Accentuate The Positive - Flash Fiction

He received a smack across his chops. A sonorous slap acutely stinging his kisser. Imprinting a scarlet macula upon his crimson labia. Her immaculate acrimony no longer shellacked behind a pacific patina of civility. An accumulated tumulus of bruisable wisecracks, now she had come back with an unacceptable contusion of her own. His lack of accolades for her literary accomplishments had snapped her self-accord. Acted as an accelerant to her lashing out. Ransacking her own pitch-black love sump, she offered him an ice-pack to which he circumspectly acceded. The hack’s grammatical prose may not have been accurate, but her uppercut was.

Dead Line - Flash Fiction

The hands were the last outpost of activity. Or rather the fingers gripping his pen. The rest of the musculature had withered through disuse. The mouth, that other outlet for words, had seized up through a wholesale aridity, dry river beds of sputum, meaning his desiccated lips were unable to form even the simplest phoneme. His legs stilled through stagnation in the chair, had now become paralysed with a deep vascular thrombosis. He could no longer feel his feet, uncertain and uncaring that he was receiving no proof of the floor pushing back at his undersoles for being in contact with one another. His abdomen, having initially echoed the current concavity of his sallow cheeks, had now blazoned its tocsin through distension, an ill-windsock of fetid air. A second, unadvised gastrulation returning him to a state of the scaffolded truss of the womb. His serpentine labyrinth of bowels having fruitlessly demanded their regular oblation, therefore began to devour him from within. While the sphincter had drawn down its shutter and closed for the business end, but only after its liquidation sale had left him marinading in his own soil in the writer’s chair. There was a deadline to be met after all. 

I have commissioned the above image as a T-Shirt design from the wonderful Little Appleseed.

It's a bastardisation of one of the tenets of Sergey Nechayev's "Revolutionary Catechism" which I use as the epigraph in my book "Not In My Name" in its original, unadulterated form for a book about terrorism. 

What do you think? 

Possible coda for the above story:

His literary agent prised the pen from the author's cold, dead hand and set it on the writing desk. He shuffled the sheaf of papers straight and slipped them into a manilla envelope. He smiled at the thought that the publishers had little chance of getting their advance back as it would go into the marais that was probate. How were they to know what he held in his hand was the final work? he could claim it was an old manuscript found beneath dust on the author's shelf. He would pocket all the proceeds, save for an honorarium to pay for the author's pauper's grave. A writer's final resting place marked without any words at all. 

Squid Ink - Flash Fiction

The sea was a perpetual whirring roil of motion. Shoals and schools of corybantic choreography. Treasure hunts for shiny stones on the seabed, or the come hither siren tease of pearly mothers. Spawns and other pregnable culch-ures. Procreation and the anti-creation of predation, rapturous raptors going about their annihilating antics. Squid-I took my place in this tumultuous orchestration. Staking my mood from the ambiance of my surroundings. Cooling my blood to blend in with the sandy bottom, or raising my temperature to bouquet the riot of colour of the underwater flora. Else I fire my ink-jet heels to make good my escape, nebulising the senses of my would-be consumers. But then my nervous system was struck by a notion, what is it about this world that constantly makes me need to escape? Why cannot I just reside contentedly within it? Why do I have to cast small simulacra of myself to stymie my foes, when each exudation only weakens me, dilutes my being? They munch me in effigy anyway.  A sudden impulse made me fire my ink when no pelagic guzzler needed blotting. I watched the chromatic mucus shape and form my feelings, but not just through the usual matching pigmentation, rather they agglomerated into words. Until they diluted and dissipated on the gentle sway of the underwater swell. I fired them again. Different words coagulated before again dispersing on the undertow. I watched the iotas of my verbiage diffuse further afield and I saw it brought discomfort and unease to the marine life who encountered it. Mildly toxic it seemed to perfectly encapsulate my temper. I used some of my appendages and appurtenances to inscribe into the sand and grit of the seabed, before inking in my words there and passing rocks over to hold the type in place beneath. No fish prey or predator dared disturb my reverie of penmanship. Amid all the pother and bustle, I had discovered the peace that lies at the heart of the ocean.  The ink concentrated, the thoughts magnified, my blessings countable against each one of my tentacles, finally I had come into my own against the backdrop of the eternally teeming crowd.  

9-Line Nonpareil - Flash Fiction

I author infect you. I stain you with my word markers. I impregnate you with my seminal ink. You download my minuscular packets of lexical data. Even if you scale no further than the opening chapter, my verbal DNA has ineffably entered your bloodstream. Your eyes burn in the back of their sockets. Your breathing stops up and when you swallow for air, it burns the lining of your throat such is the caustic corrosive nature of my verbiage. For you can’t unread me. Words are viral. The symptoms are similar even if you regard the words as invigoratingly communicable, as non-pathogenic. Either way, partially digested or complete, your system extracts the aliment, my propellant, while the lexical orts refuse your expurgation and bulwark and barricade themselves rendering you discomfitedly costive. Your mental immunosuppression system may attempt to quash my word sepsis from reproducing within your host, but they hitch a ride with your vulgate leukocytes. Catch as catachrestic can. Sink their claws into the antigen receptivity, forestall your production of antibodies through a circumlocution here, a turn of phrase there, to elude the wandering phagocyte censors. Suppressing your suppressors. The macrophages who would seek to inject me with their deleterious toxins, when it is in fact my printing press that squeezes and devours them. My words knock off your words. They duel and grapple and attach themselves dual. Whence my muscular molecular vernacular makes use of your cellular apparatus. A reverse transcription to multiply your vocabulary and shape it inevitably mine. I rewrite you. I seep into your very marrow, to be spewed out a thousandfold greater in volume. I bleed you dry, drain you of lymphocytes and replace them through my own hematopoiesis. I transcribe your blood. I author you.