He was nailed to the wall.
Literately.
Not a stitch of clothes on. Nailed to the white painted wall with arms and legs splayed out. Nails, about a dozen of them in each arm and leg, held him firmly on the wall about six feet off the dull colored gray cement floor. A dead carcass on a virgin white canvas-covered wall. Blood, dark . . . almost black . . . from the gapping hole in his neck ran down his chest and one leg, pooling on the floor beneath him in a grim lake of past deeds.
Last week, I hit a homeless man. Okay, I hit him a few times. He didn’t hit back, only helplessly yelled, “stop, stop, stop” like a poorly timed chorus in a punk-rock song. I finally did stop when I heard more honking cars than I had my whole life. They sounded the same, all too high-pitched to be taken seriously, all operated by people too pussy themselves to stop what I was doing. I rushed back in my car, blew a red light and turned the wrong way down a one-way street but kept going, focusing on my rearview the whole way until I heard another honk. Then, I instinctively, immediately stomped on the brake pedal, for my own safety.
Continue reading A Homeless Man In The Side Mirror by Chris Wilkensen
The subway train flew by Lowell Sweeney as he pulled his body weight backwards at the last possible second. There were a few sighs of relief on the station platform, muffled by the roar of underground public transportation. At this hour, it would take four or five minutes before another train stopped by. He would have to stay on the edge, rocking and keep asking himself. Over and over again. Keep trying to find the courage. Might as well get in before somebody calls security. There would be a better moment to die.
“Well now, looks like we got us a little situation here son.” He leans back looking at the ceiling and blows a perfect smoke ring, then another.
“Yessir. You got that right.”
He lowers his head and stares at me with his one good eye. The other, the lazy one as my dad used to call them, drifts up above me and to the left. Whatever you want to call an eye like that, I didn’t like looking at it so I concentrate on his mustache for the most part.
“And I ain’t your son.”
“Well yeah, there is that. Thank heaven for small miracles.” He shifts his position on the couch as he speaks and I follow him with the Remington. Des is a rough piece of work. My mother’s latest in a long line of boyfriends. This one was a hard man no doubt, as big as a fuckin’ doorway and not an ounce of fat on him either.
We stare at each other for a bit more.
Alone now, I tread the shore to a tangled spot in the jungle and calm myself under a roof of wilted palm trees and wild weeds. To the west, The Cannibal Priestess and Cannibal Daughters sharpen tools for another hunt; I imagine their snarling mouths ripping into my flesh. The Priestess chants a litany of wavering verse that crescendos in a sustained falsetto squeal to the delight of her audience. I shiver through the echoing applause of twisted giggles and wild cheers. All night the Daughters hum praise to their Priestess like beautiful engines of insatiable death; bare bellies and murderous lust-songs gurgle through the jungle night.
Continue reading Night of the Cannibal Priestess by Jamie Grefe
Izzy spit teeth onto the sidewalk outside the Hidden Cove Lounge and watched the reflection of the bar’s neon in the window of a long black car parked at the curb. His eyes shifted to the bald tank of a man who’d liberated a couple of his pearly whites. “You’re gonna have to do better than that, Randall.”
I remember the first time I saw them.
On a scale of 1 to 10 of depressing journeys, this one had begun as a 9.99er.
The RER train was going from the centre of Paris to a faceless bourgeois suburb. I should have seen the signs on the platform at Chatelet Les Halles. Sat on a cold concrete bench was a tramp. He was wearing a rotten suit jacket and woolly hat. Holes in the elbows and pockets. Dark turtle neck jumper. Scuffed and shitty trainers. And that was it. His cock and balls lay flaccidly between legs. Flaccid. Thank the gods for small mercies. It was minus three out in the street. I wondered aimlessly how he had managed to get Continue reading The Wild Hunt by Jason Michel
Tyler ordered five shots of espresso.
Two weeks of drinking had somehow failed to erase the reality of final exams. He needed all the help he could get for what was bound to be a long night of gorging on information. Information that he would promptly yak up the next day, hopefully on paper.
They were taking forever with his drink so he went to take a slash. He was unzipping his fly when he noticed the checkerboard floor tiles in front of the urinal were rather shaky. Four of them, all uneven, grout between the tiles reduced to dust. He crouched, lifted each tile and stacked them in a corner. There was a piece of cardboard Continue reading Squishy Tendrils by Chris Rhatigan
My parents told me I could do anything I set my mind to. Then, when I tried to conjure a demon, they were mad about it.
They were also wrong. I couldn’t do it.
I’m not an idiot. I realize what can go sour when summoning some hell beast. It wasn’t that I wanted to use him or have his great powers. I wasn’t planning on freeing him, I Continue reading Reach for the Brimstone by Charley Daveler
Drumming a disjointed tune on the steering wheel, he squinted through the fly flecked windshield. The night, vast and starry, moved around him. A lone sign, frozen briefly in the dim glow of rushing headlights, flashed by in the darkness:
LA 315
Suddenly cramped, he yawned and shifted his weight in the seat. Morning was a long way off, but it would still arrive well before Los Angeles crept into sight. Hell, he thumped the steering wheel, he’d count himself lucky if this old car got him as far as Ventura County! With a sigh, he turned the radio off at last.
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