Tragicomic

I wanted to tell you about the ones who watch. But I lost the thread. Look, if you have to begin again, whatever story you were trying to tell is no longer the same story. 

So take two.

They are the ones who watch.

Different ones. They are dirty and silent and sit on the landings of broken motels, and they wait. Surveilling some squandered lot under a pewter sky.

A gravestone is a lozenge. Place it on your hungry tongue and wait while it dissolves. This might take a while. Decades even. Until… ah, death (death you rascal, you holy, holy rogue) is now inside you, as it should be. Let us meet again beneath a canopy of green, smiling and true, and grab my forearm, clasp my augmentations, my fingers as you insist on calling them, as they gesture and curl, urging unity, emblematic of accord, my compañeros, my luminous sisters, my radiant brothers, and wait. 

Sounds arrive, fashioned from beachcombed shells and the gentle breath of a hundred tides. An inner ear and some vulvic sculpture, such tender whorls and devotional twists of flesh. Folds and fabrications. To listen is to love. 

Following the atrocity, you arrive late at night. Unobserved, you think. Sleep a fitful hour or two. Moments after a weak and dilute dawn withdraws in shame, the children flock and sing their crude atonal rhymes beneath your window, and reluctantly you stagger from your bed to witness them. 

"Mister, we know why you're here!" shouts one, because they're the children of the ones who watch. 

But you can't let it go, because comedy, so you call back.

"Of course you do. It's because this tale needs a Greek chorus."

And instead of retreat or bewilderment, the children's grimy faces under the lice-swarming tangles once known as hair crease with such genuine joy that it brings you to your knees, and you begin to sob like a small child yourself, one who first believed the promised gift would be a pony or a trainset before you opened it and found the irradiated post-tsunami ruins of a miniature coastal town, which turned out, stunningly and over time, to be a more apposite bestowal.

Because, mindful now, you watch too.

How funny tragedy is. How hilarious the unfolding of awful things, witnessed from some window with a flower box beneath it, while songbirds gather staves and clefs for abstract nests from which they compose and perform something lovely, even though friends and colleagues plummet in fiery feathered arcs around them. 

It doesn't take a giant rock. Just millions of smaller ones. 

And still we laugh. Because it's funny. There's literally nothing in this world that isn't funny. Otherwise nothing is.

Flash Fiction Contest

Should have blogged about this a lot sooner, but last week I won the Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Contest for a second time. The premise was a comic one, involving a caveman named Og and a deer or two, and it was an opportunity to write something very different. So I grasped the deer by both antlers and went for the funny bone. Apparently it was just funny enough to win. The thing is, aside from the feeling of pride you get from winning a fiction contest—itself reward enough—the winning stories will be anthologized at year's end, so it's a worthwhile stab at a form of immortality alongside some other excellent writers. Anyway, without further ado, here's Og's story:

© K.S. BrooksOg Hunts

by David Antrobus

Og lonely. Wish had friend.

Wait. Deer! Og move slow, get close to deer. Drum inside chest pounding. Breathe slow. Jump up and throw rock. Og miss, but deer not run away. No. Deer run toward. Head down. Og surprised. Catches Og’s loincloth with pointy head spears. Tries to shake Og off. Can’t. Og’s teeth and bones hurt. Deer panics, runs into water. Og breathing water. Og scared. Notices log. Tries to grab it. Not log. Log with teeth. Log bites deer on leg and starts to spin. Og spins too. Loincloth rips. Og naked. But Og free. Deer not so lucky. But here come other logs with teeth. Fight over deer. Og doesn’t think. Og wishes Og thinks more. Og grabs bloody part of deer and runs, heads for cave. Thinks tribe will like him again now. Make friends. Piece of deer is almost deer.

Arrive at cave. Tribe home. Og smiles. Tribe look at Og naked and laugh. But then not laugh. Tribe look over Og’s shoulder. Og and bleeding deer gut trail been followed by big cat with mouth spears. Tribe scream. Run. Big cat with mouth spears eat two of tribe, Glug and Grog. Tribe sad.

Next day, Og lonelier. Og hunting far away. Very far. No rocks this time. Sunburn in bad place.

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David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.