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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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Entries in Kansas (1)

Friday
Sep112015

One Night in Nebraska

After the rains, the fog bloomed like a sudden resolve.

She drove through the night, hunched forward now, and more careful. Soon, a sign loomed ahead and moved to her right, then was gone.

PRISON AREA

DO NOT PICK UP

HITCHHIKERS

With her notch-below-average height and build, and notwithstanding her jet hair gathered and piled under a black ball cap, her outsize leather biker jacket, and her purloined outlaw swagger, she knew she looked more like a young adolescent boy than a man, but any effort was preferable to none. Driving alone through the Midwestern night had its unique risks.

She toyed with the radio. Crazed preachers. Dire conspiracies. Sports and weather. The usual. If she had left it for thirty more seconds on one particular channel, she would have heard a news story about a prison break just outside of Lincoln, but she hadn't so she didn't.

From out of the fog, something darker appeared then dissolved back into the gray. Her flicker of an impression was of a man, in which case he was far from shelter on this chill Nebraska night. She hesitated and came to a rolling stop. Over her shoulder, her brakelights bathed the fog bank in a bloodmist, and from that backdrop a man emerged. Again, she almost second-guessed herself, and the silhouetted figure seemed equally skittish, moving slowly, leaning forward in an effort to see who'd pulled up on this dirty, dripping night.

She felt the cold reassurance of the .38 Special nestled between her thighs and opened the passenger window an inch or two.

"Where you headed, fella?"

There was a harsh laugh, followed by, "It's me, ya dizzy cunt."

A pause.

"Good to see they didn't kick all the charm outta you." She still couldn't see his face, but she knew he was grinning. "So you did it. Well, hell, get in then, why don't you?"

He did and they pulled away.

"Someone gonna miss this vehicle?" He said it like it was two distinct words—vee-hickle—and she realized how damn much she'd missed the bastard.

"Nope. Not gon' miss nothing ever again either."

He whistled through his teeth, an oddly forlorn sound. She glanced at him but he was staring ahead into the bank of gray punctuated only by the occasional set of headlights, and they were quiet for a while.

"Guess we're headed for Kansas, miss Dorothy," he said at last.

"How'd you figure, mister Tin Man?"

"License plate, 'course."

"Yeah, got lucky. Dumb old dead bitch in Iowa almost caught me jacking this beauty, then I found Kansas plates very next place I stopped. We're an hour away from the state line, so I figured we'll be less conspicuous once we cross. Damn pea-souper actually helps."

"Figured right, no doubt. No interstates, and 77 gets us near Wichita, if I recall." Then he added, almost whispered, "You're a good girl."

"Yeah, but I owe you, hoss. Owe you big." She wouldn't look at him. Couldn't.

"Sure you do. But you're here now, so that probably makes us about even."

"Right." She ached to pull into the desperate gravel lot of every cheap motel they passed, but that "about" hadn't escaped her.

"Hell, woman, you're a stone-cold, dead-eyed killer and y'ain't done a minute of hard time. Man's gotta respect that." He chuckled.

"Yeah, sure."

"Girl, you're one honeycomb I ain't gon' rile up, no matter how big and hard my stick, if ya know what I'm sayin'."

She smiled her crooked smile, but inside she thought about that, about what some learned folks might call "power dynamics," and about how a small-framed woman is always imperiled around a larger man, even if he is wary (hell, especially if he is wary), and how most of 'em are indeed larger, and also wary, and some might feel they're owed, and some don't mind either way, and about how damn lonely it could be out here on these endless gloomy highways passing between rude clonelike towns with identical water towers and dusty feedstores and squat, boxy dwellings, and how it always took some trade-off, some transaction, spoken or otherwise, to make it to another day, another week, to feel something halfway good for a few bartered moments, while the radio played soft jazz and the lights of rigs loomed like the luminous eyes of ancient monsters glancing terrifyingly close, as if sparing them some awful fate—for now, at least—under the filthy charcoal night of an accursed old America whose time, like theirs, was already passing, had perhaps even passed, all of it gathered in the dying saurian eyes of Triassic brutes from before history itself even started.

She drove on and willed herself to please stop thinking.