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Friday Fiction From The Tyrant

Tyrant Books is in talks right now to make this thing a book. It will be a helluva book. This is just a sampling. Enjoy.

Here's a little rundown of the history of what's below. Brian Evenson and John Sellekaers first met when they collaborated, along with Daniel de los Santos, on a music/spoken word project related to Brian's first book Altmann’s Tongue. That led to Brian contributing a story for John’s musical project the Missing Ensemble. Once they'd done that, John suggested doing something with his pictures. Brian looked at them and immediately stories started bubbling to the surface. Tyrant Books is in talks right now to make this thing a book. It will be a helluva book. This is just a sampling.  Enjoy.

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(#21) Ready
He kept his back to the wall as he broke down the rifle, laying each part carefully on top of the shirt he had beside them so that they wouldn’t slip through the cracks in the floor. Below him, he could hear the water lapping softly against the stilts, the structure slowly swaying with the wind. He cleaned each part carefully, then reassembled the gun. Then he loaded it, eight hollowpoints. Two for each of them, just in case the first shot missed.

He stood. He made his way from window to window, staring quickly out before moving to the next one. Nothing. He kept moving, from window to window. This time I’m ready, he thought. Let them come, he told himself. Let them try to surprise me this time.

The Boxes (#104)
In winter, once the light had slid very low in the sky, the sun barely cresting the horizon to muddle its way along the edge of the horizon before succumbing again, Einar found his sanity slipping once again into questionable realms. Unable to stop himself, he wandered the darkened streets, gathering what bits and scraps of metal he could find. These he arranged in his apartment, tacking them to the walls or spreading them in careful patterns on the floor. This did not seem to help exactly, but he told himself that without this activity to occupy himself things would only have gotten worse.

This was before the discovery in the street of the two boxes. One had a metal grillwork for its face, the grillwork thick and doubled so that one could not see through it. The other was completely enclosed save for two dark holes, the first hole blocked by a metal cross, the second just a little too small for him to force his hand into.

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The boxes were connected to one another, both attached to a long thin rusted metal sheet, puckered at one edge. Einar did not know what they were. He wondered if they weren’t a part of a wrecked ship, something someone had dragged up from the rocks and then abandoned. Or maybe a piece of an old building, the rest collapsed now, scattered.

Nor could Einar say how long it took him to drag the thing home. It was wrong for the house, he realized as soon as he had it inside, too massive and self-contained to sit comfortably with the smaller scrap. So he hauled it outside again, left it around back of the building.

#

It was still there a few weeks later, when the light had reached its nadir and it seemed to Einar that the world was guttering so low that it threatened to be permanently snuffed out. I must do something, he could not help but think. Before he knew it, he found himself in the backyard, his flashlight balanced on the ground, beam shining up. He dragged the boxes and the metal sheet connecting them up near the building. Then, slowly, he forced the whole of it to stand upright.

They loomed over him, but something was missing. Wire, he thought, and found it and strung it about until there was a good skein of it linking the boxes to one another and to different objects in the yard.

Thus he waited, staring at the boxes, for what would happen next.

#

Hours later, the flashlight’s beam growing dim, the cold making his bones ache, he suddenly felt more lucid than he’d felt in weeks.

Oh no, he thought. What have I done?

But it was a fleeting lucidity, quickly gone.

Camouflage (#100)
She was there somewhere, there hidden in the garden, back among the flowers—he was sure of it: he had just seen her, hadn’t he? But there was something different about her. Even the brief glimpse he’d had of her had made that clear: something, he couldn’t help but think, wrong with her, something missing. And she had seemed—unless he was mistaken—afraid. What is she afraid of? he wondered, rubbing his chin against the butt of his axe. Surely not me?