Old Words

Archives follow:

2019:

"Hundo Won"

by Nizwa Knox-Jones [@Jn90Kn]

She stomped in the boggiest three acres, looking for the locket. She silked corn, thumped a bright green worm away. She burned the yard, and the wind took sparks, and the flame took her neighbor's field and blue barn and shrill dog. She learned a Moroccan stew, made it for a dumb date. She read the Bible, finally, and wasn't impressed. She rebuilt the barn, she re-sewed the seed, she mended fences. She took the dumb locket from the dumb date. She couldn't get started, couldn't keep momentum; she couldn't find anything in this bog.

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"The Happiness Producers"

by Robert Hoekman [@rhjr]

During the Age of Sadness, Happiness had become nearly impossible to produce. They put out a sign: Now hiring, competitive pay. We went in. We were young then, trying for our mustaches. They showed us how the tools worked. Grinders, welders, a CNC machine. We made toys, vacuums, suitcases. We grew up craftsmen. We turned old there, earned pensions. Still sadness was everywhere. Then Petey thought to do chocolate chip cookies. We built a prototype. Three feet round, golden, oozing. And that smell! People lined up. We made a jig, threw sparks, and we had it, a glistening new sign.

(For Saraya)

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"Midnight Ride"

by Tucker Lieberman [@tuckerlieberman | www.tuckerlieberman.com]

At midnight, shapeshifters implant chalice-hearts in men: glass smeared with soul-surgeon’s ointment. The human bodies reject the glass, but the inert medicinal matter remains in their flesh and blood, undigested and unsewn. Now the men are shapeshifters too, galloping at night, raising chalices in their left hands, performing acts of monstrous death-aggression.

The martial impulse may be a blissful release. A grave-frame of dark rain, backlit by the moon, descends from an aether to these terrestrial depths. Chalices fill with rain. It is an ointment that will be poured into every last body.