The Thread for Intermittens #3: Weirdness

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

How do you guys feel about weird short fiction in the Inermiens?

[EmmaE]

Anything I can do to help?

I can...

...

well, I can edit. 

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I'd like to announce (in this issue if possible) a new art movement. I think it'll be sufficiently weird.

http://namcub.accela-labs.com/stories/ebooks/post-croggyism-manefesto.txt

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I'd like to announce (in this issue if possible) a new art movement. I think it'll be sufficiently weird.

http://namcub.accela-labs.com/stories/ebooks/post-croggyism-manefesto.txt

Dude

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dadaism

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Comparing post-croggyism to dadaism is something only a secret post-croggyist would do, obviously.

[Jenne]

Ok, Khara and I are almost done--just some of what she needs to put in and maybe some tweaking.

You have a Meth-od to your Madness. 

Shhhh!  I'll never tell!

[Cain]

' a "prophet" who could apparently summon UFOs '

is that the guy from vegas

I think so.  The Prophet Yahweh, is his name.  Black Hebrew.  Little strange.

[AFK]

How do you guys feel about weird short fiction in the Inermiens?

The more the merrier.  Can you have it written in the next couple of weeks?

[Cain]

OK, I'm throwing out the parapolitical stuff, since that can go into the [citation needed] issue.  Thats two pages gone and a substanstial rewrite on the cards.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

How do you guys feel about weird short fiction in the Inermiens?

The more the merrier.  Can you have it written in the next couple of weeks?

I can certainly give it a shot!

I also thought maybe the sheep story would go well there.

[AFK]

I'm unfamiliar with the sheep story.  If you want it in just copy/paste it here, please. 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I haven't found it yet, but I found this:


My name was Eugene. I was born on the shores of a small lake in what is now known as Michigan; no, not a large lake. As the spores attacked my brain I had no idea what was coming, and the others in my village believed that I was a genius, a shaman. To me they brought their wounded and sick, their congenitally deformed. My name was Eugene and I had no special powers, only a fungus that had entered my brain one day in late childhood and lain there dormant for nearly a decade before consuming my intellect. As I infected their loved ones with my disease, which showed up most often as a simple ringworm, I called out in the voice of the loons which nested in the cliffs at the north end of the lake, and the villagers were convinced of my holy status. To me they brought their infants, their women in childbirth, their retarded children. As I lost my ability to speak a human language and the mushroom in my braincase impinged upon my optic nerves, I wished I could still cry out stop, stop, stop; save your people while you can.

My name was Eugene.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Oh, here it is:



The fucker dumped me.

For the first couple hours I couldn't think; I just lay on the couch and cried, and a couple of times I went into the bathroom to look in the mirror and see what a mess I was. I was FUCKED UP: my eyes were red and squinty, my face was shiny, and my mouth was all open at the corners in a figure-eight, sort of like some kind of Lucille Ball mockery. I'd compose myself for a minute, but as soon as I looked in the mirror again that Lucy-mouth would come back and I'd hear my own helpless wailing echoing off the bathroom walls.

After a while though, maybe after I'd fallen asleep and woken up without noticing, it was all of a sudden plainly obvious what I needed to do. I had to call three butcher shops before I found one that was willing to give me the number of a farmer who would sell me a live sheep, and the guy had a Lafayette address, like an hour drive from downtown, so I was going to have to wait until my day off to go out there, but that was OK.

The farmer was kind of a freak; he was like "So why do you want a live sheep, again?" and I was like, "I want my fourth grade class to get a sense of the reality of where meat comes from, you know?" He totally gave me the eyeball, but he couldn't come up with a decent argument in the face of my explanation, so he accepted my cash and loaded the animal into my Subaru Forester without saying much more.

I had to wait until Wednesday. I just kept the sheep tethered in my kitchen until then; I know, the back yard would have been better, but I didn't want to give myself away and at least it was easy to clean the poop off the linoleum. The thing about Wednesday, besides me having the morning off, was that during the week his mother always gets up early to eat breakfast and do some gardening, HOURS before he gets up. Oh, did I mention that he lives with his mother? Fucking loser.

So Wednesday morning I drove over to his house and checked that she was actually HAVING breakfast as usual before proceeding; sheep are way more expensive than you might think, and if she was sick or sleeping in for some reason, then the whole thing would be wasted and I'd have to buy another. So I checked her out, and she was in the sunroom drinking her orange juice with her pink-daisy ardening gloves and her flower clippers on the table, and I knew it was OK to go on as planned. I went back home, scratched Mr. Woolly on the head, then straddled him, held his chin (he was really docile) and slit his throat with my Henckels 8-inch Chef. I really believe in spending the money on high-quality cutlery, you know? It's just not even worth the hassle of using some crappy Ginsu shit or anything like that, and once you've cooked using a good knife, there's no way you'll ever be satisfied with anything cheap.

Anyway, I bled the sheep into a bucket I got at Fred Meyer just for the purpose, and it was surprisingly tidy! I totally thought I'd be mopping up a huge mess, but other than Mr. Woolly evacuating his bowels, there was hardly any mess at all. After he stopped twitching, I hurriedly incised around his neck... I had to act fast before the blood congealed... and peeled the skin from his head. It went smoothly except for some sticking around the eyes, snout and lips. I got it off, though, and was just stuffing the sheep carcass into a garbage bag when I thought, hey, of course I should keep one of his legs for chops! That would be so yummy! So I took off one of his hind legs and somehow managed to like, jam it into the freezer compartment without knocking out all the half-eaten Haagen-Dasz containers and the frozen tamales from Trader Joe's.

The drive from my house to his is only about fourteen minutes, which is of course why he used to show up at my place in the middle of the night all the time, drunk and horny. I parked half a block away, and once I checked that ol' Ma was out in the garden, I slipped in, trying hard not to let the garbage bag rustle. The stairway was right off the living room, and his room was at the top, to the right of the bathroom but left of his mom's. I left the Hefty at the bottom and crept up with the half-full bucket, careful not to make the stairs creak even though I knew he could sleep through me getting up three times a night to pee, or dogs barking, or air-raid sirens, or whatever.

So I went into the bathroom first, closed the stopper on the sink, and carefully poured about half the blood in. I wiped up the couple drops I spilled with toilet paper and stuck it into my pocket; I didn't want to risk flushing the toilet because I was pretty sure I would have gotten in major shit for being in his house without telling anyone. I walked back out to the stairs, and meticulously poured a line of blood on each tread without letting any of it run over onto the next tread; it took forever and my arms were getting tired of holding the bucket, like fifteen minutes or something, it sucked.

I finally got to the bottom and it was time to set up Mr. Woolly; I took him out of his plastic bag and tried to set him up standing, but his body was still too floppy, since rigor mortis I guess takes a while. I ended up leaving him more or less on his knees, with his flayed, open-eyeball head pointed at the staircase, and went home so I could wash up a little before work, since I was pretty skanked out from all the stuff I'd gotten done.

That night I was marinating some chops when the phone rang. My heartbeat picked up a little and I could feel my cheeks turning pink as I wiped my hands on a dishtowel, before picking up the phone. I was breathless, all like, "Hello?" and he was all, "Um, I was just thinking about you, and stuff that happened," and I was all "Really?" and he was all "Yeah" and then he totally asked me if we could get back together and I invited him over for dinner that night and it was really great.

So yeah, that was a few weeks ago and things are still going good.

[Jenne]

Ok, Khara and I are almost done--just some of what she needs to put in and maybe some tweaking.

You have a Meth-od to your Madness. 

Shhhh!  I'll never tell!

K dude, check your pm's...it's all good.

[AFK]

Czeched.

Danke.