A jawbreaker lies
Uncjewed on the ground, shattered
By the jaws of life
April 11, 2016
From “Jawbreaker Haiku” by Anonymous
Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: fiction, haiku, humor, poetry, story |Leave a Comment
April 10, 2016
From “Poem of the Dead Hand” by Lucy Y. Shantell
Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: fantasy, fiction, goblins, Lucy Y. Shantell, story |Leave a Comment
In the palm of Nä Ti, the Dead Hand
Lies Rait Tirat, the Tomb of the Rebel
He who rebelled against It
Nyir Rvi, murderer of the Creator
Xon Vty, father of the Goblins
The father awaits his children
To give to them purpose anew
And to anoint them with right
And free them of their sins
April 9, 2016
From “The Last 36 Hours of Yekaterina Dmitrievna Dyatlova”
Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: fiction, horror, mystery, science fiction, story |Leave a Comment
Once the transmission ended, Yekaterina made no further log entries. Based on biometric data, it appears that she systematically depressurized all the units of the station except for three: her quarters, the central corridor, and the arboretum.
The cherry trees in the arboretum were in full bloom, and Yekaterina apparently clipped all of their blossoms one by one over the course of the next 36 hours, stopping only to eat food stored in her quarters and to use the bathroom there. Once she was done, she laid out her EVA suit on the bed and filled it with flowers before closing and locking the faceplate.
What telemetry is available suggests that Yekaterina’s next action was to move through the station, pressurizing rooms ahead of her and depressurizing them behind. When she reached the main airlock, she overrode the safety mechanisms with a screwdriver and opened it.
To this day, no trace of her body ahs ever been found, and the reasons for her final actions remain a mystery.
April 8, 2016
From “Faith of the Old Orcs” by Lucy Y. Shantell
Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: desert, fantasy, fiction, Lucy Y. Shantell, orcs, religion, story |Leave a Comment
The Orcs practiced a syncretic religion that was related to the worship of the Creator, as in the Sepulcher of the Creator, but also Muolih the Spreading Darkness, as in the Goblin and Dwarven faiths. Furthermore, many minor spirits were recognized, from ancestors to those posessing trees and streams, though the primary surviving codices note that they all emphasized the paramountcy of the gods of good and evil.
In Orcish, Muolih was called Tirat, the Rebel, while the Creator was called Nyir, which literally means “that which has created.” Their faith was, as a result, sometimes called Nyirtirat, literally “creator-rebel” but more accurately “the rebel and the rebelled against.” It’s important to note, though, that despite commonalities each Orc community and band had its own extremely local interpretation of faith and disagreements up to and including violence were all too common.
Naturally, this changed with the introduction of the Hamurabash by Hamur, which replaced the former religion with a set of ethical and atheistic strictures and emphasizing the memory of departed kin. The bashamalurs who succeeded Hamur were generally successful in eradicating all traces of the former Orcish religion with only a few isolated (and well-fortified) communities harboring so-called taiwa or apostates.
Even as Hamur’s successors agressively spread his message of atheism, equality, ancestral memory, and the militarization of society, there remain significant Orcish ruins in the high desert of the Lrira, predating the Hamurabash, and in many cases even the Sepulcher, deeply carved and embossed with the memory of the old faith.
April 7, 2016
From “The Lucky 13th Emperor” by Rocky Pluemer
Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: emperor, essay, Roman Empire, Romans, Rome, story, Trajan |Leave a Comment
Think of the most lauded person you can who isn’t actively a deity. Someone who is pretty unanimously thought of as a moral person and who left a major mark on our world and on Western civilization–but as a ruler, not a philosopher or a religious leader.
You’d be hard-pressed to find someone like that with a better reputation after 1900 years than Trajan, the lucky 13th emperor of Rome.
He was renowned as a builder and a leader, who made more civic improvements to Rome and the empire as a whole than anyone before or since. Trajan was also a military leader who expanded the empire to its greatest extent in history, from the Persian Gulf to Britain. The list goes on; the Senate usually gave emperors titles to comemorate their rule, and for Trajan they simply awarded him Optimus, best. Every subsequent emperor was wished to be felicior Augusto, melior Traiano–as lucky as Augustus and as good as Trajan.
It’s a strange thing, then, that there are almost no surviving sources from his reign: all the relevent books are lost, and all that remains is people writing years or centuries later. Stranger still is the fact that Trajan was also an arch conservative when push came to shove; asked about Christians, he mercifully said that they should be given every opportunity and benefit of the doubt to reclaim paganism. If they still demurred, well, to the lions with them. That little detail bothered medieval and Renaissance theologians so much that they came up with outlandish ways for the centuries-dead emperor to be resurrected, forgiven, and baptized.
But the most interesting detail to me is this: Trajan was never related to any of the emperors that came before him. He was of comparatively humble stock, working his way up from the bottom. His predecessor basically had his arm twisted to adopt Trajan as his heir to retain the support of the army, after all.
It kind of makes one wonder–what sort of man was the “best emperor,” really? The sort of man you’d have a beer with? A standard politician with an unusually astute mind for appearing humble? Or a Pope Francis-like figure who really was humble and able, but whose talents happened to lie in war and the apex of political power rather than religion?
We’ll never know. But Trajan is a fascinating guy all the same.
April 6, 2016
From “A Place for the End of the World” by Dawn E. Lenza
Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: ANZAC, apocalypse, Australia, end of the world, fiction, New Zealand, story |Leave a Comment
I’ve never read or seen The Quiet Earth or On the Beach, both of which have been books and movies.
But their message is nevertheless compelling: the last people on Earth, the last survivors of a physics experiment and a nuclear war respectively, living out their final days in ANZAC. Australia and New Zealand are in many ways an admirable locale for such: isolated yet temperate, distant yet with all the comforts of the First World.
They would be excellent places to live out an apocalypse, if apocalypse come.
So even though I’ve never been there, even though their cost of living is astronomical, even though, even though, even though…I am attracted to the romantic notion all the same. Places distant and safe, civilized and alien.
They seem like places I could live.
New Zealand especially. An isolated microcontinent, diverse in flora and fauna, as far away from Europe as one can get without booster rockets. If ever I fear an apocalypse, I feel like it’s as good a destination as any.
April 4, 2016
From “First Love, First Kiss” by Anonymous
Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: poetry, story |Leave a Comment
The first love
Which one? There are
Many firsts
Holding hands in grade four?
Maybe I was just imitating
The girl in seventh grade
The first I noticed
An eighth grader
She was the first
I even considered asking
Or the freshman? I’d known
Her since we were three
I think she’d have said yes
If I ever asked. When she
Asked years later I said
Yes but my mind wasn’t there
At the time, a junior
I only cared for the most
Volcanic crush, the first
To break my heart, the first
To say no
The first kiss
Unconscionably late
Classmates had children
Before I took even that step
Twenty-two and two degrees in
She was from my hometown
Her parents knew mine, though
We never met before
I waited too long, gave an
Awkward hug trying to screw
Up the courage
I kicked me heels in the lot
Afterwards, scarce aware of
The Dear John email a month
Away and the journal, online,
I’d only see years later
Chiding herself for accepting
A kiss from someone she wasn’t
Interested in, critiquing my
Goofy look of satisfaction
Wishing she’d kept her
Lips to herself
April 3, 2016
From “Earliest Memories” by Altos Wexan
Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: Altos Wexan, story |Leave a Comment
As a child of the Class of 1983, so to speak, my first memory is probably from late 1985, when I was a little under three years old. I remember visiting my mother where she worked from September until she took her leave to give birth to my younger brother.
The building was an ugly Brutalist monstrosity with more a large curved exterior wall, something which made a big impression on me as a tot. Inside, my mother’s office was all bright lights and cubicles. She was visibly pregnant at the time, with my brother. I had no idea what she did, and only a vague idea that “work” was where she was all day.
And the next memory I can assign a firm date to? July 8, 1986, the day my mother went into the hospital to deliver my brother. We got new carpets that day, carpets which would last us until 2014, and I remember sitting on our dining room table with my older brother, looking out on the bare wooden floors and wondering when the new baby was coming home.
April 2, 2016
From “Five Problems with Social Media” by Andrew A. Sailer
Posted by alexp01 under Excerpt | Tags: fiction, rants, social media, story |Leave a Comment
Desperate Marketers
Everybody and their mom is on something social, which means that they are all also infested with self-promoters looking to make a buck. Whether ads, reposts, “signal boosts,” or desperate pleas to “like” the page of a small struggling business, you get the feeling that you’re the central cog in a money making machine that no one has quite figured out how to run. You are the “Part 2” in the “Part 1: Steal Underpants, Part 2: ???, Part 3: Profit” formula.
Poorly Researched Memes Ahoy!
People like clever things, and things that make them look smart or good or smartly good or goodly smart. Passing on the latest meme does this handsomely, and people like George Takei have built a personal brand out of it. But it also means that you have a constant, firehose-like stream of meme disgorged at you, and much of it is patenly false, misattributed, or easily slain by Snopes. Good luck trying to convince that girl you met at a party once in Phoenix that her rant about mind control flouride in the water is bunk, though!
Preaching to What You Think Is the Choir But Really About Half of Them are Atheists
I have three major social circles on social media: friends from family, friends from high school, and friends from college. They tend to be on the right, far right, and far left respectively, a stew of mutually incompatible political and social viewpoints. And yet they are all, all of them, always, spurting stuff that’s incredibly offensive to any dissenting viewpoint and acting surprised when the few people of another persuasion call them out on it. I’d say it’s the closest thing to genuine political dialogue I see anymore, except it usually gets little beyond the name-calling stage before unfriending is afoot.
Pressure to Like and Comment
“Why didn’t you like my slides of Tijuana?” says your aunt, or your friend, or your friend’s aunt. “Don’t you love me?”
Blazing Speed Plus Weighted Timelines Equals Uh-Oh
“Because you posted them ten minutes ago, Auntie Mae, and my timeline is weighted by an obscure algorithm with 11 secret herbs and spices that thinks it’s more important that I see the 110 cat videos and liked sponsored pages than my own flesh and blood.”
Excerpts From Nonexistent Books 