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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 Trump Crime Family (1)

Saturday
Oct122019

High Times

It’s high time we talked about the High Times.

“Closed mouth ain’t gonna get fed.” 

She was a mother and she knew some shit.

We experience all these intense things, second to second, minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, decade to decade, all of them brimming with astonishment, wide-eyed and hoarse with love, yet we die with almost nothing, all these accumulations, dripped as stalactites, dropped like an old backpack, amounting to fucking what exactly?

The neighbors fit all of Eden into their front yard. Green tendrils spilled. Leaves of tubular red. I was with someone before the rainstorm, starting to make out, but she got spooked and left. After which I stood on the porch and thought long and hard about her, and Tom Waits growled a lament from crackling speakers wedged on some nearby sill. Jersey girl, my first and last, how much I cherished you. After the rainstorm, the waters braided like lovers, spiralling and twining, dreaming sclerotic dreams about how they might become partway manifest. A person got murdered that night, after the sun broke past the rainclouds and we gathered in the evening, but I never knew who. Someone played the opening bars of Zeppelin’s “No Quarter” on an electric organ, and we all chilled in the coming night, and someone got themselves slaughtered but we never knew who.

Wait. Let’s do this again, take another run at it. 

She was vehement. She told me she was prejudiced toward people whose shoulders aren’t horizontal. You get that, right? Weakling frames that slope downward, defeated before they start. Feeble half-assed primates, chinless and feckless, like the Trump spawn. And to a lesser degree, those whose earlobes don’t exist. That just join without a proper lobe. “Fuck those people too,” she said. I never could argue with that. She damn near had me on board.

“D’you put the seat down?” 

“I don’t recall.”

“Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?” she said.

Truth? She was terrifying. 

I heard the countervailing cries: “She ain’t the same as you are.”

All such things are relative. Offering a cold beer after an apocalypse is like delivering a truckload of gold in the High Times. To think we cared about politics, about football, about butterflies, about pronouns, about someone able-bodied parking in the handicapped space. About spades and hearts. Before the Great Loss, I drove south through Wisconsin one early fall, got caught up in some biker thing, some end-times rally of aged outlaws, checked into a Travelodge outside Madison along with two hundred slow-moving leather-clad seniors. They were blunt and loud and likeable and no longer capable of violence.

“Bear with us, sir. We have a room that overlooks a field of corn. Or are those sunflowers?”

The High Times were adorable: Opera and spice and guts. Opulence and idle spite and us. 

This night, tonight, the other side of that sliding light, is our night.