Issue 4 October 1, 2019
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WELCOME! Issue 4 October 1, 2019 Welcome to Fleas on the Dog! We’re a no frills brown bag BYOW(eed) online lit rag. (We like to think we’re underground with our heads sticking out.). We don’t care about pretty pictures or fancy layouts. We’re interested in one thing and one thing only: GOOD WRITING. Our sole mandate is quality which means if your mother likes your writing we probably won’t. With this issue we are introducing 2 new categories. The first is Poetry. We were deluged with it even though we only call for short fiction and nonfiction. Apart from the obscene sonnets we carved into washroom walls, we don’t know a heck of a lot about it. (The Wasteland is an album by U2, right?) So we coerced, no, invited, bardo-bard Hezekiah Scretch to abase himself as our Poetry Editor. The fact that he despises verse of any kind is only important if you’re a nitpicker. And so the dude quintet has become the dude sextet. The other new category is Plays (Drama). Since all six of us agreed that Shakespeare’s Death of a Salesman is our all-time favourite comedy, we knew we were on the right track. Besides, what Streetcar wouldn’t Desire such a category? So if your name’s Sam Shepard or David Mamet (and even if it isn’t) you’re welcome to submit your play, previously performed or perennially rejected. We’re proud to announce two writers are making their publishing debut in Issue 4. Congratulations to J(J-priryodhi) and Michael Lange. You’ll find both of them under ‘Fiction’. And among our veteran writers we are honoured to feature Ted Hughes Award 2019 nominee Maria Straw-Cinar (poetry). 2017 Booranga Center (Australia) Fiction Prize winner Mitchell Grabois (poetry); the San Francisco James D. Phelan Award winner and 4 times Pushcart nominee Nels Hanson (fiction). West Texas Literary Review fiction editor Joel Page (fiction). Poetry Pacific editor and 10 times Pushcart nominee Yuan Changming (poetry), Director of the Gallo Tricolor Review and Robespierre Review Daniel de Culla (fiction), Andrew Steketee, first place winner of the MIP Book Awards: Art/Photo 2002 (fiction) and John Conway winner of the John Curtis Award for Lifelong Learning. It’s a fulsome issue, frank and feisty, with lights and darks from talent that rocks. We hope you enjoy it. And until we meet again in Issue 5 always spread the love and remember READ is the best 4 letter word in the world. Tom, Charles, Richard, Robert, Steve and Hezekiah. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS ISSUE 4 FICTION ‘Ex nihilo’ by Joel Page (Literary/Experimental), 4-7 ‘The Heavy Metal Sound of Steel’ by Daniel Thompson (Noir), 8-22 ‘Vaga-Luxing’ by Suzanne Gannon (Satire), 23-26 ‘Three Variations on a Theme’ by Nels Hanson (Flash/Literary), 27-30 ‘4 fixions and 5 lines’ by Nick North (Nano), 31-34 ‘Pink Eye’ by Jeff Blechle (Flash/Humour), 35-38 ‘Laptop’ by Scott Schoenberg (Mainstream), 39-53 ‘Shrink A.D. 2075’ by Edgar Allan Monaghan (Futurist), 54-73 ‘A Love that is Pure’ by Andrew Lafleche (Urban Realism), 74-80 ‘The Shadow Prison’ by Dirk Van Nouhuys (Literary), 81-89 ‘The Shroud of McCann’ by Joseph Austin (Humour/Speculative), 90-103 ‘K. W.’ by Michael Lange (Literary), 104-110 ‘Guerilla Prose: 7 Short Hybrids’ by Daniel de Culla (Guerilla prose), 111-130 ‘Real’ by Stephen Roth (Mainstream/Fantasy), 131-143 ‘Class Novel’ by Fiona Jones (Literary/Experimental), 144-153 ‘Jog, Then Restaurant’ by Charles Pinch (Mainstream), 154-165 ‘Undiscovered’ by J (J-priryoghi) (Mainstream/Outsider), 166-182 ‘DVC Inc-Prospectus’ by Robert Cantrell (Satire), 183-187 ‘recidivism’ by Andrea Jefferson (Flash/Literary),188-190 ‘9 Excerpts from ‘Buena Vista’ by Andrew Steketee (Hybrid/Experimental), 191-205 2 POETRY ‘Master of the Dance and other poems’ by Maria Straw-Cinar, 207-221 ‘6 Poems’ by Yuan Changming, 222-227 ‘Some Poems from ‘The Arrest of Mr. Kissy Face’ by Mitchell Grabois, 228-241 ‘Our Left Eye’ by William Carleton, 242-243 ‘Portrait of Jesus Christ’ by Ian Lindsay, 244-246 ‘3 Poems’ by Tom Smith, 247-250 ‘Five Poems’ by Nicholas North, 251-253 ‘Five Poems’ by Merlin Flower, 254-256 PLAYS ‘Rescue’ by Karl Miller, 258-268 ‘Short Five-Act Plays: #16441 Theatrical Texts’ by Richard Kostelanetz, 269-290 ‘Radio Active’ by John Conway, 291-301 NONFICTION ‘A for Asshole’ by Alexander Taylor (Memoir), 303-310 ‘The Care and Keeping of You’ by Brooke Jean (Creative Nonfiction), 311-319 ‘Sin is a Made Up Marketing Scheme’ by Caitlin Johnstone (Essay), 320-324 ‘The Arrest of Mr. Kissy Face’ by Cynthia Anderson (Book Review), 325-327 ‘Honesty for Heaven’s Sake’ by Tom Ball (Musings)328-333 3 Ex nihilo By Joel Page WHY WE LIKE IT: The grossly unfair cosmic intelligence that radiates through this story is the surest proof that a God who might not exist does not create us equally. What begins as a surrealist projection of a hypothetical image morphing into philosophical investigation gestates before our eyes into the poetry of metaphysics. All five of us emerged from ‘Ex nihilo’ with stars in our eyes and lumps in our throats. The prose is beyond…beyond…Quote: Sneeze, cough, laugh, scream, break your sentences in half and recombine them. This is the grammar of God.’ Ex nihilo At this point, scientific consensus holds that no one is speaking through the giant floating Lips that hover a mile and a half above the Gulf of Mexico. The Lips speak, of course; they speak a grammarless river of words, likely a precursor of Indo-Hittite. Most rigorous analysts, however, do not believe that anyone, any mind, chooses the words. Rather, the words (and perhaps the Lips) are nothing more than language itself. There are three kinds of dissenting theories on this point, none of which I share. The first concerns the possibility of alien contact and posits that aliens project and control the Lips from afar. The second dissenting opinion is similar, but it imagines a human source: a hoax, or maybe a work of art. Aliens are the more attractive of the two projection theories, because it is impossible to know the extent of their technology, and hence impossible to rule them out entirely. Nonetheless, the following measures tend to disprove the two projection theories: o The Argentine air force outfitted a turboprop cargo plane with a battery of sensors; it flew circles around the lips for 24 hours, yet it failed to detect any manner of incoming wave – x-, gamma, radio, UV – that might be animating the Lips. o A daredevil flew up to the Lips by jetpack during a television special and kissed them; she reported that they are composed of solid matter, indistinguishable from any human lips she has previously kissed, save for their colossal size and facial detachment; this would seem to eliminate any suspicion that the lips are merely a projected image. o The US Navy, in conjunction with a Chinese construction concern, succeeded in building a giant lead ball, attached to the seabed in the manner of an oil derrick; the ball surrounds the lips and blocks any signal that might be reaching them, yet the lips continue apace. 4 Now this compilation of evidence will not satisfy everyone. Conferences of respectable scientific opinion – not cranks – posit quantum mechanisms of matter transmission. These mechanisms might permit another species to create and animate the lips from a distance. And there is a certain logic in the alien transmission idea. If another species understood (somehow) that human beings speak with their lips, and wished to communicate, what better image to show us? Further, if they wanted to speak to all of us, why not use the first human language ever spoken? But as I say, this is a dissenting view. The capacity to create objects in another galaxy is at this point conjectural. Indeed, maybe less than conjectural. One astrophysicist has convincingly argued that quantum entanglement is impossible absent prior physical proximity between the entangled particles. The number of particles in the lips, moreover, exceeds the number of particles that come from any one solar system in all but one in one million simulations of the Big Bang. So aliens, as I say, are a dissenting opinion. The human source hypothesis also has its defenders. In its most plausible form, this hypothesis posits collusion between the trickster who animates the lips, on the one hand, and some combination of the Argentine Airforce, US Navy, and kissing daredevil. While the idea complies at least with the laws of physics, it wants utterly for social plausibility. No evidence has been offered for such a conspiracy, and no motive could explain the behavior of these parties to undertake one. We turn then to a third explanation positing the existence of a speaker: that the lips are the voice of God, or of the world in toto, which is perhaps the same. The popular rejoinder to this hypothesis, aside from the traditional arguments for atheism, centers on the seeming inability of the lips to utter any sensible collection of words. Why would God speak to His creation if He did not wish to be understood? Last Thursday, the lips told us in Indo-Hittite: fire mother the if if deep woods woods warfare into the cooking woods mother brother sister brother sister bird run hungry run if kill wagon chewing mouth raining mouth chewing if the the if into out void And what manner of God would say such a thing? I have to say that I find this line of rebuttal unpersuasive.