The Crow Highway

Thanks again to Dan Mader and his Friday flash fiction challenges. Here is the latest two minutes-worth of strangeness to be dredged from the dank recesses, in which Ted Hughes meets Iain Banks, maybe? Along with something far less savoury.

Exercises like these force you to not think about your writing, to allow the words to emerge largely unedited and unfiltered, stream-of-consciousness style, which makes them interesting on a psychological and a literary level. Not sure what they reveal. Not sure I want to know. Although I suspect Crow knows.

I live on the crow highway. We all do. Crow wants us to bleed. Crow wants us to smile and reveal rotten teeth. Crow himself smiles as he hears us moan in our sleep. As children are beaten. As wives are punched. Crow doesn't smile because any of this makes him happy. No, crow smiles because he knows all things find resolution somewhere along the loop and that a predatory beak stab here will become the tugged, torn earthworm there, and that the once-assailed will be the assailant, somewhere along the crow highway.

Presence

More three minute flash fiction, and thanks again to Dan Mader and his blog for the inspiration, the motivation and the opportunity to inflict more words on people. For want of a better title, this one is called Presence. Like the Led Zeppelin album, not the things you unwrap at Christmas. Or, actually, whatever you want it to be—now it's left the confines of my skull, it's fair game. These tiny pieces come from somewhere buried; no planning, no editing. Just words bubbling from the subconscious like dreams.

It followed me. Soon as I found the trailhead and set one hiking booted foot on the damp mulch and root-strewn path, I felt its presence. An animal? I don't know, I never saw it. Whatever followed me was crafty smart, blending into the fractured barcode woods, melding with banners of mist, chuckling alongside creek beds. No doubt it enjoyed my pain as I struggled up the mountain, raw with lung burst, heart hammer and quadricep quiver. I could feel its glee, its grin of triumph, knowing each step took me closer to its awful stretched maw. And when I became lost, its eagerness was rapid warm gusts on the back of my neck. But I found my way, and next time I'll be stronger and will know more. It sits here now, in the darkest corner of my basement, pouting, sulking, knowing it cannot lose but nevertheless will have to wait.

The Lonely Room

Every Friday, JD "Dan" Mader opens his blog, Unemployed Imagination, to impromptu flash fiction writing, a generous gift to his fellow writers. Whether you participate or lurk outside admiring the entries, it's always a fun playground. This week, I started a piece and it kind of took over and, embarrassingly, it went way beyond the two minutes of allotted time. But it said something slightly different about something frightening and sad, in a way I hadn't captured before, so I thought I'd better reproduce it here, edited slightly, on this poor neglected blog of mine. So, here's "The Lonely Room":

It's like being trapped inside a dirty white room with only one door: the glare of the fluorescents scratches your corneas; the random, rhythmless drip of a tap somewhere keeps you from sleeping or even relaxing. The lights make dying electric sounds. There are things in the dim corners; terrible things. You wonder if the room will run out of oxygen. Your heart rate picks up, tethering itself to this new anxiety. But then it in turn goes away; you forget to be scared and wonder instead whether you're already dead. Then, there are the scenes on the stained walls, projected by a pitiless torturer known as nostalgia: happy scenes that feel like they could sever your aorta; once-shining things now like shards. They cut and you bleed. You are in this room every day. For weeks. Months. Bleeding, in appalling pain or feeling nothing at all. You must be dead, you think. Then, one day, of no particular calendrical significance, you stand and look through the single dirty pane of glass and see a small boy walking by and another child on a bicycle is riding like a neutrino in a collider toward the first child and you think some terrible cosmic catastrophe will occur, but the boy spies the bike and sidesteps it, and…. that is all. The threat is past, has passed. You once knew how to do that and now you know again; you know to ready yourself for the assaults, that they will be coming—of that you can be sure—but you can roll away, use their momentum, sidestep them, remove their sting, deflect the worst. At which point, astonished, you realize the door had never even been locked.

Beachhead Elegy

And they were never seen again.

Cold dark waves like chocolate shavings, assailing the frosted grainy icing of a winter beach. Anemones and urchins know. The herring gulls think they know. Sea monsters might possibly know. We are utterly betrayed by the pretenders to the royal court of Happily Ever After, within the cruel kingdom of Some Day Soon.

I remember the two of them – arm in arm, sweetly curious, as if fresh-weaned kittens had developed hard science – combing the lacerated beach, scrutinizing reeking bones, shells, asking of all that capital-D-death what may have brought its unique chill to pass, at last.

“What is this? Do we know?”

“No.”

Oh, yes, that, of course, curiosity and the cat… along with that most chilling of clichés: Never. Seen. Again.

No monsters now. Just the lap and draw and slow allure of saltwater, over and over and over. Sucking and soothing. Whispering, like Highland mothers, “wheesht” to the stilted watchers, the quiet witnesses so wholly lost in the face of sorrow, so sorrowful in the lap of loss, so strained in the lacy flutter-and-flap of their licit and illicit loves. Beneath a leaden sky. Beneath all effective notice anywhere.

Three-finned fish limp and hump through wet mud. Something wretched with the spreading bloom of its own impending end mewls, infected, feeble. A drooping sun drops beyond it all.

“Pass me that scoop. That lens. Those slides. Somehow, we must preserve all this.”

We measure. We forget. We measured. We forgot.

The great heaving ocean once redolent of ramshackle life, salted, pungent, exuberantly sharp, now just reeks of something so utterly dead the ancient stars preen and pulse.

We look on, almost and even recalling the strides we took, the surf we rode, the honour we stole, the dirt we spilled, the balls we juggled, the plates we spun, the strings we plucked, the feasts we gorged, the grapes we trod, the lambs we slit, the blood we let, the steps we skipped, the fires we loosed, the love we snubbed, the holes we bored, the pricks we jabbed, the…

…the actual shrieking horrors we awoke, lacking any sedative. Or all perspective.

In the saltspray, hearing squalls, offering despair, thanking ourselves, raining stupid on our own parade, lurching nowhere, dark, dim, harrowdown.

Go away now. We are done. They are done. The subliminal drone is gone.

The End has never, ever sounded this dumb.

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A version of this story appeared on BlergPop on May 4, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

Story Contest

My story immediately below (see previous blog entry) won the most recent Indies Unlimited "Writing Exercise with a Twist" contest. It's a creepy little piece of flash horror fiction based on KS Brooks' enigmatic photograph and the theme of insomnia. We were limited to 250 words, and boy did I discover how strictly we were limited (ironic for a site with that name), and for which I am now very thankful, as it forced me to hone it, whittle away at the verbiage, and discover the shape within. Not a pleasant shape, but a shape all the same.

Each winner of this contest will be published in an ebook at the end of the calendar year, so it is very satisfying and I would like to express my gratitude to Stephen Hise for his apparently unlimited (ha, that word again!) energy and continued support for independent authors.

Thanks to everyone who voted.