Category: Fiction

March the seventeenth. Thinking about the body guard: got shot.

I spent two weeks in the hospital. I can remember getting there.

There’s a spider crawling on the counter.

I awake with a start, and then slip back to this time.

I stab the cherry tomato with my fork; trying hard to not let it shoot off the plate or squirt seeds at me.

People get killed. Are hollow. They come up to me like clear outlines with no insides, no complexity.

The dirt falls from the shovel all too slowly. I swear it doesn’t want to cover her body: it keeps slipping off to the edges.

People talking in the hotel bar. A couple maybe mid-sixties.

I wait here every day for somebody to come in.

And after the bar? What happened after the bar, he asked.

We stop at the next bench, only a few yards away and she sits gently.

On the edge of a main highway that runs through a small desert town.

This acts as some kind of nominal starting point. Because it was.

It’s a bit embarrassing. I’m worried about stretch marks on my back.

Maybe in the future she’d embody the pure-feminine-ideal or something, but right now Suraj had to explain just who Judy was and why she killed herself…

Meet Sidney (aka the Sacred Scribe)—a PhD candidate in Physics with a problem in the paradoxical human realm of love. What does a love triangle look like in the fourth dimension? Quantum indeterminacy rules, as Sidney and her friends explore a bold new cosmology uniting Science and Spirituality, and Sidney’s “wave function” must decide between the primal magnetism of Bruno, her friendship with Alyzia, and the life of her mind and creative soul.

He was but a breath, a simple creation of some greater existence. Nothing implied, nothing necessary, nothing required. Just a breath. As was the face. And is the face. And always will be the face.

Did I dream it all? I guess I did. But then I see the card on the table. I pick it up. It feels real. TAKE THE ELEVATOR, it says. Did I?

These people in the church with him today have heard all those words over and over, they can’t really hear them any more. He remembers other words: If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.

The subject was discovered on a routine gravimetric exploration approximately one mile beneath the Earth’s surface in a small cavern rich in copper. Dwelling in complete darkness and surrounded by approximately 3500 urns of various shapes and sizes, the age of the subject remains indeterminate. Subsequent testing revealed the age of the urns to be approximately 500,000 years old.

He stood upon an old skull, and he crushed it under his dark heel. A snake was inside it, and its blood seeped into the ground. He stood in the crater where Gods went to die, the valley without light where a bloated Leviathan would rest upon the ground, and spears piercing its belly beneath dark clouds, the sun would turn away in time for it to rot and die. In its carcass, in its open bones a new God would form, a new rotten Beast to occupy the holy Throne….

Since the end of the Paleolithic Era, it is possible that we have been riding a long curve of descent, in which all things once transparent have become more and more opaque.

Join the Readers Underground for a group reading of Gregory David Roberts’ novel Shantaram, hosted by David Gaian and Marco V Morelli, starting April 17, 2017.

I am, I am slightly ashamed to admit, a little paranoid at the moment. Some of it is genetic. My family have a history of “nerves.” My lovely cousin, who shares a big batch of genetics with me along with a childhood of school holidays spent together indulging our creative whimsy