Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The procedure failed.

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Inner voices. Lowered but pure. Outwardly seeping. Venus is weeping. Everything pales. You are the sun. Our songs united. Undying and lighted.

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“You did say you would break up with me immediately if I ever did that,” I said into the phone, pinched between my neck and shoulder.

I looked down into the blood-soaked bathtub, where rivulets of ichor had started to run down the tile.

“So I won’t be doing it,” I added.

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“Well, welcome to the neighborhood!” said Della. “If you ever feel like trading some tips for your new garden, let me know!”

“It’s true,” laughed Thom. “My Della will show you how to grow a wife if you let her babble on.”

“Th-thanks,” said Leo. “Good to meet you both.” He politely excused himself, shut the door, and deposited the neighborhood welcome wagon basket on his kitchen counter. Then he pulled the trick book from his living room bookcase and descended the stairs into the basement.

There, under the best greenhouse lamps money could buy, Podia rested amid her leaves, her lovely smooth green skin unblemished.

“Soon, my dear,” whispered Leo, stroking her stem. “Soon.”

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“Hey,” said Mike to the unusually large cicada. “I’m going to need you to keep it down in here.”

“You’re such a buzzkill, Mike,” it replied.

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They’re stealthy…
They’re hardy…
And if you’re an insufficiently devout Orthodox churchgoer or an improperly-dressed young lady, they’re coming for YOU!

They’re the
BABUSHKA NINJAS
and they’re coming to theaters this January 7.

“You’re not going outside dressed like THAT, are you?”

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Have you ever been speechless in an argument only to think of a comeback only when it’s too late? Have you woken up weeks later, in a cold sweat, with the perfect response and no way to use it?

Fret no more!

Introducing COMEBACQ, the new retro-conversation app from the makers of Twinger and Slapchat!

Using COMEBAQ is easy! Snap a surreptitious photo of your target, and then take as long as you like to think of a zinger. Just pop up your smartphone, say your comeback into the COMEBACQ app, and upload your creeper pic!

Your offer will be distributed to COMEBACQ’s network of professional actors, enabling any of them to collect. Then they’ll approach your target and goad them straight into the comeback you’ve provided. You’ll get a first-person video of the encounter that you can save and cherish.

And the best part? Unless your zinger gets delivered, there’s no fee!

If you’re an out-of-work actor who feels like making some cash on the side, you can join COMEBACQ as a provider and start earning today! You get paid immediately less a small maintenence fee, or you can sign up as a monthly subscriber to get additional benefits and waive all fees.

Your first zinger is free as a COMEBAQ user, and if you join as a provider, your first gig is fee-free!

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“Here’s what I don’t get,” said the cop. “Everyone dreams of getting injured at Disney. It’s the jackpot. Lawyers swarming out of the woodwork, working for free to get a chunk of the nice fat settlement.”

“Yeah,” said his buddy. “If you’d come straight to us, you could’ve had a wrongful death suit on your hands that would’ve paid for the funeral, the trip, everything. Enough to buy your kid as many grandmothers as he wants.”

“The kid wanted to be there so much,” said Eric. “And you get to skip the line if you have someone in a wheelchair, whether they’re alive or dead.”

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Zombie President Brayne scored a major victory today as the Senotaph voted 50-50 to confirm his nominee for Secretary of Dessication. The tie was broken by Zombie Vice President Mortis in favor, and nominee Botulia Detritus begins her duties immediately.

Many Senotaphers in the opposition Necrotic Party denounced the nominee, insisting that Ms. Detritus had no record of public service and knew nothing of dessication, having had her own children mummified at private clinics. The interview process had also raised eyebrows, as Ms. Detritus removed and stroked her brain several times during the proceedings before announcing she had no idea what anyone was talking about.

Her association with the Brainist movement has also come under scrutiny, with Ms. Detritus on record as saying that teachers should be prepared to eat their students’ brains. She has also branded mixed zombie-fleshie schools “failures” and supported the controversial brain voucher system, in which zombies trade “vouchers” representing the brains of the living which they intend to consume as soon as it becomes possible. “Ms. Detritus’s nomination,” said Senotapher Gland, head of the Necrotic Party caucus, “will set back integrated zombie/fleshy education a hundred years.”

But Zombie President Brayne’s Mortician Party defended the nominee as an “outsider” with “fresh ideas.” At a press conference, Blight House Press Secretary Amy G. Dala noted that Ms. Detritus’s “private sector experience” made her “the perfect choice for bringing rigor mortis back into the cirriculum.” When asked by an NBS reporter about whether the post was a “reward” for Ms. Detritus’s $1.2 billion dollars in contributions to the Mortician Party over the last five years, Secretary Dala dismissed this as “fake news” before slaying the reporter and eagerly consuming his brain.

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I thought that getting my book published would be the solution to all my problems. I was sure that, once I got in print, everything else would work out.

Then I saw my first book remaindered to a dollar store, and I had to rethink that.

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