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The Substitution ParadigmThe Substitution Paradigm

Ramu came up to our table. Glaring at me, he said, “You either order something or get out.”
I glanced away from the threat, and turned to Raghav. A single drop of sweat was running down his brow. Ramu saw that too and identifying his prey, he sprung.

Swinging around, he faced Raghav, “Order something or get out.”

Then Ramu just stood there. It was not as if we had rehearsed it before hand, but he knew. He knew that my co-occupants generally folded in the first round. Only the stout made it to second level, but they too buckled under Ramu’s relentless gaze.

I always had a policy of n

Down By The SchoolyardThere is a rather cliched phrase that states that some people live double lives. I have always found that to be an intensely misleading statement and I guess you can call it a bit of a pet peeve of mine. No one leads "double lives", they just lead fucking lives. That those lives are more complex that the singular one-track existence of lesser creatures shouldn't be a matter of duplicity, but of common sense. No one is exactly who they seem to be.

Julio is one of those who they would later say lived a double life, but it is no more true for him than anyone else. The difference in this case is that there are two of him, rather than one.

Perha

i think we've got it bad.the long dirty road has wheels printed into it and buildings jutting from its sides, cars stopping completely, submissive to all the too-bright light. it's freezing but i feel okay, i feel whole. i feel like i could step outside of myself and the numbness of it all wouldn't let anything touch me. the essence of me. the idea of me.

you wait for me under the street signs with your heeled shoes and too much black smeared around your eyes. it makes you look sad but maybe you want to look sad i don't really know. your hugs feel like a mother's. we're going to a party, some great musician's with golden toilets in his loft that likes prostituted gi

Demons are Smarter Than YouThe mist obediently hovers within the binding circle, coming once more and tamely to my call. How raucous it was when first I summoned it! How loudly it roared its name to the ceiling—how silent were the heavens that night. But now it is silent when it arrives, as silent as the heavens when I call, for I have bade it so. With it comes the sulfurous reek of its home and its own pets—a pair of tiny bat-winged imps no larger than my hand—and a deepening of the shadows in my basement conjury.

The fool has cast his spells of summoning again, and never were more clichéd words uttered than in this room. He thinks I am silent because he ordered

Russian RouletteThey take her on her honeymoon.

The wedding was lovely, or as lovely as it could have been with a couple that were more polite acquaintances than anything else and two sets of in-laws as stuffy as a dusty pile of money. They grab her when she sneaks out for a walk one night, two men, beefy, not even bothered to arm themselves. Her last thought before the bag is shoved over her eyes is to wonder how much this would ruin her parents' plans.

She comes to in a small brick room on a sallow mattress, windowless and lit by a cool yellow lamp. There's a man there, standing just outside the barred door.

"Kelly Shale," he says, voice nasally, greasy

The Price of Dying“I want to be interred after I die,” Mr. Peters said. He made that clear to his family while he was still lucid, before old age and illness rendered him unintelligible. Seventy wasn’t that old, but he recognized the symptoms that were creeping up on his ailing body – the aches, the fatigue, the feeling of helplessness and despair. Despite his daughter’s attempts to assuage his concerns, he sensed his own mortality.
The worst part about dying, Mr. Peters thought, was what happened afterwards. Even since he was a small boy, he had been afraid of fire. He could never forget the scorching heat of the orange flames searing his skin, the dark billowing smoke entering his nostrils. The time that his house burned down, the fire almost took him with it. How ironic then, to escape the fire only to be fed into it after death.
So one day, he sat his son and daughter down after dinner. “I want to be buried whole,” he said, emphasizing the

Survival of the IllestAre those hints of lemon I detect?
Look, I'm just here to get wasted, don't try
to make it more than that.

I'd drink motor oil if I thought
it could get me high; chase it with a shot
of antifreeze
so
you can keep your survival instincts,
locked up
in that pretty velvet box (along with all
those other things
you thought you could convince yourself
you lived for). Instincts are the bare
bones of the impossibilities we wanted
to believe in,
remember,
those times you tried to tell me that
adrenaline was God's way
of saying
that
we were His chosen ones, we were
special, we were free.
I tried to tell you that instincts an

A Night at Pinetop's TavernSomewhere in the back alleys of the city's older section there was a crumbling brick building that had been around since before ragtime music was popular. Hanging above a faded green door that led down to the building's cellar was a wooden sign, and despite the peeling paint, you could still make out the bar's name: Pinetop's Tavern. Nobody really knew when Pinetop's first opened; local folks would tell you it had been there since time began, and the world had grown up around it. It was one of those places where the lighting was always dim and the cigarette smoke never dissipated and the cloud you were breathing now had probably been around

MeanderingHardly a mountain, though on lowering days its head sits wreathed
By the mists of a passing front, aged and befogged as bygone elders
Doddering about – before there were names for the malaise
That hazed their thinking
And from this modest crown there slouched and sloped
A long shoulder, meandering down to meadows below
Pausing now and again to coddle a pleasant hollow
Casting a sloping pitch – enough to rush a torrent
After a sudden shower
Seldom pooling
Its glint and glimmer burble among the stones
To join a rill and plash and swirl and putter about a root
It's there I'm apt to wander

Not much of a path, hard passed a

The Animal(Howl into my ear;
give me your claws.
I want the animal in you;

in you I shall nest.)

Take your clothes off, take them off for me.
Let me see the scars and the marks,
those dark moles and faint sun spots.

I want to memorize the way your fur grows.
I want to tickle my cheeks with your goose bumps.
Let me count the bruises and the cuts.

I'll bless them with names;
I'll lick away the blood stains.
We can lie skin to skin for days.

I have enough kisses for your brows and lashes,
for nails, teeth and toes, for thighs and knees;
in your curves and dents I'll nuzzle my nose.

Let me see your skin dance.
Through and around; your

The Doppelganger 2The book still sings to me, and that's when I pull it from under my bed and stroke the cover. But I never open it, because I know what happens if I do it wrong. It's still blank; but only of ink. I know the secret, you see. It's how I understand the songs, and know the melodies it echoes up to me, through time. There are impressions hidden in the pages- spilled mead and raucous laughter, summer sunshine and frost on dead leaves. The last time I tried feeling them from start to finish, I passed out from the sheer weight of knowledge, and it left my brain scrambled for ages.

I found out things about my past and my family's past. I have Irish o

grassy field with rustgrassy field with rust
--------------------------

I'd heard about the old car, three miles out of town and all alone. I just had to see it. It was time. School was over for the summer, my friends were at camp, and I was bored. I set out Thursday morning for a hike, following directions that Uncle Will had given me. As the heat was still growing with the climb of the sun, I found the field and wandered around looking, and looking some more, trying not to be distracted by bees buzzing in the flowers, and butterflies and baby mice. Then it was there, just a bit upslope from the bottom of a natural swale, and just below the sky at th

Gnome Noir  "I did it for the money and I did it for the girl.
        Well, I didn't get the money – and I didn't get the girl."
::  Walter Neff - Double Indemnity
So I point the flintlock at the guy – and that's no easy thing, big musket like that on a little gnome like me – and I peer down the sight. Not many people know what it's like to stare at a man through a glass. But in those sacred moments, the whole world takes a breath and it's just you and him. I line up the shot, and I think about the girl, and--

What? That is the start. What do you want, Sheriff, my life story?

Alright, well, I'm Gniles Brody the Third – that's

001. beginnings.Beginnings are vague things. Quite often you can't pin them down to one event – you have to trawl back further and further through foggy past, peeling apart what ifs and untangling strands of memories.

Eventually one has to go all the way back to the start of the universe, and that's a question even the experts have to shrug their shoulders at. It's not like you can plug it into a calculator and come out with a balanced algorithm. At least, not yet.

But it is true that sometimes you can fasten down an occurrence or a moment or even just a single breath, like sticking a thumbtack through a dead butterfly, and label it as a 'beginning' i

chromaWe were merely children when the stars came.

They rained down from the sky in a burst of light, like shards of glass pouring down from the heavens. Supernovas blooming in the night sky, petals raining down onto the barren earth - angels, falling with their wings sheathed, glowing, as they glided down. We watched, starstruck, as the glow overtook us - we were mesmerized. We waited with bated breath as the meteors landed, the celestial light subsiding as dark forms started to pick themselves up from the dust.

They moved towards us with an otherworldly grace, their steps leaving no marks on the earth as they descended upon us. Frozen to our sp

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More from ~Schandlich

The Night RunnersIn the evening we will rise, and in the night we'll run
To bid adieu to brighter skies and toward the sunken sun
The man in black will lift his bones
And say, "Wherefore go ye?"
"We go the way of all flesh to join the great majority."
When widows cry
"Go past, go past, that you not haunt us still!"
And vermin cry
"Run fast, run fast, that we may eat our fill!"
When the time has ticked its last
And from our day we flee
He who hath wrought long 'fore I
Will come and welcome me
"This is our great escape!" we'll say
And shed our skin like fleece.
Into the earth we all roll toiling
Where tongue and teeth will cease.

ShortcomingsI don't have a poem, so I know that I won't be noticed
click, clack, click
My fingers skid across the keyboard without
Wit, thought,
So fast that I forget what I've typed and what I've I've begun to repeat
Marking each key with with desperate enthusiasm

My hands are black
My keyboard is black
My clothes are black
I find no soothing calm, however, from the habitual mantra of coloring

Grey matter struggles but loosens words and fleeting thoughts
Click clack—
Jammed.
"R" "A" "G" "E"
Th most usd kys on my kybod.

I don't have a poem,
I will not be acknowledged among the the the bones licked of flesh, used to pick teeth and

A Perpetrator's RevelationBzzzz…Bzzzz…Bzzzz…Bzzzz…

The light outside won't stop flickering…. The city blinks its eyes, breathes. The natives blemish her with dice and bullets leaving bountiful mounds of sex and cocaine as hand-me-downs to the next generation. She endeavors to rise up and pry the people from out of her seedy womb with murder and pestilence. They strong-arm and bruise her face with plows and new malls. They're free as birds down there. Free to rape the concrete with graffiti and massacre common sense among thousands.

I justify to myself that, "We're not different. We just don't condone each other." The light outside shivers on

Not OnceI cannot shake the feeling
That I've never met you once.
Not once.
Somehow still, with the philosophy of you,
Comes a sort of ecstasy.
You are my Abel, made to feast on the fatted calves
Seen as the goodly child,
While I lay emaciated
Thieving your scraps from the desert traps,
Miles wandered past the gates of Eden
Truly, we are, brothers, aren't we?

Both of us riddled with scars of our divine destruction.
Damned to repeat.
Damned to shed blood.

Warm and sweaty...

Through another life I lead nations and made mothers of my own sisters and
Was father to the daughters of those sisters, my nieces.
Grandfather to my child

Phantom DawnI've known you and never known you for four years now.
Your presence is as potent as a fading dawn,
and the last traces of mint
Making strange flavors after sticks and sticks of bubblegum.
We've subsisted and coexisted in our haunting schism,
I, praying to God that the sickly affections
Of my wilting infatuation
die with the morning.
But morning becomes evening in muteness and we sit side by side,
speaking inaudibly with shut mouths and sullen inner health
Cleaving, our descrete bedding shoulders you and I when the sun has made our bedroom walls orange with its luminosity.
The instant becomes hours, until your heat warms my

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Gullibility

by ~Schandlich, Jul 7, 2012, 1:39:51 AM
Literature / Prose / Fiction / Horror / Short Stories

The infomercial had lied to him. It couldn't juice anything. And by "anything", James wasn't simply contradicting the product slogan "It can juice anything!"

No.

He remained sedentary in the middle of another man's kitchen on blood drenched tile, with the sinking feeling that it truly couldn't juice anything.

Perhaps it was the amount of fat on the bones or the amount of pieces, but to accept the latter would mean admitting a flaw in his calculations. That would be too much.

"Oh no, Big Boy. This one is all your fault." James murmured, scrubbing the bits of Harold Reeves from between a blue and green ceramic plate.

"Harold, Harold," James hummed, "Or perhaps I should call you Abundiantus. Do you know what that means?"

A chunk fell with a plop from the yellow painted wall to the floor beneath it.

Messy.

"Of course, you don't…" The pile gurgled, partially hanging out of the faulty fruit-juicer. He gave a wry chuckle and quipped, "One really can't blame you. I'm sure that a few pieces of your comprehensive thought are partially soaked into your pant leg...What a catastrophe you are,"

As the rigorous cleansing ensued, James' arm began to ache as he scrubbed and sopped up the mucky, guilty mess that he had made. With a groan, the frustrated man abandoned the task and dropped the sullied rag to the floor with a squish. The juicer was large, and truly did appear powerful, but it seemed that even a genius could make the most obvious of mistakes.

"What a catastrophe you are," he snarled again.

James stripped wordlessly and flung Harold's oversized shirt and pants onto the sofa. He deftly replaced the rags with his own clothing and packed the juicer, sauntering through the lopsided wooden door, and closing it behind him.

Perhaps, he would burn the place down if he ever returned. With a last look at the run-down shack Harold had once dubbed a home, James slid into his car and drove away.

During his travel home, James took a moment to glance forlornly back at his disappointing purchase. He rolled down the window and let the air dry the clumps of blood in his hair.

In the end, he hadn't killed Old Harold. The man had long since passed in his home.

However, who could've said that the aspect of trying out a new, supposedly innovative fruit juicer wasn't tempting?

Certainly not James.

Gullibilityby ~Schandlich

Literature / Prose / Fiction / Horror / Short Stories

Mature Content

Day 7 for FFM. I'm super late.

UPDATE!!!!-----

As I replied to other comments regarding this, it was my spell-check that turned James' darling, little chuckle into delicious grain. I edit my stories on my mobile at times (because I'm a dufus), and happened to put "ry" instead of "wry" and the phone decided that bread related things was the right way to go. I've replace the word with the correct one and am now moving on...
Rest assured, I'm thoroughly embarrassed about that, but since putting this story up, I've gotten my laptop out of repair. (YAY! No more phone editing!)

Daily Deviation

Given 2013-01-09

Gullibility by ~Schandlich Suggester Writes: Horrific and hilarious; what more could you possibly want? ( Suggested by =SilverInkblot and Featured by ^Beccalicious )

love 2 2

joy 2 2

wow 1 1

~~mad 0 0~~

~~sad 0 0~~

fear 1 1

~~neutral 0 0~~

~The-RemnantJuice Jan 25, 2013

*Chuckles

~kabuto124 Jan 10, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

what is the correlation between being gullible and mutilation?

You just found out!

~Artuition Jan 10, 2013 Student Artisan Crafter

WTF did i just read?!

...Whatever it was, I think I liked it

~GrammarshineHyena Jan 9, 2013 Hobbyist General Artist

He killed a man... just to test out his new fruit juicer? LOL!!! xD

That story was so awesome. I love it. O3O

~DRS2406 Jan 19, 2013 Hobbyist General Artist

No he did NOT kill him.That´s the whole point of the story.

~GrammarshineHyena Jan 19, 2013 Hobbyist General Artist

Wait... what? I'm confused...
O____O

~DRS2406 Jan 20, 2013 Hobbyist General Artist

Read it again,closely.
It sais the old man had already been dead.
And the guy from the story found him and then thought:"Hey if he´s dead already,I can as well test my juicer on him...

~GrammarshineHyena Jan 20, 2013 Hobbyist General Artist

Ohhh... Sorry, I missed that part.

lawl

~DRS2406 Jan 20, 2013 Hobbyist General Artist

Now the story´s even cooler,eh?

~GrammarshineHyena Jan 21, 2013 Hobbyist General Artist

yeah! xP

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Gullibility

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