The State of Bizarro Report, vol. 1: What is Bizarro?

A certain other blogger has been making a lot of claims about Bizarro recently, most of which are highly exaggerated or outright falsehoods. In the interest of giving some positive clarity to the matter, as well as some actual history, I've decided to put together just a couple of blog posts about it. If any of the information I give here is inaccurate, PLEASE do not hesitate to contact me to correct the info.

That being said... where do we start?

A lot of people start with a seemingly simple question:

WHAT IS BIZARRO?

That's a good question, but it's not a simple question to answer, and that answer is inextricably tied to the origins and development of the Bizarro scene. The most basic attempt to give a guideline (and a guideline is far more important than a dictionary definition here) is this: Bizarro is the literary equivalent of the cult movie section of a local video store. This is a section full of lots of different, off-kilter, and genuinely strange movies by filmmakers like John Waters, David Lynch, Takashi Miike, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jan Svankmajer, David Cronenberg, Guy Maddin, Lloyd Kaufman, Terry Gilliam, and Yorgos Lanthimos.

That covers a lot of territory and some people find that confusing - everything from surreal art-house to low-budget shock films - but it's hard to make it any clearer in less than a thousand words of explanation. Recently, when I used that rule of thumb, the person asking responded that this guideline was "uselessly broad." And I responded, "Well if American Psycho, The Wolf Man, Dead Alive, Jacob's Ladder, Scream, Shaun of the Dead, Jaws, Videodrome, and Critters are all the same genre, how usefully narrow is that?"

EVERY genre is extremely broad, and until you understand the associated elements and the aesthetic you won't get it. All Bizarro could be classified in other genres, though not necessarily in a way that's sensible. Just like one person might argue that American Werewolf in London is a Comedy movie first and a Horror movie second, or that Bone Tomahawk is a Western first and Horror second, Bizarro is one particular metric that overlaps with a lot of other genres. And that metric is WEIRDNESS. If the appeal of something is that it is entertainingly weird, then it is Bizarro. Period. Regardless of whatever other elements are in play from any other genre or style. A lot of Bizarro is trangressive, or surreal, or absurd, or grotesque, or perverse, or incorporates horrific elements, but none of these have ever been required for a book to be considered Bizarro, only weirdness.

Is a category of weird books useful? If you don't think so, then Bizarro may not be for you. This is a category that didn't necessarily happen by design - just like Lynch didn't decide at the outset to be a cult filmmaker - but it is also not something that happened by accident. Bizarro coalesced when a tiny group of writers and small presses noticed there was a growing amount of hard-to-classify underground lit that shared some similarities. There were "Horror" authors whose work was far more weird than scary, and often darkly humorous. There were authors writing with elements of Sci-Fi that focused less on the science and more on the general weirdness of the world it allowed them to create. There were authors doing almost experimental literature that was too low-brow to be taken seriously in the academic scene and used genre elements that ghetto-ized it. And they looked around to more popular authors who were hard-to-classify like Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins, Roald Dahl, or Joe Lansdale, and they decided that not only was there already a genre of weird in existence, but it needed a label so that people who were into weird stuff could find it more easily.

So three presses got together and decided to brand their releases as Bizarro. It was extremely small at first, mainly limited to authors already involved with Eraserhead, Raw Dog Screaming, or the now defunct Afterbirth Books. This was 2005, when "Bizarro" was picked as the genre tag for all these previously misclassified books. Those first Bizarro authors had already been writing Bizarro since the early 2000s or even the 90s, but they'd never had a name for it. They'd never had a convenient way to communicate to readers what their stuff was all about. Bizarro, as a label, changed that.

Now, for a lot of authors whose work doesn't fit into traditional genres, Bizarro provides a haven and an opportunity to reach an audience that they may not have known existed before there was a rallying point, a short hand, a brand name. I didn't set out to write Bizarro. I know that I am not alone. I started out just writing stories that were too weird to get accepted by the Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror, and Lit markets I'd been submitting them to. I was getting rejected because I was submitting to the wrong places, not realizing how bizarre my work was by core genre standards. When I found Bizarro, I found the appropriate market for my work. And I was way late in the game compared to progenitors like Carlton Mellick III, Kevin L. Donihe, John Edward Lawson, D. Harlan Wilson, or Gina Ranalli. But I came to Bizarro the same way they did: seeking an outlet for a voice too weird to make it in other markets. If I hadn't found Bizarro, I might have eventually given up on ever getting published. You can only take so many rejections before you feel like your work must suck. And it's very hard to tell, especially with form rejections, if the problem is the quality of your work or that you aren't writing what the markets are looking for. If no other market is looking for your work, YOU are probably Bizarro.

Now, when I first heard of Bizarro and started to look into what it was about circa 2009, I was immediately skeptical. I looked around and got the impression that it was the paperback equivalent of Troma films and IN-YOU-FACE Gwar videos dripping with green hog semen. But this was not accurate. There were those books, don't get me wrong, and I'm not shitting on authors who write those kinds of books, but at the time it seemed to me that my weird was different from their weird.

I started to explore some Bizarro books and I was pleasantly blown away. The genre was incredibly diverse, and even titles that screamed GONZO SLIME EXPLOITATION were actually books that defied my expectations. There was something going on in this scene much deeper than superficial shock humor. There was an undercurrent of weirdness that ran through this material, from one end of the spectrum to the other. There were weird children's books and weird romances. There were incredibly well written books with cuss words in the title. It was hard for me to process. But once I got it, I had found my home.

From the time I got involved in Bizarro in 2012, the scene has only grown more diverse, more vibrant, and more creative. If anyone tells you anything else they are selling something. There are still plenty of shockingly extreme titles to choose from, as well as fabulously weird magical realism, weird noir, pop culture absurdity, high-brow strangeness, and even absurd Bizarro erotica that you can't imagine anyone jilling off to. There are so many flavors of weird here, I can hardly believe it.

And in closing the section, I'd like to visually list just a few TOTALLY BODACIOUS AND RADICALLY IN YOUR FACE TITLES that came out in the last five years, showing definitively that the Bizarro scene is not dead, oh no it's not.

A Big Blue Dick: A Review of Clown Tear Junkies by Douglas Hackle

This is that painting by Munch, The Scream

Do you know that painting The Scream by Edvard Munch? Okay, now imagine that that character there in the foreground is real, and he’s called The Scream, and he doesn’t talk or make any noise at all, and he usually keeps his wavy hands next to his gaunt face unless he’s doing something else with them. And he hangs out with an immature, blue-collar jerk who takes him clubbing all the time, trying to pick up chicks. And the chicks all think the Scream’s friend is a loser, but that’s okay, because he’s got a pat response that puts them all in their place: he tells them they are 7s. Then goth chicks start to dig The Scream and he becomes a horror movie star, so the two part ways….

That’s pretty much what it’s like inside Douglas Hackle’s mind all the time.

And that’s pretty much the story The Scream, My Dog, part of Hackle’s collection Clown Tear Junkies. I spoilered the crap out of it, but you should still read it because it’s still good.

Camera zooming out for a moment, Clown Tear Junkies (WARNING: Contains zero clowns and/or circuspunk elements) is a collection of 27 very short stories. People like to use the term “absurd” to refer to this style of prose, and while some of it is absurd, Hackle’s style is much more nuanced. He draws equally from the wells of the existentially absurd turf mined by Kafka (see: Struggle of a Description); the playful, list-loving postmodernism of Barthelme; and obscure pop cultural references—Stiles from Teen Wolf makes an appearance alongside the chain-smoking Indonesian toddler of YouTube fame. What makes Hackle’s writing so much fun is his unpredictable wordplay and his juxtaposition of low brow fare and academic trivia. You’ll find quite a bit of recursive humor tying the stories together, not the least of which will be the intoxicating and addictive nature of clown tears (esp. when mixed with mime tears and mainlined—what a rush!). You’ll find yourself looking up words to see if they are in the real dictionary or at urbandictionary.com (yes, both chyme and chyle are for real). You’ll find yourself expecting the stories to be going in one direction; you’ll be surprised where they end up taking you.  

Now, there are a few moments when the stories just get downright silly, and there’s probably a story or two that doesn’t stack up to the rest of the collection. But 27 is a nice round number, and who are you to tell Hax to the Max to drop a story from his baby? I mean, these stories are like his children, and just because some of them are born with beards or flippers or lobster faces doesn’t mean you love them any less, right? Are you asking the man to pick his favorite child? What kind of a monster are you? Quit Sofie-ing his choice! When you do see one of these freak babies, do not make direct eye contact. Just keep your head down and push through to the next paragraph, which is bound to be creepily brilliant, like Crispin Glover playing Sherlock Holmes.

And there are a few moments where you think to yourself, “Is Douggie Hacksaw trying to tell me something?” It’s possible some of the stories actually have a meaning. Racism, homosexuality, intimacy, education, cosmology, music, art, life and death, puppets/poppets, chyme and chyle are all examined in varying degrees of insanity. At the end of the book, I learned that Strange House advertises within Rooster Republic books, and this seemed like a sort of conflict of interests, but nowadays networks advertise their shows on other networks, so whatever. It just makes it harder to remember which station the shows come on, but I have a TiVo, which doesn’t seem to get confused and can always figure out how to record the shows I tell it to.

I’d point out the highlights, but that’s almost the entire book. If I can only recommend three of these stories to strangers, I’d say that you, stranger, should start with The Perfect Popcorn: A Recipe, Fishing with Higginsworth Fig VII: A Tale of Denial, and Give Courtney Cute Anything She Wants.

The Scream, My Dog could really act as a sort of synecdoche here. Meaning, I could say, “You read The Scream, My Dog yet?” and you would understand that I meant, “Have you read Clown Tear Junkies by Dig Doug Hackensplatz yet?” We just have that kind of understanding of each other, don’t we, stranger?

Wait, forget it. Just read the whole damn book. We’re done here.

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

Virulent by John Edward Lawson

One day, while gathering plantains, I happened upon a fruit-bearing penis. The thing was roughly the size of an adult, with large fronds and fruit of every type. I at first considered tapping it for sap, but in the end let it be. To ensure that this discovery remained unnoticed I did my best to obscure the path I had followed.
    At night I took women from the village up to that desolate area on the farmland’s border. Darkness hid the nature of the “tree” under which we made love; I felt it prudent to take advantage of such abundant virility.
    Inevitably my scheme was discovered when the women began birthing various fruits. Despite--or perhaps because of--the fact that the fruit was quite tasty (or so I was told) the villagers became unsettled. Roused by such obvious heresy they stormed the farm and burned my prized fruit-bearing penis alive, all the way down to the ground. This in turn ignited the underbrush, and soon the blaze spread to all the farm.
    I have wandered penniless and alone ever since. To this day I cannot decipher whether the plant was a blessing or a curse.
-----

John Edward Lawson has published nine books, seven chapbooks, and over five hundred works in anthologies, magazines, and literary journals worldwide. He is a winner of the Fiction International Emerging Writers Competition, and has been a finalist for the Stoker Award and Wonderland Award. Other nominations include the Dwarf Stars Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Rhysling Award. As a freelance editor he worked for Raw Dog Screaming Press, Double Dragon Publishing, and National Lampoon, has edited seven anthologies, and served as editor-in-chief for The Dream People. Recently he became a columnist at IMJ, covering events in the publishing industry.





"Virulent" originally published at The New Absurdist
Copyright John Edward Lawson
Artwork by Max Ernst

 

Karst Topography of the Soul by Mark Allen Berryhill

My wife wanted a picnic—she grew up in the urban blight of Seoul, and the way she told it that city wasn’t exactly rife with prime picnic parkland. Admittedly, there wasn’t much good picnic land left in Springfield either, but I knew about this secluded and manicured stretch of land behind the Wal-Mart on Campbell Street. All of the nearby houses had either been condemned or seized in an act of senseless imminent domain, but that was probably for the better—this area had a nasty sinkhole problem. I suppose everywhere did, but they were especially bad in this neighborhood. You couldn’t walk your dog around here without the earth swallowing it up. I wanted to take photos of abandoned Hoboho camps.

Luckily, I had an app for that. I saw an article on io9 warning of the impending sinkhole apocalypse, back before sinkhole apocalypses were cool, and they recommended a few useful apps for iPhone. So, armed with this little digital safety net we ventured out into this perfectly mowed valley, ignoring the No Tresspassing signs to find a sunny and flat spot close to the biggest tree around, a ginormous sweet gum that had blanketed the surrounding area with those annoying barbed little balls. We figured that the roots would keep the soil together, so we set up our straw picnic mat just outside the ring of gumballs.  Jiddy made  kimbap, a sort of inside out sushi filled with pickled radishes and spam. I brought the finest wine that three dollars could buy, a merlot so cheap that the “t” wasn’t silent.

We had the whole place to ourselves, on one side of the valley sat rows of fortified houses, the owners had spent a fortune safeguarding their property against erosion and errant topographical disasters—but to no avail. The property values plummeted, and the stigma attached to living in this neighborhood became so severe that many of the occupants fled their homes and jobs, preferring to live their lives as indigent peoples—Hobohos whose livelihoods involved scavenging the land for losing lottery tickets redeemable in those online second chance promotions. The Hoboho were also notorious dumpster divers, holding vast open air yard sales with prices so cheap you didn’t mind the inevitable bed bug infestations that came along with the purchase of their goods.

The other side sported a suburban greenway, a curvy stretch of safe sidewalk, potted plants, and ornamental grasses that the still well-to-do jogged incessantly, willfully oblivious to the urban blight on the other side of the ravine.

“How do they mowing here?” Jiddy asked.

 I didn’t have an answer for her. Someone had gone to great lengths to not only make the grass look beautiful, but to also fill in all the sinkholes with large chunks of limestone gravel. For those who didn’t know any better, this area would have looked like any other park.

We talked about nothing, smeared low SPF bug repellant on each other, and ate our food. Jiddy drank half a coffee mug full of merlot to make me happy, while I chugged the rest in a hurry. The three dollar bottle of wine tasted about the same as the nine dollar bottle of wine, but you wouldn’t want either to linger on your tongue. I had to get drunk enough to make exploring the abandoned neighborhood seem like a good idea. If I could stumble upon a mason jar of Hobogris to sell online we could pay our rent for a few months, and maybe, just maybe, we could afford the twelve dollar bottle of shitty wine. Also, I had hinted that it would be cool to plan for some spontaneous outdoor sex, which she seemed uncharacteristically enthusiastic about.

The wine stabbed at my guts and punched me in the bladder. I excused myself to pee and found a clump of uncultivated overgrowth, edged in a safe distance, unbuttoned my pants, and pissed for what seemed like forever. You had to get right up on it, but fast food wrappers, receipts, and plastic bags littered the undergrowth. I made a game of soaking all that shit. I peed and peed, and when I leaned against the nearest tree I put my hand right on top of a six inch honey locust thorn. I had to go so bad I didn’t notice what kind of vegetation I had nudged myself into. A dollop of blood formed on my palm. Looking down around my ankles I saw that the other plants were way worse—stinging nettles and poison oak. Shitness

Jiddy cried out, and I rolled my eyes. Of course. We can’t just have a nice picnic. My first instinct was that the Hoboho had taken her, but I had heard that they were a skittish lot; their jingoistic and superstitious fear of foreigners should have kept them at bay. She yelled again, a slew of Korean profanity I had heard before but she refused to translate for me, for fear that I would repeat the words I had learned in front of her family.

 Which I totally would and she knew it. I stumbled out into the valley, my ankles already itchy and uncomfortable. I could hear her mumbling and cursing, but all I could see was an empty little valley. Fucking sinkholes. As soon as I made it to the green I put away my dick and whipped out my phone.

“Help to getting me down you motherfucker!”

Getting down? The app showed no signs of recent karst activity, although it indicated a 76% probability of a very large sinkhole opening soon. My phone should have sent me a push notification when it went over fifty percent.

“Goddamn asshole! The tree got me!”

And it totally did. That sweetgum tree had her by the ankles. It held her up and regarded its catch. I approached the tree with my hands up, to show that I was no threat.

“Okay buddy, just put her down, we don’t mean no harm.”

The tree creaked and groaned and thrashed about, slinging seedy little balls everywhere. My iPhone chimed. The sinkhole predictor hit 92%. Jiddy squealed. I rushed to the trunk, that big bastard was already in its own hole, the balls had camouflaged its predicament. I quickly find myself up to my knees in sweetgum balls.

“You don’t have to take my wife with you, let her go and I’ll write a story about you, I promise.”

The tree dropped her into the gumball pit and she went completely under. I waded out to her, and thought that if it weren’t for the ticks and chiggers a sweetgum ball pit would be so much fun. I fished around for her, grabbed her by the crook of her elbow and hauled her out. She screamed and cursed at me the whole way.
We retreated towards the greenway trail, watching the tree sink into the earth.

“My picnic stuffs!” Jiddy said as we sat and panted.

“Leave them.”

“This is your fault.”

“I guess. Do you, um, still want to have sex?”

She grunted something I couldn’t translate but totally understood and we started the long and itchy walk home.


------------

When he isn't gardening, Mark Berryhill spends his days exploring complex social issues through fart jokes. 

Copyright 2013 Mark Berryhill 

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

A Heartless Romance by John Edward Lawson

I closed my eyes and puckered my lips; my heart was doing the same. I never imagined my heart and I would go that far but we did, and it was unnervingly exciting. I wanted to whisper, “Don’t look.” Or, “Don’t tell me if my mouth tastes funny.” Or, “This hole in my chest is getting cold.” Instead we kissed long and hard, and the serenity that came over me only just barely countered the quickening of my breath, the mounting tension in my muscles. The kiss itself could not have lasted more than ten seconds but was as draining as a funeral service. When we finally drew apart my lips were dripping warmth--not a wetness induced by the passion of the moment, no; it is simply in a heart’s nature to be a bloody mess.
    We held back in wonder momentarily, laying there in the stark moonlight with the stiff grass complaining against our backs. Then we simply embraced. It pulsed sticky against my cheek, and yes I am not ashamed to admit that in that moment I took the liberty of fondling a ventricle. Rest assured there was no protest from my heart.
    “I…love you,” I said uneasily. It was the first time for that arrangement of syllables to pass the hurdle of my lips, but somehow they made it.
    “Don’t get carried away,” my heart said with it’s typical brashness. “You’ve got that attachment thing going on, don’t you? That co-dependancy thing. Seen it on the TV.”
    No, I wouldn’t let my heart spoil the moment’s worth, not after all we had been through. So after a short lull I looked over its quivering, bulbous exterior and said, “Check out those muscles. You’ve been working out again, haven’t you?”
    “Ah, well,” it chuckled, finally softening. “You noticed? Do I really look like all that?”
    “You know it,” I purred reassuringly.
    So I leaned back on my elbows and watched my heart strike some muscle poses, cranking out coronary-worthy pumps in the attempt to impress me. “How about that,” it huffed. “How you like me now?”
    “You’re the only heart for me.” Having said that I let my mind wander a bit, which brought on a surge of panic. “Oh no. Oh no, oh no. What are we going to do? Huh?”
    “Hey, we got away clean. Sure there was some gunfire, and sure some people got hurt, but we made it out of there okay. All’s we got to do now is stick to the plan and get moving. Head down Mexicali way and lay low for a while.”
    This settled my nerves enough that I was able to start gathering our get-away gear. “I love you. I really do.”
    My heart did not reply.
    “That man, the one at the desk? He had pretty good aim, huh?”
    “Good enough to tear your chest open pretty bad.”
    In that grove of trees it felt as though we were redefining enchantment with this criminal affair. Robbery, murder, arson, we did it all with a passion that had been lacking in every other moment of my life. My heart had me in its grip, I knew it then as surely as I do now, and maybe in the final analysis I would be no more than a pawn blinded by love in this game of rogue excess.
    “It’s time we got a move on. Remember, careful what you say to people. All’s we got to do is hook the first car what comes along, then we’re home free. Or we’re walkin’.” I followed my heart out of the woods. We took to the road and the ensuing reliance on my feet gave me a whole new appreciation for them. But that love quadrangle is another story altogether.
----

John Edward Lawson has published nine books, seven chapbooks, and over five hundred works in anthologies, magazines, and literary journals worldwide. He is a winner of the Fiction International Emerging Writers Competition, and has been a finalist for the Stoker Award and Wonderland Award. Other nominations include the Dwarf Stars Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Rhysling Award. As a freelance editor he worked for Raw Dog Screaming Press, Double Dragon Publishing, and National Lampoon, has edited seven anthologies, and served as editor-in-chief for The Dream People. Recently he became a columnist at IMJ, covering events in the publishing industry.








"A Heartless Romance" originally published at RedWritingHood.com
Copyright John Edward Lawson
Artwork Remedios Varo

Early to Rise, Late to Bloom by Mark Allen Berryhill

Audra stared at her ceiling. She always woke up before her alarm. It wasn’t fair. She looked over at the pot in which the alarm grew. It quivered and twitched, and at this point looked like a slimy egg popping up out of the dirt. She gave it maybe twenty minutes before it bloomed and started shrieking. At least she would beat her brother to the bathroom.

She sighed and turned on her side, but jumped out of bed when her hand touched something wet and slimy. She pulled the cover back to reveal an irregular spot of dark red goo about the size of a saucer. She groaned and pursed her lips. The first time this happened she thought she had finally gotten her period, that maybe she had leaked in the night, but no, it was just her brother’s pet slime mold, Rusty, coalescing.

“Go do that somewhere else, you little asshole” she whispered.

She rummaged through the junk on her floor to find her cell phone on and tossed it at the little beast. It quivered and slowly oozed away.

She didn’t trust that thing. Last week she woke up and it was in her hair. She guessed it liked her, but as pets go that thing was pretty gross. Her mom said it liked her room especially since Audra did such a terrible job of keeping it clean. It wasn’t fair that he got a pet and she didn’t. For her next birthday Audra would demand a kitten.

She rummaged through her clothes pile, which had gone from being mostly clean to mostly dirty. She picked the bra she wanted to wear today and plucked off a tiny white mushroom.  Her mom would freak if she knew how dirty her room was. She flicked the mushroom into the slime mold, which dripped off her bed into a little pool near her feet.

“Don’t say I never did anything for you.”

Her mom insisted that if she would just fold up her clothes and put them away like she was supposed to she wouldn’t look like such a slob. She sniffed the clothes she picked out and her jeans still smelled like laundry, and that was enough. It wasn’t like she was going to impress anyone. Everyone paid attention to the girls who didn’t look like little boys.

She gathered her stuff up and snuck out into the cold and damp hallway. Fungal shelves full of knickknacks lined the walls, giving off a faint light you could only see if you didn’t look directly at them, but at least they made it easier to avoid bumping into anything. If she woke her brother up he’d demand that to go first and then stink the place up and use all the hot water. So, she tried to be as quiet as possible. She had always wanted to be a ninja assassin when she grew up, but her mom said that would never happen unless she took school more seriously. Audra had already figured out that school was just a place to socialize, and she just didn’t see the point in that.

She opened the door and closed it without making much of a sound. The first thing she did was to turn the shower on—if her brother knocked on the door she could always say she couldn’t hear him over the sound of the water.

She flipped on the light and it flickered into a soft bioluminescence. Her mom needed to replace that bulb. She took off her night clothes and kicked them into a corner, then looked at herself in the door mirror. She thought of this as The Daily Examination of Shame.  Nothing. No change at all. What the hell was going on? She couldn’t think of another girl in her grade that was as underdeveloped as she was, it was ridiculous. She was tired of pretending to complain about cramps that she never had.

She thought back to the fourth grade. They split the girls and boys up and forced them to watch cutesy sexual education videos with kiddy cartoon euphemisms. Well, her fruiting bodies didn’t look like they were going to bloom any time soon. Everyone giggled throughout the entire video and it really pissed Miss Spink off. It wasn’t that they weren’t mature to understand what was going on, but they all had the internet, they might have titled the videos, “What You Already Know In Insulting Animated Form”. In fact, her best friend Tabby had already got her first period so it wasn’t like any of it was a secret.

That was a long time ago.
 
She tested the water, it was so hot it almost hurt. She turned the showerhead so that it blasted the wall instead and stepped into the tub and pulled the curtain closed. She peed into her hands and worked that into her crevices. If the girls at school saw her do that they’d eat her alive. It wasn’t like her family couldn’t afford antifungal soap—they didn’t have to do it this way. If her mom would skip the organic food that wasn’t any better for you than real food they wouldn’t have to use their own piss like poor people. And it didn’t even work, not like the medicinal stuff! She still got rashes. In fact over the summer it got so bad that most of the hair on her head fell out. The buzz cut she sported might reinforce the whole little boy thing, but no way is she going to rub urine into her hair no matter how “sterile” or “natural” it is
.
Her mom insisted that by using anti-fungal soaps humanity is just breeding more dangerous strains of infection. Before Audra was born her uncle had contracted a nasty brain fungus, climbed a radio tower, and then bloomed—to everyone’s horror. Or so she said. Audra knew her mom just liked being a weirdo and wanted a freak for a daughter.


The gritty bar of soap her mom bought smelled good, so at least there was that. Gym class would be so much worse if she stank on top of everything else. She scrubbed herself with that soap until it almost hurt, and when she rinsed the soap out of her eyes she looked down to see a trail of red swirling between her legs and going down the drain.

She gasped and turned around. Rusty had slipped under the door and followed her into the tub. The little bastard was way smarter than you’d expect it to be, or dumber. It slithered unsuccessfully up the side of the bathtub, trying to get out. She tried to scoop it up, but the water wasn’t helping, and soap, even stuff that wasn’t anti-fungal, did terrible things to slime molds.

She didn’t know what to do, so she adjusted the shower head to rinse it down the drain.

There was a pounding on the door.

“AUDRA, YOUR ALARM IS SHRIEKING!”

“CAN YOU FUCK OFF, MOM?”

“WHAT DID YOU SAY!?”

“CAN YOU TURN IT OFF, MOM?”

Audra wished she could wash herself down the drain, too.

-----

When he isn't gardening, Mark Berryhill spends his days exploring complex social issues through fart jokes. 

Copyright 2013 Mark Berryhill 

Tree by Sarah Shaw

Roger had never seen the tree before. It didn't seem possible, since he walked through the woods every evening after returning home from work, but there it was. The tree loomed over the trail that cut through the dense forest near Roger's home; the trail that was frequented by hikers and berry-pickers during the summer, cross-country skiers during the winter, and Roger every day at around 5:47 pm.
    What the hell was a tall deciduous tree doing here amidst spindly spruce and birch trees, anyway? The trunk had to be at least seven, no eight, times the thickness of the oldest and healthiest spruce in the forest. Roger stepped off the path to investigate.
    As he circled around the tree, the glowing outline of an arch became visible on the trunk. Roger put his palm on the bark surface and, with a minute amount of pressure, the arch swung away from Roger and he tumbled in.
    "What in the goddamned...." Roger sputtered. When he pulled his knees in to stand, the door he had tripped through slammed shut. He frantically felt around the smooth curved wall around him, but his fingers didn't find a door.
    "Oh god, oh god, what the fuck..." Roger repeated, spinning around the circular closet. All that occupied the room was an electric lantern on the wall. Then he smelled it. A familiar scent wafted into his nostrils and he breathed it deeply. Roger would know that comforting smell anywhere. Oatmeal Cookies.
    Oatmeal cookies were his favorite. They beat out chocolate chip. Snickerdoodles didn't stand a chance against them. The smell lulled Roger until his eyes rolled back. He dropped to the floor in a heap and was too busy being unconscious to notice when the floor disappeared.
       
                                           ***

    "Wake up, Mr. Blue."
    Roger felt a light tapping on his forehead.
    "Wake up, Mr. Blue."
    Tap, tap, tap.
    Roger struggled to open his eyes. They felt glued shut, but he was able to manage it. He was lying on his back and the strong scent of oatmeal cookies was still present. A small, dwarf in a green jacket and pointed hat was leaning over Roger and smiling at him with an a lipless mouth full of gray and yellow teeth.
    "You're finally awake, Mr. Blue. That's just grand," the dwarf chuckled, "I'm so glad. It's your lucky day.”
    "Lucky?" Roger slurred. Whatever had knocked him out was still lingering.
    "Oh yes, quite lucky," the dwarf grinned.
    Roger looked around. He and the dwarf were in what appeared to be a hospital room and he was lying on a cot. Next to the cot was an unused monitor with wires hanging from it.
    "What happened?" Roger noticed that this particular hospital room had no doors or windows.
    "You happened, Mr.Blue!"
    "Who's Mr. Blue?"
    "YOU are Mr. Blue, Mr. Blue," the dwarf poked Roger in the chest three times with a gnarled finger. Roger looked down and saw that he was wearing his blue work shirt. When he looked back up, the dwarf raised one of his small hands above his head.
    "Macaroon!" the dwarf shouted and with a snap of his fingers, the hospital room was gone.

                                          ***

    Roger and the green-clad dwarf were in a lush meadow, surrounded by stone ovens and wooden tables. Working busily all around them were brightly dressed dwarves in matching pointed hats. The wonderful and intoxicating smell was even stronger than before. Oatmeal cookies.
    "I'm Bertram, bye the bye," said the dwarf in green," and I told you that it was your lucky day! It's Oatmeal Cookie Day! Every day is a different cookie and you just happened upon us on oatmeal day, Mr. Blue. Would you like to try one? Or five?"
    While Roger had no idea how much time had passed since he first fell into the tree, he did know that he was hungry. All of the fear that he felt had dissolved. He didn't even care where he was. All that Roger could focus on was the stack of neatly piled oatmeal cookies that sat on one of the wooden tables. He snatched a cookie and sniffed it. He took a bite of the cookie while Bertram looked on, rubbing his bony little dwarf hands together.
    The cookie was the best cookie that Roger had ever had. The flavor was familiar, but so unlike anything he had tasted. Sweet, with a hint of cinnamon, and a savory undertone that Roger wouldn't have believed possible if he hadn't experienced it. His body buzzed in sexual arousal and Roger fought the urge to touch himself. He wasn't so enraptured that he forgot about Bertram and the other dwarves staring at him.
    "Hmmmm...." Bertram muttered and sounded very distant to Roger, "usually this is where they fall down. Guess I should take care of that."
    Roger was swallowing the last bite of his cookie when Bertram hit him in the head with a wooden rolling pin.

                                        ***

    Roger was awakened by a hard slap with a spatula. He tried to voice a protest, but someone had stuffed cloth into his mouth. Bertram stepped back from the table that Roger was bound to, grinding his nasty little teeth and tossing the utensil over his shoulder. Roger couldn't move, but could see that they were in a shack with a door and two curtained windows..
    "You can't move, Mr. Blue, so don't even bother to try. You're tied to that table and you wouldn't get far without any feet anyway." The dwarf gestured to a counter along one of the walls. On the counter, a foot stuck upside-down out of a meat grinder. Roger looked down the length of his prone body and saw that his legs ended in charred, black stumps right beneath his knees. His eyes teared up and sweat started to streak his forehead. He twitched as he stared at a pile of bloody ground meat that sat on the counter. He realized that the air didn't smell like his favorite cookie anymore.
     "When I said that it was your lucky day, I meant it," Bertram started turning the crank on the meat grinder and a crunchy, squelchy sound filled the room. Roger fought the vomit that threatened to come up his throat and choke him.
    "That was the best damn cookie you ever had, I betcha. And don't worry, Mr. Blue. You'll have some more. Can't promise that they'll be oatmeal, but they'll be good just the same," Bertram waved the aroma of the bloody pile of meat and bone to his nose.
    Roger tried to scream. Bertram didn't notice.
    "Ah yes..." the dwarf inhaled deeply, "I think that you will be quite wonderful in a ginger snap. You seem to have just the right bit of tang to you. These feet are plenty enough for a big, fine batch of baked deliciousness that will last us awhile." Bertram swiveled back toward Roger and snapped his fingers. "You must be famished, eh, Mr. Blue! I'll go fetch you some cookies. Got to keep your strength up. Can't have you dyin' before we've used every last scrap of you. The ingredients have to be fresh and no meat is fresher than meat that was just alive!" Bertram shuffled quickly through the door and closed it behind him.
    Roger wept.
------------

Sarah Shaw lives in the middle of Alaska where she thinks up stuff and writes it down.

Copyright 2013 Sarah Shaw
Artwork by Juan Gris

Day 4 at HackleCon by Douglas Hackle

One Saturday morning a man woke up in his bed just before dawn.  It’s too early for me to be up, the man thought as he lion-yawned and lion-stretched.  He sensed something was wrong.  At first he wondered if maybe an intruder was in the house, and he tensed up with fright.  But then he realized what the problem was.

The skin on the side of his upper right arm felt extra naked, that is, more naked than the skin covering the rest of his buck naked body.  The skin there somehow felt . . . empty.

He reached over and turned on the nightstand lamp, causing the room to explode with light.  The man looked down at his arm:  Sure enough, the tattoo he’d gotten there a couple weeks ago was gone!  The tattoo was of himself—fully naked, flexing his muscles in a side pose that showcased his ripped pecs and his ripped right arm, the profile of his limp junk dangling impressively between his ripped legs.  It was the only tattoo the man had ever gotten.  But now there was nothing but taut, unmarked, peach-colored skin where the tattoo had been.

‘The fuck?’ the man said.  That’s when he heard a light knocking coming from downstairs.

Groggy and confused, the man climbed out of bed, pulled on a pair of sweatpants, and walked out into the hall.  He followed the knocking all the way downstairs to the front door of the house, at which point he flicked on the porch light and opened the door.  At first it appeared no one was out there.  Probably just the neighborhood kids messing around, he guessed.  But then he caught movement in his lower peripheral vision.  He looked down.

The man’s missing tattoo—the tattoo of himself naked—was standing there on the porch looking up at him, only now the tattoo was 3-D instead of 2-D.

‘The fuck?’ the man said. 

‘Sorry if I woke you,’ his tattoo said in a voice identical to his own.  ‘I went out to get a tattoo.  Check it out.  It’s us!’  The tattoo held out its ripped little arm to show the man its tattoo.  The man leaned down, squinted, and saw that the new tattoo was yet another identical tattoo of himself—naked and flexing—except the new one was proportionally smaller in order to fit on the arm of his tattoo.

‘Pretty fuckin’ metal, huh?’ the man’s tattoo said.  It leapt back onto the man’s arm and flattened itself out, settled back onto its rightful home.  Somewhat dumbfounded, the man stared down in wonder at his tattoo’s little tattoo, touched it with the tip of his index finger.

A few weeks later, something very similar happened to the man just before daybreak one Saturday morning.  The man woke to that unsettling feeling again, that weird emptiness-on-the-arm feeling, only this time the intensity of the feeling was a mere fraction of what he’d experienced the first time. 

The man reached over, turned on the light, looked down at his arm.  His tattoo was right where it was supposed to be, flexing its muscles on the canvas of his skin as douchily as ever.  But now the tattoo’s tattoo was gone!

He couldn’t actually hear the knocking coming from the front door downstairs (the sound was too faint to be heard by the human ear at that distance), but the man instinctually knew the sound was there.  He climbed out of bed, pulled on a pair of sweatpants, and walked downstairs to open the front door.  On his way down, he wondered if he’d even be able to see the tiny new tattoo on the right arm of his tattoo’s tattoo.

The End.

***

Still nervously holding onto the edges of the podium, Douglas Hackle concluded his reading of his original flash fiction effort “The Three Tattoos” and looked up from his sloppy, handwritten manuscript.  His eyes swept across the large conference room that he’d rented in downtown Cleveland.

Empty chairs as far as the eye could see. 

He’d spent a lot of money—money he didn’t have—to rent this room for the writers con that he’d named after himself.  But due to a combination of factors that included shyness, sleep deprivation, low blood sugar, and inborn stupidity, he’d neglected to invite anyone.  In fact, no one but Douglas knew of the event’s existence.

Well, no one but him and one other being.

For at the back of the room, in that last row of chairs, was a single occupied seat.

And in that seat sat none other than Terror Clown.

Terror Clown was not applauding.  Terror Clown was not smiling.

And just as the nameless protagonist in “The Three Tattoos” had been too far away to hear the knocking of his tattoo’s tattoo at the end of the story, so Douglas was too far away from Terror Clown to hear the demonic clown’s low, satanic growl.  Nevertheless, he knew the growl was there.

“Please don’t fucking kill me in the face, Terror Clown!” Douglas pleaded.

Terror Clown’s brow knitted in great annoyance and seething anger, feelings that had been brewing for four days now.  “That doesn’t even make any sense,” reprimanded the demonic clown.

                                        To (Not) Be Continued . . . .

----

Douglas Hackle writes lobsters that are bizarre, surreal, satirical, horrific, macabre, veiny, vainglorious, childish, moronic, or some combination of these qualities. His lobsters have seen publication in both online crabs and printed manatees. Douglas resides in Northeast Ohio with his wife and little boy, and he sincerely apologizes for using the phrase “lest you order seven fetal marionette pizzas” four times in the previous sentence when one time would have been just as sufficient.

Visit him at: http://douglashackle.wordpress.com/

Copyright Douglas Hackle
Artwork by Gustav-Adolf Mossa

Attila King by John Edward Lawson

Attila the Hun was sent to the grimy, smoky future: the 1990s. The mighty warrior king had not come to conquer. Instead, he sought only to observe the United States Postal Service in action. He hoped to bring great renown to his people by instituting an efficient parcel system of his own.
    “What wonders the future holds…such technology! Such advances! Primary care physicians and dentists under separate health plans!” He clucked his tongue in astonishment. “My land will benefit greatly from future knowledge.”
    While strolling the gritty pavement of Los Angeles, Attila was approached by five pale skinned police officers. “Excuse me sir,” the lead officer said. “Do you mind if we examine your clothes?”
    Attila's Mongolian ears did not comprehend; he wouldn't have let them inspect his furs and leathers regardless.
    Suspecting the furs to be from endangered species the officers grabbed him. “Do you have any sharp objects in your pockets, sir?” Two more police joined them.
    Attila offered the foreign dogs some choice archaic Mongolian profanity. After finding two concealed daggers on him they proceeded to give him the Rodney King treatment. Or, it would have been the Rodney King treatment, except…
    In ancient Mongolia Rodney was busy introducing polyester and margaritas to the nomadic warriors, profiting greatly from his knowledge of the future.


-----

John Edward Lawson has published nine books, seven chapbooks, and over five hundred works in anthologies, magazines, and literary journals worldwide. He is a winner of the Fiction International Emerging Writers Competition, and has been a finalist for the Stoker Award and Wonderland Award. Other nominations include the Dwarf Stars Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Rhysling Award. As a freelance editor he worked for Raw Dog Screaming Press, Double Dragon Publishing, and National Lampoon, has edited seven anthologies, and served as editor-in-chief for The Dream People. Recently he became a columnist at IMJ, covering events in the publishing industry.


Attila King originally published by Bust Down the Doors and Eat All the Chickens.
Copyright John Edward Lawson
Artwork by Carlo Carra

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.



----

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

THE TRUTH OR DARE CHAMPION by Justin Grimbol

Earl woke up to someone pounding on his door.

“Who is it?” he yelled.

The door opened. Light seeped into his room. Pussy Bear stuck her massive bear head into his room. She was drunk.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I’m bored,” she said.

“It’s five in the morning. You’re supposed to be bored. You’re supposed to be sleeping.”

“I don’t want to sleep. Come on, let’s hang out?”

“And do what?”

“We could play Truth or Dare.”

Pussy Bear loved to play Truth or Dare. She was a pro at truthing and daring. Once she dared a girl named Lila to stick a super powered flash light up her butt. It made both the girls ass cheeks glow. It was the best time ever. Earl was a nerd. He didn’t get to see cool stuff like that very often.

Truth or Dare could also get very awkward though. Pussy Bear loved to dare Earl to sit in her lap and touch her. She loved to make him uncomfortable.
 
Once, she dared Lila to kiss him. Lila refused. “He smells,” she said.

Earl looked like he was about to cry. This made Pussy Bear furious.

She started verbally abusing the girl. She called her a skank. She told her she was ugly. “You look like fucking Mrs. Potato Head!” Pussy Bear told her. Lila eventually ran out of the house crying.

It had been months since the incident with the Lila. Still, he was apprehensive about playing Truth or Dare. What if she got him all horny and they ended up boinking? He didn’t want to lose his virginity to a drunk Bear.

“Who else is awake?” Earl asked.

“Just me.”

“You can’t play Truth or Dare with only two people.”

“Sure you can.”

“It would be boring.”

Earl sighed. Pussy Bear was his first roommate. He thought it would easier to live with someone who was older. It wasn’t. He had been living with this big titted bear for almost a year and he hadn’t gotten used to it. She was belligerent and sex crazed and she never did the dishes. He heard that before she got the surgery she was just a normal woman and that she was pretty.  People told him that the surgery had changed her, that it didn’t just make her look like a bear, that it also made her act like one.

“Listen Pussy Bear, I’m eighteen now. I’m way too old to be playing Truth or Dare.”

“Age doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m old as hell and I still love playing Truth or Dare. It’s the best.”

“I just don’t want to play, OK? I got to get some sleep. I got to go to work tomorrow.”

“OK. I understand.”

Pussy Bear closed the door. Earl lay in bed and listened to her stomp around their apartment. He could hear her rifling through the refrigerator. He could hear her dropping food onto the floor and then drunkenly cleaning it up. Pussy Bear got hungry at night. Especially when she was feeling rejected.

At one point he heard Pussy Bear talking to herself. She was playing Truth or Dare. Alone.  “Truth or Dare?” she asked herself. “Truth,” She said. “Don’t chose truth. Only wimps chose truth. Truth is boring.” She said. “Fine I’ll chose dare. OK. I dare you to stay up all night, eat all the food in the refrigerator and then to take a nice long piss as you watch the sun rise.”

Earl laughed when he heard her say this. She was so determined. She was like the Rocky Balboa of Truth or Dare. Part of him wanted to join her. An even bigger part didn’t want to get molested by a giant bear.

He couldn’t sleep. His thoughts were racing. He kept thinking about Pussy Bear. All that fur. Those giant breasts. Her musky odor. Then he thought about Lila. He thought about her ass and how it shined like Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer.

Hours passed. The sun rose. Birds began chirping.

Earl heard Pussy Bear walked outside. He heard her pissing. She pissed for what seemed like a small eternity. Earl loved the way it sounded. It was the sound of triumph. She had succeeded. She had played Truth or Dare by herself. And she had won.

-------

Justin Grimbol went to some college for a million years and he has a beard, but you should totally buy his books:  Drinking Until Morning and  The Crud Masters.


Copyright Justin Grimbol
Artwort Giorgio de Chirico

James Brown Saves Christmas by Andrew Wayne Adams

“Get up!”

“Get on up?”

“Get up!” shouts James Brown again, “it’s Christmas!”

“Holy shit!” I say, and jump out of bed, throwing off the covers and rising straight up like Nosferatu. “Christmas!”

We run downstairs, James Brown in the lead. His face is all sweaty. He screams, “Stay on the scene!”

And by “the scene,” he means: Christmas morning!

We each have one present under the tree. From each other. He opens his first, ripping away the paper to reveal: me!

“So good,” he shouts, “so good; I got you!”

I open mine next. It’s: James Brown! He doesn’t wait for me to finish unwrapping him before he gets up and dances, flinging off the last bit of paper himself as he does the Mashed Potato.

Dad comes in—we haven’t seen him in years—and unwraps his present (that he got for himself) to reveal: a snakeskin purse!

James Brown screams, “Papa’s got a brand new bag!”

Then Dad leaves again for several more years.

We both fall silent, looking inward. I sink to the floor. The Christmas tree wilts. From the fireplace comes, not Santa Claus, but carbon monoxide.

Then James Brown does the Twist, and he looks at me and screams, “Get up!”

“Get on up?”

“Get up!” he shouts, and I do, and we both run to the kitchen and fling open the cupboards and fridge and grab flour and sugar and eggs and butter and PCP and start to make Christmas cookies!

Once the dough is ready, James Brown rolls it flat by dancing on it. Sweat drips from his face and mixes with the dough.

I feel good.

We cut shapes from the dough. We bake the shapes. We decorate the baked shapes and put them on a plate. We make hundreds of cookies of every kind. I feel nice.

James Brown picks up a gingerbread man and says, “This is a man’s world!” Then he eats the gingerbread man.

We eat hundreds of cookies.

The overload of sugar and PCP turns James Brown into a monster. A vampire, to be specific. He grows fangs and dons a cape.

He attacks me. I grab a cookie shaped like a crucifix and try to ward him off. He hisses. I back him into a corner. He does the splits and wraps himself in his cape. I stand over him, holding him in place with the cookie.

A saxophonist sneaks up behind me and honks his instrument in my ear. It startles me, and while I’m distracted, James Brown bites me on the arm.

The saxophonist bows to James Brown, calls him “Master,” then turns into fog and disappears into the exhaust fan over the stove.

I look at the bite on my arm. I look at James Brown.

James Brown screams, “I got you!”

Indeed; and soon I will be like him: undead!

I cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

I drop to my knees. James Brown drapes a cape over me.

I die.

James Brown puts me in the oven and rolls a large rock in front of it. I bake at room temperature for three days/months. Then:

“Get up...”

“Get on up?”

“Get up...” James Brown croons into my mind through vampiric telepathy; “it’s Easter!”

“Holy shit!” I say, and burst out of the oven, rising from my tomb like Nosferatu. “Easter!”

We run outside and hunt for eggs and drink the blood of humans. The humans call me “Master.” They are my flock. I feel good.

I knew that I would.

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Andrew Wayne Adams is a total jerk from somewhere in the Midwest or something.  He wrote a book called Janitor of Planet Anilingus.  He stole G. Arthur Brown's Kitten and he won't give it back. He now lives in Portland where he is happy and successful (and licking butts).

Copyright Andrew Wayne Adams
Artwork by Leonora Carrington

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

Tesla’s Brigade by John Edward Lawson

Twelve children were sent to the future to communicate a desperate message on behalf of their era. Future humans will phase out hearing altogether due to noise pollution. Tesla knew such a predicament would arise so he instructed the children in the ways of sign language.
    “Why have they sent you to us?” the future humans will ask.
    “Keyser Wilhelm needs to borrow some milk.”
    This statement will lead to solemn deliberation amongst future governments. Wild gesticulation will rule the day.
    The decision: “We can’t see how one ‘borrows’ a cup of milk. After usage the milk is incapable of being returned.”
    Saddened by the rampant stinginess they encountered, the envoy returned to the early twentieth century. Tesla administered a sound spanking to them. Meanwhile, Keyser Wilhelm was unable to bake a proper cake for receiving foreign dignitaries, leading to World War I and the popularity of Veganism.

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John Edward Lawson has published nine books, seven chapbooks, and over five hundred works in anthologies, magazines, and literary journals worldwide. He is a winner of the Fiction International Emerging Writers Competition, and has been a finalist for the Stoker Award and Wonderland Award. Other nominations include the Dwarf Stars Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Rhysling Award. As a freelance editor he worked for Raw Dog Screaming Press, Double Dragon Publishing, and National Lampoon, has edited seven anthologies, and served as editor-in-chief for The Dream People. Recently he became a columnist at IMJ, covering events in the publishing industry.

"Tesla's Brigade" originally published in Idiot's Manifesto
Copyright John Edward Lawson 
Artwork Remedios Varo