-star review on Amazon.com).

My first inklings of her true scope were revealed when I spoke with her in person, in a kitchen, during BizarroCon 2012.  (WARNING: Some parts of this conversation may have never happened.)

(The dimly lit kitchen is full of strange people, ie authors and artists, milling about while drinking homemade beers and speaking about the nature of life and shit.  G. Arthur Brown and S.T. Cartledge attempt to engage in meaningful conversation with Laura Lee Bahr.)

G. Arthur Brown: (To Laura) So is Haunt your first book?
Laura:  Yah, totally.  I was like all writing scripts and stuff and that's how I met [John] Skipp™ who helped me get the book out.  But I wrote it a bazillian years ago.  When I was in my early n0's.
G. Arthur Brown: Wait? How old are you???
Laura: I'm X.
G. Arthur Brown: No way!  I thought you were X-10 years old!
S.T. Cartledge: Yeah, I would have thought you were no more than X-6.
G. Arthur Brown: (Slaps Cartledge across his pretty, goateed visage.)
S.T. Cartledge: Ow! I was going to say X-16. You damned Americans are so impatient!
Nikki Guerlain: (Wandering in, to Laura) You look like a young Maggie Gyllenhaal!
Laura: OMG! LOL! Thanx!  Also I'm a very talented singer/songwriter/ actress/etc...

Yes, ladies and gentleman.  She's (partially) written a very intriguing musical and a "slightly embarrassing" concept album.  So, without further ado, I'll let Laura speak for herself:

I love musicals.  Some people don’t.  Some people hate musicals.  Some people say, “I just hate musicals because they are so unrealistic. When in life do people just burst into song?”  In my life, all the time.  Or really, I just burst into song all the time and sometimes people are nice enough to sing along until they get too embarrassed for me and try to encourage me to stop.

So—

Here’s the lyrical refrain from an unwritten musical that banged around the brain for some time.  It takes place in a dystopian world that one of my best friends tells me is actually just like many places thriving right now:  It’s a romantic comedy set in a place where you get shot if you are sexually transgressive or unmarried by a certain age.  It’s called Nobody Gets the Girl

These are the lyrics sung by the ingénue:

There is nothing nothing to do
There is nothing nothing to say
There is no place, nowhere to go
We're just here - so we might as well stay
But the light in your heart and the light in my head
strike a match and the room starts to glow
there is nothing, nothing to do in this world
but say goodbye-
to once again say hello 

Also, I am slightly embarrassed to admit, I have a Salinger tribute concept album.

(When I say ‘have’ I mean, in my brain and in pieces in garage band.) It’s called The Glass House. Each song is named after, yeah, one of the members of the Glass family. The first song, Buddy, is pretty close to done thanks to Studio 2628 in the valley (but not quite!)  Here’s the latest version of that.

The second song, Franny, is just this:

Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me
Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me
Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me
and
my pathetic little ego

Why I am slightly embarrassed to ‘have’ a Salinger concept album and not embarrassed at all to serenade random people?… well, it’s just because Jerry and I had this thing when I was young and trapped in his cabin, it was like Misery in reverse (“you’re my # 1 fan!” “no! I’m really like number 6173! Owwww! Okay okay! I’m your # 1 fan!”) and I never was quite right before or since.  Jerome David—wherever you are, I have learned to forgive- but I will never forget.

 

People Keep Interviewing G. Arthur Brown

 People.  They keep interviewing me. Will the questions never cease???

CV Hunt did one.
Jess did one.

These will not be the last of their kind, I fear. 

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

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

Juniper's Window by Mr. Nihil (including Potato Baby)

Juniper ran her finger along the rounded edges of her phone, absorbing the cool of the plastic into her being.  This sensual black plastic warmed her nethers, dampening her panties.  She began this affair about a year and a half ago, at work.  At first, she spent her breaks with the phone, but at this point, Juniper no longer cares about her job, and simply caresses the phone at her desk persistently throughout the day.

I know where Juniper works, and about 6 months ago, I started going to her office on my lunch breaks.  Juniper doesn’t know me, I just saw her one day while I was at that office- her lips slightly parted, her cheeks and bosom flushed, her finger on the phone.  Since she doesn’t know me, and because I have no business at her office, I stand outside of her window and watch her for about 35 minutes, Monday through Friday.  My lunch break is an hour long, but it takes about 10 minutes to reach the office, and 9 minutes to get back to my place that I work, as I always hit a red light en route to Juniper, and a green one on the return trip.

Since I’ve started watching her, Juniper has been spending less and less time actually working, and more and more time in some sort of sexual bliss with her phone’s plastic shell- I know this because I follow most of her co-workers on Facebook.  Many of them don’t have locked profiles.  So involved is she with her phone that I didn’t think she ever noticed me peering around her window frame in the afternoon, but today, just for a moment, her eyes flickered upward, and our gazes met.  I’m just sure of it.

Mr. Nihil did the illustrious cover art for my first book Kitten, part of the New Bizarro Author Series of 2012, released by Eraserhead Press.  Mr. Nihil has a lot of comics, flash fiction, flash animation and other stuff at http://nihil-and-rat.com.