Flash! Far From Dubrovnik and Ypsilanti (The_MM_Fiction_Throwdown)

Things to do:
Get up

Start dating again
Draw more
Regret Nothing
Quit smoking
Acid

Squelch the Animal
Find new friends
Get a girlfriend

Punch a fucking mountain
Spend less money on alcohol
be more penitential

get some stylish new friends/clothes
Seren Gibson
become a member of the British Drinking Team
get rich or die trying
my homework
stirrup some Jambalaya for tomorrow

survive
stop being such an old nark
Write as. many. short. stories. as. possible.

go back to bed

As many short stories today as possible:

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Tam
She sits on her stomach, facing the blank wall where the ceramic angels sit on the red oak cabinet, listening to the records playing loudly down both the hall and stairs. Her grandmother's house. That big ole house, riotous with music until the song ends and the record only spins out popclicks and empty silence. Soon she will scootch up and listen to the floorboards creak beneath her barefeet, as she returns downstairs to flip it back over to Side A, again.
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Nigel

“Do I look okay?”

“Yes. That is exactly how you look. You know you're going bald though, right?”

“You can shut it brother.”

“Did you know that men with full heads of hair earn on average 17 percent more income than their bald coequals?”

“I did not know that, no.”

“Perhaps it is because bald men like you are statistically less informed than men with full heads of gorgeous hair like me.”

He scowls into his reflection and tremblingly finishes the business with the tie, a flourished bloom, carefully centered.

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Ashbery
Still half in the dream John carries the glass of bedside water across the room, his arm half raised before him trudging Christlike steps from one station to the other, the typewriter, where he plumps dumbly into the stool and blinks wet eyes at the sunlight piercing the southern window. His spindly white arthritic knuckles hover over their instrument. The creative rivercourse run through it's earthy dollop of intrinsic muses, thus enters the final valley: Rimbaud translations...
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Dude
The torrent of data a nearly suffocating stream, he peels through 300- 400 pages of code, lines and lines not filled with information so much as just an influx gush. He scours strafes and scowls. The night is anxious and shaky, but affords it's own complex of distractions. He checks his emails, his forum feeds and Facebook, dispatches a witty exchange in an ongoing text war with a girl in Sierra Vista he is already regretting and then giving up to focal paralysis. He needs a cigarette break. Doorslide, lighterclick, pace. Digits stream. His brain juggles source bundles, frustrated with it's own diminishing rate of connective return at this late hour. Drag puff. Drag puff. Limited memory capacity. “Hafta work more on that tomorrow,” he mumbles, his throat rusty with phlegm and disuse. The smoke out and he grabs a soda before heading back to the computer concave for one final cognitive burst before bed, slightly refreshed but still tired of studying the old codes with new insight tonight.
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Anja

We spend the night admidst the dew of the rose garden, drooping foxgloves gleaming as they pet your barearms, my pants burning like the sun I recite “poems” for you, actually restless assortment of song lyrics since you don't know the language that well anyway, it's just about the synchronicity of sounds in the end. The grassblades whispering like my fingers, your hand is thrust warm and forceful in mine. "Come takk me homes." The hair stands up on the back of my neck and I dizzy sway, our bodies hum and then we reach the stoop where the men sit. They sit at all hours, or squat, smoking and spitting, the guardians of the immigrant apartments, bored and jobless, watching. They say something to you gruffly. I lower my eyes and you respond, not stopping, not letting go of my hand, pulling.

"Is it okay?" I ask, once safely inside the enclosure.

"Yes," you say, "I tells them we are lookin' at flowers." Your smile is the moon.

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RMD

The corner of the bedside Gideon's folded in onto Ezekiel, “And I will drive you out of the midst of the city, and into the hands of strangers, and there inflict judgment upon you” I lay it down on my chest where I just woke up groaning, my head spinning a vague thread of horrendous memories into a blanket of dark nothingness. Who am I tonight? This abject hotel room tells me nothing. I stare at the spinning ceiling awhile, waiting to remember and half hoping nothing will happen to remind me.

Across town, the old man pages his orderly one last time, in vain.

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TaSean
TaSean rushes to the sidelines and grabs the phone, dropping his helmet to the turf. Before it even hits the ground his entire world has changed. He is a father.
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April

She was right to snap at him, she thought. It made him stop. Still, it made her feel bad to scold him, like a scared balked puppy his eyes got all huge and guilty. For a moment they both sat there, adjusting themselves and breathing deeply. The protestation still ringing in both their heads: “You're my brother's friend”

She pulled the buttons back into place, shyly shielding once again the delicious curve of her warm, succulent breasts.

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Ray
2:01 am- Ray happily sluffed out of the fraternal lodge at closing time and – oh. my. dear. lord. this place'll freeze yer butt off!

Just enough light to find his car, he caught himself wondering once again what it must be like to work in an insurance office. Shit. An unanswerable question, not because it couldn't be answered, but because it shouldn't be. She worked at an insurance office, and every time he passed one the same baleful lineage of thoughts genuflected in his subconscious, crippling him. There she was, rail rail thin, pa-paper thin, b-b-b, and see, now he's stuttering again too.

She hated his stuttering.

2:02 am- Ray fell into the car feeling ugly, begrudged, drunk and alone. You can drink all night but you can't outrun sorrow.
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Cecily
She heard them come in. She heard them cross the apartment and close the door behind them. Thinking that would be the end of it she turned over on her side and returned her attention to reviewing the ubiquitous rehash of tweets from the week. Then the bed started squeaking a bit. She stopped and waited, listening intently. The squeaking turned into wall-shaking, and the headboard started knocking against their shared wall. Cecily reached for her headphones and opened up iTunes. The moaning and screaming started just as she hit play on Justin Bieber. This might be inappropriate, she thought.
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Jessie

“Dad wassa matter?” Silence. “Wassa matter Dad?” Crickets. “DAD!”

“You serve two tours in Afghanistan. Then I can tell you.”

The kid goes quiet, legitimately considering it. Fuck, thinks Dad. Change the year and the country and I've turned into my Father.

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Gerald

On a bike ride in Iceland Gerald appreciates the diverse seasonal and colored blooms of the highwayside weeds. Astonishing sights alongside, the meeklings thirsting towards the chilly source sun.

A straight road, but it is a curved path he must take, for frost heaves. To the engagement dinner across the valley for the brother and the brother's fiance who he doesn't much like because they're so very different!