entitycradle

[entitycradle]

The thing you want doesn't meaningfully exist. That's the secret.

Sorry. It's not your fault.

#writing #microfiction

[entitycradle]

The Turning

#writing #comics #horror #comic #original comic #short comic #traditional art

[entitycradle]

ARTHROPOD 3

It's like a little tick. It trundles on your dusty arms. It makes its away across the dry calves and itchy eyebrows. It is round and again very small, not even as big as this -> o

Occasionally you feel it, like a tickle that sighs. It requires nothing from you.

#writing #microfiction #original fiction

[entitycradle]

#writing #comics #comic

[entitycradle]

ARTHROPOD 2

It's called an angiopede. It looks like a centipede at its ends, but it's branched like a tree. The single tail of the angiopede buries itself deep underground, deeper as it grows, while its multiplying heads spread out and emerge from the soil to trap bugs and small vertebrates. The centimeter-wide, meters-long body is colored a shiney, dark mahogany. The millions of segmented legs have thinner portions of the same pigment, so they look like tiny yellowed finger bones.

COVERED BELOW: Predatory Behavior, Decapitation Phenomena

PREDATORY BEHAVIOR

The heads use a combination of paralyzing venom and physical restraint to immobilize their prey. A particular angiopede branch may have up to a meter of slack between its head and its elbow, so the branch may rapidly extrude from its burrow to wrap around prey as the venom takes hold. Once paralyzed, the angiopede drags the catch down into the earth. The angiopede has a unique mechanism for this burying process: once the branch is wrapped around a catch, it "rolls" the catch down its length. The rolls propagate down the branch like a kink in a rope. The waving legs massage the soil and the rolled-up branch lashes and shifts to prevent knots forming. Once it has settled underground the buried juvenile heads feed between the gaps of the wrapping.

Typically, once the catch is consumed, the branch unrolls up to the surface, expelling any inedible remains. But mature angiopedes have so much redundancy in their body plan, so many heads and such long branches, that some remains are never unwrapped. The kink in the branch remains underground, unmoved, indefinitely. Every few minutes the buried legs mutter in waves. The angiopede fashions from itself an animal's crawling tomb.

DECAPITATION PHENOMENA

The angiopede's extended body plan requires complex neural architecture. There are nerve bundles in each head as well as each elbow where branches meet one another. If you cut all the heads off of a mature angiopede, this distributed nervous system allows it to survive for weeks before it starves to death. In this interval the angiopede's headless limbs twist, without sight or venom, and in their aimless many-fingered reaching they capture things stranger than animals.

Small out-of-place artifacts may be found in the underground hollows created by headless angiopede captures. These are technological objects which exhibit an age much older than the supposed development of the technology; for example, an opened plastic package of branded AA batteries with wear that suggests it is over five hundred years old. Very occasionally artifacts with highly complex construction and unclear purpose have been unearthed; it is theorized that these are "out of place" in the present and native to the future.

Curses and blessings are buried by decapitated angiopedes. A dread, dim woods becomes just a forest; a time full of light and wonder becomes a sequence of steady, daily mornings. Angiopede capture is a method of sequestering subjectivity, neutralizing realized human judgements. Subjectivity is well-preserved in angiopede hollows and for this reason it is dangerous to open them due to the subsequent unpredictable ontological changes. What form does a blessing take once its prior social understandings have become obsolete? Who or what will it seize?

The angiopede may even capture voids. Like subtracting a negative number, burying a void is equivalent to excavating the thing that fills it. In one recorded case a lost child, naked and filthy, rose from the earth to fill his stricken father's arms.

You may be wrapped, in some sense, in the branches of a dying angiopede. Not that it could materially drag you underground. At the end of the day it's just a bug. But if you have ever felt like something was missing, like the parts of you worked but they never fit together to make a complete human, know that it may not be the fault of your failures or trauma. It may be that a segment of you is hiding under the forest floor in the fingers of a dead, blind myriapod. In a desperate moment you may seek it out. But be careful, when your shovel first cracks the skinny, brittle corpse to open a wrapped-up hollow, of the foreign pieces you will unearth.

#writing #original fiction #weird fiction #new weird #sff #american gothic #flash fiction

[entitycradle]

Dinner

Tried to improvise panel-by-panel on this one. Transcript below the cut.

PAGE 1 - A fellow decides to make a dinner, even if it seems impossible to others.

Panel 1 - Fellow: "Hmm... Yes... Yes, I think I will..."

Panel 2 - Fellow: "I will make a dinner."

Panel 3 - Guest A: "Did he say a dinner?" Guest B: "It just can't be... dinners are so hard to make!" Guest C: "And the easy dinners are depressing..." Guest D: "It's the most expensive meal of the day!"

Panel 4 - Fellow: "OH! My sweet people."

Panel 5 - Fellow: "Comrades."

Panel 6 - Fellow: "Friends!"

PAGE 2 - The fellow assures his comrades of the dinner, then serves it to the pleasure of all.

Panel 1 - Fellow: "This very evening, I will prepare a roast chicken, spinach salad with chickpeas, and fried plantains as a treat."

Panel 2 - Fellow: "To you all, I will serve this dinner,"

Panel 3 - Fellow: "for free."

Panel 4 - Narration: And so like their ancestors before them and their ancestors' ancestors and so on, the gathered companions partook in that joyous hominin habit of the feast. One after another, they thought to themselves, How strange. While Kronos's spiral guarantees my descent into lonesome perdition, so too does it assure a sweet return to this moment of peace, plenitude, & goodwill. One of the guests even brought box wine. It was good.

#writing #comics #comic #original comic #short comic #traditional art #are sharpies traditional

[entitycradle]

#writing #comics #comic #original comic #short comic

[entitycradle]

I don't know what she's talking about, tripe is good in all kinds of stuff. I'm starting to learn to just improvise a cartoon, no penciling. It's very fun.

#writing #comics #cartooning

[entitycradle]

Death itself doesn't know

Death's curse is its stupidity. Perhaps that is unkind; death's experience of reality is so distant from ours. Even with all that time, all that it has seen, it still doesn't quite understand us. We can only forgive its misinterpretations. What else can we do?

Death appears as the image of a drowned corpse floating through the air.

The corpse in the image bobs, rocking gently, delicate strands of hair floating about its head like a halo. It has a definite location: get closer and it appears larger; get further and it appears smaller. Yet walking around it in a circle does not change your view of it, nor does looking from underneath or above. It's as if the image is on a plane that rotates to always face you, though multiple people can view death at once and all perceive the same image "facing" them. Only the corpse's twisting in the slow current allows you to see different parts of it. The image is visible through walls and other obstructions, including your own eyelids.

The eyes of the corpse are browned and sallowly pale but they follow you. It does not break eye contact, even to blink. It may attempt to comfort the distressed by twisting them fourth-dimensionally against some higher-order warmth. It speaks too quietly to hear, those caved-in lips moving, but you know exactly what it means because its speech appears in your head as thoughts that you believe are your own.

To the dying, death plays a song. This song is loud in a way that, somehow, does not drown out anything else. The deep tones and reedy melodies and dark, glittering intervals rise and expand until you can't hear them, and as this music goes yet further beyond your attentive mechanisms themselves loosen and relax. You don't notice when you cease to hear anything at all.

#writing #original fiction #microfiction #flash fiction #new weird #weird fiction #death

[entitycradle]

Matrix Inhabitance Disorder

Due to muscle atrophy, ataxia, and other movement-related pathologies caused by long-term simulation sleep, escapees from the Global Metachain System universally require assistive devices ranging from canes and glasses to power wheelchairs with eye tracking control systems.

In escapee communities physical therapy has taken on a ceremonial, even religious character, often performed in mass gatherings at central, carefully constructed edifices. People with different kinds of ability fill different roles within the community and perform their bodily maintenance in different parts of the habilitation temple. This leads to the formation of semi-cohesive social groups based on ability.

The transition of an individual between these groups is usually marked with a large, highly personal ceremony, not unlike a wedding, to celebrate change and acknowledge their personhood within it. They may even permanently mark this change with adornments such as rings, nose ornaments, and medallions. These ceremonies take on different modes depending on the kind of transition; however, these modes may not straightforwardly map to hierarchical notions of disability. For example, a person losing their ability to talk due to increased dysarthria (injury of speech-related muscles) may hold a ceremony characterized by relief and relaxation at the public declaration of something which required frequent explanation to strangers, and excitement at the prospect of being welcomed into the existing mute community.

Signing and speaking are equally prevalent; those able to perform both do so simultaneously, especially in public or to strangers. Announcements, signs, and instructions are very carefully designed. Elevators are everywhere.

#writing #original fiction #microfiction #flash fiction #sff #scifi #disability #I'm disabled but I don't know everything #Let me know if any of this is disrespectful or ignorant

[entitycradle]

Hallway Bolt

She shook her head. "Sorry."

"Aw. Aw, no, no problem."

She just sat there, head bowed.

"Hey, let's… I'll put my coat on. We'd go for a walk?" Ollie offered. In this dry, still, cold evening, among concrete and light. But, no, "I'd--like to hear it."

She rotated her head their direction, but didn't tilt it up. She stared at their shin, surrounded in her field of view by the cheap tile. Narrow twigs tickled through the gaps with the mortar.

Self-conscious, Ollie bounced that leg. "I would." They watched her smile.

Mafe turned back to her piano and sniffed. She cupped her fingers over E2 and E4. Right foot on the pedal, like the burled-up roots in the other place. She'd done this first part so many times but she was shakey about the rest. That's okay, Ollie knows. So, there's the chord, and the next six. Then over. Smear their notes across the measure, then tighten them into points and syncopate. She felt her fingers shake--this wasn't right, that wasn't. Slow down a second. But, no, keep going, that's all she could do, anything else was impossible. The hard knot in her brain didn't let her feel the soft action of the keys, didn't let her see the chipped wood trim that gave Ollie a splinter the first time they ran their knuckles across it, didn't let her think that maybe the right notes weren't the important part. Not that they weren't important. But she couldn't think even maybe.

This hallway was too narrow for the upright, and tall, and sterile, but there wasn't anywhere else to put it. Getting it in here was hell. And it needed to be tuned, Ollie didn't know a lot about piano but that's what Mafe said and they could definitely hear that sort of off sound. Ollie listened to her right hand roll as her left clawed tensely. Aw, listen to that. She just, added, something. And then--

Mafe opened her mouth. She set herself up with the basic progression again and let out a shakey off-key moment that was almost enough to make her stop. But she felt Ollie lean in. The apartment was too small, and her this little nothing at the bottom of a chasm, miles of void. Everything was too small, and everyone being small together didn't make it better. Maybe it made things worse. She stayed shakey and off-key and leaned in anyway.

There were no words, barely any enunciation. Almost a moan, a humming uh. And then she stopped playing with the left hand, so sort of broke it down to something simple, and started with the dadada and bent towards a high note and hit it. Froze Ollie's ribcage, dropped their heart.

Mafe rang. She put on vocal fry. The piano was out of tune because the air conditioning didn't work in the hallway, so the temperature changed too much. She went for the blues lick and hit it. It felt good. What was this? What was this? And then she was repeating herself.

Ollie's eyes were open. That sky. Through the trees.

Mafe petered out lamely, forgetting, then giving in. She shrugged with her whole body, hands going up, bouncing on the piano bench. "There's what I have. I don't know where to go next." She looked at Ollie.

They jumped and looked up, gaze searching. "Whoa. Where did that come from?"

Mafe blinked. Ollie was bewildered, for some reason. "What?"

"Sorry, I--Mafe, that was--! Did it just thunder? Mafe, it was," Ollie tumbled towards her and the two collided into a kiss, Mafe surprised but delighted.

Her ego swelled. An unusual feeling. Holding them, she said, "Thunder?" It was silent in the hallway.

"Yeah, did you hear that? Right at the end. I didn't think it was even raining."

"I--guess--"

Ollie just kept going. "But Mafe that was beautiful, wonderful--wonderfully--uh, beautiful." They grinned so wide, hoping she felt their admiration.

She did.

"It was like--it was like, for a second--and I mean," they kissed her again. "When you started singing, wowow wow your voice. For like a second, I even thought--I could see, this forest. Like I have this really distinct image--it was evocative! That's the word."

Mafe was curious. "You saw a forest? What did it look like?" Because the other place looked like a forest. And right now it was--

"Yeah, right? Like, shorter, kinda scraggly trees, with white, uh, like pale bark. And sort of--I really dunno why it's this distinct, but they're not barren but the leaves are kinda sparse, and it's hilly, and you can see up and out, to this cloudy sortof purple sky. And the ground and the leaves were a little shiny, like wet. Is that like--" Ollie tightened up. "Is that like what you told me, that one time? About the forest?"

Right now, in the other place, it was thundering. Mafe hunched over, staring at them. In the hallway it was flat and silent. She couldn't feel how hard her heart was beating.

Mafe had gone from holding them to hanging onto them. Ollie felt a piece of her moment. They hunched with her, conspiratorially.

"I heard it." Right?

"I was there."

She pushed her head into the crook of Ollie's neck. In the other place it was thundering, wide open, wind up, soaking, stomped, powerful, splayed and leaning. How? She'd opened a gap, a person-sized, seconds-long gap. What were the conditions? What did it mean? Was this better or worse?

"Do you think, if you played it again, I could climb a tree?"

She laughed. "Maybe." The branches would be rough and slick under Ollie's fingers. Maybe.

#writing #original fiction #flash fiction #weird fiction #loneliness #short fiction #new weird #american gothic

[entitycradle]

A THUNDERSTORM UNDER AN OPEN SKY AT MIDNIGHT

GOD IS THE HUMAN FACE OF NATURE GOD IS THE MASK HUMANS PUT ON NATURE LANGUAGE IS THE MASK HUMANS PUT ON THOUGHT. WHICH IS WHY YOU WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND WHAT I'M SAYING UNTIL YOU'VE EXPERIENCED THE SAME

THE WHOLE SKY LIGHTS UP MY PANTS ARE SOAKED. WET HAIR STICKS BETWEEN MY EYES AND MY GLASSES IT'S ALL TOO BIG, WAY WAY TOO BIG YOU REALIZE WHY THE STORIES TALK ABOUT THUNDER AND LIGHTNING IT'S THE BIGGEST THING YOU'VE EVER SEEN AND FOR SOME REASON YOU'VE CHOSEN TO STAND UNDERNEATH IT THE SOUND MY FEAR BREAKS THROUGH AND I START FLINCHING AT EACH CRACK. I HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE. NOW I REMEMBER ALL THE INSTRUCTIONAL DIAGRAMS MY GOD THE SKY. THE LIGHTS. THIS IS ALL THERE HAS EVER BEEN AND ALL THERE EVER WILL BE

I RETURN HOME AND I CRAVE IT AGAIN

#writing #poetry #original poem

[entitycradle]

Do you ever get that thing, where you look at yourself long enough in the mirror, y'know, moving your head around a little, you look at yourself long enough and for a second you see yourself as others see you, and these pores and hairs and lips are someone else's, this other person is looking right into your eyes but it's you, but it's them, and the vertigo hits and you just see your reflection again?

Recently I've gained the ability to extend this phenomenon. I can go maybe thirty seconds to a minute, watching this face that is not mine wobble in the mirror, her face. And it is a strange thing to talk about because in those moments it is my face but the thing that is looking at the face is not me, outside of me, the me that's typing right now. I think. It gets confusing. Because the thing that's seeing is thinking of the thing that's being seen as a different person, but there's identification both ways, "that's what I look like" and "that's what she looks like" both feel like reductions of a thought that I guess isn't quite language, because who says it has to be.

And it's (she's?) been coming in other ways recently. I spend a lot of time alone, have spent a lot of time alone, but I've been making progress in the last few months, talking to people. And when I do I feel like I have no control. Not that I'm not myself, but more that my actions are entirely determined by my personality, so there is no actual choice or will happening, just this thing playing out the way it has to. And I think that's actually okay, I'm not a bad person, like it's not a bad personality, but then come the moments afterwards where I do feel deeply in control and active in my choices and this contrast makes me feel like a different person. Why did I do that? Who is that woman? She isn't who I want to be, and I don't know how to change her, but there she is, all the time, in these moments that make me, we are social beings. How don't I have control? Who is that woman? Who is that woman? That's not me. That's someone else. And the other night I had the thought, and it was scary when I had it, that if that woman's someone else then it doesn't matter what I do, because she's not me and I'm not her. This was pretty low-stakes, I just needed to get to sleep. But I stayed up. Not as late as I could have, as disidentified as I felt. But I still paid for it when I woke up. When she woke up.

I mean the real worst part is I don't even like her. Who's typing right now? Do they like each other? Christ, the fuck is this? Fucking D.I.D. LARPing. But I can't deny this feeling, this strange, estranged feeling. I crouch here, on the curb outside a bar where I should be celebrating, and it's not even the people and the vulnerability and the being that I fear, it's getting into bed afterwards and realizing what she's done.

#writing #flash fiction #barely #original fiction #loneliness

[entitycradle]

a lot of Grim Possibilities in this brain

[entitycradle]

Warning: gore and suicide.

In a weird way I feel like I've been expecting this. "Are you kidding me?" I'm angry, I get up right in his face, "Are you FUCKING kidding me?!" I do something to him, I don't know, he stumbles back but comes at me again with a shoulder. I tilt and crack the back of my head and stay down but I'm so so angry, "the thousands of me that I've killed. All the pasts I've traveled to, I do it OVER and over again, some crunch or bang." He just looks down at me, unyielding.

I scrabble my limbs around me like a pinned spider, crawl roll, a foot slips but the next purchases and I launch from under him, hop and hop back, arms wide. "The guns I've shot myself with! How many days of the year do I pull the trigger? How many times a day? How many YEARS?" I shake like some creature, the air going through me is crazy, I'm going crazy crazy like of course. He's tense. Scared? But not of anything dignified or controlled or good. "I stand atop a mountain of my own CORPSE. Of course I'm the strongest. They all died, didn't they? And I did that, because I'm IN YOU. You're so BRAVE in all that blood. Take yourself then. I haven't yet. Fear is strength."

He does have a holster, I notice, veins still pumping. A cinderblock hangs from a rope over his shoulder. Probably a knife somewhere. A sharp one in his right front pocket, that's me, I feel that in him, I recognize the tools. I feel the wounds and impacts and cracked sobbing gasps and the bits of crushed brain that don't know they're dead yet.

He asks now, "Why did they lead me to you? You're... you're talking nonsense, you haven't killed anyone. I have a device, an actual physical mechanism. How did they know about you? Who are you?" And that's enough. I rush at myself.

"Who am I?! How DARE you. How fucking dare you!" I have me in an easy grapple but I get my tremulous hand to my gore-slick cinderblock and pull something in my back as I swing it up to my head which turns toward it so the corner bounces off my cheekbone and against my eye. And I don't know who I am but my hard knee smashes my soft groin and eighty pounds crush my windpipe. Finally, the gun comes out, what relief, and it almost doesn't matter what happens next, where it is dropped and grabbed, the giving in is the thing. A misfire rings like waking up from a nightmare and then a shot hits its target. There are more shots to the same target. High-velocity slugs into the human body. And more. And all the slugs come to rest. And all breath comes to rest.

There is no portal, no gun, no pain. I am what remains. CONSTRICT NERVURE IPSEITY LOATHE

A portal opens before you and out steps a version of yourself covered in blood. “I’ve killed hundreds of you and they say you’re the strongest one. Time to find out why.”

#writing #original fiction #flash fiction #prompt #gore #suicide #death

[entitycradle]

Last night I got takeout and my fortune cookie had this inside it:

It was a little disconcerting because I was eating alone. Of course, nothing happened, I just opened my front door and of my own volition invited the suave gentleman standing behind it to share my pad thai. He informed me of the coming tide, then offered me an agreement. Now he's my business partner in a new project that we've nicknamed Universal Soul Collapse. I feel strongly that it's the right response to things that are about to happen.

#writing #original fiction #microfiction #horror

[entitycradle]

Container

Throw the bottle at the fucking ceiling. The heavy base punches through the drywall but not before the rest of it shatters, glass fired everywhere. You flinch your face away, hands already up. Something nicks your forearm but you're mostly fine. Glare up at the hole and wish you could take your hands to it, rip it open, feel dust and material and pain against your soft fingers as you tear the space apart. Listen to the cracking thuds of protest as the lacquered wood floor gives way. Feel ecstasy when the beams surrender to you and the room is crushed, unbecame. Entropy takes away your will to return.

Of course, it comes back, it all comes back. It will not be your choice that takes it all away. The ragged disk of glass remains lodged in the hole in the ceiling. You go and take care of your cut. Shame like mist through a thin orifice. The world is a projection on the walls of this fucking room, which you have never left.

#writing #microfiction #flash fiction #poetry #original fiction #original poem #loneliness