Glimpses of Flickering Madness

"Glimpses of Flickering Madness"

A short story

Gary Baker, August 2016

We sat in the room on the side of thought, the cushions of the sofa like clouds as we listened to the pair in the other room. They were arguing again; as always.

“...and so you fucking dare to…”

I pulled a pillow to my face and pretended to suffocate myself with it. If I wasn’t so god damned high, it would have been like witnessing a murder in slow motion. Thankfully by then the pints had already begun to work with the smoke and… well things just got interestingly numb.

“...like I give a shit about your…”

The statue beside me, the girl made of stone and crisp linens, grated her cheeks to grace my eyes with her own. Should we leave? She mouthed. Colors swirled as I watched the television that had cut to static, where I swore I could see the pair in the other room glaring back through the fuzzy black and white ants.

“...oh, yeah, like that makes anything better…”

“...if you’d stop being such a bitch about…”

I shook my head and took another swig of the hard stuff, the burn no longer searing as much as it once had, the nausea no longer as fluid at my tonsils. By then I had simply become a pool of atoms and electrons vibrating along to the beat of distant stars. As I watched his eyes contort into a scowl on the static I felt my face begin to burn.

I heard a nasty slap and my eyes went wide. The statue beside me and I suddenly watched the atoms of air between ourselves and the far wall, facing perpendicular to the arguing going on just meters away. I cringed as tears reached out from my eyelids and traversed across the hilly expanses of my cheeks. I shook. My atoms shook. The sofa wilted beneath me and the flat plane of cushion beneath my hand curled into stone fingers overlapping my own as the statue surged with emotion that I could taste.

Now can we leave? She thought into my mind.

I could have wept again, the darkness in the other room tainting my own miasma until I could hardly decipher between the angry reds and the blooming pinks. Yet it was when the ceruleans and azures darkened to charcoals and oblivion that I shuddered and took her stony hand in my own. I nodded. Yes. We would leave soon.

“...how about I do it again, then? How about I give you something to…”

Thunder came again and a squeal came like a kitten whose claw had gotten stuck in the carpet as panic cut deep. A bustle came like the clatter of winds knocking furniture around in a man-size twister and the statue led the way through the door. I barely kept up, stumbling as I went to catch the key on the wall. I missed it and the crackle of steel hitting hardwood floor echoed out to me as though through a turbine engine fan.

“...you fucking like that?! You want some fucking more?!...”

We raced through tall grass with wispy tendrils of Earth’s awe becoming mist-like in our vibrations. Trees reached to hold us, to console us, to hide us from the anger that tore out after us as we ran into the oblivious darkness. I could feel the motherly love of the planet reaching out to help us, her roots shifting to trip the bastard as it’s radiating heat came for us.

Cool air clung to my skin and I swore I felt droplets of rain…

...until I realized that they were coming from the statue’s face ahead as she pulled me deeper into the brush, as we fled deeper and deeper into the hilly expanse of trees and saving wildlife. Brine soaked with incredible washes of sadness and anger and vibrations of hopelessness all imbued within tiny sparkling droplets of saline and water.

But still a torrent of rage came after us.

We rushed headlong into the abyss, just aware enough to keep from being pulled too closely by the friends of bark and sap, just aware enough to avoid being buried by soil that would have loved to embrace us six feet under with loving caresses to our lungs and veins and atomic resonations.

Why us? The wonderful figure of stone and life echoed into my thoughts. Why did they have to live with us?

I slowed and put a hand to my lips so I could think. It made a circuit which then allowed my thoughts to run as they should, as my heaving, thrumming muscles tried to focus on staying alive, as they tried to focus on anything but not simply dying. It was bad enough that I was on the verge of accepting the reality I had never known and letting the vibrations of distant stars wash me into ripples of universal energy again. All it would have taken was a simple accepting thought toward it.

What’s wrong? She asked. Is he still following us?

I blinked. He was following us? I swore it had only been the anger, I swore it had merely been the rage, the abuse, that had sought us out. I swore it had been echoes of reverberating fear which had wanted to sink it’s visceral teeth into our vibrations. I never would have guessed the human form of it all had been the beastial echo that kept our tails.

My throat seemed to shrink back, releasing itself from my control, and pressed my air out with vibrations I seemed to be creating. “I,” there was a moment where I lost myself in the woods overhead, where the dark branches seemed to create the very same appearance as neurons in the brain, and I was drawn to set myself in the soft, moist soil. “I forgot why we were running.”

She looked back the way we had come and seemed to think on things I could only wish to comprehend. Her eyes could have hidden the light of entire galaxies, and I couldn’t so much as pretend to feel her thoughts. So do you think we’re safe?

I rolled my face toward her and let an ant crawl along my forehead. “For now I think we are…” I blinked and tried to focus, my train of thought derailing as fast as it could get going again, “...going to be okay.”

With a nod, she set herself onto her knees beside me, her dress soaking up some of the mud beneath us as we fought to break reality and make things better again.

“...going to be okay…”

Tears welled up in her eyes and I winced. Where was the wonderful work of art that I had gotten to know over the last several years? Here sat the saddest statue of sandstone and stardust that had ever been formed from the clay of cosmic awe, and all I could do was lay on my back in the mud and watch as nausea returned.

God, you're high. Your eyes are bloodshot, she shook her head and sighed, so so bloodshot right now. Her lips moved, but I barely heard them as my head began to throb with renewed vigor. She watched me as I rolled away to finally let out the pent up alcohol, then reached forward to wipe my face with the sleeve of her sweater as I pulled forward onto my knees.

“What… what happened back there? For real?” I choked at last. The girl closed her eyes most of the way and watched me in curiously indecipherable expressions.

“You,” her voice struck my ears with the soft suddenness of a cello in the dark. Sadness threatened to overtake me by the tremors alone. “You mean you…?”

I sighed as the high finally seemed on the verge of ending. “Sort of. I was lucid enough to get the gist… but what caused it?”

Tears welled up in her eyes once more and she leaned forward to hold me as dearly as anyone had ever been held. Her arms were like extensions of the universe itself, as comforting as a mother and as wonderful as life itself usually was. “I wish I knew…” she moaned with new echoes of the chaos lain within, and her face pressed deeper into my shoulder, “they came home while we were already stoned off our asses and…” she shook violently, her stony figure becoming more and more human with every passing second.

I nodded and rest my cheek on the top of her head, “and he hit her...I remember that much.”

Suddenly her eyes sought my own and she held me in the most magnanimous glare that I could imagine possible. Cerulean disks seemed to hold the universe within their center, and somewhere within those lay our future together. “Can we go?” I knew what she meant, but I stammered too long for her to understand, “I want to move. Now. Let’s just take what we can and run. We don’t need much, I promise.”

With a grim sigh I reached out and took her hand in my own. She once was a statue as stoic as the cosmos, and yet just then I felt her form begin to crumble at the edges, her base shattered by what we had just escaped, by the chaos of what she wouldn’t soon forget. All I could say to her was “yes” as the moonlight traced our outlines in the woodland mud and soil. “Of course, dear.”

Tendrils of Chaos

“Tendrils of Chaos”

a short story

Gary Baker, early 2016

Smoke wafted like tendrils of some deific tentacle from the microscopic sea of a lit cigarette set aside in an abandoned ashtray on the brass countertop. “Shit, man,” choked Gril as he set down a thick nine-millimeter with  metallic clunk. His eyes started watering, and his cheeks warmed into a deep red even as he reached out and retook the burning tobacco. “Now that is some potent shit, if you ask me.”

Oria scowled, offended, and swiped the cig from the other man. He took a long draw and held it for a count of seven before exhaling, eyes closed, through the nose like a bipedal ape-like dragon. “Trust me, Gril, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Finally Gril was able to unclench his teeth and pryed open his eyes again, to look his greater with increased respect. “We gonna go for another round?”

“Hell yes, my friend. Hellz yes.”

Oria reached forward and grabbed the thin man by the wrists, fingers lacing around his leather sleeves, painfully pushing the steel zippers into his skin. On cue to his humming, the room seemed to glow, the air thickened, and the incessant ticking of the chess-timer slowed. Red lights tocking back and forth on the “we’re open” sign hesitatingly became one-sided, the tufts of smoke ceased to rise, and a barmaid wearing black fishnets purposefully making her way toward them stopped in her tracks, slowly making that last step. Her booted foot came down like falling rain, then slowed to a feather’s fall, and finally simply ceased to move less than a centimeter from the wood-panelled flooring.

Gril wanted to look about, but felt the pressure of the air around him as though he were encased in solid glass. He couldn’t breathe. His lungs scrapped within him, trying to break out and suck in whatever happened to be there, be it oxygen, formaldehyde or even liquid water. All he knew was that his lungs wanted air like the moon wants water. It felt like he was creating a solid block of cold, hard ice deep inside of himself and he could do nothing about it.

Eyes wide, he looked to Oria, smiling like the devil he was and blinked. Once. Twice. Three times.

Cue given, the man clenched harder, digging his nails into Gril’s wrists as though he were trying to kill him, blood began to seep out and around the man’s dull nails, and, finally, the smoke began to descend just as quickly as the barmaid’s boot began to rise and move back to where she’d previously been.

Gril wanted to moan, his testicles felt like someone was massaging him where it truly counted, and the air began to move within him like a living being, forcing open his lungs to flow out like cool liquids going in the wrong direction. He could feel the different coils that the air had made on the way in begin to form again and shift back toward his teeth and away from the sponginess of his lungs. He felt the tingling sensation of the electric zap that he’d been given when the cigarette had been initially picked up, but in the opposite direction. The gust of air that had been loosed when Oria had opened the window hit him like a fist from the wrong side, moving toward the window as though out into space, and the scent of chimichanga’s from the kitchen wafted back to his nose once again.

It was tantalizing to say the least. His muscles contracted instinctually at the point when he’d picked up the martini glass on his table, and he watched as the glass moved as though by his hand again. Suddenly warm liquids shifted up and out, flowing through his throat and across his tongue like before. Again his gums burned as the alcohol coated his teeth and he watched it all pour into the salted glass as if watching a POV video of a man drinking a manhattan in reverse.

The glass then moved out and down to the counter between the two men and settled beside the ashtray where the now just-lit length of tobacco rest with a full arm of white and only partial burn marks. Oria grinned and the coin he’d flipped into the air only moments ago, despite the ages since he’d released it, tumbled high again from far behind himself and slowly, ever so slowly, revolved until it held in the place he’d had it before picking it up to flip it in the first place.

The cigarette then lifted from the tray, as with a lighter tucked into Oria’s breast pocket, and met each other in the middle where the embers seemed to spark a flame that then simply ceased to exist, causing the smoke to end in a flash leaving the paper and cut leaves as burnless as water.

Oria grinned at Gril and let go at long last. Instantly the world started up again, the man drinking rum alone while failingly hitting on the barmaid brought his hand back down to her bottom only to receive the same slap that Gril had seen, now, many times over. The girl in high heels and a mini skirt who’d come here with her boyfriend again found herself slipping on the unseen, fallen ‘wet floor’ sign, and despite the expectation of it, Gril found himself once again stunned at the kid’s ability to catch her mid-fall. Again she turned to the young man and planted a wet kiss in gratitude, not noticing as the drunk at the bar leaned back to check out her thighs.

The headache Gril had gotten was gone, as was the intense high that he got from the trip each time. He felt the urge for a smoke rise, and Oria whipped out both in perfect response, as though they’d been thinking the same thing.

“Want some blow?”

That was different.

Gril hesitated, eying the white length warily. “Um,” he breathed, “sure, why not?”

He reached out, grabbed the white roll, already lit, and brought it to his lips to take in a long draw. It was worse than he’d expected, the sensation nearly killing him in the process of going in. He felt his heart race for several moments and his ears pop when he thought the world had become a hallucination. Worried, he reached out and grabbed Oria’s wrists and fought to speak. Blow was not his thing. Not in a smokable form, at least.

“End. This.” He choked.

Complying immediately, Oria wrapped his long fingers around Gril’s wrists again and the chemicals came out and back into the blunt, recombined into one log of paper and powder, then unlit itself and made it’s way back into Oria’s pocket. Like a cat, Oria watched Gril from across the counter as he felt the high increase despite the loss of the chemicals.

Gril slapped himself loudly, feeling the strike of icy fingers hit his soft, warm cheeks, and again felt the need to stare as the drunk groped the unsuspecting barmaid, or the man catch his date before she could crack her head open on the hardwood floor panels.

The high increased still, as though, despite the absense of chemicals, his mind wanted nothing more than to obey to what it had initially been prepared to see and feel. His fingers went slightly numb, his throat tightened, his pupils dialated, and his nostrils went cool as his breath chilled somehow.

“Here,” Oria chuckled, “let me get that for you.” He reached forward with the cigarette again, lit and ready as it had been before, and again Gril felt himself complying without objection.

He brought it to his lips, drew, and exhaled softly to feel the tingling numbness overtake him and add in to the otherwise increasing high. Suddenly he could feel the burn of the alcohol overtake his tongue and gums again and stared with wild wonder as though the Manhattan was about to lift into the air and pour itself into his open mouth.

It didn’t, but that wasn’t the point, either.

“What,” he stammered, “what is this?”

Oria shook his head laughingly, and stroked his sideburns with a stray fingertip. “Just you wait, my friend. It gets better.”

Gril looked up with incredulous eyes. “How?”

The man motioned toward the drink, still full and still very much untouched. “Take a sip and you’ll find out.”

So he did. He brought the bourbon and cherry to taste-moistened lips and felt the familiar loving burn begin to take him anew. His tongue warmed as it coursed across to his tonsils until at last Gril swallowed and felt that same searing intelligible electric heat as it made it’s way down.

Oria grinned like the cheshire, and once again grabbed Gril’s wrists.

The feeling was as nauseating as it had been the first time, but when it had ended he felt both the high of the blow, with the numbness of both singular drinks that were actually the same one, as well as the mental clarity brought on by the number of cigarettes that he’d had, without lighting more than one.

A tear made it’s way down his cheek and onto the countertop with a near-inaudible splish and again the drunk snuck his dirty fingers out and onto the plump flesh of the barmaid’s shorts. Again Gril watched with horrendous awe as the young man caught his date. Again he felt the need for a smoke increase within and could predict the precise moment when Oria would whip both items out and around, when the smoke would begin and just how the tuft would rise and shift about when Oria opened the window to avoid detection.

“God, man,” he breathed aloud, “this is intense.” He looked to the curator of all this with a smirk-turned-sour, “have you ever done this before?” He looked around, at the folks moving passed on the street outside, at the barmaid making her way toward them with heavy footsteps, to tell them to stop smoking inside, at the way the drunk heaved down another pint. It was all so surreal. Colors seemed to shift and warp, smells seemed to combine and alter each other, tastes ceased to be while overpowering his mouth in the same thought, and his pulse quickened.

Oria smirked in response but said nothing. He merely tucked his hands away where Gril could not reach, and kept the burning cigarette perked in his pursed lips, letting the smoke fray and splay out in the incoming breeze. He exhaled off to the side without taking away the tobacco, and shrugged.

Gril blinked and suddenly maroon flecks lay silent off to the side, the bar completely gone, and his gaze now looked where a limp arm wilted like an overheated rose trimming, adding more crimson coalescing into one greater pool with the continued ticking of the clock. The longer Gril looked, the more he started to realize that the bloodied arm he was staring at, the one extending from beneath his prone form, lain awkwardly on a glorious wooden floor, was his own.

He turned his head in shock, the pain coming in tides of greater and greater agony, his senses blaring, his nerves undone by the burn he couldn’t comprehend. What happened? What was all this? What had happened to the bar? How had he gotten here? He winced as the pain roared within what few portions of himself had yet to go numb, and he shook for a moment with the electric insanity writhing under his skin.

Then he glimpsed Oria smoking a cigarette while leaning against the balustrade of a balcony just outside. “See, the thing about time,” Oria took a drag almost ending the drug, then the cigarette nauseatingly burned in reverse to become a full piece again, “is that it moves whether you are there for it or not, you dig?”

Gril tried to sit up, but found his torso unwilling to comply. He rolled in his mind about the thrum of the hot, endless horror that had become his limbs. It took all his concentration to simply focus on Oria’s words.

The dark shadowed man paced over, his hands hidden behind his back. “I feel kinda bad, actually,” he mused as though talking to a failing student, “here you are with absolutely no clue as to what you did,” Oria paused looming directly over Gril and pulled his hands out from behind his back. In his hands were a pair of bloodied steak knives. “And yet, what would I be if not consistent? You’re not exactly the first to do this, I should mention.”

Gril panicked. He raged within and fought to move, fought to be free of this torment, fought to get out and away and to live. His whimpers must have done something to the man who almost seemed to dissolve with the shadows at the peripherals, for he stooped low and cocked his head to the side.

“What did you do?” Oria asked. “Is that what you’re trying to say?” He paused a moment as Gril nodded violently. “Well I guess cutting out your tongue might have been a bit much...huh.” He shrugged. “Fine. You were too curious. You found out my secret and threatened to expose me. You found out how…” the impossibly-calm man looked to his fingertips and the cigarette rebloomed and unlit itself, then moved to his ear of it’s own accord to rest there quietly, “...how I do this.” He turned back to Gril and winced. “It’s not magic, that’s for sure, but for me to remain a god no one must ever survive to tell anyone else. That means you, too, Gril. You discovered my secret and now you must pay for it.”

The bastard had the nerve to caress Gril’s cheek absently as one might with a loved one. “You were so close, Gril. We could have been lovers. We could have ruled the universe together. But… as they say: curiosity killed the cat.” With that, the blade in Oria’s right fist struck to the hilt and Gril’s world went dark.

The Drive

"The Drive"

a short story

Gary Baker, January 2016

Brendan pushed the pedal and set them surging forward as Peal Jam came on under the dim roar of wind tearing through the open windows. "It's like this, kid," he gestured with his shift-hand while keeping the other loosely on twelve o'clock on the wheel, "how long's it been? What? A decade?"

The silence led on long enough that the passenger, sitting awkwardly in his would-be coffin, eventually mumbled "Nine years, three months, se-" with the speed of a viper Brendan backhanded the man.

"Right. There." Brendan pointed. "Right fucking there." He reached down onto Carl's side of the car and pulled a can of lager from the paper grocery bag there. He shook it vigorously and then held it out for the passenger.

Carl look askance, and took it with gingerly trepidation. "You want to drink? While driving?"

The driver shot a glance at his companion. "No," he said, "I want you to drink, while I drive."

"Whatever, man." Carl looked sideways out over the passing dunes to his right. The sky was breaking into a bright clear azure the longer they sped on.

"Again!" Brendan exclaimed. He slapped his palms onto the wheel as though tapping out a heavy-rhythmic drum solo from the stone ages. "What are you doing? Right now. What the fuck are you doing, bro?"

Carl shrugged. "Im... waiting for the beer to settle?"

"Fucking exactly." The driver shifted into a higher gear and the roar of the wind grew as they broke eighty. "Fucking. Wonderful. You just proved my point, bro. Right fucking there, you just did."

The highway began to veer slightly to the left, but Brendan just pressed on with the needle rising as slowly as the clouds passed by overhead. Dunes meshed with patches of grass and stones, occasionally broken by a thin ripple in the terrain where a dry creek bed once existed.

Carl finally shrugged. "Man if I open this now, the whole thing will spray me in the face. Do you want that to happen? Do you want your car all messed up with beer?"

Brendan smiled, his point having been made without the effort he had expected. "Bro that is your problem. You forgot how to take a risk. You forgot what it was like to just dive in and see what happens."

"And the beer?"

The driver shrugged. "It's a metaphor, bro. Fuckin wait if you want to, that's entirely up to you, but you'll never experience life by waiting. You won't get to taste the sweet relief that comes from expecting the worst," he took the beer from Carl's hand and popped it open without holding the wheel for the time it took. Amazingly nothing happened. Brendan gave his companion a knowing look as he handed it back. "...and getting the best."

Carl took a swig and leaned an arm out the window. "Well you timed that perfectly, you smug bastard. You knew it had been long enough not to worry."

"Did I?"

"Why would you do it, otherwise? If that had shot you in the face... while we are speeding, I might add...."

Brendan nodded. "Proving a point, bro."

"And this," Carl tossed back another swallow, "all of this. It was all because I'm not dating yet?"

Brendan kept his eyes forward, set his jaw, and kicked the car into the next gear up. In a blink they had broken into the triple digits, and the driver gripped the wheel with a new sense of security. They whipped passed dunes as if they were blades of grass, the whole desert turning fast into a blur in every direction but the general areas ahead of them

"It's been ten fucking years, man. You hear that?" The passenger took a swig that ended the can, threw it out the window where it disappeared as though it'd disintegrated into oblivion, then reached down and took out another. It was open before Carl's hand even had it out the bag. He took a long swallow, and wiped the drippings of his chin onto his sleeve. "Tabetha and I..." he looked long out the right hand window as if to try and understand the blurs he was seeing. "We were perfect together, man. We had it all."

He looked over to Brendan fiercely. "And you know what happened? It ended. It fucking ended. Just like that. Just like everything else. My life was ruined." He took another long drink and ended the can, sending it to the same fate as it's predecessor. Carl grew quiet and seemed to shrink in on himself. "And it was all because love doesn't exist, man. It never did."

Brendan went to speak but Carl cut him off before the driver could get a word out. "No. It. Didn't. It doesn't. It's all just molecules and hormones and bullshit energies at the atomic level that make this fucked-up contraption," he swung his finger about his ear, seeming to point to his head in general, "think that the concept of love exists." He spat out the window angrily. "But it doesn't. How could it, man? Tabby and I... goddamn, man, we.... If love really does exist, then why did she and I fail? How can something last for so goddamn long and not have some element of truth to it?"

Brendan waited. When he was positive Carl wanted an answer, he shifted down and brought them back down to one-ten. "What if it did?"

"What? Have some element of truth?"

Brendan nodded. Incubus began to play from the speakers, the song titled 'Agoraphobia', and the driver reached over to turn it up.

Carl seemed not to notice the music. "Fuck man, what if you're right?" He shook his head slowly, staring out at nothing in particular. "Man, that would mean that love can die. Man how fucked up is that? I mean, you always hear of it acting like a virus or something, but... but what if it actually is a virus or something, and we just haven't discovered it yet? What if being in love is just being mutually affected by the same strain of a malevolent nonliving organism that plagues most of humanity?"

He looked up suddenly. "What if love isn't actually that common, and we only think it is, because we are unaware of it's viral nature?" The passenger reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of brown cigarettes and a lighter, then offered one to Brendan. "Want a light?" Brendan took the stick and let Carl light it, then took a drag as the passenger did the same.

Carl shook the lighter to cool it, then thrust it back into his breast pocket and let his arm dangle out the window. "No, but seriously, man: this whole love thing is as fucked up as the world in which we live. Think about it. If it really is a not-so-common virus strain, then think about how many relationships are built on the lie that our species constructed entirely by itself? Think about how that would change things, man, were we to discover how to see it? To learn how to discern one strain from another." He took a long drag and tapped the ashes to the wind. "I mean, then loneliness: that shit would be nothing more than our brains crying about being addicted to the affects of a virus that we barely understand! Think of the drugs you could concoct to counteract that!"

Brendan shifted again and took them back down to the double-digits. "It'd be one hell of a realization, bro."

"Yeah it would. That's what I'm saying, too, man."

"So what are you going to do about it?" Brendan leaned back in his seat and relaxed as the road turned perfectly straight for as far as they could see.

Carl cursed, hitting the doorframe with his right fist. "Goddamn you, man. All I want to do is mourn over the loss of Tabetha, but here you got me convinced that I just happened to eliminate the virus within me right when I learned she had cheated, man. All I want is to fucking let myself go and to turn to dust and shit, and let this life be over with, but now I can't help but wonder if maybe, just maybe, my strain mutated to fit the needs of another strain, instead."

Brendan smiled, and inhaled deeply through the cigarette. He breathed out like a beast from hell, letting the smoke slowly filter out of his lips to be drawn out into the desert by the raging torrents of winds that fought the car with every mile. "Wanna try that beer trick again?"

Carl's fist struck Brendan's right arm loosely. "How 'bout you just find us a bar in the next town, up, eh?"

"Are you going to do some flirting this time?" Brendan asked.

The passenger glared. "What's that supposed to mean?"

The driver shrugged, "I dunno, bro, just that last time you started bawling about-"

"Fuck you." Carl drew on his cigarette again and crossed his arms, "but yeah, I'll fucking flirt my bloody heart out. I'll flirt so hard, that girl's strain won't know heads from tails."

Brendan looked cross at his companion. "Bro, don't force things, alright? You know the rules. We go in, buy some beer, check out the babes, and hope like hell that we both go home to get laid tonight." He lifted a hand, pointer finger held out scoldingly, "and under no circumstance are we to-"

"Yeah, yeah, man. I get it." Carl mocked. "Under no circumstance am I to talk about Tabetha or what she did to me by fucking my-"

Brendan slapped the passenger again, right across the jaw. "I fucking said no, bro. Henceforth there will be no mention of exes; by either of us. Ever. Again. Capiche?"

Carl dashed away the last of his ashes and reached through the window to put the stub out on the mirror-housing. "Yeah, yeah, just get us to a bar where we can find some babes who aren't looking to get married and shit."

Brendan smiled, taking the car into a higher gear once more, sending them back into the triple-digits. "Fucking told you I could get you over her, bro."

The Drowning Man

“The Drowning Man”

a short story

Gary Baker, October 2013

The date was August seventeenth, two-thousand and twenty, and I walked the pier leading out over the lake, knowing that I had a major problem. This was the second time this month, the seventh this year, and had accumulated into who knew how many after what, three years?

And that was just it: three years had officially passed, today, almost to the exact hour, where the sun so high in the sky cast deep rays into the crystalline waters. Down there, amidst the rippling molecules, at the bottom where fish and weeds could clearly be seen living their lives, I had lain for little more than four minutes without breathing.

I know, that seems like a lot, but hear me out, alright? This is a confession, after all.

You see, I had gone out for a swim that day, three years back, but had misstepped my dive and slammed my right temple on the edge of the redwood planks on my way in. I had been so cocky then, that I just assumed doing a full cartwheel off the end to hurtle myself in feet first would be a good idea.

Tablets, part 2

"Tablets"

a short story

Gary Baker, July 2013

(part 2 of 2)

It was near-instantaneous after that, as his reality twisted in an unexpected direction. He felt annoyance boil up at how the streets had been abandoned, yet people lived on them nonetheless. The city didn’t care for them, which was hilarious, but maddening in that they left the poor to their own devices only to crumble and burn out like lichen in the pyres of a long-since-used hearth.

He felt the thrill of rising anger as these annoyances drove him into red-faced mumbling about each thing that caught his attention.

He watched flies flit about, wanting to stop them from buzzing, their incessant noise grinding, berating, drilling deep into his head. Sure he didn’t have any headache just then, but did that give the pests an excuse to make all that racket? People walking the streets at near-midnight beyond the alley passed by without even noticing, but why didn’t they come down this way? Were they avoiding him? Were they too good to come down this way? Did they think they were too prim and proper to venture down here and risk what only they could assume would be a mugging? Did they not believe that he, a businessman from the upper reaches of society, deserved to be down here with the scum of the earth?

Well fuck them. Fuck them all. What good are those that are too afraid to do anything of worth or risk? Sissies, every last one of them. Fucking pansies. Piece-of-shit pussies, too good for this alleyway.

Tablets, part 1

“Tablets”

a short story

Gary Baker, July 2013

(part 1 of 2)

Alright,” said the shaggy thin man through lips pursed around a thin cigarette. “Alrightalrightalright. Here.” He pushed a hand toward a well dressed businessman sitting against the brick wall in the midnight alley beside him and dropped a gray tablet into his hand as he reached for it. Seeing the speculative look on the businessman’s face, the shaggy man nodded, “the ‘calmer’. We call it ‘le neutral’, don’ever take s’m’others withou wonna these in between.”

The businessman, audibly referring to himself as ‘Cookie’ for the purposes of this meeting, looked to the two quiet men on the cement next to Shaggy. One watched him like a hawk from mascara-lined eyes and piercing-riddled features, while the other seemed entranced in his near-empty bottle of low-grade vodka, would-be grout-cleaner trickling down his chin to seep into the pores of his ragged coat.

Vasher, Savior of Children

“Vasher, Savior of Children”

a short story 

Gary Baker, April 2012

[final revision: December, 2012]

The glass was empty. It was fucking empty and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Not even a single drop of anything could have deemed this container "x-percent" full. No, every last person who viewed it had to look at it as being one-hundred percent empty, and no one would be able to disagree.

Why the hell was this piece of glass shaped into a skinny skyward-arcing dome, and not then filled with something? It wasn't so much the need of a substance within the confines of this object but, rather, the prospect that no matter how he were to describe this scene he would be forced to look at it negatively. But why the hell must he, anyways? Could he not claim that it was more than one-hundred percent full of nothing? or maybe that it was full of air?

Sighing, Vasher set down the multi-dimensional mug with a loud clunk as the thick base contacted the brass countertop.