Paul and Barley

[The prompt was to write a story including the first sentence there (taken from a terrible period piece novel). I had ten minutes. You may be able to tell but you will enjoy it nonetheless.]

Paul spent the next two days trying to cleanse his body of the grainy odor that permeated his skin, his hands, his hair, and his nose. It was hard having an addiction to wheat. He would go mad with the desire and break into the local brewery, diving, naked, into the hops. Swimming, mouth open, like that one over-enthusiastic kid in the ball pit at Chuck E Cheese’s. Only, that kid was never naked. Well, okay, that one time he was. But security guards in animal costumes had taken him away, their movements nearly as smooth as their animatronic counterparts in the pizza parlor next-door. Paul had wanted to commend the boy for his bravery. It takes balls to put your balls in those balls. Or in wheat. Or in pie, as his friend Martin would attest. Come to think of it, Paul reflected, maybe he wasn’t so strange after all.

The Grammar of Silence

“No, listen,” she said. “There’s a grammar to silence. You don’t have to talk constantly. Let’s just… listen.”

I sat there on her dorm bed, awkwardly trying to pretend I was listening to silence.

But eventually I actually did start to hear… something. There was a grammar to it. Phrases, clauses, verbs, questions, and exclamations.

“You know,” I said finally, “you’re really pretty awesome. Can I see you… more often? Like, not just to buy drugs from you?”

She stood up quickly, handed me the stuff, and pushed me out the door.

“What’d I do wrong?” I said to a closed door.

She opened it again. “You ended a silence with a proposition.” And the door slammed shut once more.

Psychopunk Lullaby Vol. 5

The next morning I woke up at four, as usual. Joey didn’t know it, but if it weren’t for my constant slicing, we would’ve been starving and sleeping on the streets. It was a constant battle to stay two steps ahead, constantly staying as far Upwind as I could keep us while pilfering the little amounts we needed to survive. That particular morning I was skimming credit from my newest find, a crop of particularly well-off individuals connected by close business and personal relationships. I made it look as easy as picking grapes off a bunch, but it’s easy to look a certain way when everyone sees what they want to see.

My slicing was interrupted by Joey’s terrified voice.

Psychopunk Lullaby Vol. 4

I awaken the next morning not knowing where or who I am.

“It’s normal, Joey,” she says, bathing me in crimson light. “It’s just your brain rebooting itself to fit around the data. You’ll remember everything soon.” She strokes my face gently, her massive blue eyes pleading for me to trust her.

Psychopunk Lullaby Vol. 3

The real revolution came with Delusion. The shared layer of reality permeated everything and immediately investing in anything else became a waste of time. Television, computers, cell phones, none of them mattered anymore when all the entertainment or art or architecture you needed could surround you in the blink of an eye. Only a few of the elderly refused it, and I shudder to think how they must view this world, without the crystal edifices or the windows into infinity the skies have become.

Psychopunk Lullaby, Vol. 2

Mindcraft allowed us to personalize and accessorize our minds the way girls obsess over clothing. Hyperspecialization heaped on hyperspecialization, guilds of warring minds directing sentient matter at one another. Others devoted themselves to pure intelligent biomass, some of the bigger ones achieving over a ton of synaptic tissue.

Three Flash Pieces from Writing Prompts

Demons walk our streets. Few of them look inhuman, and most of that group can cover it up with a hat or a baggy coat or baggy pants. What they can’t do, however, is drive a car.

A train or a bus will not reject a demon. No one knows if it’s too difficult for a vehicle to detect a demon among too many people, or if they just can’t throw out the bathwater without ejecting the baby with it. But this is why subways and buses have a smell all their own.

So the next time someone insists that they love the T and would never drive in this city, remember that not all of them are worried about parking and traffic and absent street signs and rotaries and one-way streets.

---

Behind her the noise escalated. It took her a while to hear it, although her dog perked up before it approached even a whisper. The noise’s slow escalation continued to go unnoticed even when it reached a quiet ringing; she heard it merely as that sound a silent house makes to keep itself entertained. But in a few minutes the sound had reached the level where it could not be denied that something was something. She walked through her house, her dog cautiously behind her legs, until she located the source of what had become a harsh, angular wail. There, between her washer and drier, a hole in the air was widening. A glorious, bright light shone out of the rift, and as the wail became a scream she could see a glowing face peering through, blinking rapidly. Something beautiful is being born into this world, she thought. And it is not happy about it.

---

[This story's prompt was to use a word someone else had invented. In this case it's "perkiblot". When I edit this I'm going to take that out so it's not so awkward. Still, even with that, I'm especially proud of this story.]

All she left behind was a note and a half-finished mug of coffee. The note said nothing she hadn’t said before; he needed more motivation and personal hygiene, and she pleaded for him to seek professional help, this time ostensibly for his sake alone. And possibly the sake of one of her therapist friends. But he knew the coffee mug would speak volumes.

He lifted it up and placed it in the sink, then returned to examine the kitchen table where the coffee had been. He’d been an atheist when they’d met, and mostly still was, but she’d taught him enough perkiblot to make him at least acknowledge its therapeutic value. He peered intently at the ‘blot the mug had left behind, tracing the condensation’s silhouette in the air above it, careful not to disturb its fragile existence. He recalled the rules of deciphering a perkiblot, recalling also and inadvertently the first time she’d put her clammy, nervous hand on his and guided him through the process.

This one was happy news, as far as he was concerned: she would return. Not soon and not without reservation and not when he’d need her most. But she would return.

He took one of the thick paper towels she’d bought and wiped the kitchen table clean.

Ivan

[Haven't written many pieces longer than 55 words lately, but this one demanded the tiniest bit extra space. Still very much a work in progress, though, particularly the very end.]

“Don’t worry, young man,” the Martian policeman said, “He’s just a baby. He’s harmless, long as his blindfold’s on.” He patted the basilisk’s rump, his red hand making Christmas colors against its scales. The beast turned its great head to lick its rider’s fingers.

“How’s he know where to go?” I asked. My dad continued to hiss at me to get back to his side of the street.

“We’ve been breeding them for hearing for thousands of years,” he said. Then he leaned down to whisper in my ear. “By the time you’re old enough, we’ll be training humans to ride them.” My eyes widened.

The policeman straightened up in his saddle. “I’m Officer Quint.” He shook my hand. “Now, get back to your father. I don’t think he likes Ivan here very much.” He winked at me.

I re-crossed the street. My dad walked us quickly home.

When we got inside, he turned to me and said, “I can’t say this out there or they’ll put me away, but those lizards are a menace, and their riders are imperialist savages.”

“Daddy,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You don’t have to be mean to Officer Quint just ’cause you’re scared of basilisks.”

He stared at me. Moments passed and still he stared. Then he turned and walked to his study, muttering, “He’s still just a kid, still a boy.”

The Most Successful Man That Never Was

It’s a logarhythm knife, all right? I don’t know what that means

and I don’t think anyone five jumps from here knows either. I picked it up from one of the dimensions closer to the Middle, near where the Interfuck began, I guess. Where they found out how to combine time travel and space travel, it wasn’t that hard once you had the beginning and end holes lined up, the wormholes I mean, but you know they aren’t really wormholes, they’re spaceships.

Dealing.

Google “deal with anger.” You can go ahead. The links look ok. They’ve got the right titles: “10 Powerful Ways to Deal with Anger,” “How to Deal With Anger,” but when you click thorough, you find that they’re worthless. They’re all about how to prevent anger. How to “dissolve” anger. How to prevent your anger from causing a discussion to tailspin.

I don’t need that.

I don’t want that.

I want somebody to tell me what to do with my anger when I do have it. I want somebody to put some bad guys in front of me to hit. But that’s no good, is it? I’m not that competent. I don’t have special abilities. Really, I don’t even hit that hard.

It makes me want to take up sculpting. Hammering at stone, pounding until chunks are literally ripped from the block. Except that’s not how it works. You won’t get much of a sculpture that way.

Maybe I should run. Some people run. It just makes me feel tired. Irritable, mopey, instead of angry.

My body is full of a flowing, swelling energy, and I know that I have power like no other time. I can channel this. I can make it something.

But no.

Instead, it slowly seeps away, leaving me sad. Crying is really a step down from feeling like you’re overflowing with power. Now you feel vulnerable. You want someone to care for you, sympathise with you, stroke you, hold you, but you feel pitiful approaching someone like this. Love me, you’d be saying, only less. Tell me I matter. I feel even worse when you say it, because I know it’s not true.

But even this self loathing is not a resting place. Because you know that you do good things. They may not be many, and they may not matter the way you’d like, but you know that you can be competent, and that there are people who have so much more to bemoan – it makes you feel like a thief, stealing even the deserved sadness from the unfortunate.

But something sparks a thought of the topic of your frustration, and a little spark of anger flares, but it does not catch. It turns into a heavy, black coal, seething and tugging at your innards, forever straining downward.