The Book

THE BOOK
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Früd, intersystem artiste, wrote his book in fire across Death Valley. Fire fed by print books. He claimed his words could be seen from space. There were people in space. None of them could see his words. A nice helicopter ride, however, revealed the story in all its glory. Or lack thereof. For when the rented choppers first flew overhead, astute critics realized:

"Hey, this book reads like ass!" and, shortly thereafter, "We burned Steinbeck for this?" The whole thing was a disaster. Until another disaster saved the day. A group of near-sighted readers kept pressuring their pilot to get closer to the words, so he got as close as possible by crashing right into to them as well as the ground directly beneath them. This miraculously changed the word "ramrod" in paragraph seventeen of chapter twenty-three, into the word "benediction" (trust me on this) and utterly transformed the story from dogshit into a song of the divine. People wept at its beauty and Früd found success that was previously unknown in his paltry existence.

The families of the near-sighted tourists and their pilot sued for a cut of his profits. Früd claimed the book itself, and not the story it told, was the work of art, and he countersued because the defendants' dead family members had vandalized his work. Früd won.

This pissed off a lot of people who, this time, made a deliberate attempt at sabotage and turned the word "avocado" in the very last sentence into the word "mahkrolish," which of course isn't a word at all. But somehow, this made the story even better. Früd couldn't lose for winning and hired his own saboteurs to make revisions until he had enough money to buy a couple of planets.

He didn't buy a couple of planets, because who wants that hassle? His dad owned an apartment building and just dealing with those people was bad enough. Instead he bought a tower, a comfy chair and a nice sandwich and read the latest edition of his book. He found the story gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, and all those other cliched organ-tormenting things that one might expect. It couldn't possibly get any better than this, could it? He called for another helicopter to find out.

It's A Wonderful Life

IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (The Song)
by Matthew Sanborn Smith
(Loosely based on the film of the same name.)
(You make up the tune, but make it punk if you care about me.)

You give me a blowjob
And I give you my thanks
And then we get up and get some ice cream
today

It's a wonderful life
Full of blowjobs and ice cream
And firetrucks and submarine sandwiches.
We've got guns and we've got sex
And occasionally we've got drugs
If Vinnie can score some
from that guy who works at the newspaper
It's a wonderful life.

We go out and tussle
With seven Chinese acrobats
And then the nine of us go test drive the latest
volvos

It's a wonderful life
full of Acrobats and Volvos
and army ants and solar powered teeth
We've got love and we've got heat
And we even have a girdle
like the one that Vinnie found
underneath his mom's refrigerator
It's a wonderful life.

We get matching hernias
and drink rat-flavored iced tea
And then race our turtles on the salt flats.
That's neat!

It's a wonderful life
full of hernias and iced tea
and spider-milking farmers and beans.
We've got toasted leather sandwiches
And always go clog dancing
with Vinnie's ex-twin sister
who just turned three
It's a wonderful life!

Northern Discomfort

NORTHERN DISCOMFORT
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

There was Southern Comfort, there was a little coke, there were rocks in snowballs and why the hell were they running around naked in the middle of winter? Hank's rapidly returning consciousness discovered that his willie was tucked so far up into him it might as well have been a vagina. AC/DC's Jailbreak was blaring, distorted around the edges, from the back of Soto's Buick. They were drunk and fucked up and even if Hank caught Selina out there in the playground of the old elementary school was he going to do with her, besides warm the hell up?

"With a bullet in his back!" Paul screamed to the song when it came time. Fuck it, Selina would have to come back on her own, Hank was freezing his ass off and couldn't feel anything below his knees. Hank watched each step, concentrating too much on balance. His feet were bleeding maybe? He thought he left dark splotches in the moonlit snow.

Selina had long been forgotten. The location of his clothes as well. All there was was the exhaust ridden fifty-dollar Buick. The Buick was warmth. The Buick was life. He prayed it held more booze and or drugs. As he fell to his knees and crawled for safety, he prayed he could get blitzed enough to wipe this thing entirely from his life's memory.

Consider The Stuffing Beast

CONSIDER THE STUFFING BEAST
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Consider the lowly stuffing beast. An ugly creature, it's only saving grace, the succulent flesh which millions consume annually on the fourth Thursday of November. Because of their hideously mottled appearance, stuffing beasts suffer from a lack of exposure, and consequently, severe inferiority complexes. Turkeys and beasts may be slaughtered equally, but it's the turkey that gets all the camera time, the turkey whose form adorns greeting cards and holiday parades, the turkey who can count one among its number as the relieved recipient of a full presidential pardon. No stuffing beast has ever been raised by a family, named by one of the children, and spared execution because of the bonds of love.

It is because of this that stuffing beasts so often attack turkeys, not only killing them, but consuming specific organs such as the neck and giblets. Outside of these, beasts are known mostly to eat large quantities of wheat and various herbs.

Stuffing beasts, like turkeys are slaughtered year round, though the beasts are often preferred dehydrated to be sold as croutons.

Making The Call


Sorry, gang, for another incredibly short one but between work and pre-Thanksgiving events, time is short.

MAKING THE CALL
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

When we all went telepathic, the phone companies were pissed. They sued everyone for making phone calls in their heads.

Oh, The Ideas, They Fell Down Like Rain

OH, THE IDEAS, THEY FELL DOWN LIKE RAIN
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Throughout the day, the heads of the fortunates caught outdoors were pelted with explosive epiphanies and intuitive leaps. Jorge created a gene-therapy rider for fertility drugs so that women who rattled eight babies from their frightened egg-sacs would have as many breasts to feed the lot.

Someone figured out how to fix the stoplight on Poplar street and we all thanked him for that. Damned thing was always blinking.

Cornelius asked himself why, and painted the sky by bending the atmosphere until he'd achieved a pleasant peach. "No, not pink. It's peach."

Sally's children made gravity bubbles that lifted entire buffalo from their grazing grounds and carried them off into strange and distant lands. When the bubbles popped, the buffalo fell somewhat harder than the ideas.

One especially virulent meme forced strangers everywhere to join hands and play a game of crack the whip the stretched across continents, tore limbs from bodies, and sent people into orbit.

It occurred to someone else to get out of her car and walk once she realized the traffic on Poplar street would never move again.

When it was all over and the lawns had dried, Marnie asked Maxie, "What the hell happened today?"

Maxie rubbed her pretty little head where the buffalo had hit and wept. "I have no idea!"

Experiment

EXPERIMENT
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Zip injected himself with just a little bit of everything and then waited to see what would happen.

He never saw what happened.

First Kiss

FIRST KISS
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

My first kiss involved twelve other people.

I was a genetic aberration with a lip span fourteen feet across. School, needless to say, was a generally unpleasant experience. The kids called me big mouth and it hurt. Not as much as when somebody stepped on my lips, but it did hurt. Aside from that, I was happy. Not that anyone believed me. With lip droop like mine, I broke records for the largest perpetual frown.

Then in high school, Cassandra and Helen and Fran and Gertrude and Suzanne and Elliot and Petra and Trina and Julie and Paulette and Yasmine and Trish came along. They formed the Lip League, a group of young fetishists who nearly wet themselves when they met me. They swept me away to an underground party the first weekend of my freshman year and there, among the stolen six-packs and scratchy basement couches, they lifted my lips, counted three, and laid the biggest smooch upon me in smooching history. I found the whole thing bone-meltingly erotic.

The thirteen of us became sweethearts. My confidence soared. I knew they'd never leave me for someone else. We were married in a highly dubious ceremony just after graduation. My lips have not drooped since.

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The Testers

THE TESTERS
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

The boys down at the plant tested crashes all day long. They built and modified their dummies. They set them and belted them just so, or left them unbelted. They ran them into walls. They ran them into each other. All day long.

By the end of the day, the month, the year, their heads were thick and gluey with images of violent accidents until they couldn't see anything else when they lay their heads down at night. They no longer enjoyed the civilian's advantage of taking a drive without expecting a crash. So they crashed. And they crashed.

They knew just how to buckle their belts and position their bulks to minimize their injuries. While they destroyed their own vehicles as well as those of their victims, destroyed bodies and lives and families and first loves, the testers came out of things relatively unscratched. Well, the government had to shut that shit down post-haste, wouldn't you say? That's what the lawyers said. They rid themselves of the testers.

Over time, vehicles became less safe. What to do? Robots! Robots just seemed to be the perfect solution for everything (the robot manufacturers said). They picked up where the testers left off and everything seemed right with the world.

Until, of course, some asshole let the robots drive.

Yahoo Headline

I just saw this headline on Yahoo News:

Major battle in Iraq's Baqouba kills 18

Now, I'm as appalled as the next person about the cluster-fuck over there, but how does something that purports to be a news agency call anything that results in eighteen dead a major battle? Yeah, I know that if one of those eighteen was my kid, that would be as major as it would get, but let's keep it in perspective. We went through two world wars where tens of thousands of people could be killed in a single day. This is even a small number for this conflict, where literally hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed between the two wars. The nicest thing that could be said of this headline is poor judgement. The most honest thing would be to call it bullshit.

The Beautiful Ones

THE BEAUTIFUL ONES
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

They appeared over the near horizon, the beautiful ones. Before I caught sight, Edna threw a rock skyward. I wrapped myself around her.

"Stop that," I whispered. They glowed in blues and pinks, floated up and over, never looking at us. The rock would have meant nothing to them even if Edna had the arm to reach them. It was the others I worried about, the ones in the gathering crowds that might have her head for threatening their sky gods. But all faces turned upward; if they had seen anything, it had already been forgotten.

The beautiful ones were here for some other reason, not for us, but we took everything we wanted, drinking in their feathered headdresses (or heads) and carnival costumes. We took it all and there wasn't a damned thing those divine beings could do to stop us. It was the greatest pleasure some of our sad little lives ever witnessed.

No pleasure for Edna, though. Yet as much as she hated their beauty, even she couldn't look away. Maybe that was why she hated them.

For her sake, I looked at her. Only her. Edna's own beauty shone with their reflected light, a little brighter in the wet stripes which ran down her face.

Cold Comfort

COLD COMFORT
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

By the time the aliens got here, the Earth was pretty warm. So warm, in fact, that there was no ice to speak of. The only cold things left were our cryogenically preserved bodies. So, these they diced to chill the drinks at the big conquest wrap-up party in Pittsburgh.

Milk Maid

MILK MAID
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

They hung a cow on the kitchen wall so the children could enjoy fresh-squeezed milk anytime they wanted. When Charlie and his wife, Shirley, came over for cards (four games of solitaire in separate corners of the game room (they were social, but not crazy social)), Dave thought he heard Shirley mumbling something from her corner about cow's milk not being right for children.

"Human children evolved to digest human milk, not cow's milk," she said as she slapped her cards on the table. Her logic sounded good to Dave and he felt foolish for putting all that money in a cow instead of the magic beans he'd been eying at the marketplace.

He sold the cow the next day and hung a human on the wall instead. Her name was Myrtle and the kids enjoyed her milk. Dave found himself in awe of the size of the woman's breasts to the point where it began to interfere with his digestion.

That night, after Elke fell asleep, Dave snuck out to the kitchen. He hadn't been there for two minutes before Elke flipped on the light behind him.

"Hwah!" Dave said, pissing his pajama bottoms.

"What are you doing?" Elke asked.

"Me? I was, ah, just getting some milk, is all."

"I don't think you're supposed to drink it straight from the tap like that," Elke said.

"Uh, no, that's okay because, see, it's better that way. The . . . The milk doesn't hit the oxygen in the air and it doesn't . . . It doesn't have a chance to . . . sour . . . as fast."

The next day, an orange juicer went up in place of Myrtle.