David Antrobus's Blog: The Migrant Type, page 19

Skinwalker

[image error]I want to tell this story with all my truth but I don't know which order it happened in and which parts I dreamed and which parts I stole from another dreamer. They tell me to place one foot in front of the other then switch them up and keep doing that until my story's told, but it isn't like that, this didn't happen in the same way you might walk down a straight road, not even close. It's more like a bird flying between trees in a dense forest, only sometimes you jump between birds, between...

The Mood

Writing. We all struggle sometimes to find new ways of expressing ourselves. I've taken a slightly involuntary hiatus, of late, in that sense. But as short as this piece is, it seems to be a somewhat different angle into story (with story being so crucial and all). I threw words together in a far shorter time than I'm used to and tried to resist traditional or strict punctuation in an effort to follow the rhythms of the speaker. There's a hell of a backstory, no doubt. Not even sure we'll eve...

Fallstreak

[image error]It's like one of those dreams where you can't wake up.

"Wake up," you said.

I remember the day rolling away from the roof of the world, like a demoralized guest curling toward the wall, and how the darkness made everything shimmery, grainy, and animate.

"Forget it. Go to sleep," you said.

That winter the winds whistled no human tune. Just an oscillating galactic plainsong. Like abandoned sheets on the flinch of a rise, all fluttering and sullied in a dirty howling wind.

"Meet me one day at th...

Demon Eyes

When you're in trouble, it don't matter the exact location of that trouble, he supposed. Just the fact you're up to your neck in a deep mess and need to darn well fix it. Yet it still bothered him that home was a damn sight more than a hop and a jump and a skipped rock away and lookit, there were no goddamned people on this godforsaken island, apparently. Which, he had to admit, was kind of the point.

Okay, obliterated ankle and apparent blindness aside, let's back up here.

Grant was a proud...

Discount Noah

He knew a time approached when it might behoove a man to make good his escape from this tarnished jewel of a world. And for this, he began to build his pod from molded plastics and bright chrome, bringing to bear skills he'd learned in his youth. Granted, he favored natural materials, but he was a carpenter in a world bereft of wood.

"Never did Jesus much good, either," he said to Maisie Ellen, who stopped by now and again to chat.

"What's that now?"

"His trade, I mean."

"Stuff and nonsense....

Behold

Behold the dark rider in the day's pale onset.

Blaze rubbed his eyes, not yet believing in the apparition on the road to the south. The tide was faraway to his right, and the surf sounded like slow distant applause, as if the waking land itself were reluctant audience to this human theatre.

A man on horseback was approaching, ragged black against the grey ribbon of the coast highway.

Beside a sign that read Tsunami Evacuation Route, Blaze stood his ground and felt like a child who'd stumbled...

There Is Lonely

Something had made her stay.

The call of her humdrum job cutting lengths of fabric and of two likeable if slovenly roommates in an untidy apportioned suburb had not been loud enough. A relationship not so much on the rocks as fully shipwrecked had not been loud enough. Her one-time companions imploring her to head back east with them had not been loud enough.

This was loud. This place. Painted a safe watercolour veneer over hallucinatory light. Where the beat of life drummed deep within the m...

Neutrino Bay

Something had changed in the world; the hallucinatory sunsets screamed a fresh psychosis.

There might have been a soul or two on that beach with an inkling as to what that change was exactly, but right then, at that precise moment, I didn't care. I was sprawled beside one of the many beach fires that sparked like neutrinos in a dark collider against a starfield backdrop that would make a dead man gasp. Best of all, I was sprawled beside Athena, the most charming and alluring woman I'd ever kn...

One Night in Nebraska

After the rains, the fog bloomed like a sudden resolve.

She drove through the night, hunched forward now, and more careful. Soon, a sign loomed ahead and moved to her right, then was gone.

PRISON AREA

DO NOT PICK UP

HITCHHIKERS

With her notch-below-average height and build, and notwithstanding her jet hair gathered and piled under a black ball cap, her outsize leather biker jacket, and her purloined outlaw swagger, she knew she looked more like a young adolescent boy than a man, but any effor...

Cowgirls Redux

Turns out this is a continuation of an earlier piece(read this first for sense) I wrote fifteen months ago about three women running from the law across a Cormac McCarthy landscape. Very yin and yang. A story demanding to be told? Perhaps. Anyway, here's the sequel, and there might still be more, who knows?

______________________________

The night brought storms unforeseen.

The fugitive women lay more awake than not as the branches whipped like the tails of some wild vermin infestation and ro...