Edition 6.5

Today we've got just one short publication. A short short, from a friend who calls himself Lars Incorporated. Here it is.

Some nights

by Lars Incorporated

some nights I’ll look up towards the sky and see those three stars of Orion the hunter’s belt. I can see the male with his arm pulling back a bow with all his might, aiming with all his concentration on some young wild thing in the forest. I see this image for a second, but I like to replace it with a dancer, arms stretched out towards their limits, on one leg, the other almost parallel to the ground. I can’t see her face, because its craned away from me, the strain of sinews and tendons in her neck telling me more about her than a simple face could. Its on those nights when I’m likely to stay outside for hours, smoking more cigarettes than are good for me and remembering when I almost drove us into that gigantic pile of hay in my father’s old truck. Or when I told you I was looking for something better than all of this. With you gone it almost seems like I can begin to live my life, but then I hear a story here, and see a postcard from you at a friends house, and I rage silently for a little while, and that’s what drives me out here on these nights. Outside with my bottle cradled between my legs, either on top of the barn or just outside, leaning against the cracked paint walls, where I can see the whole field and there aren’t any trees to block my view of the sky. I whisper to myself first, sometimes singing softly and finding new ways to throw my voice against the thickness of cold night air. After about half the bottle, though, I start a conversation. I ask the first mouse I see if he’s heard your thundering footstep around anywhere. He hasn’t, I figure, since he just keeps on towards the safety and warmth of the haystacks inside. I try to test the high wispy clouds, hovering next to the moon as if for warmth, but really out of loneliness, clouds like to stick together on land because every one of them spends a lonely summer at sea. I shout up, so they hear me, and ask if they’d floated in from bigger cities on their way to relax out here, and if they’d seen anything of you, and if you were doing fine. That’s what gets me the most. By the near end of the bottle I know. The clouds look back and start, silently, to float away, first in front of the moon, shining brighter than they ever could on their own. They have, and they’re going back to your glow. It’s too dark out here for them, and they don’t like the smallness of this town. I shout up to them once more, asking them to give you my love, but they just keep slowly floating on, because they know, just as I, you’d never accept those regards.

Lars Incorporated is a collective of authors from the New Mexico and Arizona area, focusing on internalization of geographical alignment struggles, ie, acclimation to the New American Climate.

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On a different but similar note. We've found another blog to recommend to you readers (whoever you are). 

It's a small blog where the author posts once in a while a story of 299 words or less. "Anything else is waste," he says. Hopefully you'll like it, hopefully he'll submit to us once or twice or 299 times.

http://davidbdale.wordpress.com/

check it out. tell us we're not sharing good writing.

Edition Five.

Today we're doing a couple of things differently. Publishing just one story this Edition, which may or may not become part of a series of stories that may or may not be connected.


Now the next announcement is one concerning the next Edition: Valentines Day Poetry! So if you or any of your friends have some excellent (or terrible) poetry you'd like to share, send it in! 
We've already got a few submissions, and we're eager for more: westegg [dot] publishing [at] gmail [dot] com


Now, on to our story!


Note: Neither one of our editors endorse love as a feeling or an idea with any basis in reality, but we encourage love if it inspires creative endeavors.
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Running to the City
Sarah Fogle

          He’d been telling his mom for weeks that he needed to leave. She cradled a bowl of steaming sweet potatoes, walking toward the rough wooden table with tremulous steps, and he just said it, right then and there: “Mom, I’ve gotta go somewhere, I’ve gotta go real soon.” And his mom just let the bowl slip from her hands onto the table, slip right out of those bone fingers, and the blue glass cracked and the pulpy orange seeped through real slug-like. He wanted to yell at her so badly, he wanted to leave her to scoop up the mess and just run out to the field and scream into the tall grass. He could hear them now, the cicadas thrumming outside at dusk like dumb drone bees around a hive, humming like they were speaking to his bones.

          But he’d never run out before; he wasn’t like his father. He pushed himself away from the table, trembling hands gripping the table edge as if making to leave deep marks, and he looked up into those blueberry eyes of hers and saw the beginnings of a wild rain.

          “Oh momma, don’t cry. Now, you know I—“ and he cut himself off as his hands slipped under the cracked bowl and carried a heaping mound to the open trash can. He turned around to see his mother plucking at the glass shards like a cat trying to swat at fish in a pond, her hands too frozen to grab up the pieces as she shuffled them around like bingo chips into a pile he could sweep off the table. The sweet potato smell was everywhere, the rich earthy warmth mingling with the sweet marshmallow buttery air. Everything was indistinguishable now, a swirl of pulp with bits of blue glass. He tried not to cut himself, but it usually happened somewhere, somehow to someone or other, and it may as well have been him better than anyone else. Maris ran down the stairs in her cutest pink dress, her six-year old smile like sunlight through musty barn walls, and she froze on the second-to-last step and started to wrinkle the edges of her dress, and her face crumpled up like a paper bag, the stork bite in the middle of her forehead flaring cherry red as she saw her momma’s tears.

          He tried to clean his hands off best he could before running to his little sister and pulling her up to his chest where she breathed ragged, and he let her hot tears soak up while he petted her dark brown waves of hair.

          “Jason, you can’t leave, no way, no how.” His mother sputtered, her hands halfway through the pulpy mess, staring with eyes he knew she couldn’t see through for all the tears. He walked over, cradling Maris in his arms as she shuddered like a butterfly cocoon in the breeze, and waited for his mother to slough the pulp off onto her apron and reach out for the little girl.

          Stepping back, Jason looked at them all, glimpsing his own reflection in the kitchen door, the three of them a bright mess, marked somewhere by the orange pulp, the palm of his hand stinging smartly and his mother’s fingers covered in tiny cuts. His momma let out something like a cut-off laugh, a burst of giggle she choked down real quick. Maris buried her little head into her momma’s thick sweater, her dark hair spilling out over arms swimming in creamy cable knit sleeves. He watched his momma run her fingers through her daughter’s hair, and he uncrossed his arms real slow and made for the kitchen door with steps like whispers. And just as he was halfway out the door and his momma’s eyes jumped up and stared right at him, he say he’d be right back, and then he went.

Edition 1.5

Just one story today. More pieces next week.
-
John

by deL


I was hunched over, leaning in closer to the screen. I was searching his face for the name of a woman, but now I’m sitting back. I’m drained and overwhelmed. It’s almost as if he was created as some sort of superhuman, a rogue genetics experiment helmed by some sort of underground society, the Illuminati, or the Masons; People who know exactly what we’re turned on by and how to get us to buy it. 


I think of myself as sort of a savvy kind of guy. I understand the manipulation that I’m subjected to every day. I submit to it with a grin. A knowing sort of smile. I see you caressing my ego, stroking my dick, making me want you without my consent.  Like we’re all in on this huge heist of the mind, the appropriating and merchandising of our culture and emotion. I get it; we’re all trying to make a buck. 


With him, I can’t even pretend I’m hip to their plan.  I am, but I’m totally not; the second he starts to play that beat up Stratocaster, I’m completely enthralled. I don’t know where I am but on his hands on the fretboard, on his lips over those words.  I’m part of the target audience (MALES: 19-35, FEMALES: ALL AGES). I didn’t even mean to be here, watching (I was looking for videos of cats climbing on top of dogs), but now, I can’t stop. 



I’m leaning into the desk again; I’m eight inches away, breathing a little heavy. My ass hurts from this stupid computer chair I found on the street leading up to my house. My back hasn’t been straightened out for hours. Its 4:53 a.m. and my ears are contorted in a painful, painful way by these earphones I stole from work.


I can see his emotion, when he’s playing, even before, as he smiles out to the crowd. He knows the stranded feelings he’s going to summon back with his voice even before he begins. 


And yet, it’s so convincing. I’m taken in completely. He’s stuck on this stage, trying to vomit out so much feeling and love, he’s choking back the flow with his words, you can see it in his face. He just closes his eyes, and I know he’s felt the pain that I have. 


He’s just convinced me in that first verse that if we were to get together and drink a couple beers, just to talk, that he would become my best friend, one I respected. I would know that when he gave me advice he would mean it. He’s intelligent; he knows what’s going on in there. He can see what I can’t feel out loud in front of the girl I love. He knows what’s going on in the hearts of men in the 21st century—a cold, emotionless, digital age. He cares about grooming and taste, good sense and aesthetics. I might even try to kiss him, after I’ve told him about all the girls I’ve never had the courage or good sense to try to love. 


He would know what I mean.  


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deL is a self-made man, working from San Francisco (Full Disclosure: on this website). His influences include the artist Robert Brady, and art-deco from Washington D.C.