Three Short Fictions by Chuck Richardson

OF SUBURBAN VIOLENCE[i]

He heard the caw outside his window. It was close, but he couldn't see it. And so. We manipulate our fallen genitals until

It landed. There it is, he said, M. McConaughy-style. He watched it casing. Large, black, beautiful. Oh, no. Intrusive. Mandingo eyes the nest. The sparrows crouch, silent. Hoping for naught. Mandingo with one soft flap rises and inserts his blackness into the nest snatching a tiny white fledgling…one more sparrow lost to the world's hunger…counting every grain of sand…ruckus rendering all birds cacophonous, squealing utter agitation…the raven with its prey stunned on the grass before it…surrounded by robins on the ground and a dozen more birds on rooftops, tree branches, phone lines…the black beast being stalked…harassed as always by those darkies—red-winged blackbirds, whatnot others possessing the pyrrhic element…The raven has a young one to feed this young one to if…or maybe it's a she…a mother black bird out to feed her young…having become desperate…being constantly harassed by these smaller but angrier birds forming gangs within flocks to do just this…Mother snatches prey and takes a beeline to her nest with the robins following…but two ravens…daddy and uncle… seeing the gangs pursuing their wife and sister [respectively]…with the youngins squealin with hunger…the men abandon the nest…

Seeing this, Mom comes to her senses and drops the sparrow and veers away from her little ravenitos…drawing the militias of robins and grackles and now even starlings into hot pursuit…

A grackle, straggling, hears the ravenitos, unguarded, and eats all three for lunch. Eating one in the nest and the other two on the ground. They jumped out but couldn't get far.

As the grackle picks the last flesh from its prey, the calico stray pounces its way for her kittens…as a coyote nears…nose to the ground…pups yelping in a hole nearby…under the Smith's shed…

A CROSSBREEDING COALESCENCE OF

You suck.

Who said that?

Why?

He grimaced over the sea of brown, yellow, red and white faces. He was sure from the voice's accent it wasn't one of the white ones. Unlikely yellow either. So, he focused in on the brown and red faces. Now, granted, to most of us these faces do not appear brown or red or white…it's a gradient of tones his imagination, not ours [yes, ours, for we're human, too, and live inside culture, also, whether we like it or not]. But he cannot recognize the accent exactly. Was it gay? If so, what did the term "suck" mean? This really bothered him. High school didn't used to be this way. Now it's more real life. He should've retired, taken the buyout and left for Bimini…but no.

Why, pray tell, might someone say I suck? he thought aloud.

Because there's a woman or person of color who would do your job better but can't because they're in jail. You lead a privileged life and teach a mediocre course. That sucks.

To his surprise, it's one of his older, yet oddly precocious, apparently white female students, Tammy Damsell.

Fine thing for a nigger-loving lesbian Jewish princess to say, he spits. He heard himself speaking as if he were just along for the ride…then felt a stinging sensation in his neck…someone from the jungle section has struck him with a blow dart[ii]…he was

Going down the way he knew he one day would…he just hadn't thought it would be today…

So…

IGNITE THE NAKED EXPLOSION OF NAKEDNESS[iii]

Daddy? It's me. Irena. Open up. Please? I need…The door…He'd been waiting, it seems, forever for his baby girl to return…Her voice sounded as it did in his dreams…like she'd spilt milk and needed help…age four…so sweet…his hand, trembling, turned the knob, he could barely pull it open he trembled so, anxiety and hopefulness exacerbating tremors…of Parkinson's she knew nothing about, having been gone so long…she'd sounded so beautiful over the phone…he'd hummed while cleaning the kitchen for the first time in years…the loneliness compounded the troubles with his disease… he needs someone…and now Irena's come home…the door catches on the jam and he's forced to yank it open, causing him to stumble backward slightly, taking in the vision he'd so long forgotten and, hands churning unconsciously drew his weapon from his hip and fired…

Hitting nothing…vanishing into the night beyond her luminescent apparition…cunt bleeding, pierced wrists and ankles…2-inch nub of castrated clit…moaning…wanting to be loved…

He rejects her again…convulsing…his body rejecting…whatever she is…accepting its tremors like blows quivering lesser…Dad, finally, knowing himself…

Considers calling in a drone strike…suicide by America…shaking

NOTES

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[i]"…Sacredness misunderstood is readily identified with Evil…the violence of eroticism." [Erotism/124] What's sacred? How's it misunderstood? Does being perceived as evil mean it's evil? If violence implies a lack of power, is erotism a kind of weakness? What kind of power does it want? First, something's sacred if it's an uncommon object or subject related to religion and/or spirituality while possessing an ineffable power over the believer. Like fiction, the sacred requires a suspension of disbelief to fulfill its holy function. In erotism, erotists feel their fetish is sacred. For instance, one having a foot fetish has suspended disbelief that toes could mean so much. On their own, toes relate to their physiological function. It requires a triangulated psychology among the toe, the toe bearer and toe worshiper to achieve its sacred fetish status. The sacred is easily misunderstood because no point in the triangle occupies the same space as another point. Each is a repetition of the other, but with a difference. It's this difference that fosters the miscommunication—the evil—making communication even more necessary. Perceptions are taken as real and actuality's forgotten to make things work. Erotism's weakness is it's true without being the truth. So it's exasperated. It's about truly being horny for Truth.

[ii]“By overturning systems of meaning in which an exclusive definition is guaranteed, Bataille releases the violence of thought…There is no ideal…except revolt for its own sake:…an assertion of the self which is at once dark, violent and irrevocable” writes Ken Hollings about Ma Mere, "In the Slaughterhouse of Love." But violent revolt's only possible if one needs power. The marquis must become powerless to rebel against power. He needed to lash out violently against women as it was woman—the women in his life—who not just enabled, but imprisoned him. The female represented the limit into which he could thrust himself. This social alteration also meant a shift in meaning. Like Thoreau, Sade judged good what his neighbors felt bad, ruing his failure to do more evil and violence against their propriety until everyone else joined forces in revolt against the evil Sade meant to them—against the wildness he represented. So, too, did Emerson show regret eulogizing Thoreau, wondering what he might have done had he preferred the pursuits of men to those of children picking berries. Sade and Thoreau's contemporaries felt each had wasted his life in revolt against the common sense of their time, but gained immortality in the sense of what they did still means something today.

[iii]O goes to the beauty parlor to wax her punctured cunt, wearing an owl mask with open wounds, bruised and shocking, upsetting the beautician and, imaginably, the "gentle" reader [if one could read so far if one were gentle], hoping to comfort by saying the wax will be nothing compared to the riding crop: "No matter how many times [O]…made an attempt to explain…that she was happy, there was no way of reassuring [the beautician]…[O] was beheld with horror…when it was all over, [O] had the feeling that she was being evicted rather than leaving of her own free will." [Story of O/192] Reage has committed an act of literary and erotic terrorism per Jaffe's "Find a seam, plant a mine and slip away." That O goes out in public chained and masked shows how insular and alien she's become. O's a suicide bomber like all monsters are suicide bombers, as in Bataille's criticism of Genet—by showing what can't be said they explode It. If O nullifies herself only for Sir Stephen or the larger group, the act is good. But if she's doing it purely for herself, then it's evil. The fact is Reage has succeeded in making O's moral space ambiguous by presenting it as a vacuum. O is purely good-evil…the ambiguity inside the seam…a sensation firmly inserted twain clean-shaven labia exploding Its naked comeliness.

___________________________

Chuck Richardson is the author of six books of fiction and poetry, published by BlazeVOX. He lives in Buffalo, New York.

Fiction by Ann Bogle

First Sex

[This first appeared on the Ana Verse blog] 

On Dec. 2, I met Nils for the first and only time. Nils, a university geographer, found me at an internet dating website. He drove two hours to meet me on my turf. My own car, a 1989 Volvo 240 DL, had been and is still on the fritz, and with the weather expected to turn wintery, which it did, Nils had decided to go to me.

I have listed with internet dating websites for two years without ever meeting someone that way in person. Mostly, I get affirmation from them and little more. I do not shop the photos to look for Mr. Next. I wait for them to shop for me, and shop they do. Sometimes I receive five or more electronic winks in a day and cannot even begin to reply to them; also, I have no interest in replying to them. Then I wonder if I ought to take my profiles down from the websites so no man mistakenly believes I might be thinking of him, too, as happened to me at the beginning: I thought for a week that a certain "artist" from St. Paul had his mind on me because we had mutually "winked" at "each other." Neither one of us would pay the subscriber fee and actually correspond.

Nils was different from the start. Since he signed one of his letters with his full name, I searched him at Google and contacted him at work, which annoyed and confused him: He thought the dating website had committed a security breach. The breach was mine, not one of security, but of etiquette. Nils provided a different email address for my use, and we started to correspond. Let me simply say that Nils was the best correspondent with whom I had exchanged letters in twenty years, which is saying quite a lot, since I have tended to correspond with writers (albeit writers who may run cool toward correspondence). By contrast, Nils was fiery, opinionated, and sure on personal subjects.

After our date, which included dinner, a glass of wine, and a ridiculous TV show about a private investigator following a woman who worked for a sexual bondage service, we "did it," as we like to say here in Minnesota, on the hotel bed. I rarely discuss sex. I had learned early on that it's better never or almost never to mention sex except with the related sex partner and not to discuss past sex with someone else.

One day, out of the blue, and not due to any conversation, it occurred to me that I had not mentioned sex enough. I had left myself open to too much speculation, too many blanks that might give the impression of frigidity or boring or unearthly ways. At the website, my sexual personality test revealed that I am a Traditionalist. Nils is an Intellectual.

After our date, my sister, who has a boyfriend, came over with her Weimaraner. I started instantly to tell her of my sex with Nils. She shirked the conversation, tried to change the subject, and more than once, I persisted. I wanted her to hear about it. "I don't want to know about your sex life," she said at last. "I don't have a sex life," I told her. "I had sex, once, with Nils." In 2003, I had sex twice. In 2004 not at all, and in 2005, twice, once with Nils and once with my ex-boyfriend, who had not had sex since 2004.

I called my woman friend, whom I have not seen in two years (it seems) except for running into her once at a cafe. "I had sex," I called joyously into the phone, as if I were calling out my name to hear it echo in the mountains. "You're funny," she said, but it didn't sound like "funny" is what she meant; it sounded like she meant more like "weird." She has had a boyfriend for years; having sex for me was weird, and talking about it was even weirder. True, when I had a boyfriend, I had sex each day, and it had not seemed weird at all, but once-a-year sex is of another order and is genuinely noteworthy.

To be even more bold (and speak more about sex), I told two men about it; I told them my date with Nils had included amazing sex. I told them it was timed for conception. I told them I wanted "it," meaning the baby, even though I didn't get pregnant.

I wrote to Nils: "Sex with you was of the highest order I have ever experienced. I was nearly drunk on it. I 'saw' nothing except my open vagina against a screen, as if the whole room and world were nothing except an all-around vision inside a cunt. A flower, that is.

It was deep, indeed. So now I must ask you (since I was in stellar orbit) did you come inside me? Usually, I know that type of thing. This time I wouldn't be able to tell you."