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.

Bad Days (Extended)

I.

Shards of the children's bones in his teeth, he attempted to claw his way from the sewer, but the walls were too slippery to find a hold. He kept coming back with fistfuls of slime. With nothing else to do, he scraped his palms as clean as he could on the rim of his bucket, allowing the filth to sluggishly drip inside it. He couldn’t remember why he had not brought a ladder, except that they are just too large to carry on one’s person, especially if you’ve got a girl under your left arm and a boy under your right. The candles guttered; he was nearly completely engulfed in darkness. The light of the sun was blinding as he attempted to stare up at the hole to the surface some two stories up. He tried again to climb the wall, to get his footing in the brickwork. His soles skidded back to the floor, his ankles absorbing the impact.

He looked around at the rats, the bones, the scum, the black water, or what little he could really see of them in the diminishing light. “This is the last time I take my lunch in a fucking sewer.”

II.

Kids with air rifles had taken over the Capitol, so he smoked a cigarette angrily in the farthest minaret. If he could dampen his handkerchief, he thought it might be possible to send tiny smoke signals to the elderly who still held most of the office buildings on the adjacent block. By the time he'd hacked up enough phlegm and spittle, his cigarette had burned down to the filter. Reaching into his coat pocket, he realized his pack was empty. He wondered why he had bothered to put an empty pack back in his pocket. He flipped the lid and looked inside. There was a lick-and-stick tattoo of a circus seal inside.

They must be watching me right now, he thought, and then blacked out from concussion.

III.

She waited in the filthy diner on 4th. There was no more berry cobbler. She cried so hard that the owner asked her to leave. When she got into the streets, she could see them coming toward her at a quickened pace. The look on their faces like starving hounds. They did not care if she was not berry flavored. They hit her with Tonkas and with Wiffle bats. After a matter of moments, she crumpled upon herself and they forced her into the open manhole, into the sewer below, where it was rumored that cannibals still hid who had not received notice of the changes made on the surface.

She barely recovered consciousness before her clothes were being ripped off her and fashioned into a rope of some kind...

For more like this - Pan-Weirdism Community

What Have I Got in My Pocketses?

I promise you, things are really turning around.

Egypt and Tunisia are on their way to becoming more democratic than the USA. Libya is on its way to being powder keg for WWIII. The US is on its way to becoming a third world hellhole (and aren't I glad I don't have a Government job now?). Fates are really turning around.

And I've got some really solid ideas for a short story collection that could put my cozily at the bottom of the sellers list. See, short stories are not very popular - at least, not when compared to novels. In this day and age it's sort of paradoxical. People are very busy and have less time, so short stories would seem an easy option. But people's lives are also pointless and meaningless, so novels offer a deeper escape, full immersion. ("Full Penetration" you might say, once you've read my [proposed] short story collection.) I remain a man committed, at least in the short term (the next year at least, the remainder of my life at most), to the short story. As I've commented on other men's blogs, I rarely have read a perfect or mind-blowing novel, but I have read dozens of perfect or mind-blowing short stories. I will produce many shorts even if it means I wallow in obscurity doing so. (A promising note: writing only short fiction works for Kelly Link.)

But the unpopularity of short stories is not the only commercial obstacle to my success. Yes, there's my race of course, but this isn't about the white man holding down the white man. My writing is failing to cement itself in a solid marketing category. This is both good and bad. Good because there seems to be a demand for this sort of weird, interstitial fiction and it leaves me more flexible in terms of branding. Bad because its harder to find a convenient conduit to channel my work to those who would really dig it. There's not a good word for the writing that am I am currently doing, but I am not alone in the style. You know those fellows who combine elements of mainstream and genre fiction with the brush of the surrealist/irrealist/absurdist. Bizarro has attempted to provide a label for the 'movement,' though I think Bizarro has failed to encompass all aspects of the weird. Plainly put, Bizarro attempts to be the literary equivalent of the Cult Movie Section of the video store, but makes no real distinction between the weirdness of Eraserhead and the weirdness of Surf Nazis Must Die. For me this is a problem because I don't think I have a Surf Nazi appeal in my writing, and that seems to be more and more the direction their movement leans. See Mellick's Zombies and Shit or Donihe's Night of the Assholes for more on this point. (If you are interested in a more general sort of weirdness check out the Dreamwidth community I've started with Mr. Nihil - Pan-Weirdism.)

I suppose I should also mention my lack of discipline. Were I to work harder at planning, revision and self-editing I would also stand a better chance of being published sooner, by bigger publishers willing to take greater risks on a newcomer. But that's like something way out of my control, man. Give me a break.

Now, if you'll excuse me, 5 hours of Horatio Hornblower isn't quite enough for one day. Adieu.