We ate things on dares too. A particular favorite was the larvae of a winged beetle called the Huhu Bug. These grubs grow to about the size of your thumb and they eat dead wood so they taste almost exactly like peanut butter doesn’t.
I always liked to fry mine first, having seen a friend run around screaming with one of these blind maggots attached to his lip with its wood munching mandibles when he tried to eat one raw.
Reading and music by W. Ralph Walters
She would not be able to fly, of course, but he had run the simulations carefully, had seized his achievement in the animated projections of the contact-lens computer screen that nestled against his natural eye. She would be chased to the cliff’s edge just like all the others, but when she arrived she would not tumble graceless to the stones. She would spread wide those gossamer-green constructs of his genius and for a few precious moments that wind would fill them and she would glide until the weight of her body broke the fragile bones of the living apparatus that held her aloft. Then she would fall like a wounded bird, like Icarus as he plunged, spinning, downwards from the sun. In a tangle of broken wings, she would carry all of the terrors and tortures that he had perpetrated against her down to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
Musical production by Toby Chappell — now available for your podcast soundtracking needs. Ask him while he’s feeling generous.
Each night I have the same dream. I am sitting on a white donkey and a noose fashioned from strong Asian hemp is tightened around my throat by six laughing women. The smile fades from the tallest woman and she leaps onto a hickory tree and scampers along a stout limb. Carla’s sister tosses the rope to the tall woman who knots it about the limb. I lean forward and shield the donkey’s eyes. A cowgirl removes a derringer lodged between her breasts. She places the weapon against the donkey’s head and shoots. The donkey falls and my body swings in the thin night air of the third moon of the fifth planet from Being, the blazing star.
The secret to growing a man-eating plant is the same as it is with any plant: you must enrich the soil.
Read by Sheila Unwin
Music mixed by Navicon Torture Technologies from recordings available from ANNIHILVS:
1. “Instrument Landing System” by Propergol, from the GPWS CD
2. “Rent Boy” by IRM, from the CD, The Cult of the Young Men
3. Gutterballads Vol II, track VI by Wilt, from the Gutterballads Vol II CD-R
“Name’s Claude,” he says. “You’re new.”
I nod again, still looking out into the empty street near the alley. It’s bad enough that I’ve lost everything in my life – my job, my home, my family. But now a chilling realization splashes over me: I am going to be trapped in this alleyway, melting snow soaking into my shoes, listening to a disfigured man with breath as stale as his conversation, forever. This isn’t just another November night. It’s a pit of hell that I’m trapped in, a punishment for my unknown crimes against the universe.
“Sometimes the innocent are put in jail, and the guilty go free.”
Surprised by the comment, I turn back to him. “What?”
Claude’s face twists into a grin, his scar stretched into a new, more hideous shape. “That’s what I like about new guys. They ask questions.”
Midnight found her kneeling in grass, thick clumps of dirt all around. One by one she peeled and plucked segments of orange from its skin, then passed them between her legs. In the secret crevices of the tree, she gently tucked away the red-stained pulp. After, Cyan cradled the slender trunk, her fingers buried in its roots.
“Bear something for me,” she pleaded in her sleep. “Bear me.”
I would like to dedicate this love poem to Alice. Happy anniversary, sweetheart!
– Ben
To see the insides of you, they will have to pull you apart. The doctor is really nothing more than a soft-fingered explorer who knows his way around the black lumps and brown chunks of the human anatomy; he knows which juices squish out from where and why. He doesn’t know what a gift it is to hold your purple heart in his latex hands.
Happy Thanksgiving, and bon appetit!
The boy’s face was a thick, fluid rendering of blowflies. They crusted his eyes like false lashes, and crawled around his chapped, broken lips, their shimmering wings vibrating against their fat black bodies. The boy’s stomach was distended; he looked like a spoon, with the bulging, swooping curve of his gut leading into his rail-thin upper body. His ribs protruded; it were as though he had swallowed a birdcage that was pushing out from within.