For those of you who like my stories, I thought I should create and update a list of upcoming publications which will include my fiction.
NO YOU SHOULDNT YOU NEED TO CRAWL INTO A BADGER SET DRENCHED IN EARTHWORMS ASK THE BUS TO RUN YOU OVER AND DONATE TO FLATTENED LOSER MUSEUM GIVE UP WATER AND VISIT DEATH VALLEY WEARING NOTHING BUT A GALLON OF CORN WHISKEY IN YOUR HAND LEARN TO JUMP AT THE EDGE OF THE COOPER RIVER BRIDGE
Please shut up, Voice Who Hates Me.
Anyway:
August 2010 - at GenCon - "At the Expense of Kings" - DragonRoots Magazine Anthology
2010 - "The Definition of a Line" - Disgustipated Contest Winner - ShadowCastAudio
Late 2010/Early 2011 - "The Little Girl Who Cried in the Back Room" - Space and Time Magazine
IS THAT ALL? LOOKS LIKE YOUR ENGINE'S KAPUT, OR YOU'RE A DEAD TURTLE YOU NEED TO . . .
Again, shut up. Whitney Houston told me I should love myself.
More later, friends and volks.
Dream: The Mirror on the Balcony
Dream June 9, 2010
The Mirror on the Balcony
I looked over the railing of the balcony and saw a vast ocean roiling 5280 feet below. The balcony floated, unsupported by any building. Filling up the horizon was a sizzling yellow sun, large and crude, as if drawn by a god with special needs.
I was here for the mirror. The tall mirror adorning the door that wasn’t there. It reflected the sun, multiplying the light and heat. I reached for the mirror, and a little boy stepped through, wearing a tank top and shorts. Instead of a hat, his head was covered by a janitor’s broom brush. He didn’t see me, but rushed past a table over to the railing to gaze at the water.
I saw the LADY on the other side of the mirror, peering at me. She knew what I wanted to do. I realized that the mirror was her favorite physical object in the universe, carried from generation from generation through the dying eyes of the MOTHERS to the DAUGHTERS. But the only reason I was here being to break the mirror. To crack to smash it, the desire like a dehydrated burning thirst for water in my throat.
A brick was in my hand.
The LADY clutched her face in her hands as I struck the looking glass again and again, shattering and pulverizing its surface. When just shards remained, the LADY walked through the door that wasn’t there. She wept, her eyes melting down her cheeks.
“Why have you done this? This was my window to eternity; this was my divine heirloom.”
I had no reason within my head for what I had done, other than I thought it might create something new.
She picked up broken pieces, trying to recreate the mirror on the table. She managed to assemble a crude circle with the slivers, and immediately images were apparent inside.
A huge crush of people moved through and down the alleyways and concourses of what appeared to be an Eastern Bazaar. All the vendors and all the buyers were angry, teeth pushed out of their snarling mouths. All the people were tall and morbidly obese, which meant that nearly all the space between individuals was used up. And while each enormous body appeared to be flesh and blood, heads and necks were composed of cheap fabric, with bulbous eyes of painted burlap. Some of these angriest banged their wrathful, puppet heads together.
One small figure raced through the endangered openings, hurrying for something, someone. She was a little girl, and her regal face resembled the LADY’s.
The LADY was shrieking now, screaming at the little girl within the circle. Distracted, the girl looked, which caused her to bump into two gargantuan women yelling at a cloth vendor. Their burlap eyes found the girl, and they rotated toward her, slinging back pillar-sized arms to slap the girl, but she had already begun to run again.
The women missed the girl and slapped each other. Upon contact, they howled and their swollen eyes turned black and red. Each hunched over and scrabbled for the little girl. The small one tried to flee, but they grasped her tightly and shook her in the air above their horrid faces, holding her around the neck and squeezing, biting at her poor feet. They wrung her neck until her lovely little head popped off. Gouts of red yarn, instead of blood, exploded from her severed neck and head.
The LADY wailed. I turned away from the broken shards and saw that she had a long pole in her hand, at the end of which was a wicked hook. Her face was now dry; her eyes intact. With a quick, brutal motion, she pounded the boy on the head with the hook, piercing the broom-brush hat.
The boy turned away from the ocean, his face broken in surprise and horror. He removed the rectangular broom handle from his head. Trickles of blood came down from his scalp. The LADY tapped his head again. This time, the blood fountained. The boy cried quietly and somersaulted backward off the railing into the water.
I tried to close my eyes, to block away the broken mirror, to conceal from my mind what the LADY was now doing with the hook.
She stabbed the sun. Stabbed it and punctured it and gouged it until its moving insides fell out into the ocean below.
Dream Over
The Mirror on the Balcony
I looked over the railing of the balcony and saw a vast ocean roiling 5280 feet below. The balcony floated, unsupported by any building. Filling up the horizon was a sizzling yellow sun, large and crude, as if drawn by a god with special needs.
I was here for the mirror. The tall mirror adorning the door that wasn’t there. It reflected the sun, multiplying the light and heat. I reached for the mirror, and a little boy stepped through, wearing a tank top and shorts. Instead of a hat, his head was covered by a janitor’s broom brush. He didn’t see me, but rushed past a table over to the railing to gaze at the water.
I saw the LADY on the other side of the mirror, peering at me. She knew what I wanted to do. I realized that the mirror was her favorite physical object in the universe, carried from generation from generation through the dying eyes of the MOTHERS to the DAUGHTERS. But the only reason I was here being to break the mirror. To crack to smash it, the desire like a dehydrated burning thirst for water in my throat.
A brick was in my hand.
The LADY clutched her face in her hands as I struck the looking glass again and again, shattering and pulverizing its surface. When just shards remained, the LADY walked through the door that wasn’t there. She wept, her eyes melting down her cheeks.
“Why have you done this? This was my window to eternity; this was my divine heirloom.”
I had no reason within my head for what I had done, other than I thought it might create something new.
She picked up broken pieces, trying to recreate the mirror on the table. She managed to assemble a crude circle with the slivers, and immediately images were apparent inside.
A huge crush of people moved through and down the alleyways and concourses of what appeared to be an Eastern Bazaar. All the vendors and all the buyers were angry, teeth pushed out of their snarling mouths. All the people were tall and morbidly obese, which meant that nearly all the space between individuals was used up. And while each enormous body appeared to be flesh and blood, heads and necks were composed of cheap fabric, with bulbous eyes of painted burlap. Some of these angriest banged their wrathful, puppet heads together.
One small figure raced through the endangered openings, hurrying for something, someone. She was a little girl, and her regal face resembled the LADY’s.
The LADY was shrieking now, screaming at the little girl within the circle. Distracted, the girl looked, which caused her to bump into two gargantuan women yelling at a cloth vendor. Their burlap eyes found the girl, and they rotated toward her, slinging back pillar-sized arms to slap the girl, but she had already begun to run again.
The women missed the girl and slapped each other. Upon contact, they howled and their swollen eyes turned black and red. Each hunched over and scrabbled for the little girl. The small one tried to flee, but they grasped her tightly and shook her in the air above their horrid faces, holding her around the neck and squeezing, biting at her poor feet. They wrung her neck until her lovely little head popped off. Gouts of red yarn, instead of blood, exploded from her severed neck and head.
The LADY wailed. I turned away from the broken shards and saw that she had a long pole in her hand, at the end of which was a wicked hook. Her face was now dry; her eyes intact. With a quick, brutal motion, she pounded the boy on the head with the hook, piercing the broom-brush hat.
The boy turned away from the ocean, his face broken in surprise and horror. He removed the rectangular broom handle from his head. Trickles of blood came down from his scalp. The LADY tapped his head again. This time, the blood fountained. The boy cried quietly and somersaulted backward off the railing into the water.
I tried to close my eyes, to block away the broken mirror, to conceal from my mind what the LADY was now doing with the hook.
She stabbed the sun. Stabbed it and punctured it and gouged it until its moving insides fell out into the ocean below.
Dream Over
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