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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 Fugitive Love (3)

Saturday
Nov102018

Dry Run

It had to begin somewhere, so let’s say it began with the elastic blare of a horn on a rain-smeared night. 

I peered through filthy sheer curtains and saw only the bleary motel sign. The word motel aspired to perfection, stacked vertically in neon blues and reds. The balance of 

M

O

T

atop the teetering

E

L

As if everything was priming itself to fall, rightward, like the overreaching goodness of the world.

Aurora slept through the klaxon din. I envied her that, at least. Since we’d murdered her husband and indulged our inner Thelma and Louise, sleep had been an elusive ghost for me for weeks. Karma, no doubt, for my grubby hands-on part in the drama.

The horn came from a single car parked in the motel forecourt. I could see no one inside it, although the lighting was bad—two weak posts at either end of the lot, and the neon from the sign. Occupied or not, the car’s message was clear: time to leave again. When one’s freedom is imperiled, auguries come in bunches, and all signs and omens are there to be read.

I knew Aurora would want to shoot up before we headed out, so I shook her awake, tore her from her sleep funk a little too gleefully. She took a while to swim through the layers, but as soon as her eyes opened and focused somewhere beyond me, I could see the feral need in them again. And I knew she could see the disappointment in mine. 

Things hadn’t quite worked out the way we’d hoped. But we still had each other. And the raw, wounded, anonymous night.

She winced and I smiled. She didn’t smile. But heading for the anemic yellow bathroom, she drew on enough decorum to close the door behind her. 

***

Hours driving south, keeping to state routes. We were someplace that felt like the South. Arid expanses and weird industry. Huge dry lightning skies. Last night’s rain felt like someone else’s dream.

Though I could still hear the damned horn.

Out of nowhere, Aurora spoke. 

“A moment will come when I’ll sit on the toilet and shit out most of my organs.”

“Girl, I thought you were asleep.” 

“You wish.”

“Or you do.”

She grabbed at my hand resting on the gearstick, held it like it was a sickly pet, and I could sense her staring at me. I could feel a great distant tremor broadcast through her fragile bones as they clutched my own. Urgent. Electric. I refused to turn my head, watched the next mile and then the next.

At last she released my hand and sighed.

“We know how this movie ends, chica.”

I didn’t say a word.

All day, this endless brooding sky had stayed the shade of bedraggled fleece, putrid like the underside of a dying sheep dragged through watery mud. Less a storm threat than a vast sulk. 

Dying too, the day sank into its dark gray shroud, tolerating a thin band of corpse-light to gleam briefly on the horizon. Stark against that sickly greenish strip was the refinery, bristling like a city conceived by an alien amygdala. 

“This ain’t no movie,” I said.

___

Photo credit: © Monica Baguchinsky Lunn

Saturday
May192018

Attend to All the Tales

© Jame T. McArdleBright. So many thoughts and moments gusted like wrappings on the shoulder of a highway in the wake of a thousand passing trucks. 

(Those boxes of books, like steps. Like buildings.)

This was the time when he fell partway down an embankment and came to rest within a meter of a passing freight whose sparks on the tight steel curve burned new tattoos into his arms, and he crawled back to a semblance of a man and climbed his way up into a bright morning in some western city and started to walk. 

(Cascading guts, some kind of release.)

Girlfriend sported metal in her septum, navel, and clitoris; she raged about as much as she laughed, which made her more than tolerable. She left her nipples unmolested thanks to unexpected motherhood. Answer this. Is rank, dire poverty ever fine? It's awkward and wrong and it hurts. We lived a good half-lifetime raising kids inside a house that seemed like kids themselves had drawn it. Some rooms were sketched in plaster and lath. We could break them open and let our yearnings out, considered that sustainable.

(Staircase built from words. Librarian meets architect.)

She was a target of my new approach, my sense that facts rode shotgun to the rest of things. Slunk fast and slick beyond the fury boiled in femininity. Distilled. Clean water from myriad shed tears.

Which makes rage.

We clashed impossibly within the town she called her temporary home, me having drove (I having driven) a weeklong trail, blessed and uninformed, oblivious to the sirens, the insect scratch and clamber of pursuit, the unspooling horizon behind.

(Language itself will abandon us.)

Our unique wine released by spigots, dark oak barrels creaking in dusty dim cellars while bloodred gouts spooled into buckets made from human skin.

It's emerald. Agate. Hematite. Some geode. Maybe let's meet at noon, after the shaded herds are teased, before we climb the brightest trail again, orient ourselves to up again. The woman I know, the woman I knew, would never kowtow to any of this. She lifted herself in segments above the fray, arched her aggregated vertebrae, a silent arc assemblage like a dim makeshift rainbow made of female.

(Friendship. Why so hard to get right?)

In secret, against a desert wind that pushed her words back down her throat, she said this: "Pass me a margarita, Papi. I lust for and loathe Mexicana. My bleached American guts see nothing but banalities. Cholos, cholas. Stupid boys and girls. Stupid drama. Estúpida. That scar? That's where they cut the baby out of me. Tráfico? Sí. Please yourself and crave the Caribbean sprinter, that liquid effortless longshanks, my forgotten hope, mi esperanza."

(Climb and reach the top. And gasp.) 

Accept my sculpted facial hair and gray skull toques. This impotent clench. Where is death? She leered at me the best part of a decade ago, but nowhere since have I glimpsed her foolproof perversity. No doubt she waits. Tawny grasses shimmer, silos dance, a shifting flutter of fata morganas. Broad daylight. Hawk tails, catamounts, latrans, ragged busted fence lines. Shadow things lope and glimmer. Ranks of afternoon sunflowers wagging dreamlike faces hour upon hour. Time to branch out. Maggie runs the place up on the hill; please, let's join her. Tiny black flies. A donkey brays. Sunrays spread between the slats.

(Look. Listen. Attend to all the tales.) 

May you never misplace the romance of the world. The glorious weight of its glamour. The sheer ferocity of its ardor. May its plucked strings accompany your heart's arpeggio forever. 

Friday
Jan022015

Cormorants

A rottweiler behind chainlink stands and swings its boneknuckle head while the couple quarrel by the dismal predawn roadside.

"We're heading back east," she says.

He kicks at the dirt. "Why do you say back east? You ain't never bin there."

"It's just a way of sayin it. Besides, I suffer from lostalgia."

"Huh?"

"Never mind. You won't get it."

"The fuck? Fuck you. Well hell, I'm mostly through talking anyways."

The dog watches from its shadows and emits a low growl every time Dwight glances its way.

"Suit yerself, but whether you're with me or not, I'm going and you ain't gonna stop me."

"Not unless I throw you over this here fence."

She rolls her eyes and he narrows his.

He sighs. "We really havin this conversation?" he asks, almost gently.

"Appears we are. Ain't no bad thing."

"But we talkin about bad shit. Like dyin. Worse. The future, no?"

"Sure. Yes and no. Love, dyin, kindness, pain. Yesterday and tomorrow. That axe gonna swing itself, use you and me as its own fulcrum."

He's silent for a good minute, then says, "Seems to me you caint rightly figure the light 'less you done reckoned with the dark."

"On the right day I might say otherwise. On this day, who knows? But whatever. Pass me a cancer stick, will ya?" Something sunnier passes over her coyote-fragile face. "Oh hey, know why I love you?"

"Sure don't."

"'Cause when you light my cigarette, you cup the match like you're protecting a good clean heart, even when you know full well it's dirty as hell. Anyways, let's go, hon. You with me?"

"I guess." He looks at her. Alice. The Bonnie to his Clyde. Feels his dirty heart clench.

While she thinks of the cormorants by the bay, that night they let slip the body into such cold waters. How those great oily birds perched on the guano-painted wood pilings like the dark acolytes of apostates, holding aloft dripping black wings in lewd maledictions before hearts yet darker, before offerings more profane.

The guard dog seems to lose interest and drops to the sandy ground like some wounded Serengeti thing.

They both look eastward. Thick red light thinned with watery orange is bleeding into the sky there, below which the smoky blue mountains seem flat as construction paper, and there is no rightful way for them to know if the vermilion eastern morning holds bloodthreat or promise.