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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 Cornwall (1)

Saturday
Aug152015

Hips Don't Ever Lie

She said to me how far would you go and I answered as far as I need to and that's how things began to buckle after everything she said and I said and we both said.

Dreams and the gentle mendacity of hearts, distant police sirens and the furious murmur of crowds.

Back then, landscapes were our thing. Clouds and fields. Painting them and loving them and dealing in them. As bored as I am now, it's hard to summon that enthusiasm again, even to describe how we lived back when, but I know it felt like something. Some thing. Driving. Like a sudden dip in the long afternoon highway, as a big rig drops a gear or three, falling into the cooling abalone shadows of evening, a snug, complacent slit between dry hillsides, diverted by thirst into the rest stop before the bridge and beside the river bank, all quick-hissing air brakes while the last golden scales of the sunset shimmer on the northern Mississippi-Missouri, squirm-scattering like a slick-released fish haul.

Yeah, it's trickery. A blue gimmick. But keep watching. Everything might change, and soon.

"So. How far would you go?"

"As far as I need to."

"How far is that?"

"I don't know. I'm still waiting to find out."

"See those prefab fences out aways?"

"Uh-huh."

"Would you run for those, scale them, make yourself a fugitive defying their limits?"

"Oh, sure."

"Do you hate them?"

"No, I love them. They define my own limits, give me targets. The dull knife edge of suburbia."

"Uh. Okay. Right. Anything else?"

"Yeah. Yes. They are swimming with twilight fire beyond switchblade echoes."

"Seriously, huh?"

"Totally. Love. Need ... I don't even know. I've probably said way too much."

"Yeah, probably."

"It's never easy. None of it. None of it is."

The loneliness of the bush called us. The choking infinite greenery.

Nothing will change the unblinking reality that every bear we met was crawling with life, each predator quivering with the hot awful stink of need, every last belch of love trembling with moist, nacreous grace and urgency, all the lovers and haters arrayed and awaiting their moment to stamp each reality with its own singular conviction.

The planet turns so agonizingly slow, charcoal borders smudging brief blurred moments across a rolling plain, sparking off bright mountains and subdued by the widest waters, this invasion of the Salton Sea, of Puget Sound, of the Wash, of the vast and dazzling Sargasso.

Like a thirty-dollar motel in the Idaho panhandle, a dirty unpolished gem set in deep green folds, its thin brown floors gluey, its thumbnail TV swinging on loose brackets, its fake wood panels tacky, its water pressure weak as spit, its nestled ghostlight both lurid and brimming with refugee sorrow. 

All of this. Over and over. Greeting and decamping. Receiving and rejecting.

While gangsters broil under the annihilating heat of their own machismo. While wronged women shuck their brittle outer shells and drift into daylight, squinting and keening, their wild, exuberant hips buoyant and simmering.

While a grey church mouse on some scored Cornish bluff lifts its tiny trembling snout and samples the bright morning, gifting its sweet-tempered trust to a brand new shining Atlantic day, and helplessly, without agency, almost by accident, a pristine story emerges.