The cult section of the literary world
By: Douglas Hackle The ’70 Plymouth Barracuda was already doing a steady 95 MPH down I-90, causing the ’cuda’s shotgun-riding passenger—a lamplighter by trade—to grip the dashboard with a white-knuckled hand, dig his shoes into the floor, and press his back hard into his seat, his forehead slick with terror-sweat. […]
By: John Bruni The end. _____ John Bruni is the author of BLOOD, DONG OF FRANKENSTEIN and POOR BASTARDS AND RICH FUCKS. He lives in Elmhurst, IL, where he spends waaaaaaaay too much time thinking about weird shit for a guy who doesn’t smoke weed.
WTFridays will bring you the most bizarre moments from a variety of bizarro books, the moments that make you look up from the page and say, “WTF?” So dig into this week’s offering, provided, for your enjoyment, completely without context. _____ Puppy had driven into the little town of Monroe […]
by: D.J. Tyrer People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, they say. But, what if you live in a house of lint and wool: should you throw stones then? Serennessa lived in a house of lint and wool on the edge of the village, not far from the […]
by: S.E. Casey It was during the limbo contest that I knew something was horribly wrong. I wasn’t being ageist in noting the winner was a sixty year old man. As the captain of the cruise ship, he certainly had a lifetime of practice. But when the bar was lowered […]
by: Ben Fitts Mike spotted the water cube first, which meant that it was his to jump in. The water cube slithered across the desert towards us where we waited in nothing but our swim trunks, the hot sand stinging the bottoms of our feet. It looked like a big […]
by: David S. Atkinson I spent the better part of the afternoon packaging up my excreta in cardboard boxes and clear packing tape again. It’s time consuming, but there isn’t a whole lot of choice. Given my particular situation, I have to dispose of it through the mail. A piece […]
by: JP Vallières We couldn’t get the iceberg to melt no matter how hard we tried: blow torch, bonfire, hairdryer, rubbing our butts back and forth to the song, That’s the Way (I Like It). I’m not into melting things usually, but there were some important items encased in that […]
by: Zoltán Komor My wife wants a baby, but I’d prefer a remote control drone with HD Wi-Fi camera, so I figure out an intermediate solution: I’ll knock up my wife, let her give birth to the child, and after a couple of weeks, when she gets bored with this […]
by: Sean Noah Noah Y2K came and went and pretty much everyone could agree that the world had ended, but nobody could figure out exactly how. Just days before, everything had seemed so certain: all the computers wouldn’t be able to change the dates correctly and they’d break down and […]
by: Bert Stanton All he wanted was a bag with handles. Just one large bag with two handles. Paper or plastic, didn’t matter. Big enough to fit the contents of the brown bag sitting on the checkout counter, almost filled to the top with enough food and assorted sundries to […]
by: James Burr He danced in the dry ice, his limbs staccato-jerking in the strobes. He’d cleared a space for himself and was dancing on the spot, breathing heavily through his nose and mouth, his eyes glazed and staring blankly ahead. “I’m dancing, I’m dancing,” he kept repeating as he […]
by: Martin Rutley It was late, Saturday night, when they brought me in. Strapped to a stretcher, disinfectant smeared into the corners of my eyes, the smell of petroleum in their greasy sideburns. Dressed in the green and gray of the company uniform, each of the six had joyously taken […]
by: John Wayne Comunale Jonathan Switz was loved and renowned by his people as much if not more than he was loathed and reviled by them. Such is the plight of every leader, but Switz remained unaffected. He couldn’t feel the love, hate, or indifference of his people because he […]
by: Neil Sanzari When the girl of malnourished complexion crossed paths with the ribbit in the ruins of Saint X’s Parochial Middle School, she refrained from drawing a single arrow. It was her first encounter with the dread creature. In fact, she had only heard the faintest of frightened whispers […]
by: Cornell R. Nichols When I got to work on Monday, 8 a.m. sharp, vampire swans were eating their way through my office building. Zipping around the corporate high-rise in a flock, a ballet, a whiteness, they have managed to strip away the concrete from all twenty regular and five […]
by: Ira Rat I wonder if there will be enough air in here to last the next few hours. The guys who built this fucking thing said so, but how would they know? It’s not like they would ever come down here and test it, bet their lives their calculations […]
by: Avichai Brautigam We mined the planet dead. Not in the sense that we burrowed, like dwarves, carving Morias and Morias into the crust till it all came apart; it was Bitcoin that did us in. Somewhere, in the moldy basement of some half-forgotten Department of the Bureau of the […]
by: Christopher Lesko Mom: C’mon we need to get you some new slacks. They’ve got good deals going on at Sears right now. Boy: You’re hurting my arm. Mom: I need you to hold my hand when we cross. Could be a weed maniac zipping around the corner. People never […]
by: Chris Meekings It is barely coin o’clock in the morning, and the bourbon has only just taken the taste of Pepsodent from my mouth when she walks into my office. She’s glass and alabaster, with curves in all the right places, liquorice nice. She walks across the room, her […]
by: John Wayne Comunale I’ve always liked my women a little on the trashy side. The ones with elaborate, unnecessary makeup, boots that are way too high with skirts that are way too short, and piercing eyes glaring from beneath dramatically cut, Betty Page bangs. Throw in a few tattoos […]
by John Bruni “That’s my seat.” Chuck looked up from his newspaper. A skinny, balding guy with glasses and a sweaty forehead stood over him, looking intently down. He trembled, and judging from the steel in his eyes, it was from rage, not fear. “First come, first served.” Chuck went […]
by Bert Stanton Totino’s Party Pizza is anything but a party or a pizza. It’s a square of questionable food stuffs; dough, cheese and meat in name only. The reality is ingredients manufactured in the basement of a North Korean sweatshop. At a dollar a pop, you really can’t expect […]
by Rick Sherman DO YOU. As one of many concubines you will want to stand out. The Tah-Lahki have no concept of masturbation. Diddling yourself creatively is a sure way to attract his/her attention and assure you of an extra ration to help put off starvation for another day. PULL […]
By John Wayne Comunale Carrie peered through the curtains of her bedroom window. The man was still there. She didn’t know why she expected anything different, since he had been standing on the sidewalk across the street from her house for the last five days. Every time she looked out, […]
By John Bruni My eye cracks open. It’s unusual for me to wake up before my alarm clock goes off. I check my phone and—holy shit! It’s 8:29 am! I have to be at work in one minute! I don’t have time to eat or brush my teeth. The commute […]
by Ross Peterson The asphalt was hotter than the charcoal in Satan’s Weber. On the rumblestrip, gray fragments of Jared’s sundered brain crawled toward one another, reassembling. Little particles of him lay littered across the highway, speckled over the swath of brown roadside grass. Once his brain had put itself […]
by Nimrod Tzarking The furry morsels feast on our clutches. And we are dying. A star burns in the sky. Every day it hurtles closer. And we are dying. The continent shatters beneath our feet. Talons scrape at splintering fault lines. Ferns drift imperceptibly apart, gravel shifting between them. And […]
by D.M. Anderson Donald sneezed his brain all over the audience, his head emptying like an accordion until there was little left but a pancaked face sitting deflated atop a quivering neck. The deafening applause of the gore-splattered audience’s adoration thundered into a crescendo that would surely echo across the […]
by Cornell R. Nichols Night 1Hanging. Glowing.Hanging. Glowing.Hanging. Glowing.Waiting for dawn. Night 2Hanging. Glowing.Hanging. Glowing.Hanging. Glowing.Attracting moths. Night 3Hanging. Glowing.The layer of dead moths caking my tubes has darkened one of my letters. It’s a complete disaster.I start to blink an S.O.S.I realize there is no O in the name […]
by Meg Sefton The body is in a bag. The body is on a cart. The body rolls out of the bedroom. The body rolls out of the living room. The body rolls by the family pictures. The body rolls through the kitchen. The body bumps over the threshold to […]
by Sean Kelly The couple stood on the beach where they had first met, the ocean water sloshing around their ankles. Justin stroked Natalie’s hair and she smiled. The moonlight glistened in her eyes. They gazed at each other. This was the moment they had been waiting for all these […]
by John Wayne Comunale I went to a party a few days ago where I didn’t know anybody. I mean, like I literally knew no one. I guess most people would call this crashing but I didn’t see it that way. I was driving by and saw a ton of […]
by Matt Sunrich The fact is, most houses contain at least one monster. They usually live in attics and basements, proverbially enough, as these are among the least visited spaces in a residence. The larger the house, the better they like it, as there are bound to be great swaths […]
by Alex S. Johnson Durwood peered down, his toes itching, the rash spreading across his choirboy features like the trail of a strawberry torch. He gasped. Grandpa was in the sidewalk once again. How did he get there? What perfidious psychopaths had made him stand still for the bucket, the […]
