Blogus Arbitrarius

It is brisk outside. He pulls his old coat over his narrow shoulders. He thinks about class today. It was difficult. He doesn’t understand the assignment. He is scolded by the young man who edited his paper for having no thesis, and for having a body with no substance. There is no conclusion.

He walks on the sidewalk, and passes the young man in his car waiting to enter traffic. He waves; the young man waves back. He is glad to be noticed.

The young man drives away. He waves again. The young man doesn’t wave back this time.

He walks home. His apartment is small and smells like him. He warms his dinner and eats it, and then he sleeps.

A proper blow to the head with the right instrument can create an excellent cavity to collect the gasoline. That part is the most exciting, because when the face finally opens up, the rest of the fuel spills out onto the driveway and chases you, like a spat fireball.

He called this one Nancy, because he thought that all bitches should be called Nancy to make things easier for everyone else, and this one was a bitch alright. He’d met her at the pub a week and a half earlier.

(more…)

They won’t dance if you won’t.

“This ambulance sucks at off-roading.”

He drank, and now has regrets.

Geoffrey scarfed down another bite of his cereal, reading over the day’s paper that had been delivered at the ungodly hour of four o’clock that morning. He ignored the headline and skipped to the comics.

His cereal was raisin bran. He didn’t really like raisin bran, but he ate it because that was breakfast. His apartment was small, and he didn’t really like it either, but he lived there because it was home. He didn’t have a car, but he expected that if he did, he wouldn’t really like that either. Yet still, he’d drive it to work each day because that was what he drove. (more…)

Sitting down at his desk with his favorite pen and notebook, John had at last devised a brilliant idea for a new story. It would be a story about a troubled writer – his own life’s story – based around a man named Don, who would play the part of himself. John thought it was very clever, changing his name very slightly so that nobody would know it was actually about himself.

Unfortunately, John’s idea was stupid. Even if he had a good idea, he still couldn’t pull it off well because he was a terrible writer. (more…)

As she pulled the key out of the box that housed all of her old art supplies, Lynn tried to remember the name of the woman who had given it to her. It had been decades ago, when she was still attending high school.

“You’ll find a use for it some day,” she remembered the woman saying. (more…)

“I’m fine,” she said. She wasn’t.