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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 David Antrobus (112)

Sunday
May062012

Short Story Accepted

I had my short story "Unquiet Sleepers" accepted by May December Publications third anthology of debut zombie writers First Time Dead, Volume 3.

Indies Unlimited were also kind enough to announce it today:

Indies Unlimited staff writer David Antrobus is happy to announce that his short story “Unquiet Slumbers” has been accepted for inclusion in the May December Publications new horror anthology First Time Dead, Volume 3. The book is now available for Kindle on Amazon.com.

David has written numerous short stories which loosely belong to the horror/dark fiction genre, but this is his first published zombie story. It is the post-apocalyptic tale of a suburban soccer mom who gets the virus and, while featuring the familiar gut-churning tropes required by fans of zombie fiction, the slow disintegration of her world is surprisingly lyrical and poignant, yet still gory.

As that writeup alludes to, I wanted to write a zombie story that doesn't simply wallow in the gore—although it does that, too, of course—but that locates the bleak heart of something I've always believed about this genre; that there's a deep sadness at the core of it, that the slow leaching of humanity from its victims is both harrowing and steeped in sorrow. So, as fun as it was to play with the idea of a zombie suburbanite/soccer mom (somebody said I should have titled it "ZILF"), I wanted to move slowly away from the goofy premise and explore those more sober and sobering aspects.

If you get around to reading it, let me know whether I succeeded, or just your thoughts on the story in general. It's not often I say this about anything I write, especially fiction, but I am fairly proud of that one.

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

Sunday
May062012

Alicia

At first, we are voyeurs here on the street, chilled, reluctant.

Inside, Alicia is tapping polyrhythms with her broken nails on the display case, her eyes oscillating wildly, like those of a malfunctioning robot. The beaded change purse she pulls from the pocket of her torn flannel shirt is open like a bodysnatcher’s mouth. Someone asks her if she’s being helped. She glowers, says nothing, takes out a matchbook from the same breast pocket and reads the scrawl inside its fold, her other hand tucking a stray wisp of dirty blonde hair behind her stud-and-hoop ravaged ear.

She mimes a phone, thumb and pinkie aggressively extended, but is rebuffed by bovine looks. Her eyes roll like faraway thunder. Her fleeting anger is a tiny lightning stab. It is there, then it is gone.

But they see it, these bakery workers, just as we enter the store.  A small neat man appears, summoned from the labyrinthine recesses, from its brain department as opposed to its hands department. Ah, permission. A flint sparks in her eyes. Powder clouds of fine-ground sugar and flour float in the air. The aroma is as visceral as a diva’s swan song, powerful, melodramatic, tragically sweet.

However this plays out, frosted icing or lime filling, Alicia-baby will dine on something this afternoon.

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

Sunday
May062012

On The Bench

Late autumn afternoon, Paris. A low bench – its blockiness a predictable facsimile of the architectural backdrop – seats two people who gaze intently at a notebook in the man’s hands.

Janice:

Why’s he sitting so I have to perch right at the edge of this damn bench? It’s uncomfortable enough, this low to the ground, with no back to rest on. Who designs this shit? What the hell is wrong with this city? I need to speak:

“So that was the name he was using?”

“Uh-huh.”

“We probably shouldn’t say it out loud, now that…”

“No, absolutely. Let’s refer to him as Dante.”

“Why?”

“Mmmm. Seems darkly poetic, with a trace of sulfur or something.”

“Jesus.”

“What?”

“Nothing, doesn’t matter.”

And what’s with the prim pose, bony knees all hunched together like that? Or those skinny arms? This pointing with his pinky finger all of a sudden? He never does that. All this stupid melodrama and subterfuge. This “meet me at precisely 6:00 pm on the corner of Rue Merde du Taureau” bullshit. God, he’s creeping me out. And after what he did, too. Am I an ingrate? He does something like this (for me!) and all I want to do is scream at him to stop fucking crowding me and let me get back to my trashy paperback! His maps and charts just seem so prissy and irrelevant. Damn.

Martin:

She must be overwhelmed. It’s the residual trauma, has to be. I don’t think she could’ve absorbed the enormity of it yet, of what I did for her: tracking the sick fuck down, all the way from Waukegan to the farmhouse just outside Fontainebleau; feigning long-lost camaraderie, then ending it with one wrenching thrust and twist of a hunting knife. Christ, does she think that was easy? Does she think there isn’t a moment when the memory of that ripping, bursting of warm innards giving way doesn’t invade my daily thoughts? That look in his eyes? Fuck! This reunion isn’t going how I imagined.

“You seem angry.”

“No, no, Martin, I’m not, really.”

“Isn’t this what you wanted?”

“What exactly?”

“This ending, here, in Paris, just as we planned a year ago. Here, on this bench, our trials over, justice served. Triumphant. Whatever.”

“You really did it, didn’t you?”

Yes. Yes. Except the word, waylaid by sudden emotion, merely ghosts past my lips. She doesn’t understand.

“You killed him.”

“He raped you.”

“Martin, you killed him. He was your father, too.”

Yes. Yes, he was.

The dark gauze of a viola drifts from gaps in the many panes behind them. Something dense and hulking reflects from the window itself. Traffic stains, like crime-scene blood-spatter, fan outward from the base of the wall to their left. The ground is uneven. Recessed lights prepare to illuminate. Or cast shadows. A cello joins the viola. It dawns on them simultaneously that a) they need to get home, and b) they’re no longer at all sure what that even means.

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A version of this short story appeared on BlergPop on 28 April, 2012. also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

Friday
Apr202012

I Love You

Here, in reverse order, are ten things I like that are related to writing. Sort of. This is a completely random list and may possibly be an early sign of my eventual and catastrophic disintegration. Actually, I’ve reread it and it makes a very abstract kind of sense, after all. If you’re a surrealist. Or a nutbar. Or a strange gelatinous creature from the Aldebaran system.

10. I like hats. Not to wear. Very rarely, in fact, do I wear hats. I am far too proud of my flowing golden locks to hide them. I run my fingers through those locks while mimicking the sound of gentle lovemaking in haylofts. Anyway, hats. I will write about hats until the cows come home. And if, upon arriving home, those same cows eat all the hats, I will create more hats from whole cloth. Only, not. I’ll create them from nothing but thoughts, like Lewis Carroll embracing Khalil Gibran while on acid. The flowing golden locks part was a lie, incidentally. It’s normal guy hair, short and greying, but I still like it.

9. Roy Batty. The coolest of replicants, steeped in pride and melancholy like a lost boy in a gymnasium full of parakeets. I wish I could have written something even a tenth as poignant and plain badass-cool as the “tears in rain” soliloquy. Actually, this isn’t good. This actually makes me want to give up writing. As it should. You should too. And when I do, I will sigh, with the staggering weight of humanity’s eternal sorrow behind my exhalation, and whisper “time to die.”

8. Poetry. Poetry is very cool, it’s just that most of it isn’t. But the good stuff, the good stuff… Here:

“Maybe, as he stood
two inches from the wall,
in darkness, fogging the old plaster
with his breath, he visualized the future
as a mansion standing on the shore
that he was rowing to
with his tongue’s exhausted oar.”

from Self Improvement by Tony Hoagland

Or:

“On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon –
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.”

Coming by Philip Larkin

Poetry is not being all emo about how no one understands you, especially that girl with the cute dimples and the endearing way she flicks her hair back. When it comes to poetry, most of us get stuck in that phase and forget to move into the adult world, thinking such ephemera poetry. It’s understandable in a way. We are not always taught it with joy. But poetry is neither Hallmark doggerel nor a sterile academic sideshow. At its best, it’s more akin to music, with its odd internal logic, tone and rhythmic/melodic qualities. Each type of poem has its own rules. A sonnet is not even close to a poem written in free verse, but both are equally valid as forms, the skill of the poet and the (mind’s) ear of the audience the only things that matter. The good stuff isn’t easy to find; you have to dig. I could post maybe a hundred examples right now of why good poetry is worth your time. It’s inspiring. It’s the use of delicacy and subtlety within exacting strictures. It’s beauty. I don’t know why, but for many centuries poets were valued, yet if you say you’re a poet today (I don’t, because I’m not), you will likely be met with awkward silence or possibly even the mocking laughter of a growing crowd that quickly senses blood. In the shame scales, it’s perhaps only a rung above sex offender, or even politician. I’m really not sure why. But I like it. Good poetry, that is. Is there a person alive who wouldn’t react in some way to such a startling phrase as “astonishing the brickwork”?

7. Why don’t North Americans “get” what they insist on calling soccer? It’s inspirational. The very criticisms they level at it are the aspects that make it more than a sport, something elevated into a hybrid of art form and planetary-wide cult. Take the low scoring. It really should be obvious to anyone who has thought about gold or diamonds or raucous laughter on a killing field why that is a positive. When you make the goals so rare, their value is increased. They are precious. I watch soccer, or football as I used to call it back when I was European, and something of its grace and power and drama has to inform my writing. At least, I hope it does. It has to. Even the simulation must translate. I dive to win a penalty. Metaphorically. Even when you dive, you still have to tuck it away. The crowd is outraged. It’s wrong, yet you now have a chance to win. I can’t explain this. It has something to do with the inherent unfairness of the universe. Randomness and a terrible unquenched need.

6. I love you. And I will make you love me back.

5. I am not judgmental. Generally. But if I encounter someone who doesn’t like animals I am creeped out. I have created characters still only at the sketch stage who are extremely unpleasant and capable of great brutality, and I instinctively make them animal-haters. This I might never change.

4. Do you recall an early morning in which the air is cool yet already embracing the promise of the sun? In which the simple act of breathing is a delight albeit one containing the chill woe of its eventual absence? In which the shadows are still soft yet beginning to test their edges like a hoodlum with a switchblade grinning in an alley? I don’t know what I’m trying to say, but this dark, dichotomous urgency is filling me with the strangest panic.

3. It’s all about writing. Which is essentially communication. Which, in its turn, is how we connect with our fellow humans. So, it’s about love. Because we can’t love any one or any thing if we surrender to the awful void of the world’s loneliness. Isolation is narcissism. When we magically talk to another, and we get even a portion of our meaning across, with all its beauty or frustration or uncertainty or hunger, we are performing the work we once attributed to gods. It’s alchemical. It’s akin to magic. Love can’t fully happen without it. I take back what I said earlier: we should never give up writing. It would be like a bird giving up the air.

© mental images, 19982. I don’t know what this post is about. It isn’t funny, or even profound. We sometimes have strange days in which the quirky detritus of the world comes drifting in on rays of alien light via windows we didn’t know existed. Once we know they exist, it’s important not to board them up, yet equally important we don’t force their eldritch light to shine. Let them shine when they shine, and otherwise remain shrouded.

1. A woman stood on a promontory. She clasped a dead kitten to her breasts, and the look of sorrow on her face made the gods weep so much they lost their nerve and abandoned humanity. She looked down at the wrathful surf below, at its inexplicable tantrum against the snaggletoothed rocks and she knew both the ocean’s rage and it’s deceptive placidity. She swayed. A sudden gust would plunge her toward those rocks. She held her breath and waited to see if nature would further aid and abet a terrible crime against love, a crime of neglect. She leaned forward at an almost impossible angle. But no gust, not even a breeze. Nature was violent below, yet gentle as lark song up here on the cliff edge. The sun’s rays were splayed above the horizon, gilt-edging the few clouds amid the deepening blue of the sky. She let her tears fall and recalled a time when she had been a little girl and thought she had seen a stunted demon steal across the school playing fields, hunched and hooded and malignant as any inoperable cancer, as hostile a thing as any she had encountered before or since. She cried for the kitten that had been denied its chance to accept or reject the glory and the disenchantment, the splendour and the defilement. She held its tiny grey body out, marveling at its lightness, and she let it fall to the tumultuous indifference of the eternal clash of water and rock below. The way of yielding and the way of resistance. Thinking about the many ways we must choose to either love or murder, she turned toward home and the man who might soon pay the price—deserved or otherwise—of her eventual decision.

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A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on April 13, 2012. also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

Friday
Apr132012

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