April 2012
38 posts
8 tags
If there is nowhere to displace the dirt, it is more difficult to dig this hole. If there is no way of knowing up from down or left from backwards, then escape seems impossible. Its senses shouldn’t pick up this weak a gravity. Still, maybe one should poison the atmosphere, to be safe. Not that poison kills it, but it would buy us time. If we rearrange the stars it cannot remember its way...
7 tags
He’s not in a hospital, he’s out in the woods. The wetness has moved up his gown a few inches since he started out into the forest. He’s not in a hospital and it’s a lie to say he ever was. There is not a single hospital on this entire planet, let alone one that would take him in. The wetness chills him, slows him down. He feels like the opposite of a foxhound. What is the...
6 tags
Part of you has always wanted, and part will always want, the worst to happen. That is why they avoid you, why they offer you their seats on the commute, why you always get to go before us in the queue. We can smell it on you, everybody but you can feel that scent. And you want the worst to happen to us, we don’t want to get on your bad side. Your inner thoughts are broadcasted on your brow,...
6 tags
Back when my back’s against the wall, I capture in a bottle my want to escape. Here and now in your fairy kingdom, it’s a liquor for when I need to go. I hide it in the bottom of my glass and I feast on your food that makes me never want to leave. The wine never stops, the delight never ends. I knock my glass over drunkenly and I can’t quite drink it all, you say the feast is...
7 tags
He was offered an obscene amount of money to do that one thing. There was a catch. His firstborn child. That’s fine, no-one has children anymore. He didn’t own the child though, in the end, someone else did. As far as you can own a child, or anything. She got angry. They showed her the contract. She was still angry. What was that someone wrote, about humans? All arranged, their...
7 tags
Nina tried her hand at evidence-based love. She would disappear for twenty minutes at a time. Emerge recalibrated. It should get better every time, the paper says, or nearly every time. This time she did three things differently. Three is really the maximum number of changes, otherwise it gets confusing and you don’t know what change caused what. “Excuse me just now,” she would...
8 tags
My head is the head where elephants go to die. I’m psychosomatose; I put it all in my body. I shake as the first of the mammoths fall off the cliffs. If they had opposable thumbs, maybe they would have stood a chance of surviving a bit longer. If they had wings, if they had gills. They freeze to death. A baby elephant in chains pulls them taught and passes out and dies standing. There is a...
8 tags
Trigger Warning
My tongue swells and needs out of my mouth, I cut slits in my cheeks to help it out and it falls to the grass with a sickening sound. I lie down because my head’s spinning. My tongue crawls away slowly, and I keep telling myself I can have it back if I want to, without moving. I don’t even have to move most of my body, just my left arm. I’m right-handed. My tongue is getting away...
10 tags
For a moment there, I was the other half of myself, and I saw through the mirror I look at him, and it was strange. My beauty mark was in the wrong place, my scars were all flipped. Then I turned back and it was okay. I added more mortar, and more bricks. They were making a gorgeous, predictable pattern. This wall would be the absolutely best wall ever. I don’t understand how actors and...
7 tags
Trigger Warning
Kiss me like I’m your cigarettes, like I’m the only drug that’s left. You won’t. Every time my tongue’s between your lips and I’m not smoke you die a little more, but I’m the only thing you’ve got. So you turn this into a game. If you win, all that tar can be yours and suddenly I’m not so disgusting. You would like a post-fuck smoke but there...
4 tags
Deep, deeper than the roots of your grass, deeper than your oil. Deeper than the warmth of your heart, it sleeps. It could uproot you, it could kill you with a word, but it has no vocabulary. It lies entrenched, in flashes of smiles between sentences, in twitches as you hear a certain song. It feels good, like the berries and the cream, like the fireplace behind the words in ‘I love you...
6 tags
Alice could hear the voices in everybody else’s head, the ones that made them crazy, that was her special power. People thought some awful things but it wasn’t really their fault– not ultimately– that they had those voices. She wished she could stop hearing them.
But she woke up this night again because her psychotic (she looked it up, he fits the bill) neighbour’s voices...
6 tags
New Story: Prague
http://zombiesintelligently.com/2012/04/21/prague/
I wrote one of them stories. This one is about parasites.
7 tags
It sais October, October. I was not meant to know until October. We did nothing wrong and here’s the key, I tried I tried. Today it makes me shake again, like I’m last year again, today. It reminds me that repetition is a sign of grief. My repetisserie is doing well. I am a fake name, of course. I put more distance between them and me and them and me and them
and
...
10 tags
I am a bottle of double malt whiskey that someone, somewhere, once recommended and a tailored white suit that no longer fits me and a shaky signature and I’m a puddle of puke in a hotel lobby. I don’t know how to spell my name nor how to stop shaking and I’m the heartbeat underneath a rotten floorboard and I’m a harboured grudge and three years of humiliation. I’m a...
6 tags
Guest Drabble by felltir
I love you so very much. Why won’t you listen? They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but you don’t understand that when I copy you, I am just trying to be as smart as you. Everyone tells me how pretty I am, and I appreciate that, but I can’t express myself like you can. So I scream out words into the empty space where your love ought to be, words you have taught me, hoping you...
7 tags
The orange and red flowers bloomed all over the castle walls, like fire, hiding the thorns and the spikes of the serpentine plants beneath, eventually obscuring all sunlight for them. The thorns began to die, so their tentacular roots sucked out most of the moist from the ground below, drying out the land as far to the next town over. The flowers wilted, covering the thorns in poisonous petals....
4 tags
At the same moment Enid arrived, having gone back in time to alter the outcome of election, Hector put a gun to her mother’s head and gave her a call. Two telephones rang at the same time and only one of them was answered. She did not change the election. The other one did. One Enid broke down and broke her fists against a brick wall; one Enid published the paper and made public the scandal....
5 tags
Turn off your ears, and feel the hum of my voice. My lips are right next to your ears. You attack that instrument like a wolf attacks its prey. Turn off your fingers, and feel me in your bones. You hold me like I’m going to disappear and like you can change anything about that. Your rip the cello to pieces and I can no longer resonate. Turn off the lights, close your eyes. Turn off, I am...
5 tags
New Vignette! The Possession of Mmuti Kaan
http://zombiesintelligently.com/vignettes/the-possession-of-mmuti-kaan/
Excitement.
4 tags
The alcoholics down at the Four were possessed. It spread by touch. Karl had petted the wrong squirrel. His hand brushed the arse of a lady, ‘on accident’, and her girlfriend held her when she was upset about it. It was identified when it had spread up to the Five and down the Two, the possession, and that’s how the quarantine got started. Someone had a pet alligator, and it...
5 tags
Ninety percent or more of the things you experience don’t happen anywhere outside your head, not remotely. You don’t share your subjectivity with anyone. This makes it difficult to tell how you feel about some people. You miss her like she’s gone when she’s right there; you hurt because of imagined daggers. You flinch because of imagined touches. There are some drugs that...
4 tags
For your safety and security, this drabble is monitored by CCTV. Your webcam has been activated. Do not be alarmed. These drugs are for your own good. It hurts you to think, doesn’t it? We are here to help. For your personal well-being and contentness, the offensive parts of this message have been left out. They would have only made you angry. The drugs. Are for your own good. It hurts you...
7 tags
Nina Uvster, 41, runs from the government. At 514 feet she falls over, foiled by the tripwire. The government closes in on her! She fumbles up and snags her hand on thorny bushes but she keeps pulsing away. She’s not giving up, oh no! The government is now not far behind, not far behind at all: she can almost feel it breathing down her neck. 760 feet. Nina’s going for the world record!...
5 tags
The first thing to go is your right eye. Then the left one. Shame: they were pretty. You walk with caution for weeks, eyelids fused together like a hangover, but eventually you just let them be open. The next things to go are your fingers. You beg, but to no avail. Keep begging and they’ll take your tongue. I start telling you facts from the book I have, you remain unimpressed. Next goes...
6 tags
The two beings achieved omniscience at the same time, and their wails reached each other’s ears simultaneously. They inched closer to the strange-familiar sound of sadness and started forgetting about each other. The godhood didn’t last long. They moved closer to find out more and with every step or every second (for now they were identical in most ways) knowledge fell out of them and...
6 tags
The smoke lingers around everybody’s feet now, and we carry our children in our arms until they’re tall enough. We wear gas masks when we dance and stir things up; people feel a duty to disarr any column of smoke that even starts rising. We have adapted, as we always do. We have been taught not to breathe if we fall over, even if we’re drunk. Most of the little ones won’t...
8 tags
A child discovers something terrible, and there is not a soul around that wants to explain. All keep mum. The day after we pretend that nothing happened in the study. A child slowly loses her mind from the inside out, because we got inside. She doesn’t show it. A child’s face falls off, everybody turns into an expert in psychology. We believe philosophy is the same thing as addiction,...
6 tags
There is a hug waiting for you when you come back from your journey, a kiss on your cheek as well. I know you don’t write, call, or text me, but you can be forgiven as soon as you ask. I’m not supposed to tell you, it’s supposed to be a hard decision, but there’s a hug waiting for you inside these doors. There’s a hug and a kiss, a cup of tea and a pie, a warm set of...
7 tags
They came to take you even though no-one wanted to do it. There was a bureaucracy of paper and someone, somewhere thought they needed you and so they came. They took you with chains and words, mostly words. This hurts me more than it hurts you is a lie I never want to hear again. Reluctantly your feet made little furrows all the way from the porch to the van. The tyres made some further marks,...
5 tags
Silk. Linnéa became rope around me. That’s when the window exploded and a smoke grenade hit my bookshelf, that’s when the plan was foiled and when the satellites were shut down. Linnéa let out a silk sound humans don’t make and we both decided to ignore the noise of falling and crashing downstairs. We still had time. Silk– it was when the cops burst through the doors screaming at...
6 tags
She found a home eventually. The little windmill by the river that no-one used, it made a pretty good house. She had running water and electricity, and what more could she ask?
Daniel visited, once. He thought the thing was odd, and the guest bedroom was too cod. He just didn’t want to sleep in the guest bedroom. But she was done with him, and so there was no argument there. He left the...
6 tags
Andy was a used dreams-salesman who made 3 sales a week and never took any vacation. I fell in love with him out of desperation and nothing else.
“Well,” he said to me the first time we met, “you can’t just call everything asocial you do a ‘coping strategy’, that’s not how it should work.”
I stared at him blankly, he was polished but not...
10 tags
Trigger Warning
A whale, any whale, represents your fears. It is massive unhidden and dark and it beaches itself. Why do whales do that? you ask. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’ Philosophy exists inside anything that can choose where it eats, and that leads to panic, stress, death, and depression. So why do whales beach themselves? They don’t have guns. Your fears beach themselves and eyeballs,...
5 tags
http://zombiesintelligently.com →
Look. Look at this thing. I now have this thing too. Just – just look at it, okay? Maybe read one or two things. From now on bonus material (except additional drabbles) will happen on that site. Bookmark it.
6 tags
The walls rorschached; I followed a morphing blob from wall to wall until it shrank out of existence. I was well aware that this would come back to bite me: before gaining access to Tysan’s head I had to sign a waiver that let them sell my head at the same price. Or higher. Brains can’t feel pain, at least. The only things I sensed were the syringes. And then Tysan’s memories...
6 tags
It was impossible to tell where the forest ended and you began. It was impossible to separate the notion of ionosphere from the air in your lungs. It was impossible to breathe, difficult to stand up, nice to be still laying down. Definitions blurred and became pointless. Crime was committed. We gerrymandered our way to power in Rotterdam House. The columns of smoke that rose as a result of the...
4 tags
Helena the Tigress was the one who tested the food before the king ate it. She started out scrawny but put on weight, fast. She had stretchmarks like tiger stripes now. They started poisoning her cutlery tiny amounts so she would build up a resistance, and half a year later the king dropped dead. She was accused, of course, and didn’t get a word in edgewise. Helena was sent to be hanged. Her...
