[x]

Gnome Noir  "I did it for the money and I did it for the girl.
        Well, I didn't get the money – and I didn't get the girl."
::  Walter Neff - Double Indemnity
So I point the flintlock at the guy – and that's no easy thing, big musket like that on a little gnome like me – and I peer down the sight. Not many people know what it's like to stare at a man through a glass. But in those sacred moments, the whole world takes a breath and it's just you and him. I line up the shot, and I think about the girl, and--

What? That is the start. What do you want, Sheriff, my life story?

Alright, well, I'm Gniles Brody the Third – that's

WhitmanI am all that grows from me
and all that grows from me is sacred—
              my hair, dirty roots reaching towards sky,
fed by sky, shifted by its undulating currents
              my fingers, spiders, crescents, twigs,
gaunt, blunt, probing, inquisitive...prurient
              my ears, awkward conch shells jammed on as if by mistake,
rigid and ridged, elven,
innocent like unexplored caves for children to bound gaily into
resounding with echoed cheers of courage wanting
as if a dozen more children waited within, fearless guides;
              my nose, obdurate.
The reach of my eyes knows no bounds;
what walls are there to throw my body against?

Continental DriftI suppose you call this time fall.
It’s always autumn to me. Your alien mind
likes to speak in a distorted tongue.
And when we see the spinning leaves
drifting down an eggshell sky
I catch oak, and your hands are empty.
There half the houses stand empty,
you say as you watch rain fall.
There the world is bigger than the sky,
with room for my restless mind.
I know you pine for maple leaves,
for bittersweet syrup on your tongue.
The words are waiting to leave your tongue.
This land is small and your heart is empty.
That’s why everyone ups and leaves.
This place is paradise after the fall,
There you can be naked. No one would mind,
no one would see you bare yourself to the sky.
Through the window is my perfect sky,
the places that come easy to my tongue,
If we left maybe no one would mind
but me, I say. But if your land is empty
who would catch me in your wondrous fall?
If your land is perfect, wha

grassy field with rustgrassy field with rust
--------------------------

I'd heard about the old car, three miles out of town and all alone. I just had to see it. It was time. School was over for the summer, my friends were at camp, and I was bored. I set out Thursday morning for a hike, following directions that Uncle Will had given me. As the heat was still growing with the climb of the sun, I found the field and wandered around looking, and looking some more, trying not to be distracted by bees buzzing in the flowers, and butterflies and baby mice. Then it was there, just a bit upslope from the bottom of a natural swale, and just below the sky at th

rootslike drowned men who have lost their
clothes and faces, they lay suspended
facing the sun and grinning without
eyes through the ripples of the water.

those passing by wonder how they got here,
these homeless men without fingers or toes
long spindly stumps twisting into lost roots:

reaching to the east, to the south,
to the homes they have forgotten.

RosesYou love too much, I am told by a man with a briar heart, thorny sinews and collapsed ventricles bearing down on him, hardly beating in his tight chest. He looks at me with flat, slate eyes, chipping and eroding. His hands are dark with cigarette burns and rough with calluses; I feel them on my shoulders as he looks down at me, face collapsing in at his eyes like a dead man's.

For the first time, I realize he is dead. His briar heart dried up when winter killed his rose; my father, he is all thorns.

He squeezes my shoulders, too tight. You look like your mother, you know, he whispers, eyes shifting to the garden, to the yellow rose I plante

Deja vu. Again.I had moved here two weeks' ago, but had never visited this section of town so late at night. I had been invited to the pub by my neighbour, to make me feel welcome. An hour ago, she had phoned to say she had been asked to work overtime, and wouldn't be able to make it. Seeing as I was there, I drank a couple of cocktails. I was now walking back home.

Drunken people yelled out across the street. A couple of cars drove by, their horns blaring as the inebriated stumbled into the road. A bright yellow car stopped, flashing its headlights. A woman in a red dress banged on the window. The passenger door was opened, and a shouting match started be

earth circuitAnd when the sun sinks, the earth's skin crawls:

I.
I wonder if this awkward creature would notice me the way I notice him.
He's so tragic at his throne
I stare after him longingly.
And yet,
He never realizes that I'm the one
Who forever basks in his brilliant beams.
If only he knew how much brighter he could burn
[with me]
He'd light up the universe.

II.
I heard him speak of thirst, once.
The quenching lust of the stars had run dry.
So that night, I brought along a jar of acid.
(And how it gleamed in his glow).
I handed it to him, wrapped in taffeta ribbons,
screaming
I wish curdling joy
On my gurgling boy

the Chandler's Around the WayThe hose slipped out again. Chan cursed, and shoved it back into the incision he'd made, adjusted his mask, and bent over the pump. He yanked the cord, and the pump started to life with a cough of biodiesel. It bounced on the sand as it grumbled away. Chan kept one hand on it and held the hose in place with the other.
If fucking Fathers would spend the bone on a new one, I wouldn't be all night at this, Chan grumbled. He ached for a smoke, but didn't have the hands to spare. Plenty of hands here, he thought as he glanced at the riverbank. Some of them even had a pulse.
"Hey," he said to whoever was closest.
It was a sunbather. A walker who drew enough bone to slot time on the beach without having to fight for it. She had each arm draped around a man, both of them tattooed in the same place with the same sigil. Chan was jealous. Someday he'd have his own numbers, but they'd be women. All of them. He was old-fashioned like that.
The walker answered without raising her sungl

SomedayJane and Ellis floated parallel to one another across the vast canvas of space, eyeing the marble-like planets that slowly crept past them. Their skin reflected the starlight with a dull orange sheen. Ellis had called it 'planet gazing,' an activity he apparently thought suitable for a date.

"Do you see that one below us?" Ellis said, pointing to a round blue mass.

Jane shrugged.

"Isn't it beautiful?" he asked. "I'll bet it's beautiful on the surface, too. Like the way the dust begins to spiral when a star is forming."

"Something like that," Jane said. She didn't understand his excitement. Planets were nothing interesting. They were just

StillHe was waking or he was falling asleep, neither, both at once. This was a dream. This was the only thing he had ever known. It made no difference, he trailed his own body like ripples after a rock, smoothing and breaking and smoothing again.

His feet moved tirelessly, without thought. No longer human, only the Walk was real. For minutes, or for months; time was fluid and distant. Walk.

He broke and a low mountain pulled him forward. Smoothed. Broke into flatlands, into shallow water. Into the evening, into the weak dawn.

Smoothed, back into the soft yellow lights behind his eyes. Walk.

****

He was not alone. This thought came from his bo

SolsticeOnce upon a time, when you were still sunlighthouses and shimmering existence wherever you were needed most, you found him. He was November, shaky on his first last legs, and you saw through the mind-twistings he feigned to the mind-twistings that were really there, knotted up in his dreams.

You were still birdsong then, and thunderstorms, and your bodyheat melted the frost claws that held him tight. You held onto him as his November deepened. When he howled, you howled with him, and the wind played with your voices and pressed the softness of your lungs against your cageribs—and then against each other's.

November became solstice, and

The Order of Sublime Simulacra Kamon woke to the sound of bells and saws. The ceremony must have started hours ago; there was invigorating yellow sunlight outside the gauzy curtains. Kamon's Self was intoning eight o'clock, eight o'clock with all the insistence of a song looping in his head.

Flesh brain, he thought, you should have caught that alarm. Sometimes the flesh was louder than the devices supposed to make it properly quiet. The flesh insisted on the persistence of the Real. This was exactly the type of lesson that the brothers were supposed to learn, and Kamon hoped that relaying to the abbot how thoroughly he had learned it might lighten the inevitable punishm

WhitewashWhen you're five years old you set a promise in the dark, your sister's ice-queen eyes witness. Millie is sitting straight-backed against the headboard, face wide and earnest, and it seems as if the world has heaped itself on her shoulders, or maybe it's the strangeness of midnight.

"We can't make our wills or anything like that until we're eighteen," she says fiercely. "But I might forget this by then."

In later years you will find time to reflect that you're not as whimsical as Millie; young, you only think then that you could never forget something this important. But you can't argue with the three-years-older she holds above your head (

I Have No Names for all My Teacup BabesI feel always like I am starting over.

As a magpie I gather trinkets under my pillow,
bay leaves and bags of herbs to bring the next lover to me,
to call the next dream-face forward—a picture
painted in the tea leaves.

But truth be told the start-again
is never clean, is never gentle,
and the sweat of all that labour
is a fire on my skin, telling me
I will never resist its wind-cry.

The moon comes when I call, to help me;
midwife, she is, and she carries into being my new selves
like the babes they are, teaches them to
fill long footsteps like hers.

Truth be told, I tire of the destiny
I was given once—I am a teacup

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Rose"I've always wanted to be the other woman," she said, leaning across the counter, "That way, when I walk into a room, they'll all whisper, 'She's not so pretty. What's she got that I don't have?'"

The SuitcaseThe sunlight turned the chapel windows white.
The cemetery was rankly overgrown,
Thick vines had covered nearly every stone;
Dense leaves of ivy shimmered in the light.
Thin cracks of age were trying to rewrite
Each epitaph. The honey-sounding drone
Of engorged flies had soon become the lone
Sound in the afternoon. Then I caught sight
Behind a tombstone of a stained suitcase;
It leaned against the grave, quite unforgiving.
Red canvas, ordinary enough. No trace
Of rubbish near it, just a small misgiving
At how I am so ready to embrace
That such a place is home to someone living.

The QuestionWhen he asks, please say no.

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Boylan Books

by ~anapests-and-ink, Oct 22, 2012, 5:22:33 AM
Literature / Prose / Fiction / General Fiction / Flash Fiction & Vignettes

I first see Neal across the open sparkle mall floor, paused in serious contemplation thought speaking solely to self, whispers not for ears or voices only thoughts, shining thoughts, open thoughts thinking marvelous wonders of books and dust and corporate-but-not bookstores. His hair is green not really but blue and green pirate green, red bandanna is he a pirate? asks the little girl with pigtails and chocolate snot embarrassed mother shoo be nice that's rude tugging hand with look of so sorry, she's five, not smart enough yet, please forgive and Neal with open half-grin smiling not really there but almost, not speaking but almost, not accepting or forgiving or out-loud speaking but just shelving, shelving, shelving.

And when I stretch across open sparkle-sparkle tile mall floor (checked with gum and scuffed tile and not-allowed skateboards) Neal looks up, somewhat barely, face open innocent quiet not-there. I ask applications? Are you hiring? because I need a job but not really, no, asking because Neal has green but really blue but really bleached-once-black, maybe brown hair and a red bandanna and a Buddha smile.

A happy society must be created by people themselves,
not through prayer alone, but by taking action.

says our Buddha incarnate so I take action, take the application, sit on the twisted wire sliced cushion bench and take action. A man-boy on cobblestone bumping skateboard with stickers and snears skates by flash emptiness blankness and Neal shelving shelving now far in back invisible just splash of green not green but blue hair dancing bobbing over the sex books. I fill in the blanks, maybe lying a little, need to answer take action Are you hiring? Yes, please. Neal's hair waltzing bobs and I can't see the form, can't the paper the runny pen the smear Pollock blobs references? No references. Buddha incarnate and Keith's Dad he won't call, pirates don't call don't check references.

Neal glides never steps step softly, ghost is commandment number the first, takes the runny ink Pollock blob paper doesn't look says

"Yeah, we need holiday people still. Can't guarantee you a position after New Year's, but we haven't had too much interest so....Can you start Monday?"

Boylan Booksby ~anapests-and-ink

Literature / Prose / Fiction / General Fiction / Flash Fiction & Vignettes

Submitted before I panic and decide never to post anything ever again.

This is kinda the style I'm hoping to go with for my NaNoWriMo project; I figure stream-of-consciousness is the only way to get me to throw my inhibitions to the wind and just freaking write. This was inspired by Kerouac's Doctor Sax, and is therefore possibly as utterly incomprehensible as that novel is. That said…

Questions:

1. Is it too confusing to enjoy?
2. Did you get a sense of the characters?
3. Is Neal’s dialogue too abrupt?

sidenote: the quote is a tweet by the Dalai Lama.

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Given 2012-12-14

An uninhibited stream of consciousness allows the reader to seamlessly enter into the mindset of the narrator in Boylan Books by *anapests-and-ink also suggested by *UnspecifiedUnknown ( Suggested by =doughboycafe and Featured by ^NicSwaner )

~Filly8 Dec 14, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

Speaking of stream of concious novels check out the novel Artist of the Floating World. Very stream of concious-y

~anapests-and-ink Dec 16, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

It looks like a fantastic read, but it doesn't strike me as being particularly stream-of-consciousness.

~Filly8 Dec 16, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

It very much is. At least as far as i understand stream of concious

We went over the novel in my Great works of Literature class. One of my professors main points was that it followed his stream of concious.

*SCFrankles Dec 14, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Oh, congratulations! (Again ^_^) A worthy DD

~anapests-and-ink Dec 14, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Completely shocked, believe me.

*SCFrankles Dec 15, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Your work always deserves to be shown to a wider audience

~BHOJOP Dec 14, 2012

I liked it, but I think you'd need more punctuation - I know our thoughts don't have punctuation, but it's a necessary device in order to fit it into the constructs of language. Some parts of this was confusing for me as it stretched on and on and on.

That said, people enjoy different kinds of stream-of-consciousness narratives, and some people not at all. Perhaps I just enjoy the more lucid ones.

~anapests-and-ink Dec 14, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

I seem to drift in and out of punctuation, here. Definitely something that needs a second look; thank you!

*riparii Dec 14, 2012

Good read, it has color, noise, tension, wit and romance.
Works really well. Congratulations.

~anapests-and-ink Dec 14, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Oh, I'm so glad the romance came out! And thank you.

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