Flash Fiction Friday: Friction
by Brian Auspice
I flip a switch and turn off friction. I slide into a wall. The wall slides into me. Everything and everyone slides into everything and everyone else. We all get a good laugh out of it. I flip the switch again and begin to untangle the mess I’ve caused.
“Ultimately,” some pundit on some station says to the camera. “Ultimately, this whole situation has brought us closer together.” He sticks a revolver in his mouth and blows his brains out.
I turn off the television and stare at my reflection in the black screen. My face melts, dripping prismatic wax onto a checkered tile floor. It coagulates into liquid gold. I scoop it into a mason jar, make a poorly-timed knock-knock joke to an empty room, and dive out an open window.
CUT TO: EXT. SKYSCRAPER – DAY
Seven-thousand hour slow-motion establishing shot of stunt double falling to the city below.
I land on my feet. I twist my ankle. I untwist my ankle and do a one-handed cartwheel. Bystanders applaud. I flip them off and tell them I wasn’t trying to impress them.
“I did it for the lulz,” I say, turning and deliriously skipping down the street, head cocked back to belt out a long and unpunctuated series of psychotic laughs.
I reach the corner of Lo and Main. I sucker punch a pedestrian in the crosswalk. He staggers back and stumbles into a crowd of nuns, setting off a chain reaction of human dominos that wraps around the world twice, coming to a fiery, apocalyptic conclusion at Burning Man.
“All good things must come to an end,” I say, shrugging uncontrollably for seventy-two hours.
I wander off into a junkyard. Scrap metal. Tires. Frames. Fumes, toxic and otherwise.
RECLAIMER ->
<- THIS WAY
I follow the sign, weaving serpentine through the mounds of rust and rubber. I come to a clearing. A shack sits at the edge of a sludge pond. A flickering neon sign hangs above its door. A series of saturated wood shipping pallets float on the surface of the pond. I leapfrog across them, landing on the opposite muddy bank. I lose my footing and slide into the shack’s door. It opens. I tumble inside, leaving a skid of slime in my wake.
“Welcome,” says a man behind the counter. “I,” he pauses, clears his throat. “I am the Reclaimer.” He spreads his arms like a messiah. “This is my domain.”
I survey the room. Dented tin cans, broken toys, half-magazines, warped instruments, discarded personal hygiene products, previous generation iPhones – a collection of temporary one-time relics tossed, lost, and forgotten.
“I’ve come to barter,” I declare. I stand, stride across the room, and place my jar of liquid gold on the counter.
Reclaimer eyes it. He strokes his chin. He reaches under the counter and retrieves a pair of unnecessarily complex magnifying goggles. He straps them to his head and examines the jar.
“Few imperfections,” he mutters. “Some pitting here, bubbling. Otherwise,” he removes the goggles. “Otherwise, of good quality. The contents are useless, of course. Dime-a-dozen.” He places a rusted hubcap on the counter, dumping a handful of chipped plastic coat buttons on top. “And that’s generous.”
I laugh. He laughs. I slam my fist on the counter. The buttons tiddlywink. We stare at one another for five years.
“Very well,” he says. He places a previous generation iPhone on the counter. “My final offer.”
I nod. He nods. I hand him the jar and take the iPhone. I awkwardly bow and exit the shack. I stand at the edge of the pond. I power on the device and immediately download an app that allows me to remotely flip switches. I tap the touchscreen and turn off friction. I slide into the sludge. The sludge slides into me.
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Brian Auspice exists in an impermeable void between time and space. He is the author of Deep Blue, which was published as a part of the New Bizarro Author Series in 2014. 01001010 01101111 01101000 01101110 00100000 01110011 01110101 01100011 01100011 01110101 01101101 01100010 01110011 00101110
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Submit your bizarro flash fiction stories to FlashFictionFridaySubmissions@gmail.com.
Bizarro News Roundup!
Ready for another shitstorm of the latest Bizarro news gripping the world? Here you go:
- “A spooky clown has been scaring Northampton residents in full costume and make up.He is red haired and white faced and has appeared in several locations in the Abington and Kingsley areas.A Facebook page has now been set up for the clown called Spot Northampton’s Clown which has already achieved over 3,000 likes since it went live yesterday.The clown has proved a sensation on social media and has its own Twitter hashtag #northamptonclown.According to reports it has knocked on someone’s door and offered to paint their sills despite having no painting equipment.Let us know if you see it too”via Northhamton News
- “Hundreds of rare wild monkeys — some carrying herpes — are on the loose in Florida after a tour guide brought the spunky critters to the state long ago.Wildlife officials said that three pairs of Rhesus monkeys were transported to a park near Ocala in the 1930s by tour operator Colonel Tooey after a “Tarzan” flick sparked a fascination with the creature.But the breed has since boomed and more than 1,000 of the monkeys now live in the state, wildlife officials say.State officials have caught more than 700 of the monkeys in the past decade — most of which tested positive for the herpes-B virus.Wildlife officials now consider the monkeys a public health hazard.”
via New York Post
- Florida is some Bizarro vortex, crazy random shit happens every day there. This asshole beat up a child over an argument about hard-boiled eggs. David Belson slammed the girl’s head against the wall, harmed his wife who tried to save her, and is now thankfully in jail. Domestic disputes get pretty ugly in Florida. This guy dumped a cup of tea on his wife’s head.
- Florida isn’t the only place doing some harm with hot beverages. A 61-year-old woman in Japan killed her cheating husband with a cup of coffee!
- Meanwhile in Florida, again, a man is arrested and found with a crack pipe inside his stomach. Ouch!
- That’s nothing though, Anal Mishaps: US Woman Stuck $5000 Cash in Butt, Filipino Jobert Sucaldito Recovering from Cucumber in Rectum.
- A Colombian woman was caught trying to smuggle cocaine in a fake pregnant belly. This was a new one for Colombian police but obviously it didn’t work.
- An artist has created an “edible opera” using biotechnology which uses a cool facehugger-looking helmet that creates edible algae from carbon dioxide which feeds the algae. “The singer has trained herself specially for this project so that she can further enhance her lung capacity to produce the best quality algae possible. The slightest changes in pitch and frequency can apparently determine the algae’s color, texture and even whether it will be sweet or bitter.”
- The blobfish has officially been named the world’s ugliest animal. I totally disagree. They’re cute and endangered too. Poor blobfish!
- In beauty news, a guy named Herbert Chavez dropped £4,400 on 13 surgeries to make him look like Superman. He now looks like an android which is pretty cool.
- In involuntary body modification news, this asshole tattooed his name on his passed out girlfriend’s vagina.
- A Chinese woman was attacked by a snake that was kept for 3 months in a bottle of wine. Sweet revenge!
- Scientists discover that a species of frog can hear with his mouth using mouth cavities. Gardiner’s frogs are one of the smallest species of frogs in the world.
- Peninsula instructors prepare youth for the zombie apocalypse. “Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic,” a graphic novella geared to teens and young adults prepared by the Centers for Disease Control, has the answers. ‘If you are generally well-equipped to deal with a zombie apocalypse, you will be prepared for a hurricane, pandemic, earthquake or terrorist attack,’ said CDC director of public health preparedness Dr. Ali Khan, who appears as a character in the comic book. The zombie comic started as a tongue-in-cheek campaign, but has evolved into a popular way to impress young people with the importance of emergency preparedness, he explains on the CDC web site.” You can read the CDC zombie pandemic graphic novel here.
- Talk about awesome finds! This German kid found a human mummy in a sarcophagus in a corner of his grandparents’ attic!
- 16 human skulls found near a school in Prague. The skulls were said to be from a “private collection.” Ok I want a collection of human skulls. Obtained legally of course.
- Iowa has issued gun permits for the blind. I think that’s cool, blind people need guns too.
- Man sets fire to neighbour’s house trying to smoke out wasp nest. That’s one way of doing it…
- In cryptozoology news, Swiss police are on a hunt for “Le Loyon,” a mysterious creature who has been spotted roaming the woods in Switzerland for over a decade. He is said to be wearing a gas mask, boiler suit, and cloak. “While he does not seem to be obviously aggressive or dangerous, police are hoping to speak to Le Loyon in an effort to encourage him to be less threatening.”
- Joker-obsessed fan stabs a man at the gym and tries to carve a Joker smile on his face when he’s arrested. He also posted “Why so serious?” on Facebook right after the incident.
- Don’t worry, Batman will save us! Batman and Captain America save a cat from a burning house.
Until next time Bizarros!
Twisted Tuesdays: The Beautifully Fucked Up Comics of Joan Cornellà
by Tracy Vanity
No dialogue and pure lulz, Joan Cornellà makes the most incredible comics I’ve ever seen. Joan hails from Spain and has a really fucked up sense of humor that I can relate to. You can follow him on facebook, twitter or see & purchase more amazing comics and art at Joan’s Cornellà website. I’ll post my favorites:
BTW Happy Birthday to Carlton Mellick III!
Bizarro Breaking News!: Giant Genital Beatdown, Moving Museum Statue, Mac N’ Cheese Stabbing & More!
by Tracy Vanity
Blame the Supermoon but a lot of weird shit has been going on lately. Here are the highlights:
- Woman dressed as a giant vagina saves a giant penis from mob attack.
via Dangerous Minds
Performance artists dressed as giant male and female genitals from the Nomadic Academy of Fools were running around merry old England spreading the joy of genitals when a group of passersby took offense to the giant dick and started beating him up. The vagina saved him and the assholes dressed as regular people called the police who told the dick and vagina to remove the costumes because it was offensive.
Quote from Nomadic Academy of Fools:
“We’re trying to highlight the contradiction in society. People were offended by us walking around in costume, but it’s nothing you can’t see in magazines and newspapers that are often displayed in a child’s eye-line. On the whole, the reaction we had was positive from most people.”
Assholes-dressed-as-regular-people ruin everything!
- Ancient Egyptian Statue turns 180 degrees, scares the shit out of everyone.
via Geekosystems
In what looks like a job for the crew of the Mystery Machine, an ancient Egyptian statue in the collection of the Manchester Museum seems to have taken on a life of its own, rotating 180 degrees in its closed glass case, apparently untouched by any outside force. A time lapse video of the statue moving — seemingly of its own accord — has gone viral, causing some to go full O’Reilly and claim that supernatural forces are behind the motion. Others, including noted physicist Brian Cox, remain convinced that the statue’s spin can be explained without resorting to sentences containing the phrase “mummy’s ghost.” For our part, we want someone to find Old Man Withers, stat.
The statue is a ten-inch high offering to the ancient Egyptian god of death, Osiris, and is inscribed with a prayer on its back, which after three days of slow, steady turning in its display case, faces museum patrons.
- Where else but Florida would a man stab his brother over mac n’ cheese? Seriously, where?
via wpxi.com
Randy Zipperer was really jonseing for some mac and cheese. As he searched his house for the golden goodness his brother Edward joined in to help.
That’s when things went wrong.
Randy was already mad because he couldn’t find his food so when Edward accidently knocked over his beer a scuffle followed. That ended with Randy stabbing Edward in the stomach.
Cops in Daytona Beach, Florida said Randy told them he was just playing around with his brother and “poked him a little with the knife.”
The Daytona Beach News reports Ed was left with a small puncture wound and bruised feelings.
Cops did recover a 6-inch knife with blood on the tip.
Randy is still in the slam, taking up residence in the Volusia County Jail on an aggravated battery charge.
No word on if he ever got his mac and cheese or if they happen to serve it in the lockup.
If you think I’m needlessly picking on Florida you obviously haven’t been following @_FloridaMan on twitter…
- And to close off today’s Bizarro Breaking News here’s a gallery of people dressed as superheroes beating people up and doing other crazy shit.
“SpongeBob Squarepants Brawl” wins for so many reasons!
Moral: If you’re going to act fucking crazy, wear a costume because it adds to the lulz.
Twisted Tuesdays: Animated Gif Apocalypse #3
by Tracy Vanity
My Bizarro animated gif folder is overflowing. I love animated gifs. I’m fucking obsessed. They are awesome.
Enjoy the madness! Muahahahah!!!!!
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Bonus!
