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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 Fugitives (1)

Friday
Mar062015

Wishbone

We met in the southwest, close to the border. She was silhouetted before a crime-scene sunset, blood and plasma seeping into a workshirt-blue sky darkening to ink. She smelled of road dust, weariness, and shallow-buried things.

"So what's your name?"

"Blanche. Blanche Warren."

"Don't sound too Mexican."

"No."

"You live around here, Blanche Warren?"

"For now." She poked the dry dirt with her toe. "What's yours?"

"Huh?"

"Your name."

"Cole Franklin."

"Don't sound Mexican neither."

"It ain't."

She lifted her head and met my eyes at the same moment, our heads cocked just so, like we was looking in a mirror, although to this day I can't rightly say which one was the person and which one was the reflection.

Banished coyotes both, shunned by our own packs, we each crossed the high desert separately, assailed by solitude and the swirling grit of sandstorms and dust devils—those restless Navajo ghosts—only to stumble on each other by chance, my unraveled need snagging on her last want, her torn pack on my dying boxcar dreams.

Drifting, meandering days turned fugitive nights, stark and pale afternoons now vagabond twilights. And because we had to eat, we robbed and then robbed some more. And sometimes we killed, I ain't proud to add. I could argue it was self-defense, but we all know better. They were the happiest weeks of my life.

But all good things, right? It's the way of things. We had ourselves a falling out, and shit went bad faster'n I could keep track of. Then I was alone again.

A special woman is her own climate, a world entire. If you allow that system near your own and have ever felt the mingle and skirmish of those latitudes and tropics, those calms and storms, sudden squalls and sultry airless nights, you can't imagine them ever being gone. Or how you'll feel when they go. Bereft as a moonless earth. Itself haunted by a dying star. Something as lost as that tends toward cataclysm.

Had me a small campfire in a dry gulch somewhere north of Clovis, New Mexico, took some peyote I stole from an illegal just outside of El Paso, and she came in the night. Blanche, I mean. Placed two fragile yellowish objects in my palm. Looked like a wishbone after it's been pulled. Funny, I didn't feel like giving no thanks nor celebrating nothing.

"Make a wish," she said.

"You can't be here." I backed away and held out my hand. "What is this?"

"Called a hyoid bone. Kind of a throat bone. It's broken."

"This ain't … You mean—?"

"Yeah, it's mine. The one you broke. It's yours now, baby."