“But this is my title! Who has taken this?” I turned to the opening line and began to read:
What a wonderful day to be a writer!’ I beamed to myself at the possibilities to be had at such a time and place as I scurried through the grey Vienna drizzle towards the inviting glow of the Café Central. Its imposing stone façade gave way to a cosy and coffee-scented interior, dreamy with the history of world-changing conversations.
I slammed it shut with an angry harrumph.
“How dare you! Who gave you this? I’ll sack my editor…”
The corner of his mouth turned up. “What, don’t like appearing in books without being consulted? Damn shame.” I felt like a buffoon and I could feel my cheeks swelling and reddening under his gaze.
“Since you’ve been such a boor I don’t mind telling you it was a rubbish story anyway, you saved me the bother of reading it to the end. The language is clichéd, the characters are hackneyed and pompous and it stretches all limits of believability. In fact, I’m going to stop reading it right now, that’ll teach you.”
THE END
KEEP KHARMS AND BE AN ABSURDIST
Rhys Hughes
Ivan Oknov was a man with red hair and one black tooth. He bumped into another man on the corner of Askance Street. The other man had black hair and one red tooth and his name was Navi Vonko.
You bumped into me, Navi said.
No, you bumped into me, responded Ivan.
I think it was you into me.
On the contrary, it was you into me.
But I was already bumped into, by you, when I bumped into you, Navi argued and his tone was so fierce that it became entirely reasonable to believe his version of events. So Ivan said:
Very well, have it your way. But what’s the rush anyway?
I’m rushing to work, that’s where, said Navi.
Me too, said Ivan. To work.
I make money doing what I love to do, declared Navi.
What might that be? asked Ivan.
Advising people on how to make money doing what they love to do, came the reply. That’s what I love to do and I get paid for doing it. I get paid in money, real money, for that. What do you do?
I do what I don’t love doing. I wring the necks of clocks.
Wring the necks of clocks, you said?
I said that, exactly that.
Well, I can show you how to make money doing what you love to do instead. I can show you in ten minutes.
I wouldn’t like that, said Ivan uneasily.
Why not? Why not? Navi cried.
Because I love to lose money, that’s what I love to do; and if I made money doing that, if I made money losing it, then I would never lose any, and I wouldn’t be doing what I love doing, which is losing money, so how could I make money doing what I love? It’s impossible.
Navi considered this carefully. A truck was approaching down the road. Suddenly he grabbed hold of Ivan and threw himself into the path of the vehicle and they were both crushed to death.
GOGOL FOR A PINT OF MILK]
Chris Kelso
A Labrador just sat next to me on a park bench wearing a Hawaiian shirt and lipstick the colour of shocking pink – a bitch, I think. She opens up a book called “HOW TO SELF LOBOTOMISE” with a picture of my face, wide with shock, on the dust-jacket. She sees me reading over her shoulder and shields the book against her chest all offended.
I suddenly feel the collar tighten around my neck - the short, sharp tug of my owner bringing me to heel.
Chris, come on now, bad dog!
I squat over a balding patch of grass and go number two. My owner pats me on the head and scoops up my faeces with both hands.
Good boy!
A bird flies down from the branch of a sycamore, spotted wings winking like a butterfly’s. He looks at me disdainfully, the way most inner city fowl do.
I hear hoofs clopping behind me - a giant suburban coyote atop a saddled horse.
The parks activity is always crazy like this on a Sunday afternoon.
The traffic lights ping to green and a hoard of cockroaches scuttle across the road. My owner and I follow suit. We continue along 5th Avenue on our way back to the apartment. In the window I see the striking similarity between master and pet. We’re both fragile boned and narrow faced with a wispy streak of dowdy hair wilting over a windshield forehead. We’re both pasty skinned (we’re both completely naked). We even have the same tattoos – a portrait of our dear old mother spread over our left butt cheek.
I guess the old saying is true - we really do start to look alike after a while.
Outside a storefront we bump into a woman I vaguely recognise, from where I can’t remember. I listen to the incomprehensible dialogue exchanged between the two.
Ah Chris, how are you?
To which my owner replies…
Not too bad, yourself?
She says something which angers my owner. After a sharp intake of breath, we walk away with the familiar woman calling after us.
My owner tightens my leash around a clenched fist.
The air is cold against my pink, hairless flesh. I’m eager to get home for a bowl of warm milk.
On the television screen I see my face on every channel.
A DUET IN REYES
Caleb Wilson
One Saturday evening around the turn of the century the composer Arnauld Reyes was walking home along Via Tuba when a tentacle of wind licked his hat straight off his head and over the rail into the Magoro River. He watched the hat sink as the current whisked it south, and then decided that since his route home was through the market square he would purchase a new hat on the way. At the market, he browsed several hatters’ kiosks until he found a hat which was identical to the lost one, but for a dark red velvet band, which, he hoped, would set him apart from the crowd. He bought it, placed it directly on his head, and continued home. He did not notice that, as he walked, several dozen powdery pink moths emerged from beneath the band and crawled into his ears.
While Reyes slept that night, the moths chewed his brain, severing certain synaptic connections. When he awoke, his brain had been split into two separate minds. At first the pair of composers noticed nothing amiss. They breakfasted, during which their housekeeper was either very attentive or strangely shy, and walked to Zarbigny Park, where they intended to work on a suite of rustic dances.
There were many distractions at the park, such as squirrels, dogs, starlings, pretty young ladies, and a clown. Eventually one of the composers – we’ll call him Reyes1 – noticed a peculiar behavior in the pedestrians along the brick path that passed before his bench. During their approach, all was unremarkable, but as they drew level with him, each walker swiveled smoothly so as to remain facing him. For a few steps, as they passed his bench, they faced him while moving sideways like crabs, and then each, completing a half turn, faced him as he or she walked away backwards. He watched first with surprise, then interest, and then concern, as each pedestrian seemed to move with a dancer’s grace so as to always present to him their front side. He cast his gaze across the lawns, all the way to the hedge at the other side of the park, and every person he saw, whether standing, sitting, or moving, faced him.
Meanwhile, the other composer – Reyes2 – noticed an equally baffling, if not slightly more ominous behavior amongst the very same park-goers. Reyes2 observed that all the pedestrians moving along the path towards his bench walked backwards, so that he saw only the backs of heads, elbows, buttocks, calves and ankles, that when they were just across from him they neatly swiveled, and that once past, each turned further and continued away normally. All across the park, he saw, in defiance of probability, that every person in the park faced away from him.
Reyes2 was more disturbed by what he saw than Reyes1, and was the first to leap to their feet. Reyes1 stood too, and slipped the notebook into their breast pocket. Reyes2 approached a man who stood nearby and facing away.
“Excuse me, sir, do you have the
time?” asked Reyes2.
The man checked his watch without turning around and said, in a friendly tone, “Quarter to eleven.”
“Thanks,” said Reyes2, and tried to quickly circle around the man to see his front, but the man rotated in place just as quickly, always keeping the back of his head and slightly dandruffed shoulders toward Reyes2.
“And might I bother you for a match?” asked Reyes2.
“Certainly,” said the man, and lit a match, holding it out behind his back.
Simultaneously, Reyes1, who found the same man distressingly attentive in the way that he turned toward him no matter how he dodged, dropped his cigarette unlit and dashed away over the grass, trying to escape the man’s regard.
They approached a woman holding a small child, and Reyes1 asked her, rather brusquely: “Yes? What is it? Why are you staring?”
“I beg your pardon?” said the woman.
Reyes1 circled around them, but the woman turned like a ballerina, and the small child eyed him continuously throughout their rotations.
“Leave me alone!”
The composers both began to run aimlessly across the park, each holding a single hand up a side of their face, until they plunged accidentally into a crowd gathered before a puppet show.
“These puppets are broken!” shouted Reyes2. “Stop staring at me!” shouted Reyes1, who found himself oppressed by all the eyes and faces, while Reyes2 was shunned for no reason.
Together, they began to spin. The folds of their brain began to itch, to sting, to burn. They became dizzy, and though the visual senses of Reyes1 and Reyes2 refused to conflate, suddenly each became aware of the other. The adults were either all staring at him aghast, or all giving him the cold shoulder, but a small girl who was bored with the puppets began to spin in imitation of the composers.
Each composer blinked his eye, amazed to discover that, while the girl whirled, both saw a flickering composition which wove together her front and back. This patchwork parody of their old vision nauseated them, but it was better than the madness that had come when moths nibbled the world in two. They pulled the notebook from their pocket as they staggered away from the crowd, each struggling for control of the pen, desperate to catch the notes of the new twin melodies which echoed in their skull. They must set the populace spinning, or else they would be driven insane.
This is how Reyes came to compose their most famous song, that incomparable, indescribable melody which once heard, can never be forgotten, that tune which sets the legs dancing, sets every listener leaping, spinning, the rustic dance which changed our entire society, which made whirligigs of us all– never stopping, never stopping, spinning, twirling in the streets, in the banks, in the beds, in the schools, in the cemeteries, and all to satisfy the moth-eaten vision of a divided mind.
THE LAST DICTATORSHIP
D.F. Lewis
Scene: A classroom in the Land of Belarhombus.
Lesson: The reader’s language as a foreign language.
“Today’s word is Steampunk.”
“Err, what’s that, Miss Duster?” asked Square Minor from a back desk.
“Steampunk is a sort of thing that happens in the future as part of the past – not time travel so much as Jane Austen in spaceships, but spaceships that are not fully functional with gaps for draughts…”
“Not good if you want to keep the air inside them,” proffered Tight Trapezium from his bespoke desk at the side of the non-Euclidean shape that formed the margins of the classroom. This was the Belarhomboid Government Inspector of schools, despite also being a pupil in the class disguised as a child like Square Minor, Wobbly Oblong, Triangle Major, Cone Zero et al.
“Who hates Jane Austen?” had already been chalked on the blackboard by Miss Duster as a sort of avatar of the lesson when coupled with a barely discernible sketch of a token spaceship from a foreign comic featuring Dan Dare and Doctor Who.
Below this she suddenly chalked two numbers separated by a colon: a ratio or a score? Any unspeakable non-speaker would no doubt assume that ‘Steampunk’ was a shorthand term for a new-fangled way to make language learning & arithmetic more digestible – simultaneously together! One feeding off the other, a symbiosis, a synergy…
“Well, who’s heard of Dickens?” continued Miss Duster, ignoring the Inspector at her peril, as he surreptitiously wrote in his rough book: “What the Dickens?”
The headmaster – famously tall, thin and eccentric – was also present, sitting next to Triangle Major, knees up to his chest so as to squeeze into the child-sized ironwork desk.
“Steampunk, Miss Duster,” he said, “is that one or two words?”
She hummed and hahed. It not being officially on the exam syllabus, it was impossible to be certain. She feared that it derived from some premature confusion of time-travel: a conflict of English : Belarhomboid dictionaries past, present and future. Perhaps all the people in the classroom were reconciliation drains between user-unfriendly filters of time. Daytime dreams and dribbles.
Many of the children couldn’t count past one at the best of times. A monosyllabic life-sentence to cover all eventualities of existence….
Most were away with the Geometrists (a variation on Fairies or Clouds) and they were merely learning parrot-fashion rather than with the rigorous consciousness of questioning the identity of The Doctor or whether Dickens was in history or in some science-fictional version of the future.
Truth 0 Fiction 1
But who scored the goal?
One boy put up his hand.
“Yes, Mobius Dick,” Miss Duster asked. She could tell he was odder than the others as he wasn’t an obvious shape, Euclidean or non-Euclidean.
He didn’t reply, clammed shut. He no doubt wished he hadn’t put up his hand. He thought he must be part of a book and not there in person. A book that hadn’t yet been written, he might have thought.
The headmaster, jack of other heads, not master of his own, stretched and yawned as he uncoiled from the desk, without even a circle for a face. That was what ‘eccentric’ meant, she thought, forgetting that faces were never proper circles…Blank or otherwise.
Time for a tea break. The kettle was starting to boil, judging by the steam droplets dribbling down the classroom window beside it. The headmaster had left the room, he said, to fetch biscuits to steamdunk. A Senior moment.
The Inspector totted up astrological sines in his head…. What the...! Belarhombus the last Dickenstate of them all, dare he ask? Desperate questions for desperate times. He threw the rough book roughly to the floor. Slanguage was singularly untranslatable.
The kettle having boiled, Drood Junior got up to be Mother...
PREACHER KIM
Kristine Ong Muslim
Preacher Kim woke up to a world with no violence, a world overrun by weaklings.
Picketers were outside the electrified fence of The Church of Henry’s property, and they were all too dehydrated to blaspheme. They were simply an annoyance and posed no danger. The morning sun cast a strange yellowish sheen on the protesters’ skin. Perhaps, this was what the government was talking about in their daily bulletins about the impending end of the world. The yellowish glow could be the early stages of redshifting.
At this time of the day, there was nobody out there but the people he had wronged, people who were deluded into thinking that they could go about believing all the stories that ended in happily ever after. Happy endings were just curses told the wrong way.
The breeze stirred the leaves of trees in front of The Church of Henry. The leaves disappeared, then reappeared. It was a well-known phenomenon: the behavior of synthetic leaves.
It was now exactly four months from the day the government raised the alarm about the end of the world.
Preacher Kim, the chief proponent of The Church of Henry, had a rough night. His joints ached. His right hand throbbed from fondling Nelly, the newest member of his brethren. He clambered out of the tank where he kept all of his wives. One of them
had hemorrhaged and had to be dragged away so that she would not contaminate the others. One of his disciples, the muscled Max Lombardo, did it in haste, mopped the trail of blood afterwards.
The town of Outerbridge was rocked by an earthquake last night. Cracks formed on the cathedral’s walls. He had to have one of the disciples conceal them before the churchgoers would notice the telltale cracks and doubt Henry’s invincibility.
First things first. The congregation prayed. The famous televangelist from Outerbridge donned a purple cassock and a dark green silk robe. Whenever Preacher Kim raised his hands, palms up, the congregation intoned with religious fervor the sacred paean to the deity named Henry: “Henry exists. Henry exists. Henry exists.” It had to be stated three times with eyes closed.
The twenty-minute routine done, Preacher Kim then addressed his flock and talked about salvation. “Four months from now,” he began.
Everybody listened with rapt attention.
MADAME MANNEQUIN
Douglas Thompson
You might think I have been lonely. You might think you have some understanding of the thing of which you speak. You know nothing. You are asleep, and only one of a million sleepers who have passed my window every night. And if you seemed to look at me at all for a moment, I know it was just as a glimpse of your own reflection that you fancied you had caught, in my glass, in my darkly reflecting heart. It is only ever yourselves you are interested in. Even when you go home at night and grapple all over your lover, your mistress, your paramour, your husband or wife. Even then, it is only yourselves you are kissing, for are your eyes not closed as you kiss? -As the eyes of all lovers are, unseeing, dreaming, locked upon some distant unreality, while you gleefully delude yourselves in this one.
I saw you passing by one night, I noticed you from behind my glass. Just one of the many, a dark suit amid a nocturnal sea of dark suits, all rushing home like a floodtide, evacuating your glass towerblocks behind you. Those winter nights of melancholy darkness. The rush hour, the sigh of trains and tunnels, the expectant journey home. I saw you with your immaculate moustache, your briefcase and umbrella, your vast eyes like whirlpools, a bewildered child lost among the enormous living tombstones of the office blocks. Your neatly folded newspaper, your shiny shoes as slick as raven wings. I made you stop, I made your heart leap. What was the excuse you told yourself I wonder? The dress or shoes I wore, reminding you of something? –Your mother, some other, distant, near-forgotten girl from childhood, a memory misplaced? Did your heart skip a beat, did you pause and tell yourself that dress might suit your wife, that scarf adorn the pretty neck of your mistress?