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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.

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    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 Mayhem (1)

Sunday
Dec222019

Trader Joe's at the World's End

This dirty little town. I’m here but I’m thinking of someplace else.

You laughed when you heard my hoarded tunes, at Mayhem and T-Swift, Morricone and Fairport and Eric B. and Rakim. I never got the joke, though now I have an inkling: you thought I was being showily eclectic and I just thought I was loving music. How right you were when you called me naïve.

I saw the last shadow of you disappear on the blasted concrete of the Bellwether, by the fractal Pleiades diamonds of the glittering bay, a pitiless sun lasering all and everything. You were humming a Kate Bush song, which trailed in your wake like a muted rainbow, and I remembered at that moment how your fingers often fought each other and your voice was always raw until you gargled lukewarm genmaicha and lemon, which first you bought and later you looted from Trader Joe’s. You were gloriously high maintenance before the illusion subsided—a wild, wild rose—and I loved you as much after that. 

Then you were gone, in the wake of some awful reckoning, that joyless penumbra blanketing all of what was and most of what now is. A dimension dissolved, a trance undreamed.

Walmart and Costco are convulsed nuclei clustered within the membranes of their vast deserted lots, cars no longer parked in their hardscrabble orbits, other than the burned-out kind like dead neutrinos.

The last time we saw a train pass through, Galbraith was still young. Galbraith, who tattooed Let It Bleed on the inside of her upper arm like Courtney. Hard to reconcile the chromium crone we see now with the aching maiden so many knew back then.

We all have our talents. Mine is debatable. Scavenging cells to make this ancient iPod work. For some, it seems to count, but whatever... I get that it’s hardly wringing nutrients from topsoil, but you’d think music would matter all the same.

You said, “Don’t tell me the story of your dream. But tell me how it felt.”

“Um. It felt like walking into an aftermath, the battlefield still smoking and reeking of viscera, and finding a kitten, a very pissed off kitten, outraged at all these shenanigans, and also a train moaned far away.”

“Now that’s a dream I wish I had.”

“You could have it. I’ll write it down.”

“Nah, you’re hungry, and I need to find us some food. And you have chores of your own. We can’t take pauses like we once could. But tell me about a song when I come home, yes? Something new and full of things.”

Fuck, we could talk forever. True is true is true. Negotiation and the echoes of the world. Lord, I miss you, girl.