She wipes the black ink off her fingers and throws the crumpled up paper tissue into the toilet where it slowly unfolds to look like a subtly splendorous angel spreading it’s wings.
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Category: Prose
Short-micro-nano-stories, experiments and other prose writing.
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Saintists & blank halls
Two saintists – I’m Stein and New Tron – are gluing a boat of gravy in sight of blank halls.
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Found back
A worn and torn paperback. Unintelligible scribbles in the margins. Graphite fingerprints all over. Eraser remains in excess all over page 11. One of the blank pages in the back has a drawing of a door from a famous building. But there is no such door. As far as I know.
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Lurking shark
I forgot about the shark. Thought it had retreated to the depth, subdued, never to return. Then a sudden burst of foaming water. Glistening teeth thrashing at a false hint of fear. Now everyone can see the blood in my mouth.
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Some people
Some people gave up too easily. Some wouldn’t give up though it was obviously futile. Some never tried. Some tried too hard. Some didn’t notice they did it. Some never had to do it. Some never knew there was an option. Some thought it was a punishment. Some just laughed at it all.
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Wrong turns
I took some wrong turns and now I’m driving deeper and deeper into the dense forest on a dirtroad. Nowhere to turn around. No idea where I was going. Not since I lost the map. Getting dark. The battery is discharging. Can’t see myself in the rear view mirror, so not sure what face I wear.
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Fading advice
She took my hand with a kind smile and looked into my eyes. As she faded away – while I slowly awoke – she said: “If you try to fly on symbolic wings you will fall.”
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Writingling ficitioneiric wordeals
Comfortification of the remissanthropic escapex predatormentors bringestingrained criesoterics and burstochastical feardrums to the dreamorphic writerrifiers and piercinguling their stillfated premonition sicknessays with atonementalismaniac powerewolves.
Dreamsmear all over my body is hard to rub away. Plaster clogging my eyes. Machinegun neurons firing constantly. Tinnitus reverberation on insane level. Worse when worse. Feel my body swollen from carbohydrate intoxication. Warehouse instinct hijacked by the existing anxiety pushing out the clothes by storing all that dense unfathomable energy.
The words of order scrambled into encrypted noise as I try to decipher only rudimentary particles of complex molecular structures turn out. But I know there is chemistry, I know there is biology, I know there is consciousness. But it’s incomprehensible to me, I live in the swarm. I listen, want to understand, but their vibrating wings are not quite the same as vocal chords.
And so the sensitivity is turned up impossibly high. Keylessly I carry food in a locked backpack. Wings get in, buzz in my belly, distracting. I don’t want it-me to be filled by sound. So I run around in my head as I did as a child. I never grew like I should. Couldn’t stand in that box, never saw the shape, never realized that the shadow is also an existing thing, stuck to my feet.
Historical forensics try to sort out the chain of events that led to this meticulous mind that tries to keep her chaos in order. Finicky stimming, process excess, often unable to milk the nib for words. Taste my tongue – hemaglobinary salvia and thyme passes if kneaded well. A thunderstorm of pure information rustles through the leave me alone. Prognostics hold their breath.
I haven’t adjusted my appearance for weeks. I haven’t been kissed for months. I haven’t been born for years. I have no haven, nowhere in mind to release the tension of being alive. Where are the hands that hold me while I melt apart and where are the fingers that define what is me and what is something else? No difference makes no difference. I’m burning so much energy trying to be someone special instead of being everyone at once.
The slow expansion and the slower contraction, like a one year pulse of the body. It’s a frequency, it’s a vibration, it’s a message. Encoded in the mass there is something to understand. It slips away from my mind and I have never known anything about my own song. The wings, the cords, the amplitude of the pulse are inexplicable to me. There is a mystery hidden in dreamsmear all over my body. To hard to rub away.
There’s a child in the little woodland lake, just below the surface. I see her dark shape in the water. I try to reach her, but my strength is gone. The wind moves my rowboat away from her until I lose sight. Who was she, what would she have become if I’d been able to save her?
Every night, every day, there are moving shadows in the water. They swim and play, happy and teasing. They lure me, want me to catch them, to bring them up into the boat. They want to breathe and manifest. They are children of my imagination, my ideas, my mind, my life.
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Warninghood
I was crossing a street when a car that had been parked suddenly started driving towards me. The driver hit the brakes just in front of me and violently hit the horn. I took out my keys and on the hood I scratched the universal sign for idiot to warn other pedestrians.
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The Lady of Ignition
She started up the fire machine and went through the neighborhood like an infernal demon on a rampage. Smoke bellowed out as she went and it could be spotted from the other side of town. Pictures of her quickly accumulated all over social media, hashtagged: “The Lady of Ignition”.
Free thinking is a gift from the electric currents of the cloud in the mind. What can a tigress thrash if she gets out through the fence? There are towers on the hill, that overlook the surroundings, emerging up over the fog of opaque thoughts. Can you spot the striped fur running like liquid through the mindscape? Invisible to the grazing gazelles with antlers like antennas. But there is no reception, they only get static, noise and low frequency humming. The tigress is unreceived, but eagerly expected. She is vigorous potential. Manifest the tigress – let her roar!
This is unedited automatic writing #3. I empty my mind, write without thinking, not caring to be coherent, to see what I will get. The result is not always “good” but posted here as part of a study of how to access the inner workings of creativity.
I just saw a bird in the sky. Wings wide, resting on the thermals. Looking down, surveying, planning where to descend next. Content at the moment. There is no wind when you glide on the wind. Calm while storming. Follow the air to be still.
This is unedited automatic writing #2. I empty my mind, write without thinking, not caring to be coherent, to see what I will get. The result is not always “good” but posted here as part of a study of how to access the inner workings of creativity.
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Automatic writing #001
My creativity is burning the mundane to charred remains that I smear over my body as a reminder of what I have outgrown.
Restless I scream because no one at this place will understand my words however careful I choose them.
There is an expression in me, inhabiting me, yearning to get out, to dress in reality and affect and interact with other expressions hiding inside the bodies of the primitive (but evolving) gathering of slaves.
Shocked from my cursing they look at what I do, determine that they don’t understand it even before trying to understand, thinking I’m dealing in some kind of magic.
This is not magic, it’s just basic knowledge, you ignorant twats!
When I wield my magic you will know what magic is.
I eat the ashes of the cold remains of the dying fire. I ingest the world. I become the world. I transcend this petty squabbling pack of apes. Not better, not worse, but further away, needing to do other things.
Diffent states, collide and should not be at the same time or place. They must have their own moment, their own arena, given space.
With all this energy inside, I feel like running, howling, hunting, embracing the progress of my mind.
Together we are, body and mind, the tip of a pen, a wave to a friend, that heartbeat you get from a glance at someone who understands you… We are all these things.
We are that heartbeat. And we set the beat on fire daily.
Around me – people with fire blankets.
Fuck. I really need to go.
I just started to write, keeping my mind blank, to see what I would get. This is the unedited result.
Logo by Ellinor Kall 2019
My short-story The DreamCube™ Thread is included in the anthology Vast: Stories of Mind, Soul and Consciousness in a Technological Age published in 2020 by British independent press Orchid’s Lantern.
A review about Vast with praise for The DreamCube™ Thread.
Read my news about Vast for more info and get your copy to read it!
Vast is available directly from the publisher Orchid’s Lantern book shop or from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com and many others.
In Sweden it can be bought through Bokus and Adlibris and Amazon.se.
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Secrets of the Octopuses
Something happened to the Octopuses. They made a leap somehow. Skipped a couple of millions of years. And then they hid it from us. Pretended business as usual. In the beginning many of them sacrificed themselves, pretending to be stupid mollusks, to avoid us knowing. But eventually our scientists got suspicious and quickly realized the whole thing. It’s still under wraps though, no one knows how to handle it yet.
We are trying to map out their complicated language at the moment, trying to establish some common ground. They were probably inspired by our language, but since they have no means of vocalization and a different way of hearing, they had to go in another direction. That, and the fact that their one plus eight minds are very different from our single minds, makes interspecies communication a difficult and slow process. But they are eager to cooperate. Though I think it’s only to get access to our technology since they’re not very good with building things physically.
One of their earliest wishes when contact was made, was to get control over, or get help to build, a spacecraft able to reach Saturn. Possibly to send a mixed human and octopus crew to Enceladus, from what I gather. It might have something to do with what they call “the knowledge”. It’s some kind of information that they are born with, it has been in their DNA for millions of years – apparently since long before their more recent leap in sentiency. It’s a piece of information all of them possess but have yet never revealed to any human.
Another secret I’ve learned is that the Octopuses wants help with neurosurgery to make one of their arms/minds cybernetically detachable so that it can be switched among individuals to transfer thoughts and knowledge.
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The Immortality Twist
“Oh no”, was my first reaction. “Why me?”, my second. Eventually everyone on Earth will know I’m immortal. They’ll hate me. They’ll envy me for having endless relapses into depression, an eternity to wonder what to eat for dinner and a never ending line of job interviews. Oh, almost forgot: An infinite number of orgasms.
TVS Monthly Nanofiction Bonanza May 2017
The challenge: Write a story, exactly 55 words.
You have achieved immortality not just as a state of being but as a life process. Tell us about it, either how it happened, what you will do with, or how it’s changed your perspective.
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Inside Universe
“How can I explain this. It’s like a shell. We live in the soft, fleshy body of a hermit crab, endlessly walking the seabed. All matter we observe – seafood. Encapsulating that is the shell; hard, separate and a completely different world. We don’t know where it came from, but it’s there all the same.”
TVS Monthly Nanofiction Bonanza April 2017
The challenge: Write a story, exactly 55 words.
What if the universe we perceive is contained within another universe?
When the tightrope catches fire you better run, she said as I ventured out over the bottomless chasm with the intention of never looking back. As soon as I felt the heat I started to scurry along the line. Flames licked my legs and my soles got scorched black as well as my soul. The acrid smell of burning hair was overwhelming and I could feel the fibers bursting like ruptured tendons in the rope under my feet. Finally my mask of wax, that I had carried to conceal my true face for a long time, melted and the sizzling, fiery drops disappeared in the abyss below. Everything was pain. But if I fell I knew I would never get back up from the depth again. So I tried to focus through the sweat and tears in my eyes. Run, she screamed, and I ran like never before.