Fiction

Pissant… Bib… Dollar Tree Parts… We Should Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves… 03/22/2019… Against Confidence… and The Here Book Which is a Book Here Created from the Husks of Other Books There Such Books There as the Bibliomania Book There by Thomas Frognall Dibdin and Perhaps Either Literally or Metaphorically Made from Certain Works by Iain Sinclair Especially His Book White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings Which is a Truly Inspiring Work I Can’t Recall Anything About it… Truly I Am a Phony Ah… Now What Else A Book of Critique Perhaps Could It Be Called That I Guess So I Tossed the Massive Hardcover Edition I’d Purchased of the Bibliomania Book I Tossed it Into the Trash Regretfully I Wished I Hadn’t but Such Is Life…

By Grant Maierhofer.

The way it works is the livestock comes in single file up a chute and through a vinyl strip curtain onto the kill floor, and there you are with two other guys already waiting in your steel-toe boots and extra plastic bags slipped over your throwaway Goodwill clothes like it’s a makeshift hazmat suit, and you go ahead and use this special gun that’s got a retractable bolt and place it sort of where two imagined lines between the cattle’s ear and opposite eye cross and shape an X-target there where the skull is weakest, and more often than not the retractable bolt does a real good job of it and leaves only a keyhole of a trace, i.e. it scrambles their brains to a real good mess and knocks the living daylights along with any sense of pain right out of them, out of the cattle, who most of them at this point just quiver and buckle and drop down kicking their legs if the bolt didn’t also sever their spine up high at the neck and end their reflexes too…

A short story by Max Steiner.

The door of the universal stick man was locked. I banged on it but to no avail. I banged again, almost beside myself, and this time heard a noise. The person inside was finishing up. The door opened and out came… something. He (the personal pronoun is appropriate since he had, after all, elected to visit the Gentlemen’s) seemed to be half-man and half-gorilla. Past me he shuffled, bent low with a face the colour of midnight and a throat pleated like a turkey’s. He wore a plum-coloured  jacket and kept his eyes, which I did not have the opportunity to see, firmly on the ground.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve left rather a mess.’

By James Clammer.

None of us notice the hornets’ nest per se, but we all hear a whine in the lounge. It is distracting when we try to watch the television, but we are too tired in the evenings to mention it to one another. Until Gill arrives. ‘How long does it take to make one?’ Gill stands at a distance. The rest of us stand even further away, behind her. Gill has the authority of someone who only drinks tea from a mug with her own name on it. ‘It hasn’t just suddenly appeared,’ she adds. ‘It’s not, like, magic.’

A short story by Charlotte Turnbull.

Cousin Jimmy explained that I was going to be the Druid. You rest on all fours, stiff as a board, but head-down like a wet noodle. It takes strength and relaxation at the same time, he said. They cover your back with a series of plywood planks and then pour a layer of quick-drying concrete over that, then a layer of clay, then a layer of sand. If you keep your arms and legs at a forty-five-degree angle, the body can withstand all kinds of weight and pressure. “A miracle of biology and physics,” Cousin Jimmy called it. It feels like you’re balancing the stones of Stonehenge on your spine. “That shit’s been there since the Bronze Age,” he continued, “and it’s still standing. Ancient engineering kicks ass.”

A short story by Robert Reece.

When I think of Sally, I think of the dilapidated house we shared on Arthur’s Hill. The two men rented the attic rooms. Sally and I lived on the first floor. The ginger cat was at home everywhere. Sally worked part-time as an art teacher. I was still a student. We spent entire days together in that house. I liked observing Sally. She had something placid, quaintly beatific to her features, something more ancient than her twenty-five years: an air of grave amusement softly haunting her round, still-childish face. She wore shawls and big, extraordinary dresses. Like a gypsy. When my mother visited, she said: This girl has a very old soul.

Three microfictions by Elodie A. Roy.

They buried the man with two men digging in ten-minute rotations while two others stood watch with rifles. The rest remained in the blown-out bunker submerged in snow with smoke breathing out a shell hole in the ceiling. I, among these men. I, with only my camera. I sat by the burning fire in the center of the bunker with the coat of the dead man around my shoulders. Two men on either side of me sat with hands out over embers—laughing. They laughed as though we were not stranded in the middle of the somewhere within nowhere.

A short story by Robert Warf.

I feel something so profound, like the world is tilting and all I have to do is hold on, hold on, hold on, and even up at the podium holding on for dear life against the words I wrote that are no longer familiar to me as my own words I break free, for an impossible moment, my eyes sweeping the audience and there she is, Marion with her verdigris eyes and so many Marions, Harrisons too and so many and even Eriks and all the dregs of me and all the terrible and shimmering and blossoming versions of me all at last and forever in no country I know.

New fiction by Nicholas Rombes.

my lacika would like to pretend he doesn’t know me when he’s ashamed that i’m his mother, and i must admit that occasionally he’s right, at times i’m also ashamed to be his mother

when his new book was published in the spring, i didn’t even bother to ask him to sign copies for my closest friends, because he always makes faces, as if it were such a big deal to write

An excerpt from a novel by Miklós Vámos, translated by Ági Bori.

I have a chip on my shoulder about men, and that’s not something to brag about, but my life turned out to be a living hell because of them, mainly one of them, but all men are the same, they’re all animals, they have dicks instead of common sense, and their dicks control them, nothing else, women know this damn well, and those who don’t, even they had some nasty encounters in their teens, I swear to god, any woman is smarter than a man, but it’s always the men who are in charge, they’re the leaders, they write the laws, they sit on boards, in the government, in the parliament, in the united nations, in the warsaw pact, oh, not there, because that came to an end, and they run women over like a steamroller, slap them across the face, kick them with their boots when they’re drunk, or when they want to bellyache about things

An excerpt from a novel by Miklós Vámos, translated by Ági Bori.

Miklós Vámos is a Hungarian author with more than forty books to his name. He’s undeniably a great admirer of the Hungarian language and, throughout his career, has used its malleability to create his distinctive, multidimensional style. His voice is immediately recognizable, even though his novels, short stories, and various other writings often differ from each other to such an extent, stylistically and structurally, that it’s almost as if they had been written by different authors.

A note on Miklós Vámos by his translator, Ági Bori.

All aboard shouts the conductor to no one in particular since everyone has already boarded the three-car train headed to nowhere, or rather to the end of the line, which really isn’t a proper station just where the train stops, but not really the end of the line since we have to ride back because there is only one station and that means the end of the line is also the beginning of the line and it really feels like we went nowhere at all, this being one of those trains that takes you to a place and that place is a train station, but we are headed to a wedding, and the wedding will take place soon, as soon as we arrive, the wedding procession that must hurry because the wedding should start in a few minutes, but also doesn’t have to start in a few minutes since all the guests are on the same train, waiting patiently to depart the station as the conductor shouts all aboard…

A short story by Martin Piñol.