Why are my most interesting books always the ones unshelved? The plain answer, the one made of leather and wood, says they’re the newest, the most novel, and as such of the most immediate interest, the yearning that inspired their purchase smoldering most fiercely. Or even the ones retrieved from high perches or cold cellars, snatched from their alphabetical order into a dusty chaos, their previously prescribed value, strong enough to own in the first place, an underestimate following new information, a surprising reference in a newer text, that warrants their reevaluation.
Continue reading “Unshelved”Seldom Sun
The sun sets over the serrated hills
The colors bleeding out like an oil spill.
It’s you and me always to the ends of the earth.
And we’re drinking saltwater.
Allegory of the Grocery Store
You’re at the grocery store. It’s the only grocery store you’ve ever been to, the only one you know. Maybe you know there are others, and you’re just comfortable there. Either way.
You’re there to pick up some rat poison for dinner. Here’s the thing: you’re really fucking tired of rat poison. Everywhere you go, every meal served is rat poison. It doesn’t taste good, and you suspect it’s harming your insides. But there at the grocery store, the only thing on the shelves is rat poison. Thirty aisles of rat poison. Stand-up displays of rat poison. Small packages of rat poison near the register.
TRUMP DEFENDS SUMMONING CTHULHU
By Arkham Gazette staff
This weekend President Trump defended his office’s controversial use of the Necronomicon to summon Cthulhu, a cosmic entity whose cruel indifference is outmatched only by his indifferent cruelty, in a fiery tweetstorm, as well as a Fox and Friends interview Saturday and prayer breakfast on Sunday. Critics say the High Priest of the Great Old Ones, who rose with his previously-sunken city R’lyeh on Thursday, poses an existential threat to all of humanity, but the president downplayed those fears.
“Cthulhu’s going to be the best thing for the country, and the world, believe me,” he told the Westboro Baptist Church’s June Prayer Breakfast Symposium on Sunday. “Better than Hillary Clinton, you better believe it.”
Continue reading “TRUMP DEFENDS SUMMONING CTHULHU”H2Whoa
It was maybe seven o’clock, I can’t be sure though since my watch was confiscated. Maybe that’s something you can help me with?
Sure, look into it. Anyway, I don’t understand why you’re asking me these questions again, I already talked to—
Contradictory evidence? What evidence? You got— A tape?
Yeah. No. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I—I better change my statement. But it’s—
Continue reading “H2Whoa”The Third Client
Twenty-five-year scotch crashes from crystal decanter into marbled glass, spilling up over the side beneath Sean Hannity’s shaky hand. He waits until the level rises nearly to the rim before yanking the glass up, carrying it to the Corinthian leather chair in front of the fire. He’s barely got his legs crossed before the door clicks open.
“No knock?!” Sean Hannity shouts, until he sees the face of his wife appear from behind the polished wood. His face changes, but doesn’t soften.
She seems as if she’s about to say something, but she doesn’t speak. She doesn’t want to have to.
Continue reading “The Third Client”Supermantra
I will not grieve when my favorite bands soften with age:
This is the pace of things.
D-Wrap: une avertissement
It was a day that makes “beautiful” seem not only inadequate, but insulting. Vast reaches of cerulean sky pocked in pits with nebulous blooms stretched over a verdant vista whose stillness was broken only infrequently by the piercing squeals of distant children. I sat on the front porch of our dream home, earned through years of aching toil, in a Wkr chair that she thought was kitschy but I thought felt like paradise on my back. Behind me I heard her soft footsteps, padding gently in thick Lovefeet socks, but not slowly enough I couldn’t hear the familiar swishing, and this time accompanied by a gentle singing rattle.
Continue reading “D-Wrap: une avertissement”Spinnamint
There were some places humanity was never meant to go, things no human should know. We live in an ordered world only rarely disturbed by the merest disorder: a political upheaval here, a million dead in a tsunami there. The whole of our lives is spent in the space of a pore on the paper skin of a spinning ball of molten iron, microbes on the skin of a turtle in a vast cosmic ocean of darkness, and the only way we maintain our way of life is by keeping our eyes focused on those things we can classify into an alphanumeric system inside our rotting flesh drives.
There is history, history beneath our own feet, that would drive a man to claw at his skull to physically remove the knowledge from his brain. I have seen rituals that bring forth things that made my eyes bleed and my soul wither just to look at. Plato was wrong. Stay in the cave.
My travels had taken me to locales exotic and eldritch, and now, floating in the dry Ocean of Zomm, I was to face my final destiny. Out of the shadowy clouds a massive form emerged, seeming to stretch miles in height. Covered in pestilent gray fungoid ridges, it stood as a great tetrahedron shape, each spline sharp and jagged in endless mountainous crust. There was hideous activity along the surface of the shape, a twisting and curving not of traditional motion but of the corruption of time and space in its presence. Arms began to burst outward, growing out while spawning their own arms, a wretched rocky fractal that violated the senses. Truly it could be none other than the defiler of worlds, the cosmic paradox, the dread Thogfasa.
Before I could stop to scream myself to death, it was upon me, clutching me in a spire that felt like gravel covering putrid flesh, drawing me before its hellish face. Infernal screams and cataclysmic cacophony heralded a chasm rending apart along the horizontal ridge, spilling out light of a color no human had ever seen. As its demonic mouth erupted open, a smell like my own death, like a whole galaxy rotting in the sun seemed to smother my entire being.
I coughed and tried to be kind. “Jees, buddy, that dragon breath, though.” There was enough room between where its mountainous spire arm held me and my pocket for me to get out what I needed. “You should try some Spinnamint Gum. It’ll spin bad breath right out with its patented Spinnamonoxilite crystals, leaving your mouth, or whatever that is, fresher than a spin in the washing machine!”
I tossed the pack into the diseased abyss burning hellfire in front of me. And what do you know, that did the trick. Thogfasa revealed things to me that make everything else I’d learned up to then, things that would shatter the strongest being, seem like children’s wishes. The origins of us, of everything, the true nature of our existence, what waits for all of us in the end. It annihilated every individual bit of me. But Thogfasa brought me back, that I might be a harbinger of the new way. For he is coming, not now, but soon, soon enough.
In the meantime, I have been left to rot inside the desecrated ruins of my soul. I do not know when He will return. I do not know what will become of me. And I truly do not know if I am unquenchably mad or horrifyingly sane.
But I do know one thing.
Spinnamint cleans your mouth so fast it’ll make your head twist around your neck until your spinal cord severs.
Poem for My Friend Emeline
She assaults the page with pen
with such ire
as to make you think
she applies no ink
but instead scratches away the perfect
pristine white surface
to reveal the black
beneath.