Photo by Daniel Vella

“Heart of London, there is a moral in thy every stroke! as I look on at thy indomitable working, which neither death, nor press of life, nor grief, nor gladness out of doors will influence one jot, I seem to hear a voice within thee which sinks into my heart, bidding me, as I elbow my way among the crowd, have some thought for the meanest wretch that passes, and, being a man, to turn away with scorn and pride from none that bear the human shape.” – Charles Dickens, Master Humphrey’s Clock 

Part of Schlock’s Dickens bicentennial celebrations.

Charles Dickens celebrates his 200th birthday this year.

In the run up to Charles Dickens’ bicentennial celebrations – the great Victorian author was born on February 7 – Schlock will join in the fun worldwide with a podcast focused on his work and more.

But in the meantime, we’ll be regaling you with a series of images recalling – however loosely – the multitudinous sprawl of Dickens’ classic novels and stories. Because love him or hate him, Dickens’ enduring tales of poverty and triumph, of injustice and goodness, remain a persistent influence on writers and artists even centuries after his death.

Our illustrations and photographers are already hard at work at some beautiful images – so be sure to keep an eye on the site, and your ears peeled for the podcast!

Remember to follow Schlock on Twitter and Facebook. Also, you may subscribe to our podcasts via iTunes!

Now get listening!

Readings

The Heart of Verona by Lara Schembri - 00:00:54

Megafauna by Marco Attard - 00:05:15

Breakfast in Dread by Bettina Borg Cardona - 00:09:01

Feature

Annette goes through 2011, a year certainly packed with all sorts of happenings; from revolutions and international scandals. It even brought around a pretty decent selection of treats of a pop-cultural nature. Agree/disagree? Let us know in the comments, will you? 00:12:15

Our thanks go to Annette for her aural contributions, Kurt for providing the music, Thom for help with recording the flashes and Marco for managing to put the podcast together, bit by tiny bit.

Musicians! We want your musics! Apply through this post or our email address.

Don’t forget you can subscribe to the Schlock podcast via iTunes,where you can also leave us nice review and rating over there. Actually, it’d be great if you do. Thanks for listening, and our dulcet tones will be back in, oh, a month or so. Until then, be kind, babies. Be kind. 

Copyright: Ellen Pace

With the Apocalypse on its way, Schlock has decided to celebrate our total annihilation in an issue of epic proportions. There’s stories, articles and poems, along with exceptional illustrations and photographs. The end may be nigh but it’s not all doom and gloom: amidst the wailing and gnashing of teeth, there’s a liberal dose of surreal farce – and the promise of redemption.

So stick with Schlock and we’ll be back (hopefully) with a debut, new concept issue next year. Enjoy!

(We will be publishing the PDF version later)

CONTENTS

The City is Landing by Kristine Ong Muslim, illustrated by various artists
Dreams of the End by Bettina Borg Cardona
To end, and end again by Teodor Reljic
Our Little Cult by Manuel Royal
On Killing Yourself by A. A. Garrison
The Truest Story of Jesse James by Ron Scheer
Literature in Zero Gravity by Julie Jansen
The Guardians of Armageddon by Joseph Farley
Pass the Can by Robert William Iveniuk
Not with a Bang, but a Squeaker by Thomas Pluck
The End by Peter Farrugia

copyright: Marco Attard

Copyright: Thomas Cuschieri

Copyright: Thomas Cuschieri

Copyright: Daniela Attard

Copyright: Daniela Attard

Copyright: Teena Faye Kingswell

Copyright: Ellen Pace

The City is Landing by Kristine Ong Muslim

after Jacek Yerka’s “The city is landing”

(first appeared in Linger Fiction #1, January 2011)

We do not travel in spacecrafts. We arrive in hordes on the back of a dead planet. We carve out the whole city, whole villages and their inhabitants, then send them to space. The drawbridge we tuck out of sight to discourage marauders.

We land with a thud in the middle of what looks like a marshland. The impact has decimated our tail, the unreinforced buildings where the commoners live. The castle and the courtyard are safe in the middle, and all our scientists have survived.

The air is thin but breathable. The gravitational pull makes it more sluggish to move than what we have been accustomed to back home. Nice to see that in this particular planet, acid rain has not managed to kill most of the trees. Strange how the branches bend even in the absence of wind. It is only days later that we realize they are not trees.

***

Kristine Ong Muslim authored several chapbooks, most recently Night Fish (2011). Forthcoming books are the full-length short fiction collection We Bury the Landscape (Queen’s Ferry Press), the full-length poetry collection Grim Series (Popcorn Press), and the print poetry chapbook Insomnia (Medulla Publishing). Her stories and poems appeared in hundreds of publications, including Abyss & Apex, Expanded Horizons, and Space & Time. She received several Honorable Mentions in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror as well multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Web 2011, and the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Rhysling Award. Her online home is http://kristinemuslim.weebly.com.

copyright: Bettina Borg Cardona

by Bettina Borg Cardona

Below is a sequence of dreams – perhaps ‘nightmares’ would be a more accurate term – of which I attempt to give here a detailed account, in an effort to describe them as they originally passed through the mind of the dreamer – in this case, my own.  One wonders whether it were possible to capture in words the fleeting images and impressions of which a dream is composed, and whether the conscious mind may truly ever give life to the multifaceted wonders of a dream’s rich contents. Yet, perhaps it is worth the enterprise, for, as a wise man once said “you need to write a dream down for the same reason you need to dream it”. I have no interest here in giving to the images a full narrative body, to shape them into any coherence. I am done for the moment with stories, and prefer instead to sink into the deep wells of my unconscious, to ponder its mysteries, and its horrors.

The dreams described have much in common, connected through recurrent symbols, and in particular the similarly fearful sensations that they evoked in the dreamer at the time of dreaming. These sensations can only be descibed as horror and dread: specifically, the fear that the world as we know it may too soon come to an abrupt and terrible end – a notion that is perhaps too terrible for any waking mind to entertain. I am quite fearless in laying bare the content of my unconscious mind, and what it might reveal to you. You may wish to psychoanalyse me; to tell me that I am mad, or to read into these dreams the dark omens of my – our – future. Make of them what you will. I know only that they presented themselves at the time with an unspeakably terrifying realism, and that these images have remained with me ever since, and may continue to do so until my dying day.

***

Dream one: The Moon

This dream is representative of a number of similar instances, in which the moon presents a particularly sinister aspect. In some of these dreams, the moon is crimson red, while in others it is accompanied by another moon, smaller than itself. Yet always, its presence fills me with horror, and the belief beyond any uncertainty that it wishes us – that is, the whole of humanity – only harm, and to smash us all into irretrievably miniscule pieces, simply by a slight shifting of her axis. In the particular dream I wish to describe, I am by the water (ally of the moon), which I may identify to be the Maltese sea – rocky, shallow, dotted here and there with traditional fishing boats. I am aware suddenly that the moon is growing ever-larger in size, until I am certain that it is only moments away from colliding with the Earth, at which moment it shall kill us all in one almighty crash . From this certain doom, I am able to perceive no escape. But it comes to me suddenly that the water will keep me safe. As the moon smashes the water’s surface, I take shelter beneath the waves, and discover to my surprise that it is warm and comforting, like a bath.

 ***

Dream two: Sky Lights

This second dream is similar to the first in its dread of the imminently threatening sky. In this dream, I stand in a high place that is familiar, and that looks much like the roof of my family home. In the waking world, this is located behind the Libyan embassy, which holds anually (or rather, used to hold, since its occupants have recently fallen on rather hard times), a great festival in celebration of its setting up, a day of riot and colour. The events in my dream are similar to such festivities. I watch from afar as splashes of light shoot into the night sky. Only, I soon realise that these are no ordinary fireworks, but rather an inscription in lights, burnt into the sky by the hand of some malevolent deity. In the dream, the precise message of the fireworks cannot be deciphered, or I am under the impression that the words they spell out are deceptive. Either way, I understand that written in the sky is our judgement, and it says that inevitably, the end has come.

***

Dream three: The Tower

This is the most recent of the three dreams, and is remarkable in its cataclysmic proportion, bringing to mind the striking image of the sixteenth card in the Crowley tarot series – the tower. In this dream, there is some sort of natural disaster, which upon reflection, I believe to be an earthquake, though this is merely an impression – in the dream I do not experience this event. I am once again by the sea, though this time it is a small bay, such as the one in Xlendi, its rim lined with restaurants. Some elements of the bay’s geography are however altered. The top of a cliff –one of two which hug either side of the little bay – is dominated by a large church. I am suddenly gripped by terror at the sight of a gigantic wall of water, a tidal wave that stretches up over the semi-circular inlet, at which point I know quite certainly that the church shall be toppled upon us. Indeed, such is the outcome, and the steeple begins its descent towards the shore in a rush of water, which I attempt desperately to escape. I am indeed able to. I have survived the worst, yet the landscape of the bay has changed. It is now drab, a series of poor rocks jutting into the sea. I feel there is something primitive about the place, and I realise suddenly that there are others, and, curiously, that they have found all sorts of food. The end has happened. But, curiously it has returned us again to the beginning. A poor beginning perhaps, but not one without hope.

***

Bettina Borg Cardona has found that appearing to be absorbed in one’s writing serves as a deterrent to people who ask intrusive questions; and so, her writing career progresses. She has also taken to long midnight walks in the rain.

Copyright: Eleanor Leonne Bennett

by Teodor Reljic

Picturing the end of the world is far too tempting. Even if every fibre of your rational brain rails against the inherent morbidity in imagining the world – the entire world, your world – being blown to smithereens by natural-cum-celestial disaster, you just can’t help it, can you?

And when popular culture gets in on it; when, on top of being bombarded by images and sound bites relating to either the ongoing loop that is Lindsay Lohan’s revolving door rehab policy (Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence writ tabloid), the tacky-ethics of Kim Kardashian’s decision to not marry (because we can all relate to a multi-million-dollar-worth do-nothing heiress, right?), the many permutations of Lady Gaga (each new skin slowly chipping away whatever worthwhile glitz the nu-Madonna had accomplished in the all-too-recent past)… when, in the digi-neon blare of tweets and mobile bleeps, The Apocalypse too becomes trendy, then thinking about the end is not only sanctioned by our own – ever dormant but ever ready ­– reptilian brain, it flanks us at the eyeball-level too, and we’re stuck, transfixed – and our fascination is, we feel, entirely justified.

We can think about the end. And we can think about the end until after the end. Because we know of the apocalypse only before and after – we can never imagine what it’s like to be right in the eye of the storm. If, indeed, it will even turn out to be a storm – and not, for example, a wind as sharp as a blade but just as brief, just as effective… but I digress.

Because, indeed, when thinking about the apocalypse, all one can do is digress.

So we’ve decided to half-believe the 2012 Mayan prophecies. We half-believe it in the same way as we half-believe the horoscope. It’s found among the backmatter of every newspaper and magazine for a reason. It’s our naughty escape from Father Science (perhaps, we’d like to think, some one-on-one time with Mother Nature, in fact?) And so 2012 is our latest fad. Like Y2K, but without the technological ring of truth, and with added cod-historical mysticism: the Mayans are more seductive than scrolling streams of binary, whichever way you’re inclined.

It doesn’t take an incredibly incisive mind – nor, indeed, the exertion of anything but the most rudimentary cognitive efforts – to realise that Roland Emmerich’s 2012 is just that and nothing more – Roland Emmerich’s 2012… Roland Emmerich being, of course, the man behind Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow – which are to the endtimes what Lindsay Lohan is to Nietzsche: violent, loud and obstinately shallow knee-jerk reactions to deep seated fears – multi-million dollared baby yells, feeding on a universal fear that’s just too easy to exploit.

Perhaps it’s with good reason that some of our most cherished apocalypse-related artefacts tell the story either before or after the apocalypse happened. We can’t really tell stories in an ‘apocalyptic’ scenario… we tell them in a ‘post-apocalyptic’ scenario. All you can do while the apocalypse is happening around you is record the damage. You can’t tell stories, you can’t evolve relationships. It’s the end, for God’s sake. End it.

(This is why a lot of Roland Emmerich’s films are nothing more than set pieces with borrowed, clichéd characters and dialogue tacked on as if they were an afterthought – they simply can’t be anything else.)

Really, it shouldn’t be this way. I’m reminded of a line from what remains one of my favourite films (and a bit of a cliché in itself, I’ll admit).

“It’s only after you’ve lost everything,” Brad Pitt’s dime store suburban revolutionary Tyler Durden opines, “… that you’re free to do anything.”

And shouldn’t we be free to do anything, after the end has ended? Shouldn’t we consider the world as a vast terrain that is ravaged, yes, but that’s aching to be rebuilt? No more Lindsay Lohan, no more Kim Kardashian. No more Gaga, believe it or not. We’ll only keep what we want. And what we build from there on out could be anything.

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, when it was still just a skinny, angry debut novel aching for a real audience, was released in 1996 to not that much fanfare at all. Then, at the very tail-end of the century, David Fincher came and made it into a cult classic, powered by Brad Pitt and Edward Norton as the Jekyll and Hyde of the disaffected post-yuppie (just) generation, beating each other senseless for kicks and cod-spiritual respite from their emasculating 9-5 lives (while encouraging an entire underground posse to join in).

This quickly grows into a rag-tag anarchic movement, and while the team never succeeds in blowing up anything at the end of the book, the film ends with a striking shot of the major credit card companies’ buildings blowing up as a freshly-minted couple (in then-futuristic Facebook language, their romantic status would have been flipped from ‘It’s Complicated’ to ‘In a Relationship’ at that instant) hold hands: our protagonists, united as the economic world crumbles to dust.

Never mind the real recession – which rolled in the background while we got on with our lives – at that moment things felt cataclysmic, and beautiful. And Fight Club wasn’t the only authority-prodding studio offering to emerge that year. The Matrix and American Beauty, thriving on opposite ends of the spectrum, delighted and unsettled us. They were films that kept people talking, and I don’t remember there ever being a set of films like that, appearing simultaneously, ever since.

American Beauty, in the scintillating journey of an Everyman’s self-destruction, charts the end of the American Dream and bisects suburbia to reveal a teeming landscape of hungry dreams that will never be satisfied, except in death, except when Kevin Spacey’s Lester can gather up the vignettes of his life so that they glitter with both satirical bite and strange, ephemeral beauty.

The Matrix – a cyber-jamboree that only felt original because it so aggressively plagiarised an endless stream of pop culture sources: from William Gibson to Grant Morrison to a plethora of anime and practically anything (and everything) by Philip K. Dick – showed us something we knew all along: that things are not what they seem… but oh! discovering it told like that! Thrown inside a world-within-a-world and allowed to savour violence as if it were the finest art, our senses were, once again, transfixed. The end could very well have come for us. Indeed, we could easily have been the pod-people powering The Matrix. Of course, at that point, we were. But just like the treacherous Cypher, we didn’t care.

Naturally, it was not to last. As the last decade of the 20^th century finally decided to turn over, the brief spark disappeared just as quickly. The Matrix was revealed to be a sham. Much in the same way as Neo heaves in shock once he discovers that everything he’s experienced so far has in fact been a lie, so the Matrix sequels made me feel ill as soon as I realised that the masterminds behind the series – the enigmatic Wachowski siblings – were nothing more but a double-emperor with no clothes. The machinery behind the sequels was revealed to be a cartoon, a needlessly garrulous one too. Proof that less is more. But anyway, the world had ended by then. It didn’t matter that the sequels came out. We had grown up, we’d get over it.

And so the zombies of The Walking Dead now dominate the small screens. And so, I hear (from reports quite close to home here in Malta, as it happens), that World War Z will now strive to tell us how it is, after humanity crosses over to the other side of not-being – and once again, Brad Pitt will be the mouthpiece!

But I don’t know. There’s something about zombies that reeks of self-parody. You can’t be a herald of the apocalypse if you’re already dead and brainless – if it is about anything, the Apocalypse is about life.

Give me The Road Warrior any day. If I can’t have 1999 back, I’ll have that, thank you.

***

Teodor Reljic does not look forward to the end of the world – he’s seen far too little of it. In the meantime he enjoys travelling to distant lands in books and films but unlike poor Johnny Keats, isn’t innocent enough to consider this a worthy substitute for actual globe-trotting. His next destination remains uncertain, but it’ll doubtless be powered by – and peppered with – writing of some kind, since, being a graduate of English from the University of Malta, it’s the only real skill he has.

Eleanor Leonne Bennett is a 15 year old photographer and artist who has won contests with National Geographic,The Woodland Trust, The World Photography Organisation, Winstons Wish, Papworth Trust, Mencap, Big Issue, Wrexham science , Fennel and Fern and Nature’s Best Photography.She has had her photographs published in exhibitions and magazines across the world including the Guardian, RSPB Birds , RSPB Bird Life, Dot Dot Dash ,Alabama Coast , Alabama Seaport and NG Kids Magazine (the most popular kids magazine in the world). Visit her site eleanorleonnebennett.zenfolio.com to see more of her work.

copyright: Mariza Dunham Gaspar

by Manuel Royal

In the overhead mirror, I watched my passengers nodding off. The gabble of conversations had been so constant for the last hour that I no longer noticed it; when it died down within a few minutes, my ears rang in the relative quiet and I could focus on my driving.

Humphrey Jessup slumped against the window, sound asleep. Becky Newton’s little blonde head was on Humphrey’s shoulder. They looked cute, snoring away together. Humphrey’s snore was a soft buzz; Becky’s surprisingly loud and deep.

Fourteen of the seventeen people on the bus thought we were going to Las Vegas for a seminar and gambling and some shows. The same fourteen people were all either asleep or yawning. Whatever Marcie had dosed the sweet tea with, it worked.

I was driving because I’ve got a Commercial Class B license. Also because as First Attuned I was privy to our secret plan, whatever it was.  In fact, all I knew was we weren’t going to Vegas.

Behind the other passengers, Spencer and Marcie shared the bench seat that went all the way across the back.  Marcie had upholstered the seat in purple velvet from a remnant sale.

It was typical of Spencer’s attempts at dominant leadership that he was simultaneously taking the biggest seat, and just sitting quietly in the back of the bus.

That’s Spencer Whissel, our cult leader. Cult of Their Hyperdimensional Omnipresent Tendrils, just like it says on the bus. Spencer wants us to call him The Hyperattuned, but nobody does except Marcie.

For a while, Crystine was calling him Spencerus. Somebody soon changed that to “Sponsorus”. Not to his face, of course, for fear that it might hurt his feelings and then he might drop the sponsorships. Nobody needs that kind of irony.

Marcie had sewn Spencer’s robes out of what I think was drapery fabric. Very plush, gold on purple. A little stiff to move around in. She’d also made him a tall hat like a bishop’s mitre, but he kept knocking it off on doorframes and she switched him to a purple mortarboard covered with sequins.

Marcie came forward and stood next to me, holding onto the vertical rail and studying a handheld GPS device.

“Bill, turn there!”  She thumped me on the shoulder and pointed to an unmarked dirt road going off to the right, southeast into the Mojave. I slowed to a crawl to make the turn, and kept it down to about 20. The road was more like a trail, just hard-baked rutted dirt. Now the GPS showed our path heading straight toward an anonymous little X.

I’d known Spencer since grade school. He’d always wanted to be a cult leader, ever since he’d read about the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide in Social Studies.

Spencer came up with a list of what he felt were desirable attributes for a successful cult. He wrote them on a big poster on the wall of his room:

1. REVELATION: Theological or space alien-related basis for cult beliefs.
2. Dependence upon cult leader. Singular, dynamic leader.
3. Compliance within the cult group. Common jargon, conformity of thought.
4. Devaluing outsiders coupled with belief in great destiny for cult.
5. Followers financially support cult leader.
6. Female followers sexually available to cult leader at all times. No questions asked.

While I was in college, he lived above his parents’ garage, worked odd jobs and waited for revelation. I’d bring over free pizza from my delivery gig and check on his progress. I asked him once why he didn’t just make something up. He looked genuinely shocked. “Bill, that would be lying to my followers! I thought you understood.”

I thought he’d grow out of it. Finally, he agreed to let his parents send him to HVAC repair classes. But then two things happened around the same time: Spencer’s grandfather died and left him a considerable inheritance; and Spencer fasted for a week and received his revelation.

So he forgot about air conditioning school, moved out and devoted himself full-time to establishing his cult. He also became, according to him, the only person in the world capable of sensing the eight-dimensional tendrils of twelve-dimensional Hyperminds intruding into our reality.

He named me First Attuned, and the Cult of THOT was born. I never really understood what Spencer was talking about, and wasn’t that keen on being First Attuned. But Spencer looked like he was happy for the first time, so I kept coming over and helping out.

Spencer self-published a manifesto about the Hyperminds and their synchronistic union with all thinking beings at every stage of existence. It was a pop-up book, with three-dimensional representations of the benevolent hyperdimensional beings that (he believed) controlled all human history.

We got registered as a church, got a website, cranked out flyers, got interviewed on “So Crazy in SoCal”, one of those late-night radio shows.

And here we were three years later, with a bus full of unconscious Attuneds. Almost all with some kind of “sponsorship”, meaning they lived rent-free in Spencer’s leased “compound” (more of a defunct motel).

They received a pretty generous stipend, too. This was a sad reversal of #5 on Spencer’s list. A cult leader definitely shouldn’t have to pay people to be in the cult.

I tried to talk to him about that. Hell, we could at least get the lazy bums panhandling at the airport for us.  Nope; he didn’t care what they did as long as they attended Morning Attunement and Evening Alignment, which I had to help run. (So far, nobody had reached anywhere close to Spencer’s hyperattuned level; at least, nobody could see the damn tendrils.)

Meanwhile I was holding down a regular job and giving up half my evenings and weekends at THOT HQ. You’d think a cult would be a fun hobby, but it was turning into a chore. Boring. Practically a job.

Spencer didn’t have any better luck with #6: unfettered sexual access to the female acolytes. I honestly think if he’d been a little less shy, he could have managed at least a small harem. Crystine and Melissa probably would have gone for it.

But, the day Marcie showed up at a meeting, that was it. Inside of a week she was shacked up with Spencer in his private room, picking out his wardrobe and grooming his eyebrows.

After that, they were practically conjoined, and I was shut out of decision-making, for whatever that’s worth.  Somehow that hurt. I’d never believed in Their Hyperdimensional Tendrils, but nobody likes being shut out.

When Spencer called me in to tell me about his planned “surprise”, I actually felt grateful to be back in the inner circle. I didn’t even question the wisdom of putting everybody to sleep with drugged tea. Compared to most of the things Spencer said, it sounded normal enough.

But now, driving down an unmarked road in the desert to an unknown destination, it occurred to me I might be an accessory to 14 counts of kidnapping– or worse.

I slowed to a stop. Marcie started forward again, her brow creased with the vertical line of annoyance I was getting used to. “Why are we stopping?”

I took a look at the nearest passenger, plump Rowena Bundt. She was curled up on her bench seat, sound asleep and emitting a soft buzzing snore. I looked up at Marcie.  “What did you give them?” I had to speak up; a sudden hard wind was tossing sand against the windows and making the bus creak back and forth on its shocks.

She leaned over Rowena and peeled back an eyelid. “Couple of different things. Don’t worry. They’ll be fine.”

I looked back to where Spencer still sat on his velvet bus seat. “Spence, promise me you’re not pulling a Jim Jones.”

He laughed. “Bill, chill. Let’s get them where we’re going, get them underground, and when they wake up everything will be cool.”

“Ah, huh. Right. Underground?”

“About 30 meters.”

“Why?”

“End of the world.”

By this time we were almost shouting, even though I’d walked back and was standing right in front of him. The wind was howling now.

In the rear window, behind Spencer’s head, I saw darkness. I knelt on the seat and cupped my hands against the glass, peering between them. It wasn’t just the sand blowing locally; in the far distance behind us, something like a vast black whirling column of soot sprawled across what should be Bakersfield.

Spencer was looking back as well. “Oh, that?  That’s nothing. Bill, we better get moving. Just follow the GPS.”

The black column was streaked with flashes of lightning.

“Yeah, let’s do that.”

I wished, then, that I had the simultaneous perspective on all moments in my existence that Spencer said the Hyperminds enjoyed. Then I’d know if these were my last minutes. I wished I were asleep like our 14 happy culties.

I’ve never appreciated GPS so much. Visibility to our front was a matter of yards. Fortunately, it was flatland, with only a very shallow ditch edging the road. Marcie held the GPS up and I managed to keep us on a straight line toward our objective.

We were crawling, practically at a walk, seemingly still in a bubble of howling, swirling sand. After an indeterminate time I felt Marcie slapping the top of my head. “Stop!”

Our dotted-line path was right on top of the X. I locked the brake. Ahead of us and a little to the right was what looked like a lighthouse, if a lighthouse were a blue glowing fountain of mist rising from the ground up to the sky.

Spencer had come up to join us.  “There it is.”

“Which is what again?”  Thumps on the roof; and on the hood ahead of us, green lumps were falling.  “Jesus, what the hell is that?  Is it actually raining frogs, Spence?”

Spencer laughed again.  “Of course not, that’s ridiculous.  Those green things are enormous individual cells.”

“They are?”  I couldn’t hear myself, and raised my voice.  “Really, no shit?”

“Absolutely.  Actually they’re just the three-dimensional tips of hyperdimensional cells.  Falling all over the landmass of the planet now.  They’ll crawl around, find each other, and clump together to form an unbelievably huge animal thing.”

“Oh.”

“They should come together somewhere in Asia, I think.  Kind of a god-beast.”

“Right.”  I found I was crying like a child.  I turned to Marcie.  “Is this real?”

She slapped me, pretty hard.  “Feel that?”

“Hey, hey.  Take it easy, guys.”  Spencer rubbed my shoulders.  “No point getting all worked up, eh?”

We waited until the thumping stopped.  Sure enough, the green lumps were rolling around, joining into larger and larger masses, the biggest ones lurching away on elephantine pseudopods.

I felt about done crying.  “Spence, all that hyper-tendril stuff is real?”

“What a thing for my First Attuned to ask! Bill, you’re a trip, I swear.”

“Okay.”  I pulled a deep breath in.  “Always figured you were just a little crazy.”

“Well, we all are, right?  Come on, Bill, we gotta get busy.  Here.”  He handed me a pair of protective goggles and put on a pair himself.  His had sequins, mine didn’t.

Spencer had me open the door, and he hopped out, holding his sequined mortarboard on with one hand.  I followed, somehow feeling safer sticking close to my impractical, oddball friend, the guy I’d tried to help out since high school because I felt a little sorry for him.  Spencer, who talked to god-things living nine dimensions upstairs.

The sand was blowing hard enough to sting, but I didn’t feel it.  Behind us, marking the coast, was an endless black roiling wall stretching up out of sight, shot through with blinding white bolts of lightning.  Spencer watched with me for a moment.  “Poor people in L.A.  I think it’s flipping the whole coastline upside down.  Maybe inside-out.”

“Well, that’s fucked-up.”

“Won’t last long.”

“This sucks.  I don’t think I like Hyperminds.”

“If you can get their perspective, Bill, it all makes sense.  You’d be doing the same thing if you were them.”

We approached the blue column of mist; as we got close it was almost too bright to look at.  Spencer didn’t pause, but walked right into it; at his touch the mist seemed to part from the ground; it all rushed skyward and was gone, revealing — something.

“What the fuck is that, Spence?  What am I looking at?”

“Basically, a hole.”

We were both walking around it.  “What shape is it?  Can’t make it out–”

“Right, you want it to be a sphere or something, but it keeps sliding sideways–never mind. For our purposes, it’s a hole.”

“Is it like a birth canal?”

Spencer had his patient look on. “Sure, that’s as good a metaphor as any. Why not?”

“I’m calling it the Big Space Vag.”  That got a laugh out of him, and I startled myself by joining.

“Feel better now, Bill?”

“Kinda. Suprisingly.”

He rapped me on the chest.  “C’mon, big guy, let’s haul ‘em off the bus.”

We went back to the bus and started carrying out the sleeping passengers.  I could handle the smaller ones by myself, but for the rest it was damn awkward.  Marcie didn’t care for physical labor, so she needlessly supervised while Spencer and I carried them between us one at a time and laid them down on the sand.  I told him, “Far as I’m concerned, they’re doing us as much good now as they ever did.”

“Trust me, they’ve all got a purpose.”

I turned the bus closer so its headlights would illuminate the ground in front of the Space Vag.  The giant nightmare shroud over the coast was stretching up over our heads now, blotting out any hint of the sky.

“It’s dark.”  Somehow stating the obvious provided a little comfort.

“Yeah, pretty dark from here on.  We’ve got about half an hour.  Let’s go ahead and put, say, Mitch in there and make sure it works.”

We hoisted up Mitch Endersol and, counting to three together, basically hurled him at the thing.  A little off-center.  As soon as he touched the Vag, it seemed to draw him in like a pipette drawing up blood.  A sharp snap and he was gone.

“Jesus!  Did it really stretch him out like spaghetti?  Didn’t it look that way to you, Spence?”

“Optical illusion.  Trust me, he’s right as rain.”

Fourteen unconscious loads, into the Vag.  Pitch black all around.  The wind had stopped.  It was snowing hard.  We were the only sound.

“Jesus, Spence, that’s like an eighty-degree drop.  Great, why not?  What’s next?”  My teeth were chattering; my back was killing me.

Spence pointed to the Vag, and looked at Marcie.  “Ladies first.”

For the first time since I’d known her, she was at a loss for words.  Finally she managed a smile.  “Is it warmer there?”

“Yes and no.  Come on, we’ll go together.”  He put his arm around her.

Suddenly I didn’t want to be the last person on the planet.  “W-what about me?”

Spencer spoke over his shoulder as they walked up to the Hole.  “You can follow us, or let the atmosphere freeze on top of you.”

I didn’t move, and he paused and came back to put his hand on my shoulder.  “I’ll miss it too, Man.  But in five minutes there’ll be nothing human left alive on this world.  I hope you come with us, Bill.”

So they went, and when a snowflake burned on my hand and I knew it was dry ice freezing out of the air, I followed.  Wish I’d been unconscious, like all you guys.  Yeah, you’re welcome.

Okay, you know what happened after that, and I’m sure as hell not going to try and find words to describe it.  But I hope this little journal will forestall any bitching about missing the end of the world, because you didn’t miss much.

And now, since I don’t intend to hand-letter fourteen copies of this, you can just pass it around, and then I want it back, and I don’t want any of the aforementioned bitching or moaning.  In fact, I’ll be stacking zee’s while you all read this.

Save your strength, because we’ll need it.

***

Steven Doyle was born, like Tristram Shandy, with a broken nose.  He will die.  In between, he lives in Vinings, Georgia, writes under the name Manuel Royal, and blogs about his imaginary hometown of Donnetown here: http://donnetowntoday.blogspot.com/.  Under his own name, he writes a fiction column at the Smyrna-Vinings Patch, here: http://smyrna.patch.com/columns/short-fiction.

Born and raised in the rugged Atlantic Canadian province of Nova Scotia, Mariza Dunham Gaspar sold her soul for a map of the world and some cheap plane tickets. A recent graduate of the Loyalist College photojournalism program, Mariza is finally getting to test her skills in various countries around the world. She also enjoys film, a good curry, and various woodland creatures. Mariza is currently a freelance visual journalist and artist based in her hometown city that she has fallen back in love with – Halifax, Nova Scotia.

copyright: Daniela Attard

by A. A. Garrison

Killing myself was the last on my list of fears to conquer, after Get beat up by jerks. I took to this final fear immediately after leaving the ER, still wearing my PUNCH ME YOU ASS tee-shirt.

The other me took a long six months to manufacture; the world-class art career, decades. Constructed from state-of-the-art silicone molding, and viscera leftover from Hunt and slay a wild boar, my double was remarkably lifelike, indistinguishable from myself in all manners. The exhibition was simple but effective: After a still-life drama of my effigy’s struggles, when it seemed that he would take the coward’s way, I appeared onstage and used a set of increasingly dull spoons to “kill” him, to a soundtrack of Sinead O’Connor and other early-nineties classics. Entitled, simply, Kill Yourself, it was received to great applause and sterling reviews, hailed as a highlight of my career. When I went to cross it from my fear-list, however, I was unable: I was unworthy, a charlatan, and I knew this all too well.

Thus began my cloning operation.

After completing yet another doctorate, this one in genetic engineering, I spent months studying my own cells in an effort to create a true recipient for my suicide, secretly, so no one would miss the bastard. Progress was slow, exhausting, and, ultimately, futile, though I did come away with a self-replicating, HeLa-like line of cells, which I patented and sold for no small sum. This was fortuitous, if unfulfilling, and the cells went on to spark a medical revolution, bringing genetic manipulation to the household. Cosmetics were the most affected: hair-, eye-, and skin color alteration; breast- and penile augmentation, of some consequence; nasal hair a memory. There were also cancer cures and the like, but these went overshadowed by the world’s hunger for vanity products. For all my failure, I felt a shiver of pride as I watched my cells circle the world–until they mutated and turned people into zombies, at least.

Now, this was, at first, a disaster. My cells turning their users into brain-hungry, arm-windmilling savages. Then, I saw the pictures: the zombies looked suspiciously like yours truly. Intrigued, I ventured into the war-zone streets and retrieved a specimen for study, and sure enough, the devil was, excepting an oversized phallus, identical to me in every way. I felt quite conflicted.

Despite the temptation, I released the poor fellow back into the wild and returned to studying my mutant cells, hoping for a fix. Unfortunately, my genetic tomfoolery was irreversible, as was Mother Nature’s little improvements, forcing me to stand back and watch. Meanwhile, the cells spread virally across the globe, leaving mankind in my image, and very hungry for brains (and, usually, with a terminal case of tented pants). It even extended to the wildlife, me-looking creatures alongside their human counterparts. The authorities launched several attempts at control, but this was as hopeless as my own. The infection spread faster than was polite. There were some mobs, naturally, cries for my head on a stake, pitchforks and bobbing torches, etc, but nothing came of this, with all my imitators running around. The cells had no effect on me, personally.

I did in time come to fulfill my initial, suicidal aim–many times over, in fact. Left the lone survivor of this accidental apocalypse, I got to use the Batcave-like facility necessitated by Become a superhero, where I had cached a massive armory. Fatigue-clad and in epaulets, Uzis akimbo, I roamed the cities and towns of this great nation, killing my selves in their hundreds. The first, a female me with a well-filled top, felt good; the rest, meh.

My new life is a blend of post-apocalyptic clichés: I have a dog that miraculously survived the outbreak; I travel in an armored car torn from GI Joe; my house has embrasures. My vest is extraordinarily well-stocked with bullets and grenades. I’ve gone mohawk. I swear I saw a three-fingered cowboy pushing a woman in a wheelchair, looking intent on unlit towers. I’ve gone through another create-a-cure phase or two, but I’m kind of past that now, more into searching out paradise-communities and the like.

But things aren’t entirely bad. Not all the me-zombies are violent; some are docile and herbivorous, quite house-breakable. I’ve taken a female as my wife, allowing me to literally [redacted] myself. I’ve named her Irene, and I think she understands it; she has this way of grunting twice for yes.

So, in conclusion, I would advise whatever posterity finds this memoir to settle for safer, less-satisfying means of self-destruction. I, however, have indeed earned my Kill yourself.

***

A. A. Garrison is a twenty-eight-year-old man living in the mountains of North Carolina, writing and landscaping. His fiction has appeared in various magazines, anthologies, and web journals. His website is http://synchroshock.blogspot.com.

‘iella’ is a ’89 kid, typically at the back of the class doodling, not paying any attention. Often seen smearing paint on walls, iella is dependent on caffeine and runs on lack of sleep.

copyright: Mariza Dunham Gaspar

by Ron Scheer

The town library at Prairie Creek fit into three old crates kept in a storage room where the school teacher lived. Virgil Case, the current teacher, used the books–or what was left of them–to teach reading. His young scholars cut their teeth on the likes of John Grisham, Louis L’Amour, and Reader’s Digest condensed books.

They also served for history texts, since Virgil had to explain words the kids didn’t understand. Like “martini,” “bushwhack,” and “World Series.”

Some parents disagreed with him about teaching all that old stuff. His library was about a world dead and gone, and good riddance. About as many argued that if you don’t study the past, you’re destined to repeat it, and nobody wants that. One holdout from either camp said history repeats itself anyway, so what’s the difference?

That was Crooks, a trapper who seldom came into town and didn’t have kids anyway, so nobody listened to him much. Except Virgil, who liked the man and listened to his opinions. And so he held his ground. The children of Prairie Creek would learn something about the past.

A more burning question for him was what to do with the little shiny disks in plastic cases that had been packed with the books. They were like books, but you needed some device to read them. Which was unfortunate, since the paper ones were disintegrating, and the disks looked like they’d last forever.

“I’d have throwed those out,” one of the mothers said who showed him around when he first came to Prairie Creek two years before. “But the last teacher liked to hang onto old junk. Said we’d want ’em when we got electricity again.” He’d been a believer in the Grid and that it would come back some day. She, for one, had her doubts.

Virgil’s friend Crooks had no opinion and just shrugged. Bending over the crate, he flipped through the disks with one finger, then pulled one out to study the cover. It showed a picture of a clean-shaven young man, in a hat and long coat, drawing a long-barreled revolver.

“What’s this one?” he wanted to know. Crooks had never learned much how to read.

“The True Story of Jesse James,” Virgil said, looking at the cover.

“My grandpa used to tell me about this guy.”

“Did he know him?”

“I don’t think so.”

Virgil tried to remember his history. But there was just too much of it. “Robbed trains. That’s all I know.”

“Robbed the rich and gave to the poor,” Crooks said with a little smile under his moustache. “Did some good, I would say.”

“What ever happened to him?”

Crooks didn’t know.

Virgil looked through the books for an answer. What he needed was an encyclopedia, but they were rare and expensive, if you could even find one for sale.

At the town hall, he asked the old-timers who gathered there mornings to play dominos.

“Proud Mary might know,” one of the men suggested, which caused a ripple of laughter among them.

“But I wouldn’t go asking her,” another said.

Proud Mary was a widow who’d seen two men to the grave already in her short life. For a joke, people liked to wonder aloud who would be the third.

“You want me to ask her?” Crooks said on his next trip to town, and Virgil learned that his friend already knew her well. The wink and little smile under his mustache said just how much.

Mary was a corker. She had her own cabin at the edge of town, built from what was left of an old church. She kept some laying hens and goats. Expert with a shotgun, she was rarely bothered by coyotes–or by anything else.

She not only talked loud but sang, with a resonance that made dogs howl and birds fall silent. The songs she sang were unknown to anybody. “Learned them at my mother’s knee,” she would say simply.

The schoolteacher knocking on her cabin door was apparently cause for amusement. She grandly invited him in, shooing a cat from a chair and handing him herb tea in a cup and saucer almost before he could sit down.

“Crooks said you might come by,” she said, thus accounting for the warmth of the reception. Any friend of Crooks was clearly a friend of hers.

Explaining his mission, he watched as she closed her eyes in thought. Then without a word, she hummed a little, finding a couple notes, and began to sing:

Jesse was a man, a friend to the poor,
He couldn’t see a brother suffer pain,
And with his brother Frank he robbed the Springfield bank,
And he stopped the Glendale train.

Poor Jesse had a wife, a lady all her life,
And three children, they were so brave,
But that dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard
Has laid ol’ Jesse James in his grave

She stopped, and her eyes fell on his again. “It goes on, but I can’t remember the rest.”

“So he had a brother Frank,” he said. “Was Jesse killed?”

“Sounds like foul play to me.”

“Who was Mr. Howard?”

She didn’t know.

He put down the teacup and reached into his coat pocket to show her the shiny disk in its cover.

“The True Story of Jesse James,” she read. “It must be in here. How can we get it out?”

He didn’t know.

On one of those January thaw days, the school kids–all twelve of them–were restive, and Virgil decided to forego the afternoon’s lessons and entertain them with his story.

It was only half a story really, he told them. He didn’t know it all. They didn’t care. They loved stories. So he took the disk in its case from a desk drawer and gave it to pass around as he explained what he knew of Jesse and his brother Frank.

That they robbed banks and trains excited some of the boys. The older ones had seen the locomotives pulling the cars on the railway line over in Broken Bow. That he’d left a widow and three children moved the girls.

They were taken by the mystery and kept asking to know more. He finally sent off a letter to a friend in Omaha, asking a favor. He’d heard there was a library there with old books that might have the answer.

When he didn’t get a reply, he figured the letter had gone astray. Never dependable, the mail remained more of an idea than an actual service. Passed from hand to hand, delivery of letters depended on people actually knowing where they were supposed to go. You couldn’t always count on that.

Before long, three of the children came to him with an idea for a school play. It would be about Jesse and Frank James and how they devoted their lives to helping the poor. The villain of the play would be Mr. Howard, a greedy banker. The way they’d worked it out, one day the two brothers would have a disagreement.

“We’re taking all the chances,” Frank would say in a big scene. “We should be the ones to keep the money.”

“Only a coward would do that,” Jesse tells him. “And you are a coward.”

So Frank tells Jesse he can do his own robbing from then on, and they split up.

Then in a daring raid, Jesse gets shot by Mr. Howard, the greedy banker, and as he dies in his brother’s arms, Frank has a change of heart. He ends the evil banker’s days before gently laying Jesse to his eternal rest.

It would be called “The True Story of Jesse James.”

Parts were already cast, one for each of the students, the three youngest to play Jesse’s children. There’d been a dispute over who was to take the role of Jesse himself, which was settled by a wrestling match in a muddy field behind the schoolhouse.

All went smoothly until the parents got wind of it. Then Prairie Creek split down the usual middle. History was not only bunk, some argued, but dangerous and best kept from children. Ignorant of history we are doomed to repeat it, others said, and no one wants that.

And there was Virgil in the middle.

Crooks, when he showed up in town, was no help. He just laughed and said, “Either way, this whole dust-up is just history repeating itself.”

Then a letter came from Virgil’s friend in Omaha.

She’d got her hands on a moldy book or two and found something about the James brothers. They robbed both trains and banks, but not to help the poor. Jesse had died of a gunshot, killed by a Robert Ford, a man he’d trusted. And she’d discovered the identity of Mr. Howard. It was Jesse himself. He’d taken an assumed name.

Those were the facts from history. The rest was just legend.

A little surprised, Virgil was also relieved. Given the real story, the children would decide to call off the play, and that would end all the debate.

“You sure about this?” Crooks said, when Virgil told him. “I wouldn’t recommend disappointing a kid, let alone a whole bunch of ’em.” Then he was on his way out of town back to his trapper’s cabin, leaving Virgil in his quandary.

Deciding he was surely a better judge of children than Crooks–and forgetting that Crooks had once been a child himself–Virgil gathered the kids together and told them the truth.

There were puzzled looks around the room like what he had to say was a flat-out lie. Their story of Jesse and Frank and Mr. Howard had become the truth for them. They weren’t about to budge from it.

To make their point, they changed the name of their play to “The Truest Story of Jesse James.” Their intent seemed to be to teach their teacher a lesson.

“I coulda’ told you that,” Proud Mary told him when she got the news. “Like my grandma always said, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”

Thirty-four mismatched chairs and various benches, plus something that was once a couch comprised the seating for “The Truest Story of Jesse James” when it opened in the big room at the back of town hall. The parents and older siblings of the cast arrived early to grab the best seats.

Still divided over the relative merits of history, the audience fell utterly quiet as the curtains opened on a scene of the Old West. Only a baby in the second row fussed for a while. And then even it fell silent. Virgil stood watching from the back and became aware of a presence beside him. It was Proud Mary.

Jesse–played by the boy who’d won the wrestling match–was only a fifth-grader but lived his part with the heart and soul of someone twice his size. He’d found a hat and a long coat, like the picture on the cover of the silvery disk. Mrs. James adored him with a sincerity that looked more real than pretended. With their first- and second-grade children clustered about them, they were a handsome family.

Thus, there were gasps as Jesse was shot while robbing a bank. Mr. Howard, the evil banker emptied a cardboard six-gun into the body of the fallen hero. Handkerchiefs came out as Frank rushed to his brother’s side.

Barely stifled cheers greeted the shooting of the evil banker. And at the funeral, as Frank knelt at the feet of the young widow to speak of the greatness of his brother, there was not a dry eye in the house. The debate over the merits of history had been forgotten.

“Like my grandma always said,” Proud Mary whispered in Virgil’s ear. “Never let facts get in the way of a good story.”

***

Ron Scheer reviews western fiction and movies at buddiesinthesaddle.blogspot.com. Currently at work on a book about early western writers, 1880-1915, and a glossary of early western slanguage.

Born and raised in the rugged Atlantic Canadian province of Nova Scotia, Mariza Dunham Gaspar sold her soul for a map of the world and some cheap plane tickets. A recent graduate of the Loyalist College photojournalism program, Mariza is finally getting to test her skills in various countries around the world. She also enjoys film, a good curry, and various woodland creatures. Mariza is currently a freelance visual journalist and artist based in her hometown city that she has fallen back in love with – Halifax, Nova Scotia.