Insomnia

This is my story in Indies Unlimited's recent Writing Exercise contest.

It's a little twisted and disquieting, but if you like it, you can vote for it here.

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Photo copyright KS BrooksI don’t recall seeing it, but I must have seen it. Something kept me awake half the night, after all. Then some dark urge made me return to it.

Bud Lilly’s Trout Shop.

A fishmonger’s, you’d think. And for the most part, you’d be right. But you would also be wrong.

Here on this quiet street, post-revelry and pre-dawn, I stood before that window once more. Odd that it should display its neon welcome at this godforsaken hour. And that such cold fluorescence still burned within.

Suddenly afraid, I turned away, wishing for sunrise, for even the spartan brevity of my home; anything but this suspended place masquerading as a city street.

Nonetheless, as if compelled, my gaze returned to the window. In time to see a flash of silver and an appalling face. A hideous sweating man was butchering someone with the efficient strokes of a squalid Samurai, amputating the limbs of his screaming victim. My blood froze. The night butcher propped up the dying man, whose rolling eyes and sagging lips resembled nothing less than a helpless trout… dressing his limbless torso and placing him, bleeding and faintly sobbing, on the shaved ice of the display beside the other staring fish.

The attacker looked up. Implacable, euphoric, he grinned a terrible grin, lifted his awful, dripping blade and pointed at it. Then pointed back at me and winked.

Then I remembered what I had seen earlier: my own name on an empty section of that same display, waiting.

A Titanic Struggle

This will be a short rant, and if you think that's a contradiction in terms, or you're not in the mood for another soapbox oration, then fair play to you, but Imma do it anyway (and if you dislike the word "Imma", please know I feel your pain).

Briefly, and to state the fairly obvious to anyone paying attention to this topic, the sleek luxury liner world of writing and publishing has been impacted and upended by the hidden iceberg of new media and the digital revolution. The Titanic-like so-called Big Six publishing houses broke apart and are still slowly sinking as we speak. After some early and notable successes with epublishing, a gathering tide of new independent authors grabbed onto the flotsam and jetsam and headed for shore. It was and continues to be a dangerous but exhilarating journey.

Now, before its apparent demise, the Titanic was able to blast its horn on a global scale and nobody minded. It had impeccable staff and gatekeepers, directing authors and readers to their appropriate areas and even providing grooming (editing) and advocacy (marketing) services for the former. But now, without them, the individual authors doggie-paddling desperately in the icy waters must resort instead to scrawled messages on pieces of debris: "help me!" "don't let me drown!" "please read this!"

So, here we are. Many of those independent writers desperately trying to reach the shore, some having made it and dried off and been fed hot soup, but most still in the pitiless ocean, continue to need help if they are to survive. And yet, there are those who would deny them their right to call attention to themselves for reasons of what has come to be known as "shameless self-promotion".

Flawed analogies aside, what prompted this little outburst on my part is this idea that when a great number of small people promote their work, much of which is born of pain and sweat and long, dark nights of the soul—you know, work, right?—it is referred to as "spam" or even "gaming the system", yet when the sleek ocean liners of the world do it on a grand, monstrous scale, it's referred to as "advertising". Once again, why does the bulk of the moral opprobrium descend like freezing rain on the tiny, far more desperate swimmers and rarely on the monolithic giants? Because it's easier to pick on them? Safer? Have we really become such cowards?

Anyway, with more and more writers in sight of shore, clutching their makeshift signs and shivering in the dark, I worry about what we will do next—welcome them home or push them back out in the frigid waters?

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David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

The New Rapture

Had a dream last night, alone… no, more like a vision, in which it turned out the religious folks who insist on the coming of the Rapture—that moment of self-vindication in which the rest of us sinners all burn and suffer and destroy ourselves here on earth while the righteous are taken into Heaven—have been right all along.

Only, there's this twist, see? As our future dwindles due to overfishing, over logging, the constant rapacious destruction of environment after habitat after ecosystem in order to extract the last few drops of something we either need (water) or want (lumber) or are addicted to (oil), and as the planet deteriorates into a toxic, boiling sea of tribalism and increasing barbarity, partly wrought by self-centred short termism, intolerance of others, wealth disparity and outright bigotry, a newly discovered planet slides silently into our solar system and heads toward earth, a half decade away from up close and impersonal.

The planet, at first noticed only by astronomers who decide to hold off on announcing its disquieting presence off the cold shoulder of poor relegated Pluto, appears perfectly Earthlike, with one key difference: it's a pre-industrial unspoiled earth more akin to a fantasy realm than an actual planet. Tracts of warm, green, forested land surrounded by azure ocean beneath the most tender of climates. It is beautiful.

The delay over the announcement arises from an idea put forth by a handful of NASA scientists and thinkers. If this world is approaching so close to the earth, and in under five years, how feasible would it be to transport a few million humans across the tiny amount of space in order to colonize it? They estimate it would be quite possible, albeit a massive undertaking. And due to its size and slowing velocity, they also calculate it will fall into earth's orbit instead of plunging into the sun.

The catch? Only those who have proven to demonstrate true compassion and love toward their fellow humans—who have mostly refrained from the ugliness of racism or homophobia or any type of fundamentalist creed, religious or political, who are admittedly flawed yet possessed of an appreciation of the only two things that really matter: love and beauty—will be permitted to travel there.

So, the plans are drawn up and over the next handful of years, rumours of this thing are everywhere, at every water-cooler, regularly trending on Twitter, whispered along daylight highways, invading the world's fitful dreams, with many on either side of the divide skeptical of its reality. But as the new "star" appears undeniably brighter in our night skies, even showing ever-less faintly after sunrise and before sundown, the tension increases and more and more skirmishes break out upon the earth. Millions of lives are lost in instantly forgotten border wars, in conflicts over resources, over irrelevant differences, but the moment finally arrives and the hidden silos slide silently open and release their silver seeds filled with the t-shirt-sloganned, the pierced, the dreadlocked, the Doc Martened, the tie-dyed, the sexually liberated, the tattooed, the stoned, the tolerant, the disenfranchised, the gentle, the artists, the wounded healers. Not inheriting but departing the earth.

As their planet descends into a maelstrom of rage and horror, both mirrored and fuelled by the earthquakes and tsunamis and raging conflagrations of a world at last tipped beyond the balance of stability, these new migrant-colonists look back one last time, flinching at the dying screams of the cruel, the selfish, the tyrannical, the faux-populists, the prejudiced, the hate-filled, the control freaks, the authoritarians, the zealots, the abusers, the book-burners, the bullies, those who think it perfectly fine to shoot a wolf from a helicopter, those who would deny equal access to health care to their fellow humans, those who would prevent consenting adults from loving each other, those who wish for an absent daddy to come save them, those who believe winning is more important than the joy of playing, those who add and have added nothing to the world… before turning their gaze toward the heavens, toward their new home looming ahead, a new hopeful world the secret planners had already secretly named… this world and this exodus both, named Enrapture.

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David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

Review of "Making a Name"

I reviewed Rosanne Dingli's Making a Name and other stories over at Amazon. I'll let it stand.

We are so spoiled these days, by the garish and the obvious. Subtlety and nuance seem to have been relegated to the quieter corners of the world. In "Making a Name and other stories", Australian author Rosanne Dingli seems to be on a one-woman mission to bring those qualities back into the mainstream.

These nine short stories are rich in the finer aspects of human interaction. It is a book filled with gestures. Glances, tilted heads, quiet movements tell deeper stories than many writers manage to convey in far showier works. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate homicidal savagery and alien invasions as much as the next fan of genre fiction, but who wants a meal of only protein? Green vegetables are good for you, after all. But I also don't want to appear to damn with faint praise, or compare Ms Dingli's stories to brussels sprouts. No, these are finely tuned and exquisitely textured snapshots of the human condition in all its regrettable, messy glory. And there is even a hint of unease that sometimes emerges more fully at the end, a haunted echo of something barely touched upon in the body of the story itself. I am being careful not to leave spoilers here, not that these stories particularly hinge on shocking revelations; even the twists are subtle.

One story in particular continued to resonate for me long afterward. In "Woman Peeling An Apple", the complexity of human relationships is at its most intense; all the loneliness, desperation, tender envy and regret of sexual longing are present in this beautifully crafted account of painters, photographers, friendships, and family ties. Its European setting (France, Belgium) enhances its paradoxically gentle power, and it won't let go.

If I were to offer one slight criticism, and not a particularly serious one, the writing is perhaps *too* mannered sometimes. Everyone "makes love"... and maybe this is my own capitulation to the sensational, but I found myself wishing they would get a little raunchier, a little earthier, now and then. But like I said, that is but a minor quibble; the vast majority of this work is a delight--in its memorable phrases, in its clear love of and dexterity with the language itself.

This is the territory of Virginia Woolf, or possibly Milan Kundera. Now *that* is certainly not faint praise.

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David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

Walker Is My Name And I Am The Same

There hung over the place a kynd of scortchy smel a kynd of stinging scortchy smel and the grey smoak driffing thru the blue smoak of the chard coal harts. Twean lite it wer the 1st dark coming on. Bat lite it wer and dimminy the pink and red stumps glimmering in the coppises like loppt off arms and legs and the rivver hy and hummering. The dogs wer howling nor it wernt like no other howling I ever heard it wer a kynd of wyld hoapless soun it wer a lorn and oansome yoop yaroo it soundit like they wer runnying on ther hynt legs and telling like thin black men and sad. Crying ther yoop yaroo ther sad tel what theyd all ways knowit theywd have to tel agen. [P. 189 Picador Edition, © 1980]

Not simply one of the great post-apocalyptic novels, Riddley Walker is one of the great mythic novels, period. With darkness having long descended on humankind, centuries after a nuclear catastrophe, a twelve year old boy scrabbling in the barren dirt of England's southeast corner awakens to something unexpected. Not hope, far from it. But the sense his life is not as delineated as he and his primitive kind assumed. But I want you to read it, so I won't give much more away. Other than the language itself. This is a tour de force more reminiscent of Tolkien's "sub-creation", in that an entire language has been created... in this case, a base and gutteral language that nevertheless, at its best, possesses a kind of roughshod lyrical charm. It is part fable, part dystopia, equal parts bawdily hilarious and unsettlingly haunting. Or plain haunted, even. Haunted by the dimmest recollection of a past when humans had sufficient "clevverness" to almost destroy themselves.

I have been working on and off on a kind of dark fantasy novel, and this book, this bleak visionary glimpse of one possible future, was a major influence. Why today? Why mention it now?

Because author Russell Hoban died on Tuesday (December 13) and any hope we may have harboured of anything approaching a sequel passed away with him. The only hope is that this breathtaking, near perfect work of art will now break out of its cult status and be recognised as one of the great pieces of 20th Century literature it undoubtedly is.

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David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.