The Page Cannot Be Found

You can visit almost any internet writer’s blog/website,browse their list of publications, and at least (~) a third of the links leadto a web page that cannot be found.

Stories this writer worked hard on, sent toat least (~) 10-20 online journals only to be rejected, but finally were acceptedby a journal this writer has read at least (~) every issue of and, when published,this writer proudly posted on their blog/website that, indeed, one editor foundsomething about one of this writer’s stories he/she thought worthy to includein the next issue of his/her journal (or, if not his/her journal, the journalhe/she is a contributing editor for).

This one publication no doubt, at the time, brought thiswriter a much needed boost of confidence in the otherwise hollow venture of achievinga modicum of temporary literary immortality, gave this writer a little courage tocontinue writing and sending that writing to more editors for consideration,made this writer feel less ashamed by/afraid of his/her own writing and ofrejection overall and more understanding of the idea that not everyone will likehis/her writing, but that there is probably, eventually, someone who will.

In a seaof rejection, a lighthouse… That’s stupid. Fucking 'sea of rejection'. Fucking 'lighthouse'. Stupid.

This writer, at the time, most likely grew obsessed withsending his/her writing to all the 'major' online literary journals, to feelminutely 'famous' knowing other people would potentially think differentlyabout his/her work (indeed, think at all about his/her work), as it is now publishedin this one online literary journal.

But this doesn’t always happen, atleast not as immediately as this writer initially hoped. Other writers’ writingalso appears in this issue, and this writer will no doubt be overlooked by thevast majority of other writers and readers.

One day, though, someone may find themselves trawling thiswriter’s blog/website, having read something this writer wrote (a) year(s) agoin the archives of a still-publishing journal, feeling at least (~) mildly interestedenough to read more.

This someone, however, visits this writer's blog/website and comes to the list of publicationsand finds the title of a story or poem they think seems interesting, and this someoneclicks on the link.

This link leads only to a page that cannot be found.

Thisstory is lost, the link dead.

This missing story has a story of its own, astory of the story its writer did not take into consideration—a story of loss, ofprediction in retrospect.

Theephemerality of creative conquest, preservation of finite pleasure.

This someone, trawling this writer's publications list, maybe feels thankful he/she is emotionally obligated to feel only a vague sense of disappointment at not being able to read this story or poem that seemed interesting, and feels lucky to not have written it.

This someone quickly finds something else to click on.

_________


Here are some stories I wrote that no longer appear online, in reverse chronological order:

THREE ZOMBIE FRAGMENTS

Published @ No Time to Say It
(xTx's blog, not a journal; solicited, so fits into this post only because it no longer appears online)

(August ’10)

1 /

The momma zombie breastfeeds the baby zombie on a bench atthe playground.

A bunch of toddler zombies are climbing the monkey bars,their arms ripping in dusty bursts off at the elbows, shoulders, hands stillclinging to the bars.

They run to their momma zombies who tell them they’ll befine, and to keep playing.

Other toddler zombies running around fall face-first intothe slide, tearing their faces off like band-aids.

One toddler zombie gets tangled up in the chain of a swing,struggles a moment, clawing at the sand, his fingernails falling out in theloose sand, getting buried a little like brittle, gray seashells.

The momma zombie breastfeeding her baby zombie looks at thepalm of her zombie hand, her empty zombie hand, the imaginary zombie teeth herbaby zombie never got to grow, the baby zombie teeth that never got to fall outof the baby zombie’s mouth.

The momma zombie thinks of the zombie tooth fairy, its wingswithering off its rotting back, absent-mindedly flying into closed bedroomwindows, bumping into them again and again, saying, “Ahhh.”

The baby zombie bites into the momma zombie’s breast withits gums like a brain if the brain was a silicone implant, tearing the brown,shriveled nipple off, gnawing on it like raw bacon, silicone gel oozing fromthe tear in the momma zombie’s breast like a clear, curdled milk.

2 /

Near a small lake, in the middle of the park, some zombieslay on their bellies, sunbathing.

One or two occasionally sit up to squirt suntan lotion ontothe zombie lying next to them, rubbing the lotion into the zombie’s back, thelotion oozing like milky pus into the cracks of the zombie’s rotting flesh likewhite lava pouring from a volcano in the sky and flowing through the crevicesof an arid plateau.

The zombie moans as the zombie who squirted the lotion rubsit in sensually, tenderly touching the zombie with its fingertips, moistly andstickyly.

The sun beats down on the zombies sunbathing, and a littlefarther down the lake there is a hill where people sit watching zombies on astage performing a scene from Hamlet,two zombies pretending to be clowns, gravediggers:

SECONDCLOWN: Who builds stronger than a mason, ashipwright, or
a carpenter?

FIRST CLOWN:Ay, tell me that, and unyoke.

SECOND CLOWN:Marry, now I can tell.

FIRST CLOWN:To't.

SECOND CLOWN: Mass, I cannot tell.

FIRSTCLOWN: Cudgel thy brains no more about it, foryour dull
ass will not mend his pace with beating; and, when
you are asked this question next, say "a grave-maker":
the houses that he makes last till doomsday.
ass will not mend his pace with beating; and, when
you are asked this question next, say "a grave-maker":
the houses that he makes last till doomsday.

Zombies sitting on the hill watch blankly, thinking aboutbrains, using their brains to think about brains.

Eventually, both the zombies pretending to be clowns digginga grave forget their lines, surprised they’ve remembered as much as they did,and begin to drool.

The sun begins to sink in the sky.

3 /

Across the park, a zombie sits under a tree readingNietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,staring intensely at the pages, blinking, its dead zombie eyes like mouthschewing every word.

The zombie’s dead zombie eyes swallow, and the zombie’sbrain like a belly digests Nietzsche’s brain, and Nietzsche’s brain tastes goodin the zombie’s brain, as the zombie sits under the tree contemplating itsexistence, what it means to be a zombie, what it means to be.

The zombie wants more brains like this, brains that taste sogood in its zombie brain, its dead zombie eyes chewing every last crumb ofevery last word on every page.

The zombie hears something whistling and looks up to see a Frisbee flying toward its face, and the Frisbee hits the zombie in the face andthe zombie’s head moves when the Frisbeehits it.

“Sorry,” the teenage zombie who doesn’t catch the Frisbee says to the zombie who gets hitin the head with the Frisbee.

The zombie looks around at all the other zombies in thepark, some playing Frisbee, somebreast feeding their zombie babies, some sunbathing, others eating the brainsof the few humans left.

The humans’ bodies lie in the grass in the sinking sun,their bellies ripped open like whales leaking intestines, their limbs torn offand devoured, their skulls eaten out of like popcorn bowls.

The zombie looks at the other zombies eating human brainsand thinks, “So barbaric.”

The zombie goes back to reading its book.

TARGET PRACTICE

from The Immortals Act Their Age, a Novel of Stories
Published in Writers’ Bloc (Rutgers)

(Issue #9, March ’10)

Mason remembered his first coloring book: Something about abear or a fish or, something.

With a box of cheap crayons, on a cold hardwood floor underthe blanket of a dark blue throw rug, he’d lie on his stomach trying accuratelyto scribble the bear’s or the fish’s likeness, not trying to mess up by coloringthe space around its body—but it was hard.

Mason just had twitchy hands, he guessed.

Still does.

He’d color and color, trying to recreate some idyllictableau of a life he’d never seen.

He’d never been camping or gone to the beach, and thereweren’t any woods or creeks anywhere around the projects he grew up in.

Then why all the mosquito bites, he wondered.

To Mason, Histogram City looked like a cardboard cutout ofitself, cut out of a skyline he always for that reason thought of ascobalt-blue construction paper—something only a child could conceive.

Looking at old photographs of steel workers sitting on thebeams of not-yet-built skyscrapers a mile up eating turkey sandwiches out oftin lunch boxes, he always thought of safety scissors.

His twitchy hands.

He could never color just the bear or the fish.

Always the long, elliptical loops like solar flares burstingout of the bear or fish, as if they were being hunted and just got shot orspeared so a dose of blood flew out of them like a nurse testing a syringe witha few little squirts.

Mason wasn’t cut out for coloring.

He could never stay within the lines.

Now he managed an office on the 3rd floor of the Fias Co.building.

It’s good he didn’t own a gun.

AQUARIUMS
from The Immortals Act Their Age, a Novel of Stories
Published in The Catalonian Review
(December ’09)

It logically seemed more logical to pick up a magazine and just read it.

Better than staring at the receptionist’s window, with its frosted glass and, more ominously, slid shut.

The chairs were no help, sitting there not doing anything but holding other people who had [n]othing to do with Seth’s condition.

Seth’s condition could’ve sat in one of those chairs, they were so close.

Seth’s condition could’ve been one of those people waiting to get up.

But his condition decided it was just safer to float there, and wait.

Waiting was always the best part about floating.

Conditions didn’t have to do anything, really.

Conditions could just look like they were levitating, or something.

People would just stare at someone’s condition and wonder what the hell it was it was waiting for.

Conditions could contemplate the bigger things in life, like, “What am I waiting for?”

Seth’s condition sometimes found it might look silly to someone who didn’t confuse not having something to live for with not having anything to read.

The people waiting in the waiting room, hiding their faces behind magazines, they were wondering what Seth’s condition was waiting for.

They wondered about themselves, too.

Seth’s condition couldn’t’ve been the only condition there, could it’ve?

It was almost exactly like everyone else’s: Their conditions were imaginary, made of ice, and someone kept them in a glass box on a shelf above a radiator.

One day, when they were children, they saw their imaginary conditions melt into a clear liquid, the kind used in aquariums.

But [n]othing floated in theirs.

Then Seth’s condition came along and floated into the waiting room of Seth’s primary care physician Dr. Coffin’s office.

And these people, they weren’t sure how they felt about it, hadn’t yet gotten used to adjusting.

They knew Seth’s condition was there, but where were their conditions?

The receptionist’s ominously frosted glass window slid open.

“Seth’s condition?” the receptionist said.

Seth and Seth’s condition both looked up at the same time, and, in stereo, said:

“Yes?”

“The doctor will see you now.”

“Here goes,” Seth’s condition said.

Seth took Seth’s condition’s hand.

“Don’t be nervous,” he said. “You’ll do just fine.”

“Thanks,” Seth’s condition said.

Seth’s condition floated through the waiting room and over to a nurse who waited for Seth’s condition at the doorway to the examination rooms.

Everyone else almost forgot where they were, why they were there.

Seth picked up a magazine, flipped through it, wondered that, too.

TOUR GUIDES

from The Immortals Act Their Age, a Novel of Stories
Published in Ghoti

(Issue #19, July ’09)

The infants stood almost an hour in a circle around a ONE WAY sign someone had run over who knowswhen, staring at it like a dead animal.

They weren’t sure if it was dead.

They poked it with a stick.

It might as well’ve been a DEADEND sign, like the one at the other end of the street they lived on: Progressive Ave.

The infants had nowhere else to go, to be.

They found the ONE WAYsign, some sticks.

Someone had run over the ONEWAY sign with their car and drove away—someone, they assumed, who hadsomewhere else to go, to be.

The ONE WAY sign laythere at the living end of their little street, its rectangular aluminum headflattened into the cracked soil of a dead patch of grass, bent over at the baseof its stem like a rusted sunflower a fairytale giant had stepped on.

They figured the sign was dead.

They thought of this thing, this ONE WAY sign, as something meant to perform a function, assomething communicating an idea, a philosophy that would guide people in theirlives, other people, people who had somewhere else to go, to be.

Somewhere else the infants didn’t have.

Not to ignore its place in the world, not to downplay thesign’s purpose, the infants wondered how the sign felt expressing a message noone who came down their street could understand until they came to the DEAD END sign at the other end, where no onecould only turn back to correct no one’s mistake.

Almost an hour, they stood in a circle around the ONE WAY sign.

One of the infants, a boy, lifted his head and looked overthe others’ shoulders to see if no one else was coming.

The infant boy saw Brenton crossing the street a block away,wearing a dark hoodie, his hands tucked in its kangaroo pouch.

The infant boy thought Brenton seemed anxious aboutsomething.

The infants were all alone, had nowhere else to go, to be.

They stood around staring at the dead ONE WAY sign.

The infants couldn’t read the sign.

They poked it with a stick.

GANG PREVENTION: CANCELED

from The Immortals Act Their Age, a Novel of Stories
Published in U.M.Ph! Prose

(Issue #1, June ’09)

Watson and Bermuda got to the Histogram City Community Center,and there was a sign on the door that said: See Title.

They stood there a moment, looking at the sign.

They read it over and over, knew by now what the sign meant,so they didn’t spend any more time reading it, and just stood there staring atit.

Watson and Bermuda looked at eachother.

They turned around, walked back out into the parking lot.

The infants were playing basketball on a small court besidethe Community Center.

The court was just blacktop with no boundaries painted onit.

The basketball hoop didn’t have a net, just hung there fromthe rusted aluminum backboard like a mechanical angel’s iron halo.

None of the infants had on decent clothes or sneakers, andthey all made fun of each other for it.

They played ball together, all pretty rough about it,slamming into and dropping each other like anchors wearing mob-issued cementshoes.

They all got up again, went right back to playing ball,hurting each other without ever really fighting big.

Watson and Bermuda sat on thesidelines on rusted, warped metal bleachers, watching the infants play.

The sun was real big, hot.

“You think Lucas’s sick?” Watson said.

“He’d call,” Bermuda said.

“Would he? No one else showed up.”

“But he’s our counselor. He should call.”

Watson felt himself getting angry.

He made fists, his hands mouths grinding their fingers liketeeth, and his blood got thick, hot, felt like lava.

“No, he’d call,” Bermuda said.

“Then why didn’t he?”

Bermuda didn’t say anything.

“He’s fucking with us, that’s what. He thinks we’ll just bepatient and depend on ourselves? Fuck that.”

Bermuda felt he was having a stroke,couldn’t focus on anything but: “He’d call. Maybe something bad happened.”

Watson got up off the bleachers, hopped down onto theblacktop.

He walked over to the infants playing basketball.

Bermuda watched Watson go withoutthinking about what he was doing, didn’t notice the gun Watson pulled out andshot at three of the infants with.

He didn’t notice the other infants scattering away, leapingover the chain-link fences enclosing the court, fences with long gashes in themlike runs in a stocking Watson once pulled down over his face to anonymouslyrob the corner store.

Bermuda didn’t even hear the loudpops the bullets made when compressed air coughed them up out of the gun.

Watson climbed up the bleachers and sat down beside Bermuda,who, the whole time, was trapping himself inside, getting angry about it.

His palms were slices of bleeding bread his fists bit into.

Bermuda snapped out of it and lookedat Watson, thought he was maybe asking the infants if they’d seen Lucas.

“What’d they say?”

Watson didn’t answer, just sat there with the gun in hispalm, squeezing the grip, cocking and uncocking the hammer.

“Let’s go,” Bermuda said. “I want togo.”

They got up and went to Bermuda’scar, drove around looking for Lucas, and when they found him they weren’t surewhat they were going to do.

Watson and Bermuda hadn’t yet learnedself-control.

That was this week’s session.

There was [n]othing they could’ve done to stop themselves.

GOOSEBUMP BRAILLE

from Snowing Fireflies (Folded Word Press, 2010)
Published in Tuesday Shorts

(June ’09)

Sexually insulated, like eating fiber glass cotton candy,the walls cold, the window a cracked spider web, their scars scotch-taped.

They hold each other, know too much to understand anything.

His fingers caress her arm, reading sentences on her skin.

The same sentence which says over and moreover:

Don’t Touch…

OZ MINUS OZONE

Published in KORA

(March ’09)

1 /

There were still some landmines that hadn’t gone off yet.

It became a kind of hopscotch game with the teenagers.

Sometimes when they looked up they could actually see bigholes their parents’d carved into the sky with industrial-strength,gasoline-powered hunting knives, abandoned structures around which theirparents erected scaffolding like skeletons to stand on.

To the teenagers it felt like living inside a big bluebowling ball, and there weren’t any fingers big enough to plug those holes.

All the town’s shacks appeared to be buckling under theirown weight, as if some great giant had come through crushing everything underits fists.

A lot of the town’s shacks looked soggy, even melted, likebig birthday cakes with chimneys for candles too top-heavy to stand up straightanymore, sunken into the roof’s frosting.

How deformed the whole place looked, it made people wholived there think the whole town years ago just fell from the sky through theholes in it, into the giant poppy field the town now occupied, sprinkled intowhat could’ve been a brilliantly choreographed blueprint if it weren’t justdumb luck where everything crash-landed.

Soon after what everyone believed was just a random accidentof existence, the town’s place in the world and in itself, the sky paused inmidair, and it still to this day hung there above everyone’s heads, danglingominously like some extraterrestrial golf course on the end of an infant’smobile.

The sky haunted the townspeople.

None of them knew why.

It was so long ago.

Even the parents who’d carved the sky’s holes’d forgottenall about what they’d done.

2 /

The landmines were mostly duds, but some of the teenagerswere lucky enough sometimes to step on one that was still active, still alive,and for a second it felt like a turtle was going “Ouch,” and wiggling a littleunder their feet.

But really it was a living landmine blowing up, and theblowing up of a living landmine was like a trampoline, so then some of theteenagers were lucky enough to be flung up through the holes and out of theplanet.

Some of the townspeople suspected scarecrows of planting thelandmines.

Sometimes a landmine would get up on its little legs andcrawl away to another, more secret part of the poppy field.

Sometimes scarecrows came down off their crosses at nightand snatched one of the teenagers’ parents and crucified them.

In the morning teenagers would cut class and head out to thefield.

“Get away from there,” a vague and disembodied voice wouldcall out.

The teenagers would look up from hopping around landmines.

“What was that?” one of the teenagers would say.

“Sounded like, like my dad,” another teenager would say.

That afternoon, walking up to his shack, a teenager mightsee a scarecrow standing behind the screen door holding a cup of coffee, hismother’s head on the scarecrow’s shoulder, her arms around the scarecrow’swaist.

ATLAS HEAD OVER HEELS

Published in Corduroy Mtn.

(November ’08)

Then time came when the whole world’s water swallowed thewhole world’s land, all except for one spot, one tiny patch of land big enoughfor one person to stand on.

All the world’s people built a ladder, seeing the wateradvancing toward them from all directions, and they figured that to be the bestway out.

The ladder wasn’t strong enough, and first the rungssnapped, and then the support beam things the rungs tight-roped acrossthemselves to buckled.

Under the weight of everyone in the world who had a chanceto climb the ladder it collapsed, and everyone in the world who’d climbed itfell on top of one another.

The ladder wasn’t nearly tall enough anyway.

The water was getting closer, slowly rushing inland, andthey looked at it and got scared and started trampling each other.

One of all the world’s people, Stacks, suggested they make aladder out of themselves, and he offered the woman standing next to him a boostup onto his shoulders.

Her boyfriend got offended and went to kick Stacks in theballs, but she grabbed his pantleg.

He stopped, and she convinced him to help her up ontoStacks’ shoulders and then to climb up onto hers, and then Stacks had everyoneelse in the world climb up onto her boyfriend’s shoulders.

Everyonesaid, “Okay.”

All the world’s people started climbing each other as thewhole world’s water was in the distance slowly rushing from everywhere towardthem, thinning out some as it reached the shore of their shrinking island.

Whole cities, neighborhoods, buildings, homes, schools,hospitals, movie theaters, community centers—the whole scene was a full scalemodel of a miniature disaster.

The water stopped at Stacks’ feet, and he tried to not thinkabout it or flinch under the weight of the world’s population he was kindenough to let go on over him.

Stacks held his breath until the water stopped at his feet,and it went over his ankles a little and then he blew all that air out,hoisting his brows and blinking real fast.

The last person to climb the human ladder got to the top ofthe sky.

It was a teenager named Gorman.

He climbed onto the shoulders of a heavy-set politician whohoped he would be the first one out.

The hole in the ozone was basically a submarine hatch.

It was just out of Gorman’s reach over his head, and for asecond he thought about jumping up to grab hold of the ledge, but then hethought that was stupid.

He yelled down for everyone in the world to stand on theirtiptoes, and by the time it got all the way to Stacks the guy who wanted tokick Stacks in the balls’s girlfriend said, “Tears for Fears rocks.”

“What?” Stacks said.

The girlfriend looked up at her boyfriend and said, “What?”

Then “What?” was the message on its way up toward thesubmarine hatch of a hole in the ozone, to the guy, Gorman, up there stretchingand who couldn’t reach the ledge of the hole, and who thought maybe jumpingwould do it.

It was like a rosary of echoes climbing a prayer’s noose upout of a sewer.

“Stand on your tiptoes, I said,” he said. “Keep it clear.”

An estimated 6.5 billion people passed that message downcarefully like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a sip of water, spitting it intoeach other’s mouths and hoping the person below them didn’t drool or swallowit.

The message made it down and arrived missing not one drop,nor did it contain new drops of anything superfluous like saliva or tears, andStacks used all his strength to get up on the tips of his toes under all thatweight, and everyone else in the world got up on their toes, dug them into theshoulders of everyone else in the world they were standing on, including thatguy Gorman, the teenager, at the top.

Gorman stretched out and, with the extra height he got fromthe world on its tiptoes, he touched the lip of the hole in the ozone, andthere was a hatch, a manhole closed over the sewer the world was.

It was real dark all the way up there.

Gorman felt like he was in a submarine.

“Be careful,” the heavy-set politician Gorman stood on said.

Gorman popped the hatch and took a deep breath, and his facegot sucked off his head, his whole body slurped out into space.

Down below no one had any idea what was happening, and theyall tried keeping as still as they could to prevent the human ladder they werefrom wobbling.

More than 97% of the world’s population was afraid of heights.

They were surrounded by water.

A lot of people were thirsty.

The politician under Gorman held Gorman’s legs and gotsucked out into space with Gorman, and the person under the politicianclutching his legs got sucked out.

One by one, beads from the rosary of echoes were poppingoff, rungs from the human ladder flung out into orbit like splinters floatingin water around a bowling ball.

Lots of people down below had to pee.

“What’s happening?” Stacks yelled.

Everyone was anxious, holding on tight, clutching the legsof whoever stood on their shoulders, clamping the heads of whoever’s shouldersthey stood on between their ankles.

One by one, the whole human ladder and all its rungs gotsucked up like coke through a straw, snorted like coke through a rolled-updollar bill.

The boyfriend on his girlfriend’s shoulders, and her onStacks’ shoulders, they didn’t let go in time and they got sucked up with therest of the world’s population, but the girlfriend’s legs slipped out ofStacks’ hands.

“No,” Stacks yelled.

The hatch slammed shut after the girlfriend got sucked out.

Stacks stood there a moment, looking around.

He was the only person left in the whole world.

He wondered if maybe the boyfriend and girlfriend got suckedup so forcefully he simply couldn’t hold on to the girlfriend’s legs and theywere torn from his grip, or if maybe he really just let go, on-purpose like.

He didn’t think he could answer that question honestly.

He looked down at his feet, water covering them up to hisankles.

He heard a faint sound, like someone screaming, gettingcloser.

He looked up, and the heavy-set politician hit the Earthlike an asteroid, landing face-first in shallow water near where Stacks wasstanding, shaking the ground, splashing big waves toward Stacks.

Stacks jumped back.

He slowly walked over to the politician’s probably deadcorpse, and nudged it a little with his foot.

The politician didn’t move.

Stacks turned him over.

He nudged him again with his foot.

The politician’s eyes opened wide.

“AHHH,” Stacks yelled, afraid.

“UHHH,” the politician’s dead corpse went.

Stacks sat on the politician’s dead corpse.

He rested his elbow on his thigh, and his chin on his closedfist.

He thought hard about why he might’ve let go on purpose.

The sun was going down, and it was getting cold out.

_________

Here are a couple poems that no longer appear online:

THE AMERICAN CONSUMER

from How Much the Jaw Weighs (Anonymosity Press, 2011)
Published in Dogmatika

(March ’09)

Intentionally targeted by ad campaigns

to be the best possible version of myself

acting out someone else’s fantasy of owning my capital,

I work harder to produce less efficient clones to rally

around a poor and starving theme collapsing

into its own hunger like a nomadic cannibal sitting

in one place, eating itself.

DEFIBRILLATOR FOR DEADBEATS

from How Much the Jaw Weighs (Anonymosity Press, 2011)
Published in Dogmatika

(March ’09)

Hatred born of a fist’s womb

resonates through snow like crystal

ball shavings, glitters like grated

futures whose flakes have already

fallen into the roads of my palm

which lead this ambulance nowhere,

and doing chest compressions

on mannequins like honking the car

horn frantically beeping for Death

to get the fuck out of the way.