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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 Manifest destiny (2)

Saturday
Sep072024

Downside

That phrase folks use: what possessed him? He supposed possession was as good a reason as any. He figured he knew these caves, had explored them many times in his childhood and youth, and where was the harm in a whim? How can it be wrong to feel home again?

He knew there was a chamber beyond the second bulb of a tumescent tract, and in that chamber were sparkling and luminous stalactites. Viridescent claws of underworld gods. Who wouldn’t want to pass through a monster’s caliginous guts to see such rarities? 

He hesitated at the entrance, which was small, but he’d made his way through smaller. His momentary uncertainty perhaps an echo of a future alarm, a faint warning broadcast. No equipment, no gear. He only had the flashlight on his phone, but that ought to be enough. He wasn’t going far. 

Inside, he had an immediate choice of two tunnels and halfway assuredly picked the one on the right, as if it weren’t a coin toss, then made good headway perfectly horizontal until he found another narrow gap, which dropped through a sharp turn into a near vertical eight-inch squeeze he thought would open out and flatten again soon but he was already in it not feet but headfirst when it deadended ahead of him and too late—a chill puckering his entire skin—he knew he was in a different tunnel from the one his memory had confidently drawn up and there was no way he was scrabbling backward over the lip he’d just traversed, upon which his body hinged awkwardly, and no one knew he was here, though he cried out regardless.

This silent place held him tight, though he tried, of course he tried, sporadically calling into the far reaches of the dark beyond his feet until his yells grew into shrieks. His voice a dry rasp, he cried for his mother and the pity made him cry more. 

Soon his human sounds gave way to the sonar ping of liquids dripping somewhere and the plangent echoes of all the turns he had not taken.

His occasional struggles wedged him further and after a while his battery died and within this unlit place he could hear only his own breathing, panicked and irregular as batflight in eventide, and then, soon after, the baritone seethe of his blood in his head like a tide over black pebbles on some dark and eldritch beach on which drear and lonely creatures lurched.

The pain in his skull built like a fireside bellows, pulmonary and hollow and vast, until he wished at last for the bliss of the void, the true void not this fraudulent limbo.

This death unmatched in abashment. Woe and heartshame to succumb so easily. Without a fight. Without even an adversary, unless you count cold granite his foe. Knowing he was led by a fleeting urge to a vainfoolish death, to an unjust calculus—something had possessed him and now he possessed nothing—gripped by malachite seams and the innermost slime of the moist, impassive earth. Ignominy and anguish. Nothing beyond desolation. No worse egress. 

His last vision behind eyes dimmed and irrelevant was of times long past, a slow pan of a prairie with a crude wire fence limping kinked and halfstrung to a horizon like an edgewise portent of the iron tracks to come. A child’s sketch ahead of a film crew. Symbolic. Insouciant. Push in and there’s the tiny dried remnant of a prairie dog long since death snatched and taunted it now peaceable and paltry, no longer disconsolate. Perhaps even laughing a little on the inside. At the foolishness of it all. The vanity. All things under and upon the heedless earth.

_____________________

Image © David Thielen

Saturday
Sep212019

Mercy

“We had a mind to party, but not no Donner party.” — Unknown 

I never scrubbed that sound from inside my head. That muted eternal shriek. It weren’t anything, really, just a noise that followed us 'cross the salt flats and then the desert into the Cascades, though we heard it every goddamned revolution, each time the axle turned. We tried to plane the wood at night, slice away them nicks and burrs. Nothing worked. Felt like the admonishment of the land itself, crying, wheedling, greeting, long before it had a mind for uprise or defeat. It hollered its plea in earth time not man time. 

Oh woman, you barely have a voice. You cook and you mend our boots and you lie awake nights wishing the very stars would align, like pragmatists. You urge the world to settlements, you mediate. Within this burning valley, and most places yet, you are the best of us.

Dry bone shacks and half collected cairns. Sterile cries across such barren miles. These lands are jawbones aching with carious teeth, sung to by ragtag coyote choirs. Ridgetops bristling. Stout moon rising yellow as infection.

The West, the offhand West, its fragile trickles covert, generous of light though skinflint with drink. No pass unimpeded, no voice left to speak, no dry throat slaked. 

***

“Our house is on fire,” the air whispers.

Chafed and stunned to deadpan, I walked for a day or so and only two vehicles passed. What is this?

The sky is brown umber, the sparsity of trees silhouetted conifers. 

I walk so I can get away from the thing that happened. It was abhorrent. I am only one small girl with a queerly knotted gut in a wheeling galaxy. 

One of the vehicles was a worker bee, some kid on a scooter. He slowed and almost stopped and when I yelled for him to talk to me he spooked like a deer electric and whined his way past. The other was a pickup with a bed full of women and men. The faces of the women in particular told me stories. The men could barely manage a glance. I turned my back.

But where did the world go? Did I flinch and miss it? Feels like just yesterday I was listening to Lana sing about the perils of hope and about Kanye and Plath and how we had it all.

What happened to jasmine and juniper? To the heady riot of spring? To the dance of honeybees and butterflies and the twilit helix gyre of bats? Fireflies and the backdrop trill of cicadas?

How do we measure from span to everloving span, the unutterable link between worlds?

The sky is old blood and stinks the same. 

Our house is on fire. 

I’m here at the cool rusted railing of the bridge. No idea what waits unflappable below, but tell me exactly why I shouldn’t climb over.