Blackout

BLACKOUT
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Day was light and Ned was fine with all of that, but night should be dark and Ned meant really dark. He didn’t want the street lights or house lights or anything else. He wanted dark. A spasmodic episode with a pen one day at the office gave him an idea. Wite-Out makes everything it touches white against a white background. What he needed was Blak-Out.

Thirty years later, he had it. The black goo itself really only took a few minutes to make, black paint with some flour for thickener. The time consuming part was the spongy applicator. as soon as that was done, Ned took to dabbing his goo on everything (that sounds worse than it actually was). He blacked out all of the man-made lights he could see at night. Unfortunately he lived next to the Interstate and there were multiple accidents and pile-ups when the vehicles lost the use of their headlights. More chaos as Ned blacked out the flashing red lights that soon followed. People wanted to know what the hell was going on, but they couldn’t see to find out. Their cellphone lights - blacked out. Lighters and flashlights - blacked out. Soon even the stars seemed to go out as Ned neatly dabbed at each one. Astronomers across he country went nuts over that.

The pile-ups made for minor news in the Eastern hemisphere the next day. The media there was instead preoccupied with the black-speckled sky and why the Great Hunter had decided to come out during the day for the first time in all the thousands of years that people had known him.

Scatman

SCATMAN
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Bob was a regular guy, and by that, I don’t mean he was average. I mean he had some seriously loose bowels. The guy could pass a baseball and not realize it until he looked down. He thought nothing of mentioning this in casual conversation and because of that, Bob really didn’t have anything that could be called a social life. He stopped buying planners years ago because he had no plans. He was just a man alone in the world, hoping to find a cheese that might bind him, even just a little.

One night his central heating stopped working and when he awoke in the morning he was on the verge of popsiclehood. As always, he had to run to the toilet. It wasn’t so much a run this time as a stumble. He could no longer feel his feet and he was wrapped in all of his blankets. He seated himself and forgot everything else but the cold-so-cold that pierced his very bones. Bob fantasized about eliminating this icy mass that seemed to sit in his gut. There was an odd shifting in his organs and he felt warm suddenly, like experiencing a hot flash. What happened? He stood, relieved, and looked down. There in his toilet sat a huge chunk of ice.

He checked the thermostat. The heat was still off, but he felt warm. He’d eliminated the cold, just as he’d wished. No, that was insane. The ice must have been there already, it was that flipping cold in here. Maybe it wasn’t, the ice was already melting. He had to test it. How else? What else did he want to eliminate from his body? From his life? How about that spare tire? It was crazy, but what else did he have to do? He sat back down and thought about it.

There came more motion within, things changing places as if his intestines were being rerouted and hooked up to something new. After a movement that made even Bob sweat, he rose to discover an actual spare tire in his toilet. It wasn’t full-sized, just a doughnut that you’d get with a new car, but it was still impressive. More importantly, his belly had shrunk. He could actually see abs!

There was one more thing, an hysterical thought in a morning full of hysterical thoughts. He pulled the tire out of the can (It was quite clean, thankfully) and took his position. He considered. Things altered within him and he felt a tug in his chest. When he was done, Bob felt better than he could ever remember feeling. In the toilet, half floating on the water, was a pile of gray ash. He was so glad to be rid of it. It had dogged him for years, and he’d never fully known its weight until he was free of it. He flushed away his loneliness.

He jumped when the phone in the bedroom rang. It had been so long he’d forgotten the sound. Bob wiped fast and ran to answer it.

Earth Science

EARTH SCIENCE
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

The whole thing is quite embarrassing, really, the real cosmology. What happened was that Earth and Air had been going together forever. Well, not forever, but billions of years at least and although they could still stir up some dust, their love lives had sort of dried out. But they knew this other couple, right? A real steamy pair called Water and Fire who wanted to swing. Earth invited them over and they sat on the sectional and watched a John Travolta movie (The one where he dances). Then things got hot and heavy. They tried things they’d never even read about.

Sadly, when they woke up the next morning, they found themselves stuck together, tangled up so deeply with one another that they couldn’t get themselves out of it. Fire had to call out sick from his job and his boss was pissed. Fire was inside Earth, Earth had Water on top of her and Air was wrapped around all of them. It was Naked Twister from Hell. Worse yet, both Earth and Water found themselves pregnant. The babies were born by the thousands and crawled all over their parents without knowing it. The Elements tried hard not to make a noise so the kids wouldn’t catch them in this awkward position.

And so it’s been for a few billion years. Their plan wasn’t perfect, of course. Poor Fire has to come up to breathe every now and again and Earth gets cramps that make her jerk violently. Water’s fat since the pregnancy has jiggled without end. She claims she’s not fat, that it’s just water retention and, well, by definition of her being, she’s right, they can’t argue with that. Air is in such a position that all their movement drives him nuts and he experiences whirlwind orgasms on a regular basis.

He’s a perv.

Of course, the ancient Greeks had the whole thing figured out and later civilizations just laughed at them. But you know how the Greeks were. This theory of everything fit their lifestyles like few others would. A cosmic clusterfuck would have been right up their alley.

The Secret Lives Of Sinister Shoes

THE SECRET LIVES OF SINISTER SHOES
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

A shoe is a bad thing by itself, without a human master to foot it. Its basic function is to step on things and that’s how it sees the world. “Look at that!” it says. “Oooo, I’ll bet I could step all over that!” It is one of the lowest things to the ground and yet it seeks to climb, always, by stepping on other things. It’ll step on your grandmother, given a third of a chance. When confronted, it denies everything and blames everything on a so-called evil twin, a mirror image of itself.

Shoes, left on their own, burrow beneath the ground during the day and lie in wait. When you hear faraway laughter, you can bet it’s a shoe, somewhere below. A shoe doesn’t need to sleep and so it spends the day thinking about its former master or mistress, thinks about them frantically spouting, “Where’s my shoe? Have you seen my shoe?” And this makes it giggle incessantly. Evil things, shoes.

At night it comes out and joins with other fugitive shoes. They run in packs, but mostly stick to their own breed, as stilettos can’t keep up with tennis shoes and penny-loafers are the natural enemies of flip-flops. If you’re bothered by a screeching cat outside your window at night you can take some comfort in knowing that it’s probably screeching because it’s just been trampled by a pack of wild pumps. There is a tiny bit of good in everything.

The Keys To The Yellow Kingdom

You can read my latest story, "The Keys to the Yellow Kingdom," in the new issue of Challenging Destiny (#25), available at Fictionwise.com. You can preview the beginning of my story at the bottom of the page and buy the issue if you like it. Check it out:
http://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/eBook54411.htm?cache

Hope you enjoy it!

Frog Magnet

FROG MAGNET
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

I mean, just when we thought everything had been invented, along comes the frog magnet. Just as the magnets that you and I have come to know and love, the ones that live on our refrigerators and such, are sweet on iron, so the frog magnet was sweet on frogs. Its inventor was a lady named Shirley whose pet frog had died many years before when her big brother tore its legs off. After years of experimentation, Shirley had been able to reattach the severed legs of a lab frog through the use of tiny frog magnets implanted in the test subject. Yes, different parts of the frog kept sticking to its own hips, but a life was saved and that’s all that mattered. Now little girls everywhere would be spared the heartbreak of torn-apart pet frogs. And only twenty-seven thousand frogs had to die in its discovery.

The technology moved on to other uses in the hands of other people, as technologies do. People used frog magnets to catch frogs that had hopped into their houses. Catching tadpoles had never been so easy and kids actually grew bored with the sport. Sadists created monstrous frog conglomerates, attaching hundreds of frogs to one another to make one great green blob of croaking, slimy yuchiness. Perhaps the most sinister application came about when DARPA researchers reversed the magnet’s polarity and created the FL-16, the Frog Launcher. That War on Terror they’d been on about for the past thirty years? Wrapped up within a month. Yes, it sounded too easy, but you try getting hit by ninety frogs a minute traveling at six-hundred miles an hour. That’ll take it out of you, my friend.

Such Genius Like You've Never Seen Before

SUCH GENIUS LIKE YOU’VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Dave was a genius. Dave was such a genius that only Dave knew Dave was a genius. He felt bad for everyone else. They couldn’t see the obvious. Problem was that Dave wasn’t very good at math or clever with words. He couldn’t come up with brilliant ideas or even dance very well. His only genius lay in the fact that he could see his own genius (which was the ability to see his own genius), so he couldn’t show anyone else what a genius he was by doing a trick or hyper-cubing a hyper-sphere or even reciting Robert Frost. The rest of them, his family, his friends, his coworkers at the the bottle washing plant, would never know what mental power stood in their presence.

Poor bastards.

Puppy Dog Capital Of The World!

PUPPY DOG CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

The people of Andover plant their dogs about a month after the first thaw. The kids in school will fill a milk carton with soil and stick a single farm grown embryo in it, bringing it home for their moms when the tiny hairless snout first sprouts in time for Mother’s Day. The farmers, though will throw a good eight to ten zygotes in together about a half finger deep and repeat, spacing holes about two feet apart from one another. Water and sunlight and a hell of a lot manure and come August you’ve got yourself a field of thriving dogbushes. A single bush will bear a whole litter, little puppies squirming at the end of their fur covered, bony branches.

The farmers try to maintain a quiet farm, but every now and again, some rambunctious teenagers will drive by, honking away in a stolen car and the fields erupt with high pitched yipping that will drive a man mad as it doesn’t quiet down until dusk. Come September the pups are finally ripe. Migrant workers from Vermont come in for the picking. They pluck each soft, warm puppy from the bush and toss them over their shoulders into great wicker baskets strapped to their backs.

From the farms most of the yield is shipped to western Connecticut for use in cocktail parties (hors d’œuvres), but the locals keep the pick of the harvest for tasty pies.

The tails are shipped to New Jersey for the making of little boys.

And That's When You Walked In

AND THAT’S WHEN YOU WALKED IN
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

The clouds came rushing in at me, dark grey and angry. They meant to dampen my clothes and so they did. I felt so bad, I apologized. Not just for flipping them off and sleeping with their cloud wives but for everything I’d ever done to anyone. Thus began a litany of my sins presented orally all the day and half the night. By the time I had finished I raised my head to a clear and starry sky. Even the clouds had grown bored

I craved ketchup.

The Eighth Age

THE EIGHTH AGE
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

Sorry! This story has been removed. But you can read it at Everyday Weirdness beginning on August 12th, 2009, and forever thereafter. Just look here:
http://everydayweirdness.com/e/20090812/

Thursday Only! Big Sale On Question Marks!

THURSDAY ONLY! BIG SALE ON QUESTION MARKS!
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

The actors, what were they doing when they sparked like that? Was it all up to them? Or were they controlled by that hideous acting bug? What about the writers and the writing bug? And the accountants and the accounting bug? What if some evil person who got bitten by the evil-doing bug, sprayed all the various bugs with insecticide? Would all the passion die then?

Are we all just slaves to our bugs? Is my love for Yara just the Yara bug scrambling up my unsuspecting pant leg? How many crunchy little exoskeletons had I stepped in this long/short life of mine? How many thoraxes sent squirting through abdomens? Did I crush a dream with each stomp? Is that why there are so many miserable people in the world? Because people are so afraid of bugs? Because people are so afraid of passions that they step on them at the slightest movement?

The Goatway

THE GOATWAY
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

The Earl of Thrice’s castle wasn’t sealed off exactly. It was wide open to the road but no one ever left. No one ever came in. Traders catapulted their wares over the walls and their payments were lowered from the battlements in baskets. The reason for all of this? The goatway.

The goatway was a gateway . . . made of goats. Neither man nor beast would pass through it. It smelled, for one thing. And you might get plopped upon by goat poo for another. When the Duke of One-Derful attacked, he thought it would be a simple matter to take the castle. Little did he know that not a one of his men would go through the front door. He had to lay siege to the place as if there wasn’t a great big hole in the wall already. Since he hadn’t come prepared for a proper siege, he was forced to head home. However, the trip was not a total loss. The Duke found himself bound and gagged by inspiration.

If a single goatway could befuddle an army such as his, think of what an entire castle made of goats could do! He began work immediately and many a goatherd became wealthy as the walls went up. The Duke even surrounded the castle with a goat moat. He became the most invincible ruler in the land. His people were well fed as they milked the walls regularly and often slaughtered bits of the ever growing castle for food and clothing. You can imagine, if you pack that many goats together that tightly, they’re going to be getting it on left and right. The people even had plenty of excess supplies to sell to neighboring lands.

A local Baron attempted to steal the Duke’s thunder by building his own castle from cows but everyone agreed that was just ridiculous and his people refused to involve themselves in such a farce.

NaNoWriMo Update 12/30/07

Hey isn't this two days late? Yes, and not only that but December was a big bust! I got next to nothing accomplished this past month, save for a few blog entries. You might think I’d be disheartened, but looking back on past Decembers, I don’t feel too badly. I’ve had some crappy Decembers (In terms of writing productivity) followed by some fantastic Januaries. So, new year, new you, right? Now if I come back with another do-nothing update all of you should gang up and kick me squarely in the seat of my pants. But I’m not worried that you’ll have to. I’ve felt a lot of my non-writing frustration in the past two weeks as well as a burning desire to jump back into things now. And, if worse comes to worse, I’ll start wearing skirts. I’ll be back with some progress on January fifteenth. Talk to you then.

The Oddnesses Of Languish

THE ODDNESSES OF LANGUISH
by Matthew Sanborn Smith

They say the Inuit have three hundred words for snow. In the wilds of New England they have but one. They call it “Snow.” It’s worked out pretty well so far. No hunts have gone sour, no lives have been lost for want of another word. How do they describe wet snow, or powdery snow or tightly packed snow, you ask? Well, they use adjectives. Adjectives like “wet,” and “powdery” and “tightly packed.” This system works as well for snow as it does for croutons or sweater vests.

In Norwegia there are three hundred words for sweater vests.