The Eye's Snow by Lee Widener (Random Title #3)

The Eye blazed angrily with fire, parching the land below. People knew from experience to stay inside during The Eye's Fire. Anyone who ventured out during the Fire was swiftly eyeburned, and if they stayed out long enough, even covered in nasty blisters. It was difficult to tell when the Fire would come, seemingly a capricious decision by the Eye to turn fiery, though a class of prognosticators had arisen claiming they could predict when the Eye would shift cycle.

The Fire was the most difficult cycle for the inhabitants of Jaloonga. Rivers dried up in a matter of hours, and even wells went dry if they weren't properly covered. Animals and livestock had to be kept inside or they became dehydrated, and finally desiccated. Anyone venturing outdoors without protective gear suffered the same fate. Villages were filled with tragic cases who had found themselves outside during the shift, only partially covered, winding up with withered, skeletal hands or heads that would never grow hair again.

No one knew why the Eye turned angry when it did, though the subject was constantly debated by many. Priests often claimed to have the answers, but nobody really knew. Fortunately for the inhabitants of Sterinoptiko immediately following the Fire was The Eye's Rain. The Eye would weep nonstop during the Rain, drenching the land with blessed sweet life-giving water. Rivers filled to overflowing and people took the opportunity to rejoice, shedding raiment and dancing under the gaze of the ever watchful Eye.

Every possible vessel had to be filled with the liquid nectar and stored, for one could never survive The Fire without hoarding The Rain. Livestock was herded outside to soak up as much of The Rain as they could. Though the Eye was weeping, all those below were overjoyed for the time of plenty. Crops grew quickly and had to be harvested as soon as possible. Even wood was cut during The Rain, even though it was soaked, because after The Eye's Rain came The Eye's Snow.

When The Eye's gaze turned icy it snowed, covering the land in mountains of white powder. Temperatures dropped radically and once again people stayed indoors, because to stay outside during The Snow was to freeze. It didn't take long in the frigid temperatures of The Eye's Snow. Every cycle a few unlucky souls would be found frozen stiff, unable to find shelter in time. The harsh cycle made it dangerous to travel. To be caught on the road during The Snow or The Fire meant certain death, so inter-village fraternization was rare, though necessary for survival.

So it had been on Jaloonga since the beginning of recorded history. Priests and their followers sought to appease The Eye with rituals and offerings, praying for longer Rain cycles and shorter Fire and Snow cycles, though nobody really knew if it did any good.

One particular cycle The Eye's Snow seemed endless. Temperatures had dropped even lower than usual supplies of fire wood became scarce. Priests performed near constant rituals begging the Eye for respite, even though that meant the coming of The Fire. The Eye stayed blue and icy, immune to the priest's entreaties. People gave up hope. Huddled indoors under as many blankets as they could get, shivering as their fires flickered out, the inhabitants of Jaloonga filled with despair.

One by one people watched each other die, either clinging to each other, shivering under cover, or lost in the murderous snow outside, searching for a scrap of wood to kindle the fire.

That cycle was known as The Terrible Blizzard. It was the longest period of The Eye's Snow ever recorded. Nine tenths of the population died, frozen, like mock statuary. Some villages were abandoned, their few survivors risking the trek to the nearest neighbor during The Fire so that resources could be pooled, and solace sought. Many priests found themselves without followers, both from death and from no longer having faith placed in them. After all, they weren't able to end The Eye's Snow before nearly everyone died.

Jaloonga continued, thrived and repopulated. A fear had taken hold of the land though. What if The Eye's Snow lasted so long again? Or even longer? What if The Eye's Fire lasted that long and everyone died from thirst? No one had an answer, not even the priests, and so some people began to hate the Eye. Instead of respecting the Eye as the bringer of Rain, the source of all life, they saw it as a terrible harbinger of hardship and death.  They saw no purpose in a life lived in the shadow of an entity's whims. They saw no reason to live a productive existence when it could be cut short at any moment, so they spent their time frivolously, filled with debauchery. They even spread their discontent to others and society on Jaloonga teetered on the brink of collapse.

The Eye continued on as it always had, casting its fiery gaze on the land below, or weeping in sadness, or turning an icy stare on everything, unaware of the turmoil below. This went on for many generations until the unrest grew so prevalent people were killing each other over whether they loved or hated the Eye. Entire villages did battle with each other, often resulting in total annihilation.

And so one day it ended. The last two villages wiped each other out, even amidst protests from some who reasoned that killing over a concept was insanity. Was it really a life or death matter whether one believed the Eye was benevolent or malignant? Yes, the others answered, it did, so they cleansed the world of the remaining population.

Above it all the Eye remained, unaware of developments below. It looked down on the land and made Fire if it was angry, or Rain if it was sad, or Snow if it was aloof. The Eye itself had no idea why it felt one thing or another, it just existed. And so it does today, still cycling through its seasons, blissfully unaware of anything but itself.

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Stories by Lee Widener have been featured in "Detritus" and "Death to the Brothers Grimm," both from Omnium Gatherum Media. His Lovecraftian novella "Under the Shanghai Tunnels" was published by Dunhams Manor Press, an imprint of Dynatox Ministries. He's working on his first novel and living in constant fear of eviction in Portland, Oregon.

Copryright 2014 Lee Widener

The Missing Edge by G. Arthur Brown (Random Title #2)

A girl sat in a park on a bench made from the rinds of fake plastic skeletons, which children had broken open to get at the gelatinous resin within. Recycle or die, the signs all said, but you can’t really do a lot with those rinds. And that’s why there were all these weird benches in the park.

She wasn’t thinking about the construction of the bench. It was comfortable enough that she could sit in peace and think about Eden. James Eden. He was quite a famous kid actor at the time. She had several of his pinups from the Tiger Beat Bopper magazines that she saved her lunch money to buy. Looking a bit like a skeleton herself after skipping lunch all week, she marveled over his image on the front of the new Kiddie Bat Hopscotch that she’d stolen from a local convenience store by stuffing it down her pants, filling out her mostly hollow pelvic bone.

James Eden has a pretty face, all the signs said. But she didn’t bother reading the signs anymore. She had glossy mags galore. Galores and galores of them. And they were all hers. She’d poked out the eyes of her eight sleeping sisters to be sure of it.

Horror took her when she finally turned to the centerfold. She saw his glistening, knobby preteen feet. She saw his hairless, nubile torso and his squiggly, flaccid pee-wee. She saw his pigeon chest… but she did not see his face. That edge of the page was torn away. Without his face, she realized, he was just a long pink worm, waiting to squirm against another body and shoot out his love tendril to impregnate. He was one of those dirty seed-spreaders that her mother had warned her about, before she’d cut out that filthy mother-tongue.  

“James Eden needs all his edges! I might as well eat lunch!” she said to several passersby, before throwing her magazine in the nearest receptacle and leaving the park forever. If you can’t enjoy a teen mag there, what the hell is the point of the park?

Copyright 2014 G. Arthur Brown
Artwork Remedios Varo

Random Title Generators, and the Havoc they Can Wreak

Okay, so there are these wonderful inventions called RANDOM STORY TITLE GENERATORS.

Here's one.
Here's another.

I decided to save a bunch of the most interesting titles to use to inspire myself to do flash fiction pieces. It's sort of an old surrealist technique to create stories you didn't know you had in your brain.

Then I thought, "Hey, why don't I have a bunch of OTHER people write flash stories based on these randomly generated titles, and then post them on The Strange Edge?" So that's what I'm doing.

How can you get in on this fun? 

Email me at garthurbrown  at hotmail dot com and I will give you a randomly generated title! You must then write a piece of flash fiction (350 - 1500 words NO EXCEPTIONS). Email it back. If it isn't complete horseshit, I'll publish it! Absurd/surreal/irreal/weird/psychedelic/bizarro/pulp/trash/slipstream/transgressive/alt lit/outsider and related genres preferred. Please, no horseshit. And absolutely nothing where the female pudenda is referred to as "her sex."

Also, include a short bio about yourself. And if you are attractive, perhaps a nude photo of yourself also*.

*OPTIONAL, BUT HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

So that's what will be going on here at the Strange Edge. I'll be posting flash pieces by myself and others that were written based on randomly generated titles. Sounds like fun right? Well, behind the scenes, I'm cooking up something EVEN MORE EXCITING. I can't tell you about it yet, because I don't know who you are. You could be anybody, including Edward Snowden. I'm not about to tell my secrets to a guy like that. But suffice it to say that an even bigger project involving randomly generated titles in now underway.

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

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

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

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

Pee Baby: The Musical: The T-shirt: The Contest

CLICK HERE TO SKIP TO CONTEST RULES AND INFO

As many of you know by now, I wrote a book called Kitten. Those of you who read it will also know that Kitten contains a story-within-a-story called Pee Baby. This little gem became so wildly popular with my readers that it only made sense to adapt it into a play. And once you've adapted a two-hundred word story into play, you might as well make it a musical.

So I kicked this idea around with some really heavy hitters in the world of THEATRE (you spell it British because it's art... or atr, rather). None of them wanted to help me out, but they wished me luck in my future endeavors.

Good ol' kcb from Breaking Babb helped me out by designing a great poster for Pee Baby: The Musical. In theory, this would help convince people to take the project more seriously.

We were able to convince Laura Lee Bahr to audition. She sent us a lovely betamax cassette containing a few episodes of Perfect Strangers and the following:

 

Since Laura is incredibly talented and we received no other videos, we called her in for a follow up. Which went something like this:

GAB: Hi, Laura. Is it all right if I call you Laura?
LLB: Yes, but you are pronouncing it wrong. It's Laura, not Luau-RAH.

GAB: (Making a note) Must be a regional thing. You've read the script?
LLB: I did. I'm very excited about it. Playing Young Girl would be my dream.
GAB: You've had experience?
LLB: Weeeeeell, I played Baby No. 3 in the Wet Nap Nightmare at Central High.
GAB: That's not quite what I mean. Have you ever been arrested for urinating in public?
LLB: Um, no.
GAB: Do you have a problem with urinating in public?
LLB: Do you mean, do I have trouble doing it, or is it a bad habit of mine?

GAB: Bad habit? Let's not be judgmental.
LLB: When I pee in public it is usually in a toilet.
GAB: That's great. That's what I had in mind, only hundreds of people would be watching. 

LLB: Um...
GAB: C'mon, you aren't pee shy are you?
LLB: (Flipping through script) I don't remember seeing that.The peeing is all offstage, right?
GAB: You must not have the updated script. See, the running time was only about ten minutes. Turns out I'm not very familiar with writing plays or figuring out how long stuff actually takes to act out. But I had some talented young actors run through it and it was... (referring to notes) ten minutes, thirty-four seconds. Actually shorter than that because they kept messing up and redoing their lines. I had to add some length, but I didn't want typical filler. So me and kcb came up with the urination sequence. 

LLB: I see.
GAB: It's a statement about modern sexual repression.
LLB: Is it absolutely necessary to the part?
GAB: Yes. But you'll be expected to wear a false penis, so no one will actually see your hoo-hah. 

LLB: Does the false penis represent something?
GAB: ... Art. I guess art. You've read Freud right?
LLB: I took some psych courses, yeah.
GAB: Sometimes a false penis is just art. Am I right?

LLB: Okay... Is it attached as, like, a strap-on?
GAB: Yes, strapped right across your face.
LLB: How does that keep people from seeing my, uh, hoo-hah.
GAB: They won't be able to look away from the wonder of a false-penis faced beauty such as yourself.

LLB: I don't think I'm very comfortable with this.
GAB: (Pulling the apparatus from a cardboard box) But you haven't even tried it on yet.

There was a lot less talking after that, because Laura left and hasn't returned our calls.

After talking it over in the john, we decided to abandon the musical and that kcb should simply take the poster design and convert it to a t-shirt, which we had Skurvy Ink promptly produce (fifty-three years later).
It looks something like this: 

You are free to pay CASH MONEY AMERICAN for this hip number that even cool kids like VINCE "FUCKING" KRAMER are wearing.

But you can also WIN A FREE T-SHIRT... FOR FREE! By entering THIS CONTEST.

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