Category Archives: Stories

Original shorts, fictional and otherwise.

Trojan Horse

Posted on April 12, 2011 by Dave Bonta

What is this gift whose innocent acceptance precipitates the horror that we know is coming: our transformation after dark into mindless flesh-eaters? It doesn’t seem to matter. We cling to each other, the tattooed woman and I, instant lovers — until the knock comes from the top of the stairs and the searchlight finds us and we are history, one with the zombie masses swarming the gates. I turn in my sleep, not quite surfacing. Now we are in the Channel Islands, and there is a possibility of escape. Our helicopter looks for a place to land, fighting the wind, which is so strong all the trees grow parallel to the ground. In this conference room, we will be safe. Colonel Gaddafi and President Obama are here with their entourages, each making a great show of being relaxed and in control, preparing for a chess match that will end the war.

Posted in Dreams, Stories | 2 Comments

Colonists

Posted on March 28, 2011 by Dave Bonta

We’re in a ramshackle farmhouse in the far north, a half-dozen of us, sleeping at odd hours because there are no clocks and the sun never sets. Though ostensibly this is a writers’ colony, we think we might be stars in a covert reality TV show, a la The Truman Show. How else to explain the complete psychological profile and multiple photos required in the submission process, and the rule that we only wear certain brands of clothing? Anything can be a camera these days — and besides, who ever heard of hummingbirds above the Arctic Circle?

I find a window no one’s looked out of before. It shows me a twelve-story Chinese pagoda in flames that do not consume it as long as I watch. Perhaps the flames are really autumn leaves, pulled upwards by extreme low pressure. Someone else needs to see this, I think, but the nearest writer turns out to be sound asleep, though his pen still inches across the paper. I go outside to look for the pagoda and get lost in a maze of streets. Eventually I come to to a town square with a big bank clock. 12:45, it says. If that’s a.m., I’ll go to a bar. If it’s p.m., I’ll go to a coffee shop.

Posted in Dreams, Stories | 2 Comments

Theodiocy

Posted on March 27, 2011 by Dave Bonta

In my dream, God was a jerk. I was a lawyer for the plaintiff: a man who had been crippled by a strange disease that turned him into a blue lizard. I hadn’t expected to talk to the big guy Himself, but I rose to the occasion. I suppose you know what I’m here for, I said. God had shapeshifted into a middle-aged, bearded white guy — an exact replica of myself, in fact. He imitated my every gesture like an obnoxious street mime. I began to lecture. Why don’t you act your age? Just as you have to obey the laws of physics, you’re not above ethics, either. He smirked. Homo sapiens is one species out of billions, a failed experiment, He said. But this universe — is it not also one of billions? I asked. Surely there must be other gods, then. If you’re not careful, one of them will hear our cries, come over here and kick your ass. He glowered. I took off down the stairs as fast as I could.

Posted in Dreams, Greatest Hits, Humor, Philosophy/Religion, Stories | 13 Comments

Bento Boxes

Posted on February 19, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Tweny-five years ago I outsourced my motivation to the Japanese. I wore the Kansai humidity like a second skin and shaved my beard to get closer to the soup. I went to all kinds of extremes, even fell in love. Anything to avoid going to class.

Opening a bento was like taking the roof off a cheap apartment building, the kind where you can hear every word through the thin walls but understand nothing. I speak from experience: the woman in the next apartment had a screaming orgasm every afternoon at 3:00. My roommate took to accompanying her on the guitar.

I spent so much time in one noodle bar, an older construction worker became my official sponsor and paid for everything. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t communicate very well because we had very little to communicate other than respect on my part and kindness on his. The other people in the noodle bar schooled me in how to behave.

Their economy was booming then, and it took a lot of asking around to find where the homeless lived, over near the Osaka zoo, behind a fence: another bento box. I went there with a friend. We sat down on a bench and waited for someone to join us; it didn’t take long. He’d come down from the north 16 years before to work at the World’s Fair, he said, and never went back.

The only foreigner I met who’d completely mastered the language, modern and classical, was a drunk who went to sleep in the middle of an empty street. Flies, I heard him mutter, why do you always call on me when I’m not home?

Written for the > Language > Place blog carnival.

Posted in Greatest Hits, Memoir, Stories | Tagged | 8 Comments

The Machinery of Time

Posted on October 4, 2010 by Dave Bonta


Direct link to video on Vimeo.

A flash-fiction videopoem featuring the hands of my niece Elanor and members of her plastic entourage. The depressing subject matter might have something to do with the fact that I had just seen the documentary Gasland (highly recommended, by the way). And in fact, my preferred style of videopoem-making borrows heavily from documentaries, relying as it does on discovery rather than invention (e.g. actors following a script), and using voice-over narration to convey the text of the poem.

The Machinery of Time

The time machine was our only answer to the apocalypse we’d set in motion. Some chose to travel 10 million years into the future, by which time, they figured, new multicellular organisms would’ve evolved. Others of us decided to go back & try to change history. Someone thought she could help Carthage win the Punic Wars. Someone else wanted to insert a fable about hubris into the Homeric epic. But the backwards travel unraveled us, thinned us out & made us ineligible for death. We appeared only in mirrors, or to people with second sight, provoking fresh terror at a haunted world. When after millennia of helplessness we reached our own birthdays, we crumbled like the pages of a burnt book.

*

That’s about the maximum length for the text of a one-minute videopoem, by the way. I had to cut out a few phrases and read more quickly than usual to fit it in. Still, after almost three years of writing for the world’s tiniest daily newspaper, The Morning Porch, one minute seems like more than enough time to get an idea across. The above text would fill five tweets.

Posted in Food and Drink, Greatest Hits, Stories, Videopoetry | Tagged | 2 Comments

The Rescue

Posted on June 3, 2010 by Dave Bonta

I am rescuing Roma children from the Gestapo. They have, I discover, a marvelous gift for silence. We escape to the forest and live off whatever their quick fingers can find: eggs from hidden nests, truffles from the roots of oaks, frogs and arrowroot and wild carrots doing their best to masquerade as water hemlock. They are good at helping each other. Whenever I make a suggestion, they tilt their heads to the side, and on rare occasions when one of them speaks, it’s a single word, phrased like a question, in a language I don’t understand.

A little bit of hunger can sharpen the wits, but too much makes you dull. When dullness threatens to overwhelm us, we launch a night raid against some nearby farms, first drugging the dogs, then slipping in among the sleeping cows, their steamy breath, their hot stink, to liberate a gallon or two of milk from some rubbery teat, while the stealthiest child goes into the shed and eases a chicken from its perch without waking it up.

It’s a tricky business. The pasture is nothing but mud and we struggle to hold on to our prizes as we slip and fall and grow mired. The smaller children flail; the older ones settle exhausted onto their haunches and wait for dawn. The moon comes up and everything is illuminated: this is not mud but oil. These are not children but seabirds robbed of flight. And whatever you call this foaming about our feet, it is not the sea.

Posted in Dreams, Personal/Political, Stories | 8 Comments

Coyote tree

Posted on March 24, 2010 by Dave Bonta

fallen white oak

It was early spring. In the last light of evening, as the quacking calls of wood frogs were giving way to spring peepers, a coyote ghosted down off the ridge and followed the small creek that ran for a little way along the edge of the woods before disappearing into a sinkhole.

Something was different. He stopped and sniffed, trying to puzzle it out. He smelled fresh sawdust and gasoline, yes, but also the moist earthy spoor of rotten tree — a lot of that. As if some enormous coyote, its gut full of fur and seeds and scales and all manner of indigestible things, had stopped to leave a massive calling card.

fallen white oak trunk

The truth was almost as massive and hard to digest: the great white oak had toppled, splitting open near the ground. Many of its limbs were as big around as regular trees, and at its base it was half again as wide as a coyote is long. A small limb next to the humans’ trail had been cut — that’s where the sawdust smell had come from — but otherwise, for once, they seemed to be leaving it alone. One massive limb had jabbed into the earth at an angle and broken off, and now it made a very convenient — in fact, an irresistible — ramp up onto the fallen trunk.

fallen white oak crown

Quick as thought, Coyote was on top of the toppled giant. The smooth plates of its bark felt very agreeable, and as he nosed about, he saw and smelled not a tree but a maze of paths, all of them leading back to him. Mice, squirrels, weasels, chipmunks, fishers — nothing can resist the open highway of a log. If he waited here long enough, they would come to him.

coyote scat on white oak 1

But that’s cat thinking; Coyote doesn’t hunt like that. Any path that is too obvious can make him vulnerable to his ancient enemies the wolves, whose own lack of imagination had doomed them here in the East, and most other places besides. Coyote didn’t take over by being predictable. No, an obvious walkway like this is good for one thing and one thing only: saying hello to other coyotes. And so he did, and hopped down, trotting off without a backward glance.

coyote scat on white oak 2

A few weeks later, he happened by again, and remembered his missive. He climbed up onto the tree to take a look, and sure enough, there was a reply — a long one! He read it carefully. It said, I’m a nursing mother, I’m eating well, and I can kick your ass. He thought about it for half a minute, then left a short, neutral response — I’m still here — scurried down off the tree, and trotted rapidly back the way he came.

coyote scat on white oak 3

It was late autumn before he returned to that end of the valley again. The tree was still there, and though it had human odor all over it, at least three more coyotes had been there, too — the half-grown offspring of the mother who had left a message earlier, perhaps. There was a sort of uniform character to their odor, as if they’d all been dripped on by the same tree — which a family would be, of course. The oak itself had lost a great deal of its pungency, and his paws detected a bit more give in the bark. He squatted once again. Though in life this tree was what foresters call a wolf tree, with its huge spreading crown of crooked limbs keeping sun from getting to other, straighter, more marketable trees, in death it was definitely going to the coyotes.

For the April Fools edition of the Festival of the Trees, “humorous trees,” at Vanessa’s Trees and Shrubs Blog. See the complete details.

me with fallen oak

Posted in Greatest Hits, Humor, Photos, Stories, Trees | 10 Comments

Dash away all

Posted on December 22, 2009 by Dave Bonta

“What the hell are we going to do with all these?” I asked, staring at the eight freshly severed heads lined up in the blood-stained snow. Their eyes had filmed over and the moonlit shadows of their antlers stretched like a phantom woods across the tundra. “They won’t keep,” said the sniper. “The magic has ruined them, as it ruins everything. Watch.”

He took a salt shaker from his pocket and sprinkled each of the heads. The effect was almost instantaneous: first the fur and then the flesh melted away, leaving nothing but the bones. The snow around them turned white again as we watched. I felt the hair rising on the back of my neck.

“This is your first time, isn’t it?” he asked. I nodded. The antlers were branched icicles now on skulls of crystal, skulls that shrank, antlers that withered, as if the temperature around them were 200 degrees warmer than it was. The skulls grew rounder as they shrank, and the gleaming teeth turned sharp as knives.

“These ones never actually belonged to the Caribou Mother,” he said. “They are the children of Sanna — the Inuktitut name for Sedna. That’s the kind of evil we’re up against here.”

The Iraq War veteran bowed his head. “Thank you for this victory, Jesus, temporary as it is,” he said. “I am your crusader.”

I shifted uncomfortably and looked at the ground. Some of the best soldiers in our unit happened to be pagans. We had signed up to defend North American airspace against terrorists, and that’s what the recruiter assured us we’d be doing. Rumors of a holy war had been dismissed as just another paranoid conspiracy theory from society’s perennial malcontents.

The marksman laid a hand on my shoulder. “The Pentagon can say what it wants,” he said, “but this is a war we Christians have been fighting for 2000 years. It took centuries just to kill off Saturn! Declaring December 25th as the birth of our Lord and Savior did little to fool the forces of darkness — the longest night of the year still occurs just a few days before, despite our best efforts.” He sighed. “This Santa character is a real shape-shifter. Give me a Sunni insurgency any day.”

He squinted at the faint pink glow that signalled high noon in the High Arctic. “Welcome to the War on Christmas.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6yUCbqAGrg

Video by Rebel Virals (hat-tip: Rachel Maddow Show)

For readers from outside the U.S. who think I might be exaggerating just a bit, see “Jesus Shoots Santa in Controversial Lawn Display.”

Posted in Dreams, Satire and Farce, Stories | Tagged | 6 Comments

A game of checkers

Posted on August 24, 2009 by Dave Bonta

He will be killed and she will be killed and everyone except for me will be killed as a Muslim, as an alien, as an intellectual, as a homosexual. And I stroke my chin and chuckle in agreement with whatever crude thing is under discussion to cover a sudden watering of my eyes, because shit, they’ve just caught her with a bomb, the policemen say.

They march her in handcuffs up to the table where the commander and I are playing checkers, my silver coins against his gold (plastic is too precious). I am unable to look at her and she does nothing to acknowledge me, whether from contempt or because she wants me to live, I don’t know.

The commander prescribes his usual panacea: one bullet. They take her away. I pray to the ground in which I somehow still believe: open under my chair, swallow me whole. But it doesn’t. The moment passes. I relieve the commander of another gold coin.

*
If you haven’t yet submitted anything to qarrtsiluni for the Words of Power issue, which Beth and I are editing, you have until next Monday.

Posted in Dreams, Stories | 15 Comments

Beta versions

Posted on July 20, 2009 by Dave Bonta

SCENE: The local brewpub at happy hour, back corner of the bar.

COMPUTER GEEK: Wow, he sounds just like my ex-husband: good for a while, until you start to notice all the glaring imperfections. Total alpha.

BIOLOGIST: Oh yeah, mine too! Everything had to be done his way, didn’t matter what it was. Alpha male if there ever was one.

COMPUTER GEEK: Tell me about it. The quicker I adjusted every fucking thing to his modus operandi, the smoother things went. For a while. If I kept my eyes shut and put my fingers in my ears.

BIOLOGIST: Yup. And of course the problem is I’m a bit of an alpha myself, and he couldn’t handle that. Called me the the b-word to my face.

COMPUTER GEEK: Don’t be too hard on yourself! You don’t strike me as an alpha at all, though I suppose we’re all a little rough around the edges. Still, I like to think of myself more as a beta… and that’s definitely what I’m looking for in my next man. Must. Be. In. Beta.

BIOLOGIST: Well, I’ll go along with that! I’m definitely looking for a beta this time around. But I don’t mind admitting that’s because I’m an alpha. Someone has to be! Who’d keep all the betas in line, otherwise? Not all alphas are bad — just the ones that, you know, aren’t any good. (Laughs)

COMPUTER GEEK: Oh, well, I guess that’s true. Can’t have a beta without an alpha!

BIOLOGIST: Exactly.

COMPUTER GEEK: Still, don’t you think that, ideally, we should expect to get a little better at this each time? Relationships, I mean. I’d hate to think that anyone’s just stuck in an alpha version forever, doomed to make the mistakes with the same kinds of men over and over.

BIOLOGIST: Are you saying the beta pattern represents progress? I hadn’t thought about it that way before. To me, they’re just different ways of interacting, different social styles. But you’re right, come to think of it. As they get older, every alpha does eventually become an beta, or worse.

COMPUTER GEEK: Worse? You mean better! The beta stage is when you start to get real public participation, assuming we’re a public beta. The more people you have testing you out, the faster you’ll improve.

BIOLOGIST: I guess that’s one way of looking at it. Age certainly does mellow us out — or wear us down, I’m not sure which! And I’m intrigued by this idea that the beta stage is actually what we’re designed for. Some of the new research on human aging does tend to back that up. I think traditionally we’ve just been so focused on the reproductive stage that we’ve tended to ignore the vital social roles of, for example, non-breeding females.

COMPUTER GEEK: (warily) I’m not sure reproduction is quite the metaphor I’d use, but whatever. The important thing is that you have a pretty flexible architecture to begin with. If someone’s stuck in alpha, they just aren’t reaching their full potential.

INVESTOR (two stools down): I’m sorry, ladies, I couldn’t help overhearing a little of your conversation. I have to say I am fascinated by your interpretation of alpha and beta values!

(Biologist snorts)

I’ve always been told that you should go for a high alpha and a low beta, but it sounds like you’re saying the exact opposite! What other performance factors do you look at?

COMPUTER GEEK: Well, uh, it depends. Some people just look at adoption rate, but I’m a purist: I’m looking for elegance, I’m looking for simplicity, I’m looking for ease of use…

INVESTOR: (slides over to the adjacent stool) Tell me more!

BIOLOGIST: (in a loud mutter) Why the hell are males always so obsessed with performance? Do you have any fucking idea what we were talking about?

Posted in Humor, Stories | 3 Comments
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