You are currently browsing the Fiction category.
Three minutes and forty five seconds is the average time you’re trapped between stops on the A train between Brooklyn and Manhattan. There isn’t a huge amount that can happen in that time, but, for example, it is enough time to get attacked by a drunk, homeless, drug-ridden, disease-ridden, defecating, lonely, sixty year old. For example. Of course, you’d never really expect that to happen to you, but as I felt my palm slip down the now sweaty handrail, and counted the seconds I had left, I wasn’t thinking about the likelihood of it all. When you see someone like that coming at you, “likelihood” never really enters it.
Continue Reading…
Posted 11 months, 3 weeks ago. Add a comment
I went to the New School and did a poetry class (my first ever). We were asked to write a concrete poem (one where the positioning of the words on the page mean something). I did the following, and it got me reported. I understand the writing isn’t great, but was it really worth an official complaint from my teacher?
Continue Reading…
Posted 11 months, 3 weeks ago. Add a comment
Fed up upon a midnight dreary, I labored with eyes red and bleary,
O’er an epic tome of aging prose and poems bound to bore—
While I noodled, nearly napping, suddenly an inner clapping!
Rhyme, no less, had found a way of slapping me awake once more.
“’Tis a happenstance,” I muttered, “a weary chance mistake I’m sure—
Only this and nothing more.”
Continue Reading…
Posted 11 months, 3 weeks ago. Add a comment
- Written on Nov 15th 06.
It was as if I’d appeared in the foyer of an airport. It was as impressive as it was empty. Huge window arches, sweeping swathes of light reflecting off the walls, the floor a collage of grey and brown patterns, the faint sounds of jet engines echoing around an otherwise silent shell. I stood there with my father, and we were afraid.
We nodded at each other. It started.
We began to run. Looking to my left I saw men in black raincoats with automatic weapons break out through a hinged entrance through the marble carapace. My father pushed me. Get out of here! He shouted, unnecessarily. Then I realized he meant I was supposed to leave him behind. I looked over my shoulder at his broad, heavy frame nimbly darting around a heavy door, followed closely by the men. I heard gunfire. He had died.
Continue Reading…
- Fuck and leave babies in the street. Awesome.
Oh my god, I’m sitting around a bunch of sentimental idiots. Fortune and family; the main flaws of humankind. Gone should be all the contraceptions, gone should be the cellophane wrap, the pills, the family planning videos! We should all fuck and leave the babies in the street, and let the strongest survive. If we’d been through that we’d not be such fucking imbeciles. Imbeciles need culling worse than mad cow disease. Focus, talent, rubbish.
Continue Reading…
- I don’t understand it either, but rhythmically it’s good. I guess this was an experiment.
If it were I who bore the stupid seed, perhaps the flowers would wilt all the same, this time in pity, and not because of the torrential rain. Poetic herecy, heretic postulate, postmortem hatred, it is all the same. Not one sense in it all, but every sense in but a little of it. No need to divulge the means or the method, but leave all to the sense and senility of the peers all too keen to read on and on and on and on and on. My outpourings, now held aloft upon the backs of the weary, the final burst of passion before this world succumbs to the second coming of Christendom, now that is the reason I’m here. But you, why are you here? Why wait upon life for just that next moment when you could be living, as I failed to do?
Continue Reading…
There’s no way of stating the obvious. I am not a happy man. Linda, however, her charm and grace a memory too horrible to forget, seems just as full of life as in her youth, but perhaps I am wrong. She had loved me then, when I was full of the hopeful cynicism only the innocent know, and she still does, although now that cynicism is hardened to a crisp, and needless to say hope has long since said its merry goodbyes. That is no surprise, really. The Second Coming hit us hard: the both of us. We had assumed, naturally, we were protected in view of all the favours we had done for Him in the past, the prayers we chanted for His forgiveness, and the gentle, sweet offerings to His name, not to mention the bringing of a new life into His domain. We were separated from Henry — that is what we had called him — too soon for reason; before we had a chance to get to know the little kid.
Continue Reading…
Edgar Finkleditch pauses from his daily strut down the Balham high-street shopping mile, to find himself staring into the large, fancy mirror in an antique dealer’s window. “Fantastic,” he mutters, not to the two ladies who avoid him on their way past, but to the world in general. He continues his walk — a confident and welcoming swing — with his thin arms swaying gracefully this way and that, and his pierced lips drawn out into a thin but genuine smile. It is a sunny day.
Continue Reading…
1
Gandhi pushed his glasses up his nose and walked towards the water fountain. The asphalt was soft, the sun warm, and he needed a drink. The reflection, of course, still showed the people burning and smoking and having same-sex relationships and watching r-rated movies and playing Taboo. It was refreshing. His hands spilled more onto the floor than into his mouth. Still, there was more than enough to go around.
Picking up his robes, he walked over to the slide. The escalator was working. The golden chute was perfect. The velvet ball-pit at the bottom simply heavenly. He giggled and pushed his glasses back up his nose every time.
He held up his little bell, and gave it a shake. Everybody turned to listen, although Noah, unconscious, continued to spin on the roundabout. The smell of wine and urine floated on the breeze.
Continue Reading…
- for class. Finally my professor had given us something that wasn’t terrible to read, Edgar Allen’s poem, Lenore.
Fed up upon an evening dreary, for my mind a question queries,
O’er a tidal wave of aging prose and poems bound to bore—
While I noodled, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As if some winged desire came flapping, slapping me awake once more.
“’Tis a subterfuge,” I muttered, “a dream wrest from my phrenic core—
Only this and nothing more.
Continue Reading…
- Don’t know where the idea came from to write this, but I stumbled across it recently, hidden away.
Goldfingers
…Images of floating over sun-drenched vineyards simmer out as Jim becomes reacquainted with his eyelids. They are closed, and they ache like the last time he drank through a bottle. One eye opens, then the other, and there she is, the Louisiana farm girl, slouched against the wall of the small NY apartment, a discarded hand cocked at the wrist, hanging over he knee. Cracks of orange light signal daybreak, settling here and there amongst the layers of dust, wood-chippings, fabric, and smoke. Her brooding silence compels him to overcome the many pillows between him and his cigarette case. He lets one drop on the floor, then tucks a second gently in between two of her long, slender fingers. She almost doesn’t notice.
Continue Reading…
- I wrote this while doing a poetry class at the New School. I love an American education.
The following I wrote in about ten minutes. My professor must have met Will, because she gave me an A. If anyone out there is struggling for grades, do Liberal Arts degree in the States. You literally cannot go wrong.
I killed my brother
I killed my brother
By pushing
A very small, pointed piece of metal into
A gap in his head. Fantastic.
Continue Reading…
- I just found this on an old website of mine. Actually, I’d completely forgotten I even had another website, so this came as quite a surprise. Anyway, here you go:
Tonight I lost a friend and I feel ill
Tonight, while doing research for my final poetry submission, I noticed a little mouse creep up beside me. It died, slowly, and inspired the following poetry. I first wrote sixteen separate poems, but have combined them here to form one with sixteen parts.
1
A mouse creeped up to me this evening,
And sat on the carpet until I looked at it.
I do not know if it is a boy or a girl
But what I do know is that it is small and cute,
And that it sat there for a while, cleaning itself.
Continue Reading…
I wrote this after I realized I was in love with a friend. Obviously, this will have to go in the “romance” section, R.
We’re laying there, wine bottle in hand, slowly passing it back and forth from one to the other. We’re talking a little, but mainly our focus is on the film. The light from the television set is the only in the room, it flickers across our faces. The pillows against which we rest are dimly visible.
Continue Reading…
