Tag: absurdist fiction

The Story Monster

A man hates to read. He hates to read and he hates to see people reading. Whenever he’s at work and someone is reading the paper or a trashy paperback novel, he likes to taunt them until they put it down. Reading is not functional. It is a waste of time. He doesn’t even read contracts or anything like that. He just signs his name at the bottom after asking whoever is offering the contract if they can give it to him “in a nutshell.” Once he discovered how much he hated reading, he realized how ubiquitous words were. Ubiquitous and meaningless.

One night, as he crawls in bed next to his browbeaten, mostly illiterate wife (she was feral when he located her in the wilds of the island of Semp), a giant man enters the room. Actually, it’s a monster. Huge and hairy, not wearing any clothes.

The man, aside from coming completely unhinged around words, is not a very confrontational man. He thinks if he lies there quietly the monster will go away. But the monster doesn’t go away. It takes a deep breath and sits on the edge of the bed. It smells rancid. Like sewage and something unidentifiable but worse. The man tries to nudge the monster off the bed but the monster is way too large to move. Suddenly, the monster lurches into a story. It is a story unlike anything the man has ever heard. And the monster’s voice, for belonging to such a giant, reeking beast, is smooth and relaxing. The man finds he likes the story and he likes the monster’s voice. He stops trying to shove the monster off the bed, rolls over onto his back, and enjoys the story. He is asleep by the time the monster finishes it and, upon waking the next morning, the man realizes he is okay with falling asleep not knowing how the story ended. Because it wasn’t really the kind of story where the ending was important. Surprisingly, the man wants the monster to come back.

That night the monster returns. He comes before the man’s wife is asleep. She, not understanding this wretched beast is here only for their entertainment, panics and begins throwing objects at the monster. The monster cowers in a corner of the room but he doesn’t leave. The man’s wife asks him to make the monster leave but he tells her he is not going to do that. She doesn’t understand his explanation and hurls herself at him, claws bared, trying to gouge out his eyes. The man fights her off with a pillow and tells her it’s over, pulling out the divorce papers he has kept in his nightstand since marrying the woman. She signs her name and he gives her a one-way ticket to Semp. She angrily drags all her clothes from the closet and puts them on, stuffs her shoes into the clothes, spits on the monster, and leaves. The man never sees her again.

He crawls into bed, pulls the covers up to his chin, turns out the light and pats the side of the bed, telling the monster it’s okay. The monster stands up, sits down on the bed, and begins telling another beautiful story. This cycle continues for several months. Then the monster stops coming. The man is confused. He feels lost. He doesn’t know what to do. Now he has no wife and no monster. No stories. One day, quite by accident (he’s buying some butane and condoms from a newsstand) he discovers the monster has written a book. He is curious. The monster is on the front cover, wearing a tie and smoking a cigarette. He wonders what stories are in there. Are they the ones the monster told him? He thinks about buying the book and then thinks better of it. Maybe, he tells himself, the monster will come back someday.

January 19, 2024

absurd stories, absurdist fiction, andersen prunty, free stories, words
CTN

My girlfriend sits on the couch and begs me to come and watch the Craig T. Nelson movie. “He plays a free spirit!” she calls, naked, eating a giant hamburger. Glops of mayonnaise tumble out onto her breasts, slowly sliding downward before dripping from her nipples.

And I am somewhere very far away, fixing a television with a butter knife, slathering love upon a hateful world. Thinking of nothing else to say, I call out: “Just a minute! I have to tie my shoes!”

The movie is a drag, five hours long and all the dinner scenes are drawn out in painful detail. I go to sleep that night, dreaming of Craig T. Nelson as a sexual shaman, giving my girlfriend lessons in love.

January 12, 2024

absurd stories, absurdist fiction, andersen prunty, comic fiction, craig t. nelson, relationships, surreal fiction
The Champion of Needham Avenue

The phone rings and a voice blares out without it even being picked up. “Shovel fight! Two minutes!”

I cram some half-rancid salami into my face hole and wipe my greasy lips with the back of my hand. I’m naked and I have to get ready. I pick up my good sweatpants from the floor and slide them on, run my hands over my rotund and hairy torso. I kick in the door to the closet and select my weapon. A light snow shovel with an orange plastic head. Not a very good choice but the only one I have.

I step out onto my porch into the brisk late winter air. The neighborhood is already out, enormous families clustered on sagging porches and screaming for blood. I hold the shovel head up, letting it rest on my shoulder. I stroll out into the middle of the street and turn to face the shovel fight champion, Dick Borghum.

His shovel is massive and heavy-looking, like the man who wields it. It is a gardening shovel with a thick, iron head. He snarls and walks toward me as I walk toward him. There is no walking away. Borghum is undefeated. His eyes are huge and bloodshot. “I’ll give you the first swipe,” he growls.

I grab my shovel firmly in both hands and take a massive, roundhouse swing at his face. The shovel hits him in the ear and the lobe falls off onto the pavement.

“Half-hearted! At best!” He bends down to pick up the lobe. I bring my shovel down on his massive back. He is unfazed. He tosses the lobe to the adoring crowd, takes his shovel in both massive hands and crouches down like a batter at a baseball game. I quickly take another swipe at his face. The tip of his nose goes shooting off to his right. He whips his shovel around and catches me in the ribs. All my wind is gone. Something has to be broken in there. I land a couple more blows, weakly. They only leave red marks on him. I turn my shovel and strike down with the side of it. A small chunk of his scalp comes off but there isn’t any blood. I suddenly have the feeling I’m not going to win this. The champion of Needham Avenue raises his shovel above his head and brings it down on the top of my skull. My head splits in half. Objects fly out: a small airplane, a fingernail clipper, some candy.

Haphazardly I begin spinning in circles, swinging my shovel around and around, as though this will ward him off. He approaches rapidly, swinging his shovel across my body. My torso splits open, unleashing more of these strange objects. Children rush down from the porches to grab up these seemingly incongruent items. Their mothers caution them to watch out for the swinging shovels. But I cast mine aside, a sign of defeat and surrender. My body is so split apart it’s hard to stand. Borghum swings his shovel at the approaching children, telling them to drop the objects. It’s like this every time. The children, most of them anyway, are so terrified they drop the objects as soon as they pick them up. A few mischievous punks stuff the objects into their pockets and run back to their protective mothers. I stare vacantly as Borghum uses his shovel to scoop up the small mound of objects and it occurs to me what they are. All my dreams, all my ideas, all hope and joy are now in the process of entering Borghum’s heavy burlap pockets. He’ll take them home and give them to his wife. She will prepare a nice supper with them and then, sitting down, they will devour all this mental content until they are full, only to defecate it out sometime the next day.

I do not even have the energy to pick up my shovel. I head back to the house, trying to hold my body back together. I suppose I’ll have to call the doctor. Once in the house, I reach down into my legs, feeling for more objects. Sadly, the left leg is filled with pain and the right leg is filled with depression. I do the same to my arms and find the left one filled with addiction and the right filled with madness. I put it all into the garbage disposal. And at the end of my right big toe, I find it, the one dream I’ve been saving. I pull a box of dirt from the freezer and bury the dream. Come spring, there will be many more and I’ll have to begin training all over again.

January 5, 2024

absurd stories, absurdist fiction, addiction, andersen prunty, david lynch, depression, shovels, surreal fiction
Trendsetter

Sitting around with Ken, he idly rolled each sleeve of his t-shirt up two times. We thought it looked good, accentuating his biceps in a way we thought was cool.

A year later, mall stores were selling shirts with the sleeves rolled up and stitched. The interior was usually a different color, which was pretty okay, I guess. But … the stitch. Ken’s way was cooler.

Either way, Ken was a trendsetter.

December 29, 2023

absurdist fiction, andersen prunty, comic fiction, fashion
Chainsaw Mouth

A man goes to the dentist and has a chainsaw installed in his mouth. The chainsaw is not something he specifically asked for, it just works out that way. Leaving the dentist’s office, he tries to say “Thank you” to the receptionist but the only sound that comes out is the deafening rev of the chainsaw.

He gets home early and decides he can probably get some work done. The man is a salesman. Grabbing his bag of merchandise, he heads out to the neighborhood, going door-to-door. Whenever he has something new, some kitchen gadget everyone needs, he always starts in his own neighborhood, figuring neighbors with a lot of appliances are happy neighbors indeed.

He knocks on Mrs. Frick’s door. She lives at the end of the street. He waits impatiently for her to come to the door, shifting anxiously from foot to foot. An inordinate period of time passes and Mrs. Frick throws open the door. Half of her face is covered in make-up. The other half looks old and wrinkled.

The man goes into his spiel but the only thing coming from his mouth is the grating sound of the chainsaw. Mrs. Frick gasps in horror and backs away from the doorway. The man holds an arm of comfort out to her, begging her to stay and listen to him. She slams the door in his face and he reaches into his bag and pulls out some merchandise, leaving it on her doorstep. To his dismay, the merchandise is not some new household appliance. It is a bondage magazine and a snuff film. He wants to reclaim the merchandise but he’s so appalled and frightened he can’t. He scampers off to the next house and repeats the same process, telling himself it can’t be that bad. This time he finds himself throwing child pornography and a crack rock into the home of the retreating Miss Gallop.

The day does not get any better. His neighbors become more abrupt and violent—some of them openly hostile. His chainsaw voice becomes louder, more antagonistic. His merchandise becomes even darker and more illegal—Nazi propaganda, body parts. He retreats back to his house, throwing the door shut and locking it. He hides in the closet and crouches down, weeping with his new gasoline-powered voice.

December 22, 2023

absurd stories, absurdist fiction, andersen prunty, body modification, comic fiction, free stories, surreal fiction
The Hole

A man receives a call from his sister-in-law. She tells him his brother caught lazy eye at work. Immediately thereafter, the man develops a hole halfway up his forearm. Curious, he explores the hole. Too small to fit his index finger into, he probes it with his pinky.

“I wonder where it leads,” he muses, still digging with the pinky. He removes his pinky from the hole and smells it. The odor is only moderately disagreeable. Something similar to a sweaty navel smell.

The next day at work he brushes some of his arm hair over it and, luckily, no one notices. When he gets home that night, after showering, the hole’s smell wafts up to his nostrils. It smells much worse than before the shower. Nearly pungent. His sister-in-law calls again. This time she tells him his brother’s lazy eye has turned into a cataract.

“I’ve got problems of my own,” he growls at her and hangs up the phone.

He returns to the bathroom and scrubs the hole with great rigor. Finding a sliver of soap, he works this around in the hole until it disintegrates. It doesn’t help. In fact, the man is quite sure it smells even worse.

“Shit,” he thinks. “This is the worst smelling hole I have.”

The next day, fraught with embarrassment, he stays home from work. He breaks apart a stick of deodorant and places a piece in the hole. After a few minutes, the deodorant is gone and he puts another piece in there. If ever his vigilance declines, the hole reminds him with a scent more powerfully chilling than the worst flatulence he’s ever smelled. That evening his sister-in-law calls to tell him his brother went to the doctor. In order to solve the problem with his brother’s eye, the doctor shot it out with a slingshot. Now his eye is fine—better than before, even. The man asks his sister-in-law for the doctor’s name. He calls and makes an appointment.

The next day he goes to see the doctor.

The man forgets to bring his deodorant and the nurse directs him to a room, pushing him into it and quickly shutting the door behind him.

A few hours later the doctor walks in. Upon opening the door, he is visibly taken aback, hours of stink greeting his nostrils.

“My God that’s horrible,” he gasps.

The man points to the hole on his arm.

“Oh. I see. You have a hole.”

He pulls out a cotton swab and swabs the inside of the hole. He pulls it out and smells it, visibly suppressing his gorge and bracing himself on the bed.

“Jesus that smells. Let me write you a prescription for that.”

“Thanks,” the man says. “I’ll be happy to get rid of it.”

“Here’s a prescription for two grapes and a piece of tape. That oughtta do it.”

Skeptical, the man goes to the store, selecting the grapes and tape. He gives the cashier his prescription and medical card. She nods and hands him a receipt, suspiciously eyeing him. Once home, he inserts the grapes into the hole and applies the tape over top of it.

The next morning the hole is gone. The man breathes deeply. He feels reborn.

December 15, 2023

absurd stories, absurdist fiction, andersen prunty, comic fiction, doctors, free stories, medicine, surreal fiction
Death Sentence

I receive a death sentence in the mail.

It’s not a death threat. It’s a lot more sure of itself.

U WILL DIE

5:37 PM

It’s written in crayon and, even though it was in the mailbox, was not delivered by the postal service.

I look around the neighborhood, thinking maybe it had been left recently and whoever left it might still be around.

The neighborhood is as dead as ever.

I look back at the death sentence. If it’s true – and I don’t really see any reason why it wouldn’t be – I have just over three hours to live.

I know I should make the most of it but I’m drawing a blank.

I could buy a prostitute but I don’t really have that much money and stealing a prostitute is really just rape, I guess.

I could walk to the park but it would take me about a half hour to get there. Plus it’s kind of hot out and there will probably be a bunch of irritating kids and their more irritating parents there.

It’s kind of an odd amount of time. Not really enough to go anywhere.

I could watch a movie or listen to a couple of my favorite records but that seems too static. I feel like I should be moving, doing something.

I decide to go on a crime spree.

I don’t own a gun or anything more dangerous than a kitchen knife so it’ll have to be a petty crime spree.

I head to the gas station on the corner, leaving my house unlocked. I don’t even know if I’ll be back. Besides, there isn’t anything in it worth stealing. And, maybe, if I’m not at home, whoever’s job it is to kill me will just give up.

I haven’t allowed myself any beer or cigarettes lately, so I decide to steal those.

At the gas station, the teenage clerk has an afternoon talk show up really loud on the television and he’s leafing through a porno magazine. One of the really sleazy kinds.

I grab a case of beer from the cooler. The cigarettes are behind the counter, practically under lock and key. I’ll have to fight the clerk for them.

I put the beer on the counter and say, “Now I’m going to fight you for a pack of cigarettes.”

The clerk has already scanned the beer.

“Huh?” he says, looking at the monitor of the cash register.

I don’t feel like repeating myself so I just blurt out the brand of cigarettes I want and he smacks them down on the counter and gives me the total.

I pay him and leave.

Outside the gas station, I tear open the cigarettes and throw my trash on the ground. I go back inside and buy a lighter. I open the case of beer and take one out.

Instinctively I head for home. I should probably go anywhere but there really isn’t much to see in this town and home is really where I want to be.

I’ll just go sit on my couch and drink and smoke and wait.

Nearly home, a cop pulls up to the curb and beeps his sirens at me.

I think about running but then think, “No. What if that’s how I die? What if I run for like two hours – exhausting myself when I could be drinking and smoking – and then I end up getting shot by the police?”

I walk over to the car.

“You can’t be drinking on the sidewalk,” the cop says.

“I just figured it didn’t matter,” I say.

“Why wouldn’t it matter?”

I fish the death sentence out of my pocket and hand it to him.

He reads it and says, “You better get in.”

I start to open the handle of the passenger door and he says, “In back.”

I get in the back.

“Am I under arrest?”

“Not unless you’re not going to share.”

“You want a beer?”

“And a cigarette.”

I can’t pass him anything through the wire mesh separating me from the front and there are no handles to open the door.

He gets out of the car and comes to the back. He opens the door and gets in next to me.

I hand him a beer and a cigarette, the lighter.

He lights the cigarette and takes a deep, satisfying drag.

He pops the can of beer and sucks off some of the foam.

He looks out the window, at a distance that doesn’t really exist, and says, “Five thirty-seven, huh?”

“That’s what it says.”

“Not much time.”

“No. Not really.”

December 8, 2023

absurd stories, absurdist fiction, andersen prunty, comic fiction, death and dying, free stories, surreal fiction
The Laughing Crusade

After finishing my treatise on the New Anarchist Revolution I decide to head out to the back porch for a beer and a cigarette. The television lies on the floor in a broken, smoldering heap. I pull a beer out of the refrigerator, cross the kitchen and go outside. It’s hot and humid. Quiet, but the neighborhood kind of quiet, which isn’t really quiet at all. Wind in the trees. The humming of a neighbor’s air conditioner. Buzzing streetlamps. Televisions murmuring through open windows. A telephone ringing. Distant traffic. Distant trains. Distant sirens. All the real noise is distant.

I light a cigarette and take the first deep drag and all the quiet unquiet is shattered. Someone laughs. It’s loud and continuous, emitted from somewhere high up in the nasal passages. Female. It’s like she has some sort of loudspeaker between her eyes. I don’t hear anyone else. Just this one woman, laughing and laughing. I sit down in a chair, rest my beer bottle on the small patio table, and try to block out that heinous laughter and focus on my next treatise. I can’t. Jesus. She sounds like a braying donkey. I finish the rest of my beer in a single gulp, take the last drag from my cigarette and toss both of them out into the yard.

Inside, I can still hear the laughter. I picture her standing there on her porch, leaning out over the steps, laughing and laughing and laughing.

I urinate on the busted television and head upstairs. I lie down next to the woman who has been lying comatose in this bed since I moved in nearly two years ago. She breathes slowly and steadily. Normally, her breathing is soporific but tonight it is drowned out by the braying donkey. She must live in the house across the street and just to the north.

Hours later, pillows piled around my head, I finally fall asleep.

And wake up to laughter. Loud. Raucous. Bursting forth in unrelenting waves.

What can possibly be so funny? This woman has laughed more in one night than I have my entire life. In fact, I have only laughed three times I can remember. Each time, something dreadful happened in the following days and I don’t know if I remember the laughter because of the funny things that happened or because of the subsequent tragedies.

I curl my hands into tightly balled fists and hop out of bed. I will wait until nightfall, I decide. And then I will have to find out what donkey girl is laughing at, if anything.

The laughter continues unabated throughout the day. At dusk, I delve into the closet and suit up—a black jumpsuit, black leather gloves, and a black ski mask—items I keep around for just such occasions.

The laughter has tapered only slightly. It seems she must have gone inside. No bother. I still had to find out what all the laughing was about. I go outside.

Unseen, I slowly approach the house until I am at eye level with what must be her living room. She doesn’t use any curtains or blinds. There’s practically no one in the neighborhood anyway and, even if there were, surely someone who laughs with such reckless abandon is not the least bit interested in privacy.

A burly female with short, spiky hair and skin like a potato’s sits on the couch, staring at her television and laughing uproariously. A large caramel-colored dog stands on the couch next to her, licking the side of her head. Where the dog has licked, the hair is wet, matted down to that gross skin. I notice what’s happening on her television and her laughter shocks me even further. Mushroom clouds, atrocity slaughter footage, torture, buildings crumbling, farms burning, people screaming before being consumed by conflagrations.

Not funny stuff.

Amidst the laughter I hear footsteps. I duck behind a row of shrubs and watch three people in gas masks approach the house. Not bothering to knock on the door, they just walk right in.

Now I’m totally enthralled. Perhaps they’ve come to take her away. That kind of thing happens all the time.

Simultaneously, they pull off their gas masks. Even more laughter rips through the night. So they weren’t gas masks at all. They were anti-laugh masks. How full of joy or insanity must one be before needing an anti-laugh mask?

Now the burly laugher rises and they all head toward the front door, led by the dog, the atrocity footage still playing on the television. That kind of thing was exactly the reason I had to deactivate my television. The world had become a brutal place and I didn’t want it in my home.

The dog sniffed a trail to the neighboring house. No one lives there, I thought. The dog sniffs the door, raises its paw and scratches. Maybe someone does live there. A squatter, perhaps. Someone hiding out. The laughers enter the house and come back out with a withered, sad-looking old man. They circle around him, laughing and laughing. They tap him on the shoulder, indicating for him to share a laugh. He tries. He bleats out a laugh, raising his arms in the air. Forced. Unnatural. Even I can tell and I’m not even very close. They shackle him, drag him down onto the ground, and strip off all his clothes—choking him, beating him until he is dead.

What’s the point of this?

Are these people with the government? Are they law enforcement? Is it now a requirement to be a laughing hyena?

Apparently it is.

I retreat to my rooftop and, through powerful night vision binoculars, watch the laughers continue their cruel crusade. Or is it a hilarious crusade? They drag the quiet and the sober from their homes, beat them to unconsciousness, and toss them out into the road where a large truck equipped with a giant clown head comes along and scoops them up with a creepily fleshy, oversized hand. Meanwhile, people like Jimmy, the neighborhood drunk, the one who pisses in his lawn all the time, are able to join their ranks, increasing their overall volume of laughter.

I don’t know what to do. What will become of me if they rush into the house and find the television all broken or, worse, what if they find my treatise? I flush it down the toilet. I try to be quick about it but I have to go nearly page by page to avoid clogs. Now they are knocking on the door. Has it always been like this? I can’t remember. I can’t remember much of anything. Still, they knock on the door. My memories are not important. Was I ever one of them? Did I ever laugh like that? I can’t imagine it.

The dog scratches.

The laughers laugh and knock and laugh.

I look at the comatose woman.

What if I was in a coma?

Where did that truck take all of the non-laughers?

The front door opens downstairs. I throw myself in bed next to the comatose woman. She smiles, opens her eyes and says, “It works. I’ve been faking all this time,” before snapping them shut and resuming her breathing. I close my eyes as the laughers enter the room and wonder what the comatose life will be like.

December 1, 2023

absurd stories, absurdist fiction, andersen prunty, comic fiction, free stories, surreal fiction
The Animal Trainer

He must be on some form of disability. Home all the time. He lives across the street and I see him come out of his house with a puppy behind him.

The man walks the puppy to the bank of grass growing on the curb. His pale gut hangs out of his tight and stained t-shirt.

“Come on, doggy,” he says. “Make poops.”

The dog looks innocently at the man. They stand that way for a few minutes, the man as vacant as the dog.

“Come on, make poops.”

The dog stares.

“Here,” the man says.

He pulls down his gray sweatpants, turns his buttocks to the road and squats. A turd slides out, landing on the shaggy grass.

“Do that,” he says to the dog.

The dog sniffs at the man’s feces, hunches his back, crouches, and lays one down.

“Good,” the man says. “Good dog. Good dog.” And he pats the dog on the head, feeding him something from his palm.

November 24, 2023

absurd stories, absurdist fiction, andersen prunty, comic fiction, dogs
Delayed Reaction

It’s a good thing Virgil doesn’t react to the knock on the door and squeeze the trigger. Because, well, because his head would be on the kitchen wall. Virgil has to admire the irony. He is sitting in the kitchen with a fully loaded gun resting on his bottom teeth. It isn’t a series of events that has brought him to this. It is a series of nothing. Not even really a series. More like a wave. A giant wave of static nothingness slowly devouring his sanity.

No friends. No conversation. No laughter. No visitors.

This knock on the door is the first knock he’s heard since moving into his apartment two years ago. Roughly. Somewhat bemused, he puts the gun in the refrigerator and walks to the door. Opening it, he is stunned. There are five girls backed out into the hall.

“Hello,” he stammers.

“Hi,” a blond girl in the front says. She looks to be at least seventeen or eighteen. The rest look younger. They all look delicious. “We’re from the Springdale chapter of the Daughters in Christ Brigade. Mind if we come in?”

“No. Not at all. Please do.”

Virgil steps aside and motions them over to the beaten couch. They all sit down in a militant line, their skirts riding up as they cross their legs.

“You ladies care for a drink?”

“No thanks,” they all reply in unison.

“Well, then, I’m just gonna go get myself a drink.”

He walks into the kitchen and stands frozen for a few minutes. He can hear them talking in the other room.

“It’s so bare and… and run down.”

“Isn’t he ugly?”

“My goodness, he smells.”

“What do you think he uses in his hair?”

“Did you see his shirt?”

Virgil looks at his shirt. A few holes here and there. A grease spot or two. Damn, he’s buttoned it up all wrong.

He puts some ice in a cup and runs some water from the tap, walks into the family room and sits in the chair across from the couch. The chair looks like rats have tried to eat it.

The oldest blond who answered the door starts talking but he’s long since lost himself in the blue of her eyes. They sparkle with complete emptiness. Then he looks at her legs. From where she has recrossed them he can see a lingering red spot on one of her calves.

The time flies by and he tunes in to hear her say: “All we need you to do is sign right here and we’ll be by later in the week to drop off some of our literature.”

“Oh, sure,” he says, shaky hands reaching out for the pen and paper.

“Thank you, Mr… Bentley?” She tries to read his signature from the paper.

“Bunting.”

“Thank you, Mr. Bunting,” she says and leads them out the door. The apartment is still filled with their collective scent. It’s light and beautiful. He hasn’t smelled anything like that in a very long time.

Good, he thinks, they’ll be back.

Virgil goes out the next day and buys an entire used suit. He is careful to make sure there aren’t any stains or tears in it. He shaves, clips all of his nails, tears the hair from his nose and takes four showers a day.

For the next three days, he sits around in his suit, graying hair combed, and waits for the girls to return.

On the evening of the third day, he hears a knock on the door.

It has to be them. Virgil doesn’t even know anyone else. He eagerly crosses the room and opens the door. There are only three of them this time, but the older one is still there. All of them carry pamphlets and register a look of surprise at the new Virgil.

“Have a seat,” he invites them.

They do so, sitting in the same semi-militant formation.

“Lemonade?”

“Sure,” they say.

Already, Virgil can sense they feel more comfortable around him.

He enters the kitchen and pours the lemonade, sporting a semi-erection.

As he begins walking toward the living room, he stops, holds his head, and then bursts into flame, the lemonade in the glasses lighting to a boil before the glasses fall to the floor, nothing left to hold them. From his torso up, he has exploded, the rest of him burnt down to a charred stalk.

After their intitial surprise, the girls walk over to his remains.

“Oooooh, are those pieces of his brain on the wall?”

“My goodness, he’s all black!”

“Oh, can you smell the stink?”

November 10, 2023

absurd stories, absurdist fiction, aging, andersen prunty, comic fiction, loneliness, suicidal ideation