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  • Endless Joke
    Endless Joke
    by David Antrobus

    Here's that writers' manual you were reaching and scrambling for. You know the one: filled with juicy writing tidbits and dripping with pop cultural snark and smartassery. Ew. Not an attractive look. But effective. And by the end, you'll either want to kiss me or kill me. With extreme prejudice. Go on. You know you want to.

  • Dissolute Kinship: A 9/11 Road Trip
    Dissolute Kinship: A 9/11 Road Trip
    by David Antrobus

    Please click on the above thumbnail to buy my short, intense nonfiction book featuring 9/11 and trauma. It's less than the price of a cup of coffee... and contains fewer calories. Although, unlike most caffeine boosts, it might make you cry.

  • Music Speaks
    Music Speaks
    by LB Clark

    My story "Solo" appears in this excellent music charity anthology, Music Speaks. It is an odd hybrid of the darkly comic and the eerily apocalyptic... with a musical theme. Aw, rather than me explain it, just read it. Okay, uh, please?

  • First Time Dead 3 (Volume 3)
    First Time Dead 3 (Volume 3)
    by Sybil Wilen, P. J. Ruce, Jeffrey McDonald, John Page, Susan Burdorf, Christina Gavi, David Alexander, Joanna Parypinski, Jack Flynn, Graeme Edwardson, David Antrobus, Jason Bailey, Xavier Axelson

    My story "Unquiet Slumbers" appears in the zombie anthology First Time Dead, Volume 3. It spills blood, gore and genuine tears of sorrow. Anyway, buy this stellar anthology and judge for yourself.

  • Seasons
    Seasons
    by David Antrobus, Edward Lorn, JD Mader, Jo-Anne Teal

    Four stories, four writers, four seasons. Characters broken by life, although not necessarily beaten. Are the seasons reminders of our growth or a glimpse of our slow decay?

  • Indies Unlimited: 2012 Flash Fiction Anthology
    Indies Unlimited: 2012 Flash Fiction Anthology
    Indies Unlimited

    I have two stories in this delightful compendium of every 2012 winner of their Flash Fiction Challenge—one a nasty little horror short, the other an amusing misadventure of Og the caveman, his first appearance.

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Entries in Aleppo (1)

Saturday
Feb082020

Spindrift

She came here among us, yet no one knew her name.

Some called her the Fabulist because her currency was stories and her audience mostly children. Yet I listened too, and my name is Rashida, and I am a grown woman.

Her stage was formed in rubble, the pale beige dust tracing a chalklike ambit, the sporadic roar of warplanes a sonic frontier. The audience was the silence and its inverse. Amid bloodred cartographic deltas, septic watery spools of unraveled gauze, the dirty frightened actuality of a war zone, the Fabulist came and told her dream-clean tales. 

Of pirates, of explorers, of women who entered a dark place and found light, of men who relinquished their power in favour of something new, of wolves who moved into a magic park and changed the warp and weft of the scenery. Not content with that, she embellished the proffered truths of our age and threw them into relief. And the children loved her more than anyone, as if Santa had dreamed of a cartoon mouse and made of his largesse an infinite childhood shrine. 

As the regime moved closer, sending shells and rockets and even a terrible airborne assassin that formed sickly bubbles on the lips of the children in lieu of screams, her stories were bulwarks, speaking of the lionhearts of history, sketching the tales of forest outlaws who accosted the elites and reapportioned their ill-gotten gains to those more worthy. 

Robin Hood. Joan of Arc. Simón Bolívar. Arthur Pendragon. Che Guevara. Marie Colvin. 

The people, reduced to a faux square block of crumbling rock and broken minarets, began to gather, bereft of any other hope, and the Fabulist told stories to undo their last dissent.

“Feel my heart beating,” said Ahmed in spattered surgical scrubs. 

“I shall. But first, a story.”

And it went like this:

A headstrong woman on a beach sat for days after a shipwreck until a coconut became a fledgling palm. Nothing sailed by, and the sun remained in the sky, and the air was still as death, and shivering with the fragile ebb and the tenuous flow the palm became a tree but slowly. The woman walked the beach and traced the cadence of the tides and sang in tune with them. 

Until one day another castaway coughed and gasped his sickness upon her world. 

“How dare you come and sully this expanse?” asked the woman, now angered.

“My ship is lost, and this is nothing I would choose,” he said, still puking ample saltchuck.

“Ingrate!”

She moved to smite him with a blade of pale driftwood, but a wave pulled him back beyond the scope of her rage, a riptide rescued him, and she felt a rib inside her creak and twinge. She thought for a second about relenting and retreated. 

Shearwaters drew letters in the sky—“please help us all”—and a turtle crawled from the tide and made its way along the lower jawbone sweep of the beach, the great Nike swoosh of this desert island uptick, and settled by the sawgrass and the tiny dunes. The humans from their distant perches—she downwind on the glimmering sands, he on a cluster of rocks offshore—watched as it laid its copious eggs and buried them. Food for days, they thought, and schemed. 

But they miscounted the days and the eggs all hatched and tiny spiderlike bodies began to row tideward. 

“You should have come in sooner,” the woman yelled across the still ocean, “so you could help.”

“Why? To meet the flat of your oar blade?”

Like this, their days dissolved into something other than days, a way of being, a miscomprehension, and still the ponderous air stayed still. 

Until one day she said, “Come, then. Let us merge our skills and build of this a new brightness.”

And he came swimming from the dwindle tail of rocks and walked the remaining shallows and met the brandished edge of her driftwood blade and was dead before he hit the sand.

“That will teach you,” she said, while the petrels wheeled and screamed in cryptic cursive against the firmament and thunderheads built upon themselves offshore, distant, convulsive, revolving like sickly guts.

The children sat like penitents atop a monastic peak. The Fabulist stayed among them, now silent. Someone screamed they should go down the stairs, but no one moved. Post-traumatic blasts ramped up like lariated strings of cherry bombs. In what world does a child distinguish between a cluster bomb and a rocket? What rift has split the twin realities of life as its lived and mere story?

Only the Fabulist knows. No, thats not true. I, Rashida, cowering under the withering trellis of vines, showered by dust, dreaming spindrift tales of unthinkable escape, also know.