bloglinker
Add
your blog / journal
to
the bloglinker!
broken - excerpt...
Behind him was a park, Park of Broken Trees, although there wasn't a smashed limb in sight; that was the highway's domain. Children played with paling skin under a fading sun that had browned them for two out of twelve months. Their flesh would fade and fall like October leaves descending towards black soil. She had played. Each limb a symphony of kinesthetic perfection: each limb propelling, driving, impelling her towards a future undreamed and un-thought of. Flesh that extended in tearful protracted slow evolution, fingers and toes that had sprung like flowers in a cemetery. She had sang songs with voice angelic. Sweet, sweet angel. Oh sweet, like fresh strawberries in a mouth aged with cigarettes and regrets.
He waited and the highway did nothing. It remained stolid and indifferent to his pleas, prayers and oaths. It wove a cloak of silence with the sound of insects and beset him with anticipation. It rose and fell in concrete swells like the breath of giants towards a horizon furrowed with cloud. A breeze, unnatural exhaust, blew a transparent grocery bag off the solid black sacrificial stone; the altar top where gods would visit flesh in chariots of steel. They waited. They watched with headlight eye and felt hunger in their gasoline fueled entrails. They streamed in a steel torrent down midnight streams of black highway towards victims inhaling final breaths before the onslaught.
The highway remained immaculate. The dark black of oil and coolant created cracks, sacred markings upon the altar. Blood pooled slowly in these inscriptions and become coagulating ideograms to those who would seek to worship and comprehend.
collrin speaks...
The process of writing a story, for me at least, comes from a moment of fearful epiphany; a split second moment of terror, angst, and above all, horror. These fears are all related to a vague sense of being disconnected; a ghost in the machine of my own life. Machinery has never ceased to terrify me from the spinning, tearing, biting, and amputating blades of shop class to an inability to watch someone take the dash off my car. My fears of technology and machinery have caused me varying moments of embarrassment; the shamefaced grin when I have to admit I hate to the check the oil of my car because I fear the fan and the boiling blood activity of the radiator. My stupid smile when I tell others that I have never changed my own oil because I refuse to lie beneath the waiting beast and its crushing weight.
But that is pseudo-intellectual bullshit. We are taught to fear the car and its feeding area, the roadway, from an early age. Our parents teach us that cars are killers; they wait for children who do not look both ways; they prey on the inattentive. We are warned of black vans that devour children in their gaping black door mouths and leave their broken bodies nude in ditches. Parking lots become a nightmare landscape of grinning starved grills and roaring screams of empty stomach engines. We are told of clutches that accidentally engage, brakes that fail, doors that will not open: cars and trucks that suddenly, of their accord, roll in driveways over children. We are taught to think of the machine as an evil sentient being that will destroy us as soon as our attention falters for even a split second. We are taught fear, terror, and loathing.
We are taught to dread the road.
The road is where they feast on us, where they seek us out and take our friends, husbands, wives and daughters. The road is Death and the vehicles that move along it are angels of mortality; it moves beyond weak metaphor, becomes corporeal, and assumes mass in the nightmare of lives.
We are the waiting ghosts in the machines we have created.
Pain is inevitable.
collrin bio...
Paul Collrin is a High School English teacher (and therefore is an expert in real nightmares) in New Brunswick. He has one other published story in Cthulhu Sex magazine. Currently he lives with his wife, three children, a nameless thing which haunts his closet, and one monster under the bed. He has made friends with all of them except his wife. free newsletter...
He is working on that relationship and a novel.
back to Chimeraworld #4 editorial page
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
Chimericana Books.
