Tag Archives: experimental fiction

Shatter

246 pieces: tiny, crystalline, shards, anger-thrown and inertia-spread.

102 words: spit-laced, vulgar, hurtful, said in both fear and sincerity.

54 times: incidents like this in the past few years, increasing in frequency and intensity.

19 calls: made from inside the house and from outside the house and from the two involved and from outsiders concerned.

11 drinks: the average number consumed by one of the involved or by both before such incidents, though this number varies.

6 holes: in various sizes and in various rooms made during various other incidents.

3 fractures or breaks: solid bone either splintered or severed outright.

2 lives: desperate and scared and lost and stuck and afraid and hopeless and hopeful and hidden and ashamed and remorseful and full of self-loathing and too much empathy and excuses, this is true of each person and is also not true of them, depending.

1 cycle: never ending.

Shatter

246 pieces: tiny, crystalline, shards, anger-thrown across the room, inertia-spread across the floor.

102 words: spit-laced, vulgar, hurtful, said in both fear and sincerity.

54 times: incidents like this in the past few years, increasing in frequency and intensity.

19 calls: made from inside the house and from outside the house and from the two involved and from outsiders concerned.

11 drinks: the average number of consumed by one of the involved or by both before such incidents, though this number varies.

6 holes: in various sizes and in various rooms made during various other incidents.

3 fractures or breaks: solid bone either splintered or severed outright.

2 lives: desperate and scared and lost and stuck and afraid and hopeless and hopeful and hidden and ashamed and remorseful and full of self-loathing and too much empathy and excuses, this is true of each person and is also not true of them, depending.

1 cycle: never ending.

Just

I reject the notion that he was found not guilty by a jury of his peers.
There weren’t any mothers on that jury.
I reject the notion that evidence is inadmissable.
They couldn’t see the photos.
I reject the notion of double jeopardy.
There are some things that make you forever guilty.
I reject the notion of cruel and unusual punishment.
There might come a time when I let him out of the cage I put him in.
I reject the notion that “Do Unto Others” advocates exclusively for kindness.
There are times when cruelty begets cruelty, when violence demands violence.
I reject the notion of a minimum or maximum sentence.
I will surgically remove a piece of his skin for each and every day that I have had to live without my child.
I reject the notion that I have somehow become a monster.
There is a universal principle, an eternal law, an innate righteousness guiding and condoning what I am doing.
I reject the notion that I should give a fuck what you think.
There might come a time when you find yourself in my shoes and only then can you judge me.

Rifle

Aim: Align your sight with your target. It’s important that you keep both eyes open so you can see clearly and without distortion. This will also reduce the stress of eye strain. Keep your aiming time brief. This is the moment. Don’t second guess yourself. Align your sights on your target.

Preparing the Body

Wash the body in a disinfectant solution. Massage the limbs to relive stiffening in the joints and muscles. Shave where necessary.

Control Your Breathing: Your breathing can move the firearm enough to make you miss your shot. When you’re ready, and you are, draw a deep breath, feel it inside you, and exhale about half of it. Hold your breath as you squeeze the trigger. Remember, today is the day. The excitement of this fact might make your heart beat faster and increase your pulse. If this happens, just relax and remember why you’re here, and try again.

Set the Facial Features

Close the eyes with glue or use plastic eye caps to hold the lids down.

Hold Steady: It might be hard for you to hold the firearm steady. This is understandable. Focus your attention on the movement of the target and try to minimize the area that the target can move around in.

Artierial

Remove the blood from the body through the veins and replace with formaldehyde-based chemicals through the arteries.

Squeeze the Trigger: When you’re ready, and you are, hold the gun comfortably and grab the wrist of the stock firmly and with purpose. Remember to squeeze the trigger without jarring the gun. This requires slow, steady pressure. It was slow, steady pressure that brought you here. It is slow, steady pressure that will end the slow, steady pressure.

Cavity

Make a small incision in the abdomen. Insert trocar into the body cavity. Puncture the organs in the chest cavity and drain gas and fluids. Inject chemicals. Suture.

Follow Through: After the bullet fires, you must continue. You must continue to squeeze or follow-through to avoid the gun jerking before the bullet leaves the barrel. You must continue. You must follow-through.

Sow

Pilot’s Log
12 March 2130
Days to Deployment: 5

Infinity is beautiful. If you’ve never seen it, it would be hard for me to describe the breathtaking wonder of an endless void. Some might find the solitude disquietning, but I have come to take comfort in the isolation.

It gives me time to think.

They told me this mission would be simple. Long and mentally and physically taxing, but simple in its directives: Locate Planet X1506-78, Locate fertile terrain, Deploy and Dust terrain with panspermia capsules.

Simple.

I know what’s riding on this mission, what’s at stake. I feel the weight of hopes millions and millions of lightyears away.

Physically and mentally taxing. But, for me, I have come to see this mission as morally taxing as well.

Do we deserve to perserve our species? What right do we have to disrupt the natural evolution of an alien planet? Is life sacred or profane?

I do not have the answers to these questions yet.

Pilot’s Log
13 March 2130
Days to Deployment: 4

I spoke with my wife today. It’s just a room now, I told her. It’s time, I told her. You need to do this, it’s healthy, I told her.

It’s easy for me to say that. I’m not the one who has to remove the crib, the toys, the pictures on the wall. I’m not the one that will have to paint over all of those animals and their bright smiles and frolicking feet.

It’s just a room now. Walls and a window and a floor and a ceiling. It’s just a room as sterile and inhuman and indifferent as the white-walled hospital room with its machines and their beeps and hums and numbers on screens signifying a decline.

It’s just a room now. Just like it was just a body in the end. A tiny 14-month old body. It wasn’t even a body. It was a host. It was a tiny 14-month old cancer host.

It’s just a room. It’s just a body. It’s just a host.

Pilot’s Log
14 March 2130
Days to Deployment: 3

Is it better to have never been born at all? Given the unpredicatble nature of life, given all of the possibilities for pain and pleasure, given the uncertainty of the ratio of pain to pleasure, given the question of the duration of the pain, of the pleasure, of the act of being alive itself, is it a gamble worth taking?

Thought experiment: I come to you with a proposition to join a game. If you choose not to play the game, you lose nothing. Everything stays the same.

However, if you choose to join the game, there is no gaurantee as to how long you will play the game, how much pain or pleasure will come your way, and, most importantly, you have very limited agency in this game, your will is imposed upon by outside forces and is therefore not free.

Would you play?

Pilot’s Log
16 March 2130
Days to Deployment: 1

Hope is a strange concept, a strange bedfellow, a savage lover. The concept itself has become a little absurd and irrational and naive to me. What good is it to invest in something that’s wholly beyond your control?

Why has an entire planet of people placed their hope on me, on this mission, on these panspermia capsules?

To continue the human race? But what good does that do for them? They’re dead anyway. Is there really any comfort or consolation in the notion that our species will live on this foreign planet?

And do we deserve to? After what we’ve done on and to ours? On and to our own species? On and to every other species that we claimed dominion over?

And what about these capsules? Do they even want to start the long and arduous process of evolution to become something so staggeringly inconsistent as us?

So loving and hateful and compassionate and indifferent and charitable and greedy and peaceful and murderous and on and on and on and on.

Do they even want to play the game?

Pilot’s Log
17th March 2130
Deployment Day

This will be my last entry. I have made a decision, a choice, a commitment. Or I feel that it has been imposed upon me, so maybe I am not to blame for the consequences.

For poserity, in case this recording is ever transmitted: I feel that the moral course of action here is to self-destruct.

This will be a beginning just as violent and firey and random as the beginning of all things.

There will still be a chance for some of the capsules to survive and fertilize the terrain.

Those that fight to live will have made their choice. They will play the game, for better or worse or whatever.

Who will survive and what will become of them?

Hall

Running through surroundings that feel familiar and not-familiar, similar and strange, at the same time, there’s a weight that isn’t normally here, palpable, beckoning, eternal even, no that’s absurd, not eternal, but heavy nonetheless, it is real though, this weight as I’m running, tripping, falling, miscalulations that lead to missteps and I have to grab the wall to steady myself, hands slipping on picture frames of smiling familes that have people I recognize but don’t know, smiles that are somehow frightening, toothy and threatening, the frames slippery so I can’t quite get my grip, but inertia and momentum and an ineffable and inescapable fear prevent me from falling flat on my face, which I know would be distastrous, I know it, that falling would be disasterous, because I feel it and I feel it like a fact, not like a passing emotion, not like this fear that follows, my hands are wet and the soles of my sock-covered feet are damp, there’s a moisture everywhere here that doesn’t exist in the hall that’s in my house, even though that’s the hall that I’m running down, or it is but it isn’t, an abstraction, a concept of a hall, perhaps Platonic in its ideal, the condensation, humidity, a primeordial wet from the oceans we all walked out of, once, the oceans where we all dwelled before we could walk, before we could run, to run to reach some place, to run as play, to run to run, but I’m running away, from what I don’t know, but it’s there, this thing, behind me, I can feel a hotness on my neck, predator’s breath, our relationship, our positions, me in front and it behind, forever in tow, it’s inextricable, entwined, a predestined eventuality, inescapable, something that only our species is aware of, blessing, curse, Granny Smith knowledge, to be conscious of being conscious, an awareness of being aware, the finitude of it all, in the end, not-being is the goal, terrible, unimaginable, conscious of being conscious of not being able to comprehend infinity, ours is a limited set existence with no imaginary numbers, this I know as I run, and I know, no matter what, I know, no matter how I run, I know, that eventually, one day, on a date and time and place, perhaps this one, I know, that no matter what, I know, that whatever I’m running from, I know, it will catch me, I know this because I feel it, and I feel it like a fact.

Ambition

“I mean, they look alright.”

“Don’t they though? I had Narcissus in Quality Control give them a look.”

“Wait, what? You had Narcissus give them a look?”

“Well, sort of. I sent the final design sketches over.”

“And?”

“I haven’t heard back, but I kind of took it as a no-news-is-good-news-type situation.”

“I’m just not sure–“

“It’s fine, it’s fine. I asked Orpheus and Eurydice in Project Management for their thoughts too.”

“And?”

“Same response from both.”

“Which was?”

“They said, ‘There’s no looking back now, Icarus.’ Which, I also took as a good sign.”

“Yeah, but, I don’t think we should take–“

“Listen, Daedalus, I really think we’re good to go. Pretty much the whole organization is behind this flight.”

“The whole organization?”

“Yeah, Atlas said, ‘Hold it up, Ic.’ I think he meant hold it down, but he’s not really up on the lingo these days.”

“He could’ve been talking about–“

“It’s not just him, though! Sisyphus said, ‘Keep on keepin’ on.’ Which I took to mean all-systems-go.”

“Icarus! You know what he has to–“

“Listen, we both know we’ll never be 100% confident on this. Never. We both know that. So, there’s just one thing we have to ask ourselves.”

“What’s that?”

“What’s the worst that could happen?”

Pluck

I know. I know there are things such as razors and electric shavers. I know these are things and that they exist.

But this is more than a morning routine to get rid of an unsightly five-o-clock shadow.

This is a transformation.

If I have to pick each one of these little bastard black hairs from my arms and shoulders and stomach and legs, then I will.

I will pluck and I will hurt and at times I will bleed.

You wouldn’t want to know somebody that’s never been through an ounce of pain.

When I’m finished, everybody will want to know me.

Brackets

In an effort to allay public concern and in commitment to this office’s pledge of transparency, we are releasing the following document related to the recent event.

———————————————————————

OFFICE OF [REDACTED]

Sometime between the hours of 2am and 3am on [REDACTED]/[REDACTED]/[REDACTED] in the rural town of [REDACTED], Mrs. [REDACTED], who was awakened at these hours to “attend to biology” (her words), reportedly saw through her bathroom window a strange light maneuvering in unusual ways.

After Mrs. [REDACTED] finished “attending to biology” (she was unwilling to provide any specific details as to how long this particular activity took), she ran to the bedroom to wake Mr. [REDACTED] because she thought it was an event he might be interested in, due to the fact that Mr. [REDACTED] having, on previous occasions, shown great interest in these types of phenomenons.

Sometime between the hours of [REDACTED] Mrs. and Mr. [REDACTED] walked to the front porch of their house in rural [REDACTED] to get a better view of these lights that were behaving in an unusual and slightly suspicious manner.

According to [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] [REDACTED], they were only on their [REDACTED] porch for [REDACTED] minutes or what felt like [REDACTED] minutes (they could not be sure) before the lights in the sky that are behaving in an [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] manner appeared to increase in luminosity, leading [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] [REDACTED] to conclude that they, the lights, were moving closer.

Shortly after [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] [REDACTED] became suspicious that the [REDACTED] were moving closure, an event took place to confirm that suspicion.

One of the [REDACTED] lights in the sky ceased moving and began to pulse. A bright white hot beam emanated from the [REDACTED] forcing [REDACTED] [REDACTED] to shield her eyes.

Once [REDACTED] [REDACTED] opened her [REDACTED] she notice that [REDACTED] [REDACTED] was no longer with her on the [REDACTED] [REDACTED]. And the [REDACTED] that were behaving [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] were also [REDACTED].

[REDACTED] [REDACTED] ran back in to the [REDACTED] and called [REDACTED] to report the [REDACTED] of [REDACTED].

Local [REDACTED] interviewed [REDACTED] [REDACTED] about the [REDACTED] of [REDACTED] [REDACTED]. They [REDACTED] her that they would [REDACTED].

In [REDACTED] days the [REDACTED] of [REDACTED] [REDACTED] was found in [REDACTED]. It had been [REDACTED] beyond [REDACTED]. [REDACTED] were used to make an official [REDACTED].

After the [REDACTED] of [REDACTED], the [REDACTED] of [REDACTED] were [REDACTED] for [REDACTED]. Since the [REDACTED] of [REDACTED], the [REDACTED] of [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED].

———————————————————————-

We can confidently assure the citizens of this great country that this is everything we know.

You are safe.

Coup

Outside

It was a strange sight to see. Almost surreal. The day itself was fine, almost perfect. A balmy 62 degrees with the sun lazily inching towards the horizon, slower than usual it seemed, as if it too wanted to see how this would all play out.

The weird part of it all was where it was taking place and the particular participants involved. In fact, before the whole ordeal was over, there would be six accidents from motorists rubbernecking in disbelief.

SWAT vans in the parking lot and in the after school pick-up line. Snipers trying to awkwardly steady themselves on the monkey bars, preparing for the worst-case-scenario. Officers in full riot gear, semi-circled around the entrance. Higher ranking officials pacing nervously behind them.

“Are we really doing this?” Captain Davies asked. “I mean, are we seriously considering this?”

“I think we might have to,” Lt. McConnell said. “The rules of engagement might dictate it.”

“Breaching?”

“Breaching.”

“Into a fucking middle school cafeteria?”

“I think we might have to.”

———————————————————————

Inside

The atmosphere in the cafeteria was somewhat calm, considering the circumstances outside. Sure, visually it was a mess. Chili dogs had been the lunch special. And every last bit of what had been served, prepped, and still-frozen was splattered on the floors, walls, small bits stuck to small sections of the ceiling.

Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Jenkins sat on the floor leaning against the serving line, hands tied behind their backs with makeshift hairnet-handcuffs.

“What in the fuck are we going to do?” asked Jeff Linely, pacing frantically as if to demonstrate that he obviously wasn’t in charge of the situation. “What in the ever-loving fuck are we going to do?”

“Just let me think!” Sam Kinson said. “I just need to think.”

Lacy Mathis and Karl Sandler huddled under one of the cafeteria tables. Considerably younger than Jeff and Sam, they were confused as to just how exactly they found themselves in this position. It was only Tuesday. They were both missing drama club, though they were sure it had probably been canceled. All things considered.

“This was a stupid idea,” Jeff said. “Just stupid. How in the ever-loving-fuck did you talk me in to this, Sam? How?”

“Talk you—talk you in to it? It was your idea, fuckface. Diversity of choice. Inclusion. What about the poor peanut allergy kids, you said. What about poor gluten-intolerant Lacy, you said. Talk you into. Fuck off, Jeff. Just fuck right off.”

“I didn’t mean this! I was just trying to look out for those that can’t look out for themselves. Lacy won’t speak up! Somebody has to. But I didn’t mean this!”

Lacy poked her head out and yelled, “My mom packs my lunch!”

———————————————————————

Outside

At this point, the snipers were well into the third round of a fierce bracket-based competition of chicken on the monkey bars. The officers outfitted in riot gear were swiping left and right (mostly right) on Tinder. This included all of the single officers and a few of those in fully committed monogamous relationships too.

“We’re going to have to make a decision,” Captain Davies said. “We can’t just stand here and let this turn into some type of Waco-esque situation.”

“Seriously. Waco?” Lt. McConnell said, rubbing his eyes. “But I see your point, the drama of that statement notwithstanding.”

“So? What’s the call?”

“The ball’s in their court right now.”

“They’re in the cafeteria, sir. Not the gym.”

“Captain.”

“Yes?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

———————————————————————

It wouldn’t take days and nights and the use of psychological torture tactics to end the standoff. They would be no fire. There would be no eventual breach and no casualties on either side. There would be no investigation, no books written about the subject, no documentaries,and no limited series based on the event on any of the many streaming services.

In short, it would not turn into a Waco-esque situation.

It ended peacefully and in such an uneventful manner that is not even worth writing about.

Two things did come out of the whole ordeal though.

1. The school board agreed, quickly and unanimously, to expand the offerings in the cafeteria.

2. Jeff and Sam learned that the food in juvenile detention could use some improvement.