On Fiction: An Overlooked Reminder

Not that the reminder is overlooked, but that the thing I am reminding you of is overlooked I find more than a drop of coffee passes the lips of your's truly: a thing has to be itself.

Case 1: If you write about an artist, that person should art. They should make something. They should make something arty. If you spend half a novel having an artist running around and never once at least comment on the shape of a piece laying in the trash you might as well be writing about a politician.

Case 2: A Comedian should be funny. Even melancholy comedians should at least have been funny at one time, or they need to so mammothly depressing that they play it up for laughs. If you sum up the past of a comic writer in 3.5 pages and there isn't a joke on the page I don't believe that person was actually a comedian.

Comin At Ya!

Christine Kanownik
Paige Taggart
Chris Slaughter
Robin Richardson
myself

11/30/11
West Cafe
379 Union Ave
Brooklyn
Presented by Mental Marginalia

Wise Man's Fear

So this was released today, the sequel to The Name of the Wind. You can buy it right now. You should. If you have an ipad or a kindle or a nook, you can literally be reading this in a matter of minutes.

I was loaned the Name of the Wind a couple of months after its release by a member of the D&D group I played with. It was good times. We were all professionals, we drank coffee or beer while we played, as opposed to the little debbie snack cakes (strawberry shortcake rolls were my particularly insidious vice) and mountain dew of those summer days of AD&D youth. Activists and teachers and publishing people living in the fading dream of the Brooklyn renaissance that our too-slowly rising salaries afforded us in Greenpoint. I never got that book back to the owner unfortunately. He stopped being able to make the games. Then he moved.

But man am I happy I still have that copy. I've had 4 or 5 other copies over the years as well, Rothfuss joining Tolkien and Vonnegut and Winterson in the pantheon of writers who I can't help but pick up multiple copies of. And the book was a stunner. Literally, like One Hundred Years of Solitude or The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, when I finished The Name of the Wind I have only the vaguest recollection of where I was, as if I had been shot through with light and separated from my mind while the vast, sleepy realms of thought and the deepest reaches of my awareness churned far from my waking consciousness. It was like a magic spell.

It was as if the book had channeled a wormhall into my brain that I could only access by separating from myself. I am convinced Grant Morrison does this kind of thing, implanting alien thought into your mind through language, and Warren Ellis is very forward in putting his disease textually.

And of course, it all feels as good as it sounds, hence the allure. A book like this is a drug. It takes root in you, and begins to change you from the inside out.

Rush out, rush out now, and get your fix

Be OF the Fiction, not just ABOUT it

By going here: http://postcardfictioncollaborative.blogspot.com/2010/11/rudolph-ii.html

It is the capstone to our first full year of PFCing, and we've PFCed the hell out of it, so go ahead, check us out, browse yourself some archives, and give us that ooey gooey rich and chewy love in the comments section.

Kablammo, we're off in 2011 like a shot, with guest writer Barbara DeCesare

Our Penultimate Word Slough

Our latest PFC, chock full of sloughy fiction, with special guest sloughing by Arlene Ang is now AVAILABLE. We'll be doing this all once more before the year is out.

What Old Tamber Had to Say

“They say she lives alone out there.”

“What, like out in the woods?”

“Not like way back in a cabin or anything, but in a little house out there off the road. I'm not even sure she has a car.”

“What, does she walk in here every day? Seems a long way. And not really safe is it, or doesn't seem safe. Anyone come along on someone looks like her, well if they ain't a good sort that'd turn around pretty bad.”

“They say she speaks in a funny tongue, some weird, old accent. Old Tamber said she spoke with all manner of things too. That when you'd go up by the place she'd be outside, out in back of the place or over on the side nearer to the stream and the marsh near that fork in the road.”

“The one that leads over to Dalton.”

“Or over towards Hume yeah.”

“Hm, didn't realize the place was up that far. I'm not out that way too much.”

“Tamber says she'll be out there talking with the plants, sometimes treating them to a congregation.”

“The hell does that mean?”

“A sermon.”

“Like a preacher?”

“Yeah. Holding forth on all those plants and anything else there she might be seeing. What kind of virtue to you suppose you'd extol to a plant.”

“Hahaha, hmm. Constancy.”

“How about a venus fly trap?”

“Sort of have to condone murder on that one don't you.”

“Either that, or you and Tamber just having on, right?”

“I'm not, I'm telling you what Tamber said.”

“That old broad knows just about everyone, and doesn't strike me as to like to make up a story like that.”

“No, s'why I kind of went on with it. It's out there sure, but don't fall off the edge.”

“Still, even if she is sort of odd, she's still a beauty and there are still all kinds out there up on the hills. That one guy, the one they say takes off anytime he gets wind of the FBI after him, he lives out there. He's not someone I'd put anything past. Even if I didn't know him twice as well as I'd like to I'd've heard in a year more than half what I need to know he isn't any sort.”

“Yeah. I don't know. Makes a mystery though doesn't it. She's only lived here for what, five years. Opens this little store, always standing there in the doorway. But it's gotta be good for the town, having a curio shop that sells flowers.”

“Sure. You think you're ever gonna talk to her.”

“Me? No.”

“Why not?”

“I get tongue tied and stammerin' just thinking about talking to her.”

“You'd maybe do alright.”

“No, carpenters don't talk to pretty florists.”


-One of the 10% Stories I wrote during the triathlon. Got too caught up at the end with training to post this properly out side of its home at Fictionaut.

We're sitting a coffee shop now, trying to see if there isn't more to say upstairs in the old idea box at the moment. Re-reading Grendel at the moment, and have an idea for a thing and the artist I wouldn't mind talking to about it, so that might be a thing in and of itself. Fun, sort of.

Lights Outside

Stay out of the light. Keep your distance as if this were a bear that had no form. Ursus, which means destroyer – the shapeless, indescribable doom peoples would not name and called only bruin, the brown, the beast left untraceable, its edges incomprehensible. It assassinates inside the captivating hugeness of its body. Its shadow was sorrow, and there are many shadows here. Perhaps they are sure lights. Maybe you want to call them that and let all of that pale, wavering immateria spill over your face. Maybe.

There are some who would want the lights to be brighter, but they stay were they are, their intensity unmoved, unafflicted by your glowing emotions. The light shining around you, circumscribing your body reflecting on the surfaces in the center of everyone around you. These two come up together, dueling, charged and seconded, your glow by the perceptions of your heart and the light by the grid. The light wins out. It sorry, weak light remains ceaseless, inexhaustible, so long as its filamental gases hold out. It awards its prize, casting a pallor on the bare skin of a coughing chest waiting to come to rest forever. Pinpointing for us where weakness has developed.

Who knows, maybe it’s a paling in the end. Maybe it keeps us aware of what’s going to happen when we look at the bed. Giving us a chance, a moment or two more to adjust our senses instead of coming in here with some kind of unknowing, or at the outside worst, false hope. Perhaps they are sure lights outside room 317, knowing that they are at least honest.


The gidget below is my Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Team in Training fundraising widget. I am competing in the NYC Triathlon this year to raise money for LLS research and patient services charity. Last year a friend, classmate, and fellow writer, Honest Jon Harding, passed away after a long battle with cancer.

For every 10% of my goal that I raise, I will post a new story here or someplace else on the internet. If you want more fiction, or if you want to donate to this wonderful cause, just click below. This weeks story riffed off of this image at Elephant Words.

Update The Fundraising widget doesn't seem to be working right now, so until then, here is a link to my donations page. Anything you can give goes to a great cause, and all donations are tax deductible.

Mooritan

And the last of them. Here is my final elephant words story for now. I might do another run in a couple months. This week's image was here.


Mooritan

Come once a month, and take that spoon out of your mouth when you are here. I like a voice that doesn’t register or agree, you can pick one to your liking from the wall over there. Set it on the table and hear what you came to hear.

The sun is coming back out now, so you should be ok to drive. Please mind the lawn when you are turning around.

‘Sorry to call when you are on the road. What was it by the way?’

‘Mooritan? Interesting. Well I will see you next month. Drive carefully.’

Discorporeate

Here is my penultimate Elephant Word for the year. I took the theme to heart somewhat. I've always loved the process of bognostification, which is the method of creating a new word for the purposes of literary usage and gain. Combining that function with the images Elephant Words presented, with its link to memory (the elephant, if you are unfamiliar with the idiom, is purported to possess an astonishing memory, hence the scene in Amelie).

Here is a link to the image that inspired this weeks story: Discorporeate

wait here. Incorporeality is very likely if we get any closer. If you feel yourself starting to loosen up, a tingling on the backs of your hands or the tips of your fingers, try to start digging into the sidewalk. The pain receptors will help you maintain integrity.

They are going to press the whole world into a book. It’s a hobby. Their eyes, their mouths, salival smacking shut.

Hobbies usually require the expense of that which is seen as inconsequential, the rolling up of the birth certificates of orphans held to the ear to listen for the sound of paper. Burning the last photographs of the last, final, and now deceased members of the families of Napoleon’s soldiers. Leaving the Lionels of a pedophile outside, in a box so the cardboard discorporeates into the cars, warping the tracks.

Glossening

I am dashed and bashed and ready for the abuse of the weekend which will be thick and served in a glass mug, a very large glass mug. And in that spirit I have committed this affront to punctuation, pacing, and preposition, based on this past week's image at Elephant Words:

Glossening

He sat there on his ass and couldn’t believe, in the same way a person chooses to believe or not believe in recycling as an act of and expressing value, that she was going to turn the music up since he hated all the music played tonight never really getting into Modest Mouse which kept playing because they all thought the lyrics were just oh so clever but what the hell did look out the window of my color tv even mean, and so tensed up his shoulders thinking maybe he should do more than just mouth the words ‘wait wait wait I don’t think that’s the solution’ though instead he just sipped from his beer as she slid the knob to the right bringing to light more neon bars of LED-platinum illumination calling up a burst of bass compression like the air had compacted, crunched with rising density, matter spilling into an already defined space from another direction you couldn’t get sight of with simple three-dimensional perceptive physiology, gripped his beer tightly to ensure it remained where and what he expected it to be looking into the next room wondering if anyone now talking louder would comment the music was too loud and pulled his feet in closer to the couch as she set a vase full of fake flowers in front of the stereo on a piece of paper before angling the speakers at the long petals of fabric which began to quiver and wave loosing dust that fell upon the whiteness of the paper in grey abstract over which she now hung the crystal chimes off the front porch by a hook in the ceiling and directing the articulating neck of a lamp at the crystals shivering in sonic, prismatic glossening over the ever-evolving mandala of dust on the paper’s surface.

scringer terpem

A bit late in posting the Elephant Words story from last week. Thanking Givers takes ol' Bones up into that part of NY state where when you point at a map and ask, what is in this area, your friend says "Nothing." They're not quite wired up out there is what I am saying.

Here is last week's image, and this week's image will be forthcoming in another couple days.

Diane sat herself down on the couch. She raised one leg up and rested the heel of her boot on the table in front of her, put the bottle to her lips and tipped it back. She lowered the bottle down onto the buckle of her belt and closed her eyes. She pictured her sister sitting on the edge of a dock, legs dangling over into the water, trying to hear the splash of the water over the sounds of the party, the chattering voices. Her sister in a cotton dress, a slender scarf around her neck. Dragonflies buzzing nearby. She couldn’t picture the sun in the sky, as if it were an eclipse and the world had turned diffuse with thin, sickly, dying light, the colors all fading into shades.

“Is that a scringer terpem?”

Hideous. No hair, except ratty bits at the sides of his head, brushed out and bushy like all the sad young topiaries would ever hope to be. Dark-rimmed glasses with bits of silver on the temples, expensive jeans from a trendy shop down on Broadway, a stylish sweater. His forty-ish chin and the line of his jaw was raw and red through the stubble he’d grown out since early that morning.

Already she was tired of thinking about him.

“A what?” she asked, wholly un-amused.

“On the table.” There were two packets there. One looked like a candy wrapper, opened and likely half empty. The first looked like a packet, but it was a guitar pick.

“What is a scringer terpem?”

“It’s a prophylactic. A condom organically made.”

Hideous and now nauseating. One in ten thousand of these kinds of guys is actually genuine, actually worth half a damn and capable of telling you something about books or music. They’ve been outsiders with two good god damn’s of a rat’s ass for what anybody wanted them to think and they are living in spectacular lofts and having dinner parties full of photographers and musicians and fashion-fiends. Some have probably even met Bowie. You can see it in the way they walk, in how they’ve dressed themselves. How they look you in the eye. How they know to leave you alone when you are sitting on a couch resting a beer on your belt buckle. If there is a universal signal for leave me the hell alone for five minutes, it is a beer on the belt buckle. This guy is two years into books on how to seduce women, on image shaping courses and more than likely a little baggie full of blue triangles. He is bloated around the eyes, newly divorced after leaving his wife. Addicted to porn, too chicken shit to skip a day of work, probably in banking and responsible for processing promissory notes. He doesn’t even have a secretary he can fantasize over in the stall of the bathroom, touching himself with his pants around his ankles. He doesn’t even have an office, doesn’t know enough to leave a body alone, or that esoterically bringing up a sexual reference in an unwanted conversation ought to be punishable with violence.

Diane’s bare shoulders flex into the couch, pushing her forward. His eyes follow her about six inches below her collar. She closes her eyes as she stands up, then opens them again when she is over his head. There is a radiator behind the lounge chairs set up in the dining room by the window.

“That’s a packet of mints. I’m going over there now.”

IMELICHOLIDON

I got all stumbling upon Elephant Words some months back, oddly enough, just about the time the daring dude behind Dead Rat's Press was gathering up a small army of ne'er-do-wells for yon Postcard Fiction Collaborative.

It's switched on, let me tell you. As is our one and fine Dilettantsia's new Candor literary magazine. They say it is a place where women can spar with text and culture. They've sold me.

But getting to the elephents and their words, I decided I'm going to embrace the burst culture a bit more fully, for a stint anyway, and elephant it up from the sidelines (and like most things, it's all Warren Ellis' fault. So once a week, from here on through the end of the year I'll be posting a story that's wandered out to the road from the dark corners of my skull and hitch-hiked its way to you here.

This week's inspiration:

IMELICHOLIDON

He had something to say but didn’t know how to say it. He had been trying. Wandering the aisles he scanned the arrangements of the produce. Stacks of potatoes, melons set out alone. Heaps of apples on one side, and the next line over green beans. He compared the prices with the shapes of fruit. Kiwi, $.99 each. Oranges, $2.59 per bag (they were in season). The wooden racks reliably holding the cauliflower and the broccoli had the sense of a stall, a farmers roadside stand, of an outside world brought inside among the metal shelves, the plastic labels, stand-up coolers, and the cardboard displays. He got lost in the basic commerce of food, of sustenance, and when he found himself again he was still unsure. Still mute within the thing’s importance.

He read books, taking in the characters, their voices. Translating their desires into words, their words into the coded messages of their desires and passions, of their hatreds. He copied out passages that worked and passages that failed, and he wrote over then in pen where he should put his own words, stealing the cadence of the other writer out of the thought his own paces were unsuitable to the job.

Reciting out loud he addressed picture frames and mirrors, the shoulders of his shirts hanging in the closet. Notes were typed on a typewriter, outlines drawn with webbed diagrams in notebooks, but it sounded wrong. The words didn’t look right on the page, the meaning taken away with the sound of his voice.

Walks in the park found him trailing joggers growing ever distant or staring into the bottoms of the fountain.

At the movies he looked for the shoes the actors wore, the movements of their shoulders. He watched how they turned their heads when they followed their eyes or how their eyes moved after they turned their heads. How their motions conveyed the expression of their person, of their character. He listened. He mouthed along with the words once he had seen the film a time or two, mimicking the movements of their jaw in impersonation, to capture the voice, the resonance of the palette.

There was an old Hi-Fi in the closet. He tried different arrangements of the speakers. He pointed them at one another, away, inside of windows. He took out a microphone and read onto tape. Continuous sections, then fragments, then he used a dual deck to splice the material together. He felt as though each run-through the sound degraded. Each re-dub created more and more static. He put on CDs and read through the liner notes when the music played.

He tried to name it. He called it Roger. Helios. Imelicholidon. The Trigger. Cage. Belfast.

A séance told him he was the reincarnation of Robert E. Lee. He walked around his apartment with a saber strapped to his hip, and used a southern accent he imagined a genteel southern general might use. He said y’all once or twice.

One morning he made breakfast. He just made breakfast. He didn’t try to think of how the pattern of the yokes or the distance from the bacon on the plate would look and what it would mean. What the flowers he had run out that morning to buy said standing in the vase on the table. How the fullness of the orange juice glass mattered.

Last night, he had said it. Said it the right way.

He talks in his sleep.

Worn, Torn, Yet to be Reborn

Kicked in the gut today, so try as I try, there was nothing for it. A moment maybe somewhere in there, when it looked like it might come out into the light, but really all for naught. Got run pretty deep into the ground yesterday, face-first into the muck, to suck and choke on blubbering sick pooled thickly in the gutter, and all that.

I've got egg on my face, a stone in the pit of my stomach, and a stake in my heart. So no more blathering.

Go listen here: Kalpana

And we got some new stuff up for Septermber: Postcard Fiction Collaborative

Eggs in the Light

A pair of jeans lay next to the door to his closet, where they had been left when he climbed into bed last night, and retrieving them he walked through the doorway toward the kitchen. Midway through the living room he slid his legs into the pants. He had them zipped and buttoned by the time he reached the fridge.

He poured the old coffee from the pot down the drain. If he had plants he would have used the coffee to water the plants, diluted with some water, supposedly as a way to help them grow, but he had no plants. He dumped the old grinds into the trash and prepared a fresh pot.

Cracking some eggs into a frying pan where a pat of melted butter was sizzling quietly, he put two slices of bread in the toaster. He flipped the eggs, breaking the yoke of one, swirled the pan to spread the sticky yellow goo around, and turned off the gas let them firm up. He pulled a plastic container of tuna salad from the fridge and spread a layer of it across the warm bread. He pulled a square, plastic plate from the cupboard next to his head, and set the developing sandwich upon it. He pulled a slice of cheese from the package on the door, finally slid the eggs from the pan onto the whole mess. He pulled a glass from the shelf, noted that he might want to dust, and poured himself a glass of orange juice.

He looked down at the sandwich. Heat from the eggs pouring invisibly around the edges of the cheese poking out from around the crusts.

It wasn’t really cheese, cheese food if you read the label properly. Food or product, the effect of the heat was its softening, a lightening of color, and the breakdown of rigidity and solidity, if you can call cheese solid. All of that sounded right, but Matt wasn’t sure if his lingo was solid. He was a lax consumerist.

He punched the sandwich.

Oh Comely Kooks

The way he wore his beard, just beyond the edge of trim, where the occasional hair would stick out from the cheek revealing its successful escape from the shears, left the plane of his jaw active and moving as if it were a wave whose movements signified the tides of ideal diner sandwiches and the currents of coffee rings. Like her, he was an active cafe goer whose enterprise had to begin on the lip of full mug, as if he were jumping into a volcano.

That he winked as he passed sent her eye darting about his face, diving beneath the surface of those bristling waves down to the bed where the silt of his features lay. His mouth was lips and line across that which was hard to know but looked to have rested closer to a smile.


She had seen that smile in a dream the week before. She was with a boy from school, a face only partially known for a few years in middle school, once and only once fantasized over. They walked in the dream and found themselves in a woods to have sex. Crunching pines needles under their feet lead the way to a wooden bridge that ran across the river in their town. A railing connected up to the bridge and the sloping floor of the woods, and the other side came out on a bank toward the road. Not many people ever used the bridge because this end was far from the edge of town and there was another trail-head that let out closer by.

The bridge pushed away from everyone, from the town, and that was where he wanted to have sex, to get away from everything they knew while she wanted to do it by the railing at the trail's mouth, which wasn't over the water. She was afraid of the water, and the idea of having sex was the idea of moving away and she wasn't sure that she was ready to leave, but the thought of doing it in mid-air where the wind was blowing, over the flowing water pulled at her, tugging her away even with her uncertainty weighing her down.

They agreed to do it on the platform, and images started to spiral in the skies. They were images of the town, shapes like sculptures of the people of the town spinning in the sky around them between the silhouettes of the trees and the purple shadows on the underside of the clouds, showing her and the boy the hidden chambers tucked away behind the walls of their home. The world passed through them, guiding them through the places they'd stared into everyday whenever they saw a front door.

She saw her friend Nicole, who was already having sex, and lights blossomed showing her everything they had never been able to talk about. And how similar this boy was to her friend. Always an outsider, walking in the shadow of his name. She wanted to talk with him about the ways they liked each other, the way it could made them feel as if they knew the answer to every test they'd ever have to take, and if they had been able to, if they had risked it all and had sex then, they would have been able to draw the shape of the world.

When she looked at him she saw herself reflected as a paper toy in the center of his dark eyes, and the darkness wasn't bad, and the innocence he saw in her wasn't good. These were alloyed emotions, empathy and sorrow and loneliness and happiness all stirred together and fired into a metallic glass that reflected not the light but the consequences of their actions.

He was not someone she'd ever spoken with, but once, without knowing why, she had seen him smile and thought of seducing him. She remembered his smile in that dream and saw it again on the street with a wink .while it snowed.


He had put up his small grin just as soon as he left the subway. The smile for its own sake and for the weather and for the small falling snow. He put his hands in the pockets of his jeans rather than his jacket, where they might be cooler, but would help him feel as if he didn't need the extra level of protection. Flaunting daylight on a day off of work he pulled back his shoulders, arched his spine and raised his head, feeling as if a string pulled up on the crown of his head. He was embarrassed when, just as he passed the girl and met her eyes in a way a conditional introvert rarely chanced, a flake blew into the corner of his eye and melted just on the lower lid, and the cold and the wet tapped at his sensory nerves and shut the eye, and he knew that she had seen him wink and he worried the rest of the day what she had thought of him.

Up Up and Away

With the tip of my tongue I tack the stir-stick in my mouth against my palette and try spitting it through the beige drywall by the coffee maker.

I can see every bit of lower and west Manhattan from where I am standing in the pantry – this being a sink, a fridge, and a cupboard – as well as a good chunk north whenever I sneak into the boss office. Some important sales rep is in town for a few days and staked out a cubical on the dark side of the building, the northwest side around the corner from the coffee maker. This rep is staying away from the windows.

He looks like Toby Flenderson from the US version of the Office.

There is some of that smacking steam sound as the coffee maker fills my conveniently sized cup. Toby doesn’t look up. I pour in sugar and make sure to spill some on the counter.

This is just good business.

Spilled sugar on the counter shows visitors, competitors, and ne’er-do-wells that people are working here by gum. These people are working at and thinking about their jobs, not about their coffee, and they are eager to get back to it.

I have to walk back to my desk because we don’t have moving walkways in our office. If our office was laid out in any kind of regular sort of order, then maybe there would be moving walkways, although we aren’t really THAT kind of company. The path through the office snakes, more like a maze instead something more regular, and it becomes an experience just to use the lavatory. There isn’t a track that leads you around in a logical pattern. There aren’t uniform corridors – spaces and walkways weave around exposed, painted I-beams in some kind of hard-nosed industrial chic. There isn’t that sense of normal here.

This doesn’t create an aggressive office decorum per se, but it certainly makes things a bit edgier in an unmarketable sort of sense. We’re just a bit more aware.

I sit in a corner and try not to get so bored I fall asleep, and try not to overly invest in my work, which I find stressful. I understand some people masturbate at work. I’ve never masturbated at work. I remain detached, and can’t really see how you’d want to suddenly touch yourself pouring over a spreadsheet or project report. Maybe it’s the people on the phone all day.

Sex in the office is another matter.

If Toby Flenderson wasn’t squatting in that nook I’d go back over and take a yogurt out since I haven’t eaten yet today. It’s almost 1PM. 1 hour to go. 4 hour Fridays.

I don’t hate my job. I’m not a dick to people. Really. Like I said this isn’t an aggressive atmosphere. Some days you can’t help but feel that the patterns we walk as we move about this obstructed realm are tracing out some large, intricate cosmological pattern, and this pervading sense of the place is to wonder exactly whose cosmos we are contributing too.

Actually I feel sorry for Toby, which is why I don’t want to walk back over there. I felt sorry for him for the 42 seconds it took for my pristine little cup of coffee to brew but the journey back to my desk has altered how I view the world. He’s wearing a suit, something that cost him what my apartment costs each month, which is a lot to some people, people like me, and I’ve risen above that. He hasn’t walked around enough in here, so he looks at me disdainfully as I am wearing sandals and a short-sleeve plaid shirt, but the fact is I look –and think- better than he does.

A Wave

This is the only wave, breaking with the blood and all its’ substantive nutrients, its calcium deposits and the flecks of oxygen and iron together racing past purple to black, drying beneath the skin, the split open heart of the knuckle, like the faces of wood that you can peel away from one another. It’s terror that you can swallow up hoping it’ll choke down easily enough.

It’ll be forward and together until it strikes the wall to hand itself out as flyers on the street, it separates so easily you’d never even know one side was not near the other anymore. The pain left you and there was only the absoluteness of clenching your fist that helped you feel the pressure inside where all of it was just waiting, storing itself up until you decided to test it out and see if the whole system worked.

You curl up your fist in front of a smooth concrete wall, or brick since their roughness does feel that much better, and you let it fly, without pistoning, without that posturing cock of the arm, just the snap back you should be striving for beyond the surface. You let it run, a bull out of the gates speeding with that willpower to bring your world of flesh and bone through to the other side, or to feel the pieces of it separate and go off where ever they might, to leave you with that broken, silly wave.

Falling

She lets the book drop through her fingers to the floor and stares straight ahead watching the red lights streak by in the darkness. The train rocks her away from the seat and back; she rolls her spine along the plastic to absorb the motion, taking it away from the train. She watches him, in the seat across, his gaze shifting from the book, to her, and back to the book. His eyes rising and falling but never meeting hers like a dawn never reaching noon.

He waits for movement in her shoulders, a muscle twitching or contracting, but they are unmoving. His dark eyes come up from the book on the floor to her chest, inches below her neck, where the first indication, a pull or shift beneath her shawl, would signal that she is bending forward to pull the book from the floor. He feels sparks bursting beside his ear and feels them popping through the shirt covering his shoulder, as though sprites and fairies were setting quarks to spinning or playing jai-alai with neutrinos. They were spitting out plasma which would cost him a loan later today, when he couldn’t think straight while filling out the application. The shawl was pulled tight around her neck; realizing he is staring at her chest he looks up and feels awkward seeing that she has been watching him.

She does not change her expression when he turns red and sheepishly rubs together his hands covered in wood-stain. The train stops and she rises from her seat, walking smoothly through the doors onto the platform toward a stair with the string of elves trailing behind her in the air. He looks back too late to see the girl - head wrapped in a hive of dreadlocked hair, hemp twine, and beads, - waiting, shaking with anticipation, dart her hand out from beneath a dark poncho to grab the book, and all he sees is the dirty floor.

Momentary Disruption

Sorry, nothing to see here, move along. (Ok, it'll be back at some point, so come back then).

If the System Were Named Sampson: A Venture Brothers Fan Fiction

Deftly swinging a broom has only limited applications but in the instances where those applications come into play they really do make one stand out.

The point of Brock grabbing the broom was to try not to kill the cat, but to swat it enough times that it wouldn't want to fight anymore. To punish it, without termination, what with all that business of mice and men concerned with their plans we find that despite thought towards the path action leads down strange paths and suffice to say intention does not too often find itself getting the better of the outcome, as it were. It could not for instance overcome nature. For nature decreed in making graceful, sleek and often strikingly beautiful the cat, and with those gifts the cat was made arrogant and haughty, such as it is that through this, the cat's own natural enmity for all non-cats other than its master, it has become legendary for ire. They are species known for their spitefulness and outwardness of hatred.

This is simply the way of things after all.

So after Brock first brought the broom down on this particular cat's skull, he was, as a cat lover, affected, though by being Brock, he was not affected as another might. His affect processed according to his nature, which much like a cat's, is contrary often even to being unkind. Perhaps this explains some reason for his affinity for felines; their reflection of his self. Brock's response is entirely after the fact, in the reflection, in the brief moment of account Brock takes with each life, discerning insight in conjunction with the application of power, understanding the balances that scale within the universe.

Brock crushed the skull of this cat without too much psychological transference, so what, if anything, can really be said about contrariness without entering into wormholes of tangential causation is not a line for this page. He modulated the speed of the swing while the broom already arced through the air, seeing a murderous lack of restraint in the eyes of the cat and the scent of an acid boiling in the cat's mouth, twisting the broom from the flat to the outer edge where the metal guide would stave in even a coconut.

The cat's skull cracked under the force of a broom being swung which is impressive to say nothing else, and Brock stalked off through the train to find the cat's owner for some thoroughly justified retribution at being required, per his nature, to terminate the cat. Of course the largesse of this cat was a nature fueled with enmity and a modified physiology, so its' skull did not so much as repair as filled in the splayed, fractured portions, widening the cat's head and in the process its' maw, and shuddering its' body as a cat will do when stretching the thing got bigger to accommodate its bulkier and toothier anterior, to stalk after the non-cat it was most spiteful toward at the moment. This of course being Brock.

The cat tore the leg off a porter who was changing the bedding in Brock's cabin. The porter died hearing a Door's song in the cabin nearby, and the cat waited for Brock, waiting to tear his face off and claw out his eyes.

Brock found the cat's owner and held him by the jaw dangling between two cars of the train, letting the man's bare feet knock against the ties and stone beds of the tracks. He said nothing while staring into the man's eyes, letting the wind of the moving train spread cold against their faces and finally whispering to him harsh and menacing as he lowered him onto the tracks in front of the wide steel wheels.

The cat leapt out at Brock as he entered the cabin, going first for the eyes, scratching at Brock's arm as it was caught in mid-air, hissing and spitting while Brock stuffed it into a sheet and beat it against the walls of the cabin. It grew and its bones knit together once more larger and stronger as Brock carried it towards the front of the train, struggling to tear its way free as Brock reached the engine room. It tore free of the bag as Brock grabbed the back of its neck and clamped a jumper cable run off a line to the train's diesel engine to its spine.

Brock now regretted only having already dispatched the car's owner.

This is the first time I have ever written fan fcition. It will likely be the last.