This Is Not A Story--2

Where we talk of books, music and other things.

So, other than pissing people off and wasting my weekend away, I have been listening to some fuck awesome music. Firstly, last week I got Metallica's new album Death Magnetic...this shit is good, heavy and some songs are catchy as hell. Did I say catchy? just listen to the chorus of All Nightmare Long and you will know what I mean. 

Other than that, got Monster Magnet's 4-Way-Diablo. I really like the kind of music these guys make, weird lyrics, rocking tunes, and kick ass song themes...even though I might not understand the hidden meanings and all of the songs, they make a cool listen. Get Monster Magnet if you haven't heard them till now, they are Good!

A friend passed on full discographies of The Beatles and Led Zeppelin (who are touring, as another friend just informed me. Any lucky people? Please go and watch.)

And, been reading Jeffery Archer's As the Crow Flies, which is a good book in a totally Archer kind of way. Also been looking for Richard Morgan's "The Steel Remains", this book is on my definite Buy list for this year, and please, if someone finds an ebook do pass the link! I am also re-re-reading Morgan's Broken Angels and even on the third time around this guy shocks the shit out of me, definite toilet reading I tell you!

On the blog front, Neil Gaiman's blog is a definite must read for anyone who wants to know how tough/tiring/trying/totally awesome it can be to be a writer. Another writer whose blog I have been following is Jeffery Somers, he of the Avery Cates fame, wrote the Electric Church and Digital Plague, both nice books...the third part Eternal Prison is coming soon! which is also on a must read list. Two more books on must read lists are Patrick Rothfuss' follow-up to "Names of the Wind">>> A Wise Man's Fear and Jim Butcher's Dresden Files 11..both books are going to be released in April 2009. Gosh, the wait! 

Phew, too many books. Also, I wrote a short about a man and a corpse and a conversation they have, I still need to brush it up a little bit and I will post that or something weirder, in the next two days...in case you want to read some rhymes, you can always head over to the Poetry Blog...where we go psycho like we go psycho nowhere else.

What else! Hummm....oh yeah, there was a talk somewhere on this blog to do a short story contest, that idea has been abandoned...I thought I'd better leave the contests to experts like Jason Evans...neither do I have the experience of the expertise to do justice to the time and effort people will put in in writing stories. Maybe, someday. We can all have hope, right, it is free.

So, this is this. Let's crank some more crazy tales this week. The total stories written on this blog has crossed 200 mark, somewhere around 230-240..give or take a few.

Hope all is well in your corner of the world and life is treating you like it should :)

Cheers! and buh bye from my side.

N

The Ghost

The ghost started to trouble me on the third day after the death. First, it was the regular stuff with the electricity fluctuations, the banging of doors, the shower spewing blood instead of water, strange constipated sounds from the bathroom while I slept at night and my cat floating mid air above my head when I woke up one Sunday morning. 

I ignored it all the best I could. But then, the Sunday newspaper was gone. Not completely gone, just the cartoon section from the whole issue. And there I was on a bright sunny Sunday morning, standing at the kitchen counter in my morning gown, with a cuppa coffee in my hand and a newspaper without the cartoons page.

Fuck.

"This is so not done man," I said to the wind in the kitchen that stirred like a chuckle escaping from a fat man's throat.
As soon as I had said this, the tap in the sink turned on by itself, gushing out something black and fizzy. I moved forward to turn it off when it turned off by itself. I turned around and I heard the sickly smelling liquid rushing in the sink again. I turned to close it and it was gone.

I poured my coffee down the sink, rinsed the cup with the water that smelled suspiciously like Diet Pepsi and set forth to perform the techno exorcism for the ghost of my dead hard drive.

If there is one thing I am sure it is that the hard drive died because of old age and not because 99.9% of its space was occupied by illegal porn that my friends had stored on it. But anyway, I had an exorcism to perform and soon I was rummaging through my drawer for the different articles that will help me get rid of the cartoon-page-thief ghost. I marked out a Venn diagram on the now defunct CPU cabinet which now lay on its side like a dead dog. Then I colored the circles in the diagram with pink and black wax crayons, I placed a picture of Steve Gates above the Venn diagram and muttered the exorcism rap. It went something like this;

You were the hard drive, YO!
Once you were alive, YO!
But now you are dead, YO!
So get outta my head, YO!

Betta not be a whore, YO!
Betta not ask fo mo, YO!
Just want you to know, YO!
We want you to go, YO!!

Thus, it was done and I was rid of the ghost of the dead hard drive, but I missed drinking Pepsi out of the kitchen tap. 

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Woah! This one was intense! Not shitty enough for you? Then check out a poem about a sea of shit.

The Lie

Night. A vast, barren field. Rain. 

A figure lies in fetal position in the middle of the field. Rain soaks the person's clothes, wets the hair and the water collects in small rivulets around the figure. Somewhere near, a bolt of thunder strikes hungrily on the naked earth's bosom. The figure wakes up, startled by the crash of thunder a voice in its throat rises up, somewhere between screaming and crying.

He closes his eyes against the rain and lifts his hand over his eyes to shade them and look around himself. He feels the water cascading down his face and licks the droplets from his lips. Water is something new and amazing and he takes his time to savor the strange wetness and the unknown taste of the liquid. 

At the edge of the field an orange light slowly blinks like a beacon calling him home. He gets up and starts walking towards the blinking light. The walk through the muddy field strips him of both his shoes and lower parts of his jeans are soon the black, brown color of field mud. Something in the collecting water swims past his feet and he quickens his pace towards the light that now blinks with a rabid urgency. 

He crosses the field, jumps over a small pool of water and steps on the road. The light transforms into a complete vehicle as he draws nearer. A woman's body lies half slumped out of the door of the vehicle and blood pours down her cracked skull, collecting in its own small pool near the wheel. Something in the sight looks hauntingly familiar to him but the thought swims away like a shark before the harpoon of memory can pierce its hide. He lifts the woman's hand and tries to drag it out of the car, but the she is trapped by his seatbelt. Somehow, unlike water, he is familiar with the concept of seatbelts, and as he leans in the car to free the woman from his seatbelt, a hand slowly caresses his neck. Fingers, wrinkled with rain water, touch his neck in such a loving way that he would have preferred it if he didn't know it was the dead woman's hand. 

"It's so good to see you again, hon," the dead woman's throat croaks.

He lifts his neck slowly and looks at the other figure slumped on the steering wheel. The seatbelt has chopped him into two pieces and the torso lies comically stuck on the wheel by its own blood and staring straight at him. The realization that the body is his own shyly knocks its way into his head. The fingers caressing his neck, now encircle his throat slowly, each finger growing abnormally long and the nail skewering into his skin.

"Hon, you never got the brake fluid changed, did you?" the dead woman's voice speaks again.

"I did dear, I did." he tells the same lie for the third time in the day.

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Scared? Bewildered? Shocked? None of the above? Oh well, maybe kicking this link will help.

More keeps on coming.

Fingers

Vitra had a habit of weaving patterns in the air with her hands as she spoke. Every time she spoke, her hands were already in the air, performing their own little dance routine playing with her words as they reached the ears of the unlucky listeners. Most people forgot what she said because her fingers had come to possess a life of their own and they chose to hypnotize the people who were talking to Vitra.

This irritated many of her friends and Vitra was absolutely oblivious to it. So, her friends got together, polled a vote and decided to chop off her fingers. One by fucking one.

She cried, and she begged them not to do it, but by the time one finger was chopped off her left hand, the dance of the fingers was destroyed. And one by one they fell. Except two. The longest fingers on each hand. Her friend took the rest of the digits home to hang on their doors as lucky charms and to scare would be finger dancers, thieves, beggars and small animals.

Vitra recovered slowly from her wounds and used her middle fingers to fuck her friends off.

Since that day, Vitra's two fingers danced The Fuck Off Dance on the dance floor of life and life couldn't have been much better.
=-=-=-=-=-=-
This is dedicated to a teacher in my college, who had an electric way of telling things. I never heard, only saw. Oh well, sweet youth.

Fuck it. 

Are you following me on the blog?

And, there is a stellar poem on Black Fairies on Poetry, check it out!

More, soon!

A Talk Of Life And Death

"Dude"

"Yes, dude"

"Dude, I think I'm dying."

"We all are dude, we all are."

=====

Yup. :)

Oxygen

*Author's Note- Looking at a satellite passing overhead tonight I thought of this story. Be prepared for a horrifying, blood curdling and gut chilling end of this short story. Children below 18 please do not read. Here we go!> 

Zorak floated like a corpse in the zero gravity graveyard. His arms splayed out like Christ crucified, his space suit dirty and held together in places with duct tape.

A small beep sounded somewhere on the edge of Zorak's consciousness. He opened his eyes to the empty space station and hoped against all hopes that there was some message from earth. Ever since a passing asteroid had smashed the communication aerials, all efforts to repair it had proved futile. 

And then there was the virus, which came with an email. 

The Russian Demetri's girlfriend had made a 'video' for him which he downloaded from the email on the onboard computer of the space station. All the men in the crew appreciated the video highly while the women scoffed and sulked in the corners of the space station. None of them knew about the virus that came with that video, it corrupted the oxygen supply systems and one by one each of the 12 oxygen suppliers in the station shut down. By the time they all realized it, Zorak was the only one left from the crew as he was breathing on auxiliary oxygen already.

Zorak took a deep breath and held it inside. His auxiliary oxygen meter was already in the red and he knew that he would have to make every breath count if he had to contact Earth. With the last dregs of the station's power, he ventured out for his sixth space walk for repairing the communication channels. As he hung in space like a dead man on a rope, something fizzled in his ear piece, a voice, calling his name, over and over.

"Code 667. Code 667. Please send help, we have had a virus attack on the space station." he spoke into the mic in his helmet.

"Zorak! Dude! Wasssap dawg!" a cheery voice answered from the other side.

"WTF!!" Zorak said, the spanner in his hand fell in space and stretched its tether to its limits. 

"Exactly man! WTF? How come you are alive? My virus was supposed to fuck all of you up and sink that flying piece of shit in the strato-fucking-sphere."

"I used auxiliary oxygen you fucker, I'm not dying that easy."

"Oh yes, you are. I'm sending Miss Nuclear Missile to say hello to your Mr. Space Station."

"Like fuck you are."

"You are like, so dead dude! Now gimme a deadly smile, I gotta click your pic and put it on my facebook. The chicks on my friendlist are so gonna dig this astronaut dying in space shit!" 

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LO-fuckin-L

;)

A Demon's Word

Azz gobbled up the three chickens as soon as they are fired up and airborne. It was spooky seeing his hands appear out of the darkness and snatch the burning fireballs out of this air. Did I tell you, that it was always his hands. His scaly hands with nails that changed into forks, spoons and knives at his will. Watching a chicken get dismembered in mid air is a sight that is worth writing stories about. And besides, Azz had his word to keep, which he did.

He kept it to himself. The bastard. This is what happened.

Turned out Azz had been eating chicken from the other party too, the other party in question being the girl I had my eyes on. So, she gets teleported at my place, with her eyes bloodshot, her breath reeking of expensive whisky and her hair in a tangle worse than a bunch of snakes in an orgy. Her face looked like the demolition zone of destruction of a makeup kit and her clothes were crusted with vomit, sewage, other colors and things that crawled with small tentacles. And, she was angrier than a rhino that has just been de-horned.

All my desires to be anywhere in the 10 foot radius of her were raped mercilessly by the way she looked. I looked at Azz's hands.

"Dude, this is so not done."

Azz burped in sympathy, the stench of burnt and digested chicken filled the air.

He clicked his fingers and the girl vanished in thin air.

I sat down sadly on the wet grass of my garden and thought about the PSP I could have asked for the three chickens.

"Maybe next time little brother." Azz said as his hands slowly disappeared into the darkness.

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Yup, that's about as far as we will go with Azz and 'I'. More madness will follow. Oh and if the story didn't make any sense, please do read the last two posts. :)