[x]

i. beginningThe rain fell in heavy sheets, obscuring the ground below and the sky above. It had been falling for fourteen days now, and would likely fall for many more. Years ago someone might have gone so far as to say that it was raining cats and dogs. But there were no more cats and dogs, and there was no one there to say that they were falling from the sky. In fact there wasn't much of anything except for the rain, which seemed in the emptiness to take on a life of its own. It was going to live for quite a while longer, but its death would be just as sudden and unexpected as its birth. Its mother the clouds drifted slowly across the sky as countless

Away from NeverNeverLandMoney is dirty. Leaves invisible yuck on a person; stains fingers, smears over skin and catches under nails. Festers. And then hands turn into pincers to take and eyes small greedy and black. Skin hardens to bounce back ugly words and back curves under weight of things. Lobsters, fat and red.
Marriage is scrubbed. Clean and pretend. Perfect white dresses and kisses put and planted. Brides march and grooms promise so hard. Military of gowns with bow tie generals. An army of high heels and flowers landed in laps. Marriage spreads. Infects. Zombiefying disease. Shuffle, I do, brains.
Driving is fickle. Slide into each other, through each other. Blood and bits go with them. People cry over tombs and insurance papers. Or nothing. Home again, uneventful day. Locked behind wheel, over tarmac, lights suspended like vultures above. Danger, danger. Promise of convenience. Thrill. Like riding a shark.
Work is uniformed. Slotted, easy, organized files. Tags meaning le

Heart, Have No PityThe train sways from side to side, gray subway lights washing away all color from the world, and the shuffle on his music player is playing only the songs Jesper hates. He hits the skip button again and again, tries to keep his briefcase pinned between his legs. There is a coffee stain on his shirt, but he did not have enough time to sprint to his bedroom and change before he had to leave to make his train on time. He cannot afford to be late again.

Skip-skip-skip. He should stop allowing his sister into his apartment; she always deletes his good music and replaces it with pop that Jesper despises. He thinks he hears his station being called

Commander PinkNEW LOCATION! See comments for link.

"Something gets to him. Something gets to everybody." Luke took a flattened sandwich from his ammo box and pulled it apart with thick brown fingers. That was something Win noticed about everyone here, even the new guy—they all had strong hands. He hated to look at his stupid pale, spindly fingers. "Like me, music gets to me sometimes, you know?" Luke said. "The right song plays, and I'm bawling. There's gotta be something that could break him, you know?"

"Don't be juvenile." Brutus tore his sandwich into huge chunks and looked to Win. "Edwin, you gonna eat or what? Commander'll bite your head off if

A Lesson in the Training FieldThe young boy's hand runs the length of the bow feeling every notch in the wood. The string the arrows will rest on is taught, woven from strong hair. The wood's color is a pale yellow; "almost the same color as my skin." The boy muses with a small smile. His eyes go up when he hears someone approaching. The sound of metal hitting stone; a woman is descending down the keep's steps into the training yard, her plated feet clacking against the steps. The woman is old, her skin wrinkled and hair gray. Her steps are confident however, her back is straight and tall, a longbow gripped in her left hand.

"My young Lord, have you ever handled a bow be

Goodbye, CarosoUnmarred by clouds, the perfect blue sky mocked the parched brown desert. The wastelands had been denied precipitation for too long. The drought pushed away people and animals and turned the sparse vegetation the color of dirt to match the rest of the scenery. Wanderers escaped to cooler areas between rock outcrops, but just when the desert seemed devoid of human life, peddlers looking to make money would arrive from across the canyon with food, water and supplies. People appeared from all edges of the desert and swarmed the makeshift trading stands like hungry locusts.

Thalia didn't like the company. She preferred days spent in fellowship w

mn'teys wallI.

Nékti sat on the floor of his home, putting the finishing touches on his late wife's totem. He worked slowly, using a set of sticks he had been gathering since before the last full moon. He lovingly contoured the breasts, and scratched thin symmetrical patterns into the legs and body, leaving a fine spray of clay dust on the floor. His drawing-sticks were green-gray and hard, in a variety of thicknesses and oddly-shaped tips. One of the sticks had a curled tip—he had found it laying in the mud by the river to the south of town—and he hoped to use it later to draw the hair on her head. Not the way it looked at the end, he th

The TranslatorMalena was born on the third of April, a heady Aries and a talented translator. She only waited for so long before she put her foot down and took charge of her destiny, riding it like a child of the sea would a dolphin.

She began her job with diligent care from the moment she first awakened from the drowsiness of the very young and into the slow comprehension of children. She first translated her own simple thoughts to the world in an agonized cry - 'I'm hungry! I'm hungry!' - first in the Spanish words of her parents and then repeated in the strange, native Tupi dialect of her Mestizo nanny. The dark-skinned woman had gasped in fear and tri

The extremely short storyI once heard the tale of a man who had the whole universe inside his throat.

"Was he a giant?" someone asked.

I thought for a second.

"No," I said. "He was a storyteller."

Stationery Pt IStanley loved stationery.

He loved the way it smelled when you stripped away the crinkly cellophane wrapper. He loved the Spartan beauty of an unspoiled pad of paper (A4, plain, 260gsm). He loved the sound of a cap crisply clicking onto the top of a Biro. He loved the texture of a freshly-sharpened pencil and the flake of the finely-honed graphite point. He loved gazing over stacks and stacks of untouched Post-Its, each a perfect square of yellow, an army of ideas awaiting orders.

He loved everything about it. Stationery was neat. It was orderly. It was always needed, easily replaceable, and something that everyone can appreciate.

Stanley

WanderlustMilo dreams of caves; hundreds of thousands of seemingly endless feet, yards, miles of tunnels that twist and fold into each other like a frayed ball of string. Sunlight doesn't reach the caves, they are cold and dark as an abandoned tomb and even the air breathes thicker as mushroom clouds of dust fall from the ceiling and rise from the floor. The overwhelming feeling is of being buried alive and Milo wishes to beat on the coffin and beg for his freedom. The ceiling is too high to reach though, and rather than silence his cries are met by a cacophonous chorus of his own echoing voice. Milo turns on the spot but fails to choose a direction; a

Memory TrainThey parked at a Circle-K and hiked up the canyon trail behind the store, making it to the top of the ridge by sundown. The day had been blazing, katydids buzzing past them in lethargic arcs the whole way. Tall grass bit at them and stuck to their sweat-soaked clothing but presented little challenge otherwise... but now the sun was down and warm desert winds gave way to cool breezes.

The railroad tracks were as they remembered, twin gleaming beams carrying moonlight off to the horizon in both directions. Track so straight they appeared photoshopped, movie magic as done by lazy CGI animators who couldn't be bo

The Last SongDo you think we'll get a last song?

I'm not sure.  This diary I'm writing in is full of holes.  It's sopping like a wet sponge.  It reeks, but what doesn't in the filth and the mess?

Storm's passing.  Not like I've ever seen here.  Even the explosive storms of my youth; running in the fields, the junkyards, the rust-ravaged train tracks of old wasn't quite like this.

Something's exploded against the skyline.  Orange is reflecting off the glass; the spider-striped, near shattered glass I kicked two weeks ago while mowing the grass.

It might be the gas works.  Or the chemical sheds.  Weyrdstorms do this, you know.  That's what the warning

RiverdrumMany things have been handed to me over years:
a drum full of water, once. I threw it away,
of course, but it returned, again, again,
until I took it under my arms
and called it mine.

My riverdrum is full of water that is full of light,
but it cannot scoop up a brook of stars.

I have two children. They have made
a game of watching the cows below that
walk towards me and never reach me. The first
one to spot the cow closest to me calls out 'Cowherd!'

I have a wife. I lose her like one loses grey hairs –
achingly, and with sadness. Perhaps these hairs
float over the river of oil and water that keeps us
away. Perhaps she l

What I Wanted/Desire

Grandma is dead. She's dead, and I do not know what I am supposed to feel. Certainly, I should feel sad, right? I should be crushed by grief, and go through all the stages, and have group therapy and cry until I think I'm sane enough to go back to a semblance of living. Or should I be indifferent? I haven't known her that well, her living in Illinois and myself being a ten hour drive away. She was the fragile hug and musty-smelling house for a week and a half in May, after school got out. She was an observer as we cleaned the fish we'd caught in the cow pond down the way, marveling at the sunnies that dwarfed my father's hand.

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The Belly of a Whale

by ~juniorel, Oct 2, 2012, 12:45:18 PM
Literature / Prose / Fiction / General Fiction / Flash Fiction & Vignettes

The belly of a whale is cleaner than you'd think. It's the seashore on a wet day: a red beach with red clouds and red sand. And the voice of the whale is the voice of God.

God sings, "You were delicious."

"Spit me out." I'm on my knees, though my god cannot see inside itself to find my supplication satisfying. "I'm a wicked man. You don't want to devour wickedness, oh Lord. You'll be disgusted when you know you've devoured such a polluted thing."

"I will not," sings God.

"I've murdered a man."

"So have I."

"I've murdered a woman, too."

"So have I."

"She was pregnant."

God laughs. "The ship I sank held hundreds."

This calls for humility. I prostrate myself in the direction of God's mouth. "Oh Lord," I cry. "I can't compete with you. Truly you are a great tyrant, fearful and merciless. Had I only been given your bulk, oh Lord, I might have devoured whole ships as you have done."

God lurches. God rolls. God grumbles and coughs and hurls. I fly from his mouth in one heaving mess of kelp and plankton. "Your pretense is pathetic," sings God as I float away on a rolling wave. "Only fit for sharks."

The Belly of a Whaleby ~juniorel

Literature / Prose / Fiction / General Fiction / Flash Fiction & Vignettes

I thought since I'm finished posting one novel and not yet ready to post the next, I'd show you all why I write long-form and should never be allowed near the short-story club.

This piece is my one and only official attempt at flash fiction. It was for a college writing course. We had to compose it in under ten minutes or so, and it had to be under a certain number of words. I don't recall all the specifics. I do recall that I had to read it aloud when it was finished. Har. Har. I think I got a lot of blank stares.

In my defense, it didn't come out of the blue completely. I'm pretty sure I had the Decemberists song "The Mariner's Revenge" stuck in my head, which would have reminded me of Jonah and the whale, which would have reminded me of Revelations 3:15-16, which goes something like this: "I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth."

I remember learning that verse as a child and finding it rather odd… because if you were in some huge mouth, wouldn't you want to be spit out? I would. The absurd train of thought I allowed myself in the minutes I was given to compose a flash fiction piece led to the story of a man who desperately wants to be spit out of what he believes is the mouth of his god, so he tries to convince a whale he's a bad person. In the end, it is only his insincere humility that frees him.

And in case you were wondering, yes, I am this strange.

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*Laura-Lie Oct 23, 2012 Writer

Strangeness and wonder in perfect harmony, this was a fun read that brought me out of a rainy-day-funk. Well done!

~juniorel Oct 23, 2012 Writer

I'm so glad this piece made your day a little better. That's the best compliment ever, really. Thank you so much!

*Laura-Lie Oct 23, 2012 Writer

No problem!

=DailyLitDeviations Oct 22, 2012

Your wonderful literary work has been chosen to be featured by DailyLitDeviations and has been selected as our "Pick of the Day". It is featured in a news article here: [link] and on our main page.

Keep writing and keep creating.

~juniorel Oct 23, 2012 Writer

Oh, wow!

Thank you so much.

~YogaTeacher Oct 10, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Reading that first line, I just knew it would be great. You don't disappoint. How I would have loved to write that piece...

The religious irony and hilarity and just plain eccentricity makes me read this again and again. I think this is quite profoundly amusing, but also quite profound.

I'll figure out what I think of it soon enough, and then I'll tell you how brilliant it is.

This relates: [link]

~juniorel Oct 11, 2012 Writer

Ah, the video you linked isn't available in my country. But thanks very much for the comment! I'm glad you liked the piece.

*0hgravity Oct 8, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

well that was an unexpected read. Interesting as it kept me engaged.

nice work

~juniorel Oct 8, 2012 Writer

Thank you! I'm glad it surprised and entertained you.

*0hgravity Oct 8, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

you're welcome

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