You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Kill’ tag.
Tag Archive
Holes in the Sand
December 7, 2006 in 299 Words, Books, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Literature, novels, Poetry, reading, Short stories, Stories, Very Short Novels, Writing | Tags: Kill, Politics, Terror, War | by davidbdale | 14 comments
The brain has a fuse. After years of threat and terror, the fuse blows, leaving a scar behind, a charred little plug of once-animated tissue. It can turn a person mean. The bombs hover over our heads, almost within view. They cast their shadow over all our choices, smart bombs in search of a policy. From the rooftops, we make out, just beyond the harbor, smudges on the horizon, the ships that would deliver the missiles that would deliver us. Where we live, with our heads inside the cannon, the outlook is dark. Every year or so we hear the rumble of guns massing against us. When the international cameras arrive, the ambassador vaults the secretary-general and tramples the prime minister to be first to the podium to denounce us. Just before the elections (everyone else’s; we don’t believe in elections), surgical strikes cripple our ability to make spermicidal jelly. Meanwhile, the blockades turn back dangerous baby formula from our ports. There are more of us every year, and we’re sicker and tireder. Yes, we see the guns. We hear the planes in the no-fly zone. We thumb our noses at the guns. They move closer, they move away, they blast holes in the sand. Meanwhile another generation blows its fuse. Our children don’t know what it is to live without the threat of instant annihilation. On the other hand, they’re not tormented by nostalgia. There’s no going back for us. We would sooner give our wives what they really want than capitulate to the demands of the world. The world can take what we offer or it can kill us. We don’t divorce, and the threat of the big strike no longer means anything. You can kill us, you may have to, but you’d better kill us all.
Copyright © 1999
Killer Ending
November 24, 2006 in 299 Words, Books, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Literature, novels, Poetry, reading, Short stories, Stories, Very Short Novels, Writing | Tags: Brother, Death, Grave, Horror, Kill, Killer, Murder, Mystery, Novel, Sibling, Violence | by davidbdale | 16 comments
If ghosts could kill themselves, they would. They long to be either here or there. Bodiless but not yet dimensionless light, they darken like shadows the houses they lived in. My dead twin brother finds ways to tell me he’s still half-with us, and I more than half believe him. Ghost stories have it all wrong. Rattling chains aren’t threats or warnings; they’re diplomatic feelers from the nearly departed. So far, he’s dropped hints about the gun I helped him buy, about his accidental death, and about the novel he was writing, but not enough to pull it all together. With my clean record, my legitimate ID, and a photo of the face we share, I secured a license to arm ourselves against what I never knew, but it helped him sleep, and so it helped me, too. He’d gotten it in his head that his foot was diseased, or menacing in a way that his chapter drafts don’t specify. In the garden at dusk, he aimed down the barrel with single-eyed intensity, fired one shot, and severed the pinkie toe, then laughed at what he called my much ado. He got it in his head that we were triplets next and aimed at me in turn, calling me the one in the middle before he fired. Lonely as Adam, I dug a hole that seeped a bit and laid him in damp earth, then filled it alone. I meant to write that it pains the ghost to haunt the living, but it doesn’t ring true. This note I found in his own hand, which looks so much like mine, bears no hint of anguish or remorse. There is no twin, it says, the novel has always been mine, and who will bury you now that you’ve killed me?
Copyright © November 24, 2006
Very Short Novels 
Recent Comments