Short Ones
From Ollywiki
All of us kids go down to the pool. Someone throws a quarter in the deep end and I dive in after it, groping through the mats of pubic hair and band-aids on the bottom to search out my prize. Resurfacing in triumph, I find they’ve all gone away. The chlorine still stings my eyes.
Everyone has them now and again. Those writhing balls of tiny worms. That turd that looks just like a little man, waving. These are what is called, in psychological circles, authentic experience.
Alone, she studies the ice caps by looking them up on the internet. Alarmed by what she finds, she turns up the thermostat and wanders around the apartment naked.
Horses, not angels, dancing on the head of a pin in the tiny spastic circus of her mind.
After months of lassitude, he finally did something productive. He rummaged around the basement to find his welding machine. He took it out to the concrete stairwell and welded two pieces of steel together in the shape of a hangman’s gibbet. He stuck it in the middle of the front lawn and walked proudly back into his house. “There,” he muttered, “it is finished.”
A black wolf feasting on the entrails of a child. I try not to think about it.
Overcome by an impulse, he went out to his back garden and started digging a hole. Surprised by his newfound energy, he kept digging and digging. By about four feet down his shovel struck a wooden box that looked to him to be very old. He pried open the lid to find the head of a very small demon with pointy, parchmenty ears. “Put me back,” it said, which he promptly did. He filled in the hole and covered it with a plug of sod so no one would notice. He tried to put it out of his mind, but it was hard.
She immersed herself in the soothingness of organic crusts and biological films.
Spurlos: German, for without a trace.
The Assbreathers => Note to self : Continue this vein of thought.
(Two English ladies in a shop.) “She told me she caught Paratyphoid B from India!” “How exciting,” “She’s always does such interesting things!”
Fly shit on his computer screen: “Aaargh!”
Unsure of what to do with myself, I vacuum the house relentlessly. Perhaps I am working against entropy.
Today’s backing track: The incessant twanging and the rat-a-tat-tat of a Tennessee Three drumbeat.
Paywall: You don’t have sufficient balance in your account to finish reading my story.
Mexico:
A rheumy child sells orange juice to tourists in milky plastic bags. Each one he presents with, rather reverently, a bendy, blue straw. Behind him, on the other side of a strip of black and yellow caution tape, the dorsal ridges of a crocodile protrude through the viridian scum of a stagnant slough. Fat, slow-moving flies orbit sullenly around his head and cluster at his feet like quivering, blue jewels.
A whole long narrative, forgotten. Central Asia was somehow involved. And psychonauts.
Looking out at the parking lot through the backward ‘Air Conditioned’ decal of a donut shop window. A red and white Canadian flag, flaps jauntily over a nearby industrial park where lengths of plastic pipe are stored on rusty steel racks. A U-Haul, self-drive truck is parked on the street outfront of it with some kind of needle-toothed, bioluminescent fish painted on the side of it. A glossy black crow picks at a discarded apple cruller on the oil stained tarmac of beside an orange dumpster. A couple of other U-Haul trucks pass by, each with its informative tableau about meteorite impact craters and frog-jumping contests on the sides of its cargo box. It occurs to me that if I sat here long enough, I could learn a lot about these things. In the distance, weedy trees shimmer behind the flat industrial rooftops. From here, they almost look silver.
Phone invasion: The weeds are in my phone. Invading.
The future: Supervolcanoes covering the earth with their silly grey powder. The sky will always be black.
New in Town:
Bill and Amy R��öntgenstrahlung are pleased to invite you to a get acquainted barbecue at our New Home!
The exoskeletons withering in the dust of the corner. All those little lives!
The call of the red-winged blackbird brings to mind the sound of a dial-up modem. In the future, I wonder if anyone will ever remember that dial-up modem sound?
Cities consumed by hurricanes of fire.
A summer’s day, a long time ago, when the rats leapt like impalas in the tall, dead grass.
Fossil Foods:
Whenever he had extra money, he’d spend it on jars of honey and tins of sockeye salmon and he’d hide them away in his storage locker. “In the future,” he told me “these foods will be but a distant memory.”
Denuded biblical hills
a carpenter ant in its death throes on the floor beside the toilet.
Beneath each tree he buried a rat. In time, his orchard flourished.
Like a blind cave salamander, he has forgotten the sun.
“Intense World Syndrome”
When I told him I thought I had Asperger’s, he thought I meant “ass burgers.”
Exchanging meat for sex, as in male chimpanzees.
In 1967, in Berlin, during a protest against the Shah of Iran, a man called Benno Ohnesorg was killed by police. When translated into English, the name “Ohnesorg” means: “without worry.”
Old men in sagging shorts with no hair on their thin legs. Does it all fall off?
The century that just passed: Mass production and mass death… What is the point of space travel? The invention of air conditioning and people sleeping on grates.
A man, in early middle age with a camouflaged hunting jacket, Clark Kent glasses and a cane walks along a line of parked cars that are waiting for a ferry. New truck? he asks someone in the line-up. No reply. “I’m losing my mobility,” he continues, “so I’m going off to the mountains to see how that works for me.”
The more he masturbated, the thicker grew his foreskin. It was a vicious cycle.
He looked up suddenly, more suddenly than he usually looked up, and suddenly, the world looked different, although he could still recognize it.
She dreamed of arsenic butter and cephalofoils, which are the heads of hammerhead sharks.
The century that has just passed: A memory: Being sent to the corner smoke shop with a shoebox full of vacuum tubes, rattling and clinking. The man there, whose face looked like a Moroccan leather wallet, would let me stick them into a console, one at a time, to see if they lit up or not. The ones that stayed dark, he’d replace with new ones, each in its tidy, little box that he’d get down from a shelf, high above the till. That’s how we used to fix the TV in those days.
