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  • Endless Joke
    Endless Joke
    by David Antrobus

    Here's that writers' manual you were reaching and scrambling for. You know the one: filled with juicy writing tidbits and dripping with pop cultural snark and smartassery. Ew. Not an attractive look. But effective. And by the end, you'll either want to kiss me or kill me. With extreme prejudice. Go on. You know you want to.

  • Dissolute Kinship: A 9/11 Road Trip
    Dissolute Kinship: A 9/11 Road Trip
    by David Antrobus

    Please click on the above thumbnail to buy my short, intense nonfiction book featuring 9/11 and trauma. It's less than the price of a cup of coffee... and contains fewer calories. Although, unlike most caffeine boosts, it might make you cry.

  • Music Speaks
    Music Speaks
    by LB Clark

    My story "Solo" appears in this excellent music charity anthology, Music Speaks. It is an odd hybrid of the darkly comic and the eerily apocalyptic... with a musical theme. Aw, rather than me explain it, just read it. Okay, uh, please?

  • First Time Dead 3 (Volume 3)
    First Time Dead 3 (Volume 3)
    by Sybil Wilen, P. J. Ruce, Jeffrey McDonald, John Page, Susan Burdorf, Christina Gavi, David Alexander, Joanna Parypinski, Jack Flynn, Graeme Edwardson, David Antrobus, Jason Bailey, Xavier Axelson

    My story "Unquiet Slumbers" appears in the zombie anthology First Time Dead, Volume 3. It spills blood, gore and genuine tears of sorrow. Anyway, buy this stellar anthology and judge for yourself.

  • Seasons
    Seasons
    by David Antrobus, Edward Lorn, JD Mader, Jo-Anne Teal

    Four stories, four writers, four seasons. Characters broken by life, although not necessarily beaten. Are the seasons reminders of our growth or a glimpse of our slow decay?

  • Indies Unlimited: 2012 Flash Fiction Anthology
    Indies Unlimited: 2012 Flash Fiction Anthology
    Indies Unlimited

    I have two stories in this delightful compendium of every 2012 winner of their Flash Fiction Challenge—one a nasty little horror short, the other an amusing misadventure of Og the caveman, his first appearance.

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Saturday
Mar122022

The Corner

It’s still March; the sun doesn’t climb high, yet the trees try to lift it. Testing thermals, an eagle strains to pull it skyward with its wing draft, to reciprocate. They reach a kind of equilibrium no one is sure they want.

Which is but one way to tell of our world now. Forces pulling, even friendly ones, others pushing, anxious of upsetting an unacknowledged balance, of tipping some unseen fulcrum. Like bison on the plains, leaning top heavy and narrow-eyed into horizontal snowfall, bracing for the calamity we only dimly discern.

The people of the village tell us not to go past the Corner, Marla and me. Never venture beyond where the road curves, that grey loop turning up the side of the hill, a ghost’s cursive. How can they not know such beseechments only make transgression more beguiling?

“What lies past the Corner?” we ask.

“A thing spawned by mischance,” they say and cross themselves. 

All stockpiled quicksilver valour, uncontainable as a reactor core, Marla will go past the Corner. The inevitability of this dark, compact girl I love. Have loved since we were measured by weight not height and first touched fingertips and laughed like springwater, before we grew into language and even became human. The question is, will I ever dare follow?

***

“I’m a crone now, a dry slate headland buffeted by too many tides. You ask me why I’m angry? This isn’t anger; it’s bafflement. How about this? I used to believe there was someone counting all the insects, ready at some allotted time to sound the great alarm, to urge us to some agreed upon response when thresholds were crossed. Action. Coordinated effort. I mean, there are people watching the corals bleach, and they’re distraught, they cry onscreen as they tell us with voices shook full of woe, but we watch until the end and the credits roll. And the credits roll. And the credits fucking roll. Until the great irony of the real ending dawns on us, when we realize there are no credits, just this infinite debit. Not even a theme song. Only silence. Silence. Like the universe didn’t pay its Netflix fees.”

***

The answer now; here it is, all these years later: Marla might have led, but we have all begun—some of us trembling, others sorrowful, a few even smiling and stepping light of foot and without care—to round the Corner, no one able to say or even know if this is sayonara or a strange and even hopeful kind of hello.