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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 Japan (1)

Friday
May092014

Japan

This flash fiction thing is becoming a welcome near-weekly habit. Busy as I am with my work as an editor, writing should never recede so far back I can no longer hear its plaintive call. So my usual thanks to Dan Mader for providing the venue and the hospitality, and to all the other writers who alight there and leave their shiny, shiny inspiration stuff, and with that I'll let my latest piece speak for its own self.

Japan

When the sounds come we're ill-prepared. We're drinking cheap sake and laughing at a Louis C.K. clip on YouTube. The horizon booms and something crumples or folds and a sky the hot shade of infection spreads above us while I stuff an old fleece, a first aid kit, a can opener, some rope, knives, fishing hooks, wire, soup cans, matches, underwear, panic things, into a backpack and we hiss and fuss over whose vehicle to take, finally settling uneasily on Maryann's 2006 Toyota 4Runner.  

We go north.

My aunt, who raised me, once told me I would never understand the true beating heart of people since I was deeply unlike most of them. Huh, even though I never forgot it, I have no real thoughts about that. Do you ever wonder why ghosts refuse to speak? Do you think it's because we make them self-conscious, treat them weird? 

The logging road's like crumbled brown sugar that's gotten wet and is now trying to get back to being dry. It also hides the teeth of ogres. 

"The things we got so used to doing we'll never do again," says Maryann, struggling with the wheel. 

"How so?" 

"We might never enter the cooking time in a microwave ever again." 

My answer is to turn on her radio, punch random buttons. A bunch of excited babble. They canceled some shit in Vancouver. We should stay in our homes until help arrives. A woman repeating, "The zealous castaways are roasting their organs in the root cellar." Some preacher, preaching. Katy Perry.

In a world we need to all be painters, can you describe the difference between burnt umber and raw sienna? Exactly.

"Luka, when do we stop?" Maryann squints at me, wrenches the wheel from a sheer drop, a split second from disaster. What is disaster amid catastrophe? Nothing. Nothing at all. We could fall right off the mountain and it would be like a drop of rain joining the coming tsunami. 

I literally can't answer her. Instead I sing to myself a song, some minor key Appalachian dirge, wondering if the last recorded music I'll ever hear will be by Katy fucking Perry, not that I even dislike her that much, but still…until I remember something.

"Fuck. We left the sake behind."

Maryann bursts into tears.