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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 Buffalo (2)

Saturday
Jan232021

My Favourite Abuser

“All things said and not said, you’ll likely wish you’d never met me on this or any other road.”

“But our meeting made a tale, at least.”

“A tale to be ashamed of.”

“For you, perhaps.”

“I was never looking for you at all. I was searching for someone I lost.”

“Way it goes sometimes.”

I met Nick Cave up in the clouds, and he spoke to me. The birds themselves paused to listen. He tried his very best to let us know how grief can be outrun, but I don’t think we or the birds fully heard. It’s a lifelong thing and honestly, honey, it’s a struggle. 

Another way to say it is the torch that through the blue dream fires the cosmos. Though at this point, that just feels like parody. Who doesn’t love a Dylan cover?

Look. You met me. Or maybe I met you. We were lone snake trails in the dust of other people’s befuddlement before they could admit we’d utterly fucked them. Our dry sinuous curves were never meant to meet. But they did, and here we are. You are the flashback on my stuttering film reel; I am the static on your sputtering radio. 

For as long as there was a stage, we danced. And did we ever dance.

Glimmering cauldron howls in the treetops, I cranked up Ulver for our eldritch frolic, gyrating to the slink of wolves, the glamor of witches, and the yowl of the wildest woods. Black, blacker, blackest metal.

Dreams: electric capillaries flash on a cobalt horizon. I think of X-rays and remember all of our last days. Hallucinogenic black spiders in a speakeasy. Aiming straight for the eyes. But dammit, at least you’ll open your hellacious eyes.

Then winter. Then the remains of winter. Then a guarded breath as we dared to dream of one more spring. Sporadic remnants of old snow, greyed by road dirt, the scattered bones of long absent giants.

And memories. We looked to windward as we traversed the canyon, and we saw the lone bison, the big old front-loaded fuck, snorting and steaming in the diminishing gold of the air, mucus streamers flung like molten flags. A giant knot of this dirty-sweet earth’s best fuckery and love. A shaggy fist given life. 

Life.

I’m near done with words; luckily this doesn’t need words.

I saw in you a tiny flickering beacon, and I went to you for warmth.

You are a woman looking for peace and endlessly, maddeningly doomed to stumble on trouble. Something has been coming for you all your life. Now it’s almost here. 

And me? My life is a rusted sword blunted on the cold diamonds of my damnable dreams.

We are—literally, tragically, hilariously—each other’s just deserts. 

____

Image © Daniel Freeman

Saturday
May112019

Lonely Comin' Down

Do you know pain? Do you know where to find it? Follow the hoofbeats on dry grasses. Follow the sun's arc.

On the day he became a man, he found her drenched in blood and viscera, the cavernous wound across her midriff a silent, dripping howl at the world's indifference, and she told him they'd cut her baby out and macheted it in two. He asked why they'd spared her, and she couldn't tell him. After he sutured her together again, her body at least, she cried for days, and a small part of that was the hard blunt urge of her engorged breasts, the desperate milk of which she convinced him to suck. Not as a sexual act, she insisted, but a pragmatic one. He meant to agree, and on one level he surely did, but soon the daily ritual of her motherhood expressed into his acclimatizing mouth was quite literally a sweet arousal. She was almost twice his age. 

Thus was their baffling and atypical bond established.

But one day they had to leave the shack and join the convulsing world so maddened in its throes. 

The throng of bison boiled across the plains like darkening suds. 

Blinking, stumbling, sometimes gasping, the man and the woman followed their simmering decadeslong passage into an evensong. Then reached the silver shimmer of the coastal sweep, frail as eggshell.

We think we're lonely. Want to know what lonely is? We think it's when someone won't hear us, when our words fall dry on quieted plains. Yeah, it's that. We think it's when we're misunderstood, misconstrued. Sure. It's also that. We think it's when we've suffered shame in public, been abandoned, no ally in sight. Yeah, it's that too. We think it's when we're strung from a tree and spit on, without a friend in close. Uh-huh. That too. We think it's the whistleblower's fear, the revolutionary's grail, the dissident's rage, all quelled by tyrant malice and worse, the silent savagery of indifference. Which it surely is. We think it the panic of doom in the great brimming eye of the wounded straggler as the zealous pride closes in. The shear of the desert hawk oblique to the hot wind. The last distraught arrival at the site, ribcage like bellows, as the final liftoff launches forlorn above. The lone white bear lurching on the only unmelted floe. The last bee spiralling clumsily down like our double-helix undone. All of which it is. But when I say lonely, I mean the impossible and pitiless interim between the brief age of life and the eventual relentless stretch of each atom and its subatomic parts into an unimaginably vast abyssal chasm spanning the entirety of what is and what will ever be, space itself expanding to a point that light can no longer be shared between points, so all the particles ever created drift alone and unencountered, no hope of warmth, or hope of even a glimmer of a friend, no hope of anything, no hope even of hope. Not the end, but the end of end, the loveless eternal void, the almost-nothing cruel enough to not quite ever be fully nothing. 

The pair, hollowed out and Oedipal, stand like stormstruck trees at the cliff edge and watch the vexed and undead ocean heave with blind grey malevolence, with lunacy, as one by one the stars are doused, all light and tide withdraws, the last things seen on this or any other world two scorched and doting human hands entwined, love's final say.