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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 Lake District (1)

Saturday
Nov232019

Mountain and Midge

“I’m doing what seems the best thing to do.” — Virginia Woolf

My life is nothing, and also it’s all things. I talk to my screen, commiserate with standups suffering from stage fright, laugh meanly at commercials for adult diapers, fill my pockets with rocks, wish with renewed fervency that I owned a jukebox, cook a spicy fish stew, wrestle with pronouns, wonder if I can make anything funny from whispered tales of genocide.

From the Heights of Abraham in the nineteen seventies rises a small tubercular biker named Midge. He says this:

“Never meant this. When I cough, it’s the finest crimson spray, a warm mist from my extended throat. For ten years, I sat pillion on my best mate’s Honda 400, hacking my sickness to be caught by the tailwind and spread like a septic fan behind us. His name was Mountain, and I loved him, I now think. He walked into crowds—partiers, dreamers, backpackers, hikers, utter fucking wankers—and because he always greeted the headwind, he never saw it coming. His death, I mean. The one I let in.”

But that isn’t why I’m here tonight in this diaphanous swirl of peach mesh, this warm apricot skein. I could equally have reanimated the hippie I merged with in Windermere, the one who stared as if in a lake’s mirror and instead of herself saw me. Or the goth in Nottingham, stenciling furious anarchist missives in charcoal spray to a sleeping indifferent city. Or Lana from the Bronx, dancing, always dancing, by herself or with anyone adjacent, before she danced her last dance alone from a smoldering gash in the North Tower. 

(“Today, without notice, my time on this bittersweet earth is done.”)