You’re alone hurrying by under cloudy night skies.
I’m lost in the shadows on the lips of the fetid alley. I’m feverish, near fainting, fading, fading away. You catch a glimpse of me, spy me, eye me, wonder, imagine me. You race away to lock your doors, check your windows.
In your simple underwear you slip between smooth, clean, cotton sheets and dream me, dream me tall, slender, strong.
Over the years, I’ve interviewed a lot of people who wanted to discuss the end of the world with me, but Jeremy Smedley was a bird of a different color. He didn’t have a standard preferred pseudonym, for one. He was willing to speak with me on the phone without turning on any dodgy homemade anti-surveillance devices. Most significantly, I didn’t have to meet him in a church sub-basement, a hidden personal library, or anything one might describe as a bunker. Jeremy felt no need to conceal his galactic insights, instead offering to meet me on a charming grassy hill overlooking an otherwise charmless Midwestern town.
Continue reading “Mr Sunshine and the Instant Dawn by Andrew Johnston”
The ridiculous battle, hopelessly lopsided in the enemy’s favor, sent deserters scattering into the flaming woods, shot hopeful messengers down in their tracks, and, perhaps as an afterthought, stuffed the triage tent to the flaps with wounded soldiers. The overblown histrionics, the saucy horse that trotted into the tent strapped with dynamite, might have struck a jaded audience as faintly humorous.
May liked to set out bits of meat for the big birds. It was one of her few pleasures. She would dice up some cheap round steak and set it out in cubes along the porch rail. The part she loved, the thing about the ravens she adored was, they left her presents. She left them food and they left her a fake pearl, a thimble, little shiny things.
Continue reading ” The Hiring of May Witherspoon by Tom Chambless”
Well, I’ll tell it to you straight, my life has gone to poop. Here’s how I ruined it:
My sister, the wooly haired, laugh a lot, chatterbox, Liv Oh, at age nine or so, saw Digg, the goat bodied, eagle-headed desert God fucking his sister, Uwe, the gazelle bodied, fish-headed Goddess. Liv Oh witnessed the Holy Union in the high desert under bright spring skies and giggled, covered her mouth, too late.
This is the story of a girl who became a goose.
It began with a broken heart. Eloise found herself crying in unexpected places at unexpected times. In the grocery line, when a clerk with kind eyes asked with such sincerity, How are you today?, her eyes brimmed. The answer swelled in her throat. She had to look away and mutter Fine, I’m fine. She was not.
Continue reading “The Girl Who Became a Goose by K. Barrett”
Know this, what I tell you is not true. It is just a story, just words. It is important that you do not forget this.
First, there is a forest. Or a jungle. It does not matter. It could be a town, even, abandoned many years before. But it is not, it is a forest.
There was a hole in my ceiling, directly over my bed. I’d been awoken from a deep and nurturing sleep by a whooshing sound. Air pouring in through the hole made this sound. As I rubbed my eyes, I wondered if a meteorite had smashed through the roof. I live on the top floor of my tenement and have often speculated what would happen if a meteorite were to blaze down from the heavens and smash through the roof. I arose and thanked God for no rain. Had it rained that morning my bed would have been doused. But as it was the sky presented a plentifully blue bouquet, with feathered boa clouds gently snaking over the city ramparts.
They call it the Fully Automatic Cathedral (FAC). It’s .45 caliber and can deliver the gospel at a rate of six-hundred rounds per minute. It takes wadded up pages of the Bible as ammunition and needs to be reloaded about once in a generation. The ex-Marines I sometimes go shooting with say it takes one kind of courage to shoot someone and a whole second kind of courage to get shot. The solemn promise of the FAC is that as long as you use it you’ll only ever need that first kind of courage. It’s so accurate it could send a bumble-bee to insect-Heaven from half a mile away. I currently have it set to Roman Catholic but there’s other settings. Lutheran, Pentecostal, Episcopalian, Mormon, even Mennonite. Hit someone with this they’ll probably die, but if they don’t you can bet that whatever’s left of them will be coming to church next Sunday. It looks like your average machine gun. That is, if your average machine gun were twice as big, made of solid marble, and had Aramaic verses inscribed across its barrel.
Continue reading “An Assassin Sent Not by the Devil, but by God by Daniel Olivieri”
