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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 Nostalgia (1)

Friday
Oct272017

Despicable Men

I'm the second best person you never heard of.

Me, your goddamn guts. I'm walking now, dragged strenuous, passing beyond the biting, random glare of your accountants.

That riff you play is like your stomach flipped then dreamed something up you never even knew existed. It's tight and warm, like intimacy, like pimps turned nice. Like you found your old friends gathered outside a barbershop in the tangerine light, toe ended your kickstand, and rode like nothing else mattered on crumbling tarmac, veering into the dunes and driving those piston legs toward the tide, all of y'all hollerin madcap charms, antic conjurations, before embracing the waters under an astonished sky.

***

Conversation with a despicable man.

"So you liked her?"

"Like? Don't know how that's relevant."

"I mean was there anything about her that you responded to, not in a sexual or murderous way, but on a human level, if you will?"

"…"

"What's that look mean?"

"You ask a good question. It's kind of blowing my mind right now, to be honest."

"Can you elaborate?"

"Well, you say 'human level.' And I think I know what you're alluding to, but isn't it also human to want to destroy, to ruin? I can't answer your question until I know where you stand on that."

***

The air has a death tinge out here on the prairie. To the west, above the defining wall of mountains, the sky is umber and coral and rust, and from the stench it seems great fires burn. The old house groans at its buffeting by the charnel winds. 

Cassady told me everything west of Canmore is burned. If our prairie grasses catch enough sparks, the blaze will race itself all the way to Manitoba, and south to Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, if it ain't already. 

We did this. You. Me. All of us. With our terrible thirst, our dragon breath. Crime ain't the word. Sin ain't the word. Wrongdoing ain't the word. This was unmitigated evil. The only world we know of that has such treasures as the wild headstrong ponies of the plain and the butterfly clouds in their migrant tides and the colours of fall and the sheets of green that dance in the northern skies and we've done killed it. Maybe not full dead, but what rises from these ashes henceforth some pale morn won't be the like of what's passed. I gotta hope it will be better, but will this world's waters ever again swell with the breaching whale? Will its forests echo again with the howls of the pack, the raven's dispatch, the loon's ambushed ghost? 

My heart says no. Like a deep bell says no.

Once it might've said otherwise, but my childish hopes ran headlong into the slaughter reek of a dying world.

***

"Shouldn't it go without saying that destruction and ruin are bad?"

"You'd think so, wouldn't you?"

"But…?

"But yeah. The world. Not so simple as we once thought. Powerful men have greater urges than the weak. They must be filled."

"That's monstrous."

"So says one of the weak, I'm afraid."

"If that's the case, why are you the one sitting here in manacles and I'm going home to take my wonderful wife to dinner tonight?"

He grinned the odious amygdala grin of something that scuttled in the skull's own basement and held up the unclasped cuffs. After the first shriek, his expertise was such that the guards were still too late.

***

There was one day that felt different. When everything worked. I reserve that day forever.