Monthly Archives: March 2020

It Tolls For Thee

Posted on by Bill Chance

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

—-John Donne, Devotions on Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII

Sunset on the Caribbean, taken what feels like a long, long time ago

 

 

Short Story (Flash Fiction) Of the Day – Gingerbread, by Dafydd McKimm

Posted on by Bill Chance

And then Gretel, who had survived such horrors with him, taken in an instant by something so absurdly commonplace as a chill, skin ashen, her body racked with coughing, until she lay silent and still and he by her bedside alone, feeling like a helpless boy again.

—-Dafydd McKimm, Gingerbread

Today’s piece of short fiction explores the question, “What happens when the fairy tale ends?” Well, everyone doesn’t live happily ever after – at least in this case.

But there is still hope, there is still a future – as long as we are brave, and tough, and open to a new solution and a new future. It may not be happily ever after but it can be the best we can do.

Gingerbread, by Dafydd McKimm

from Flash Fiction Online

 

Nor Does Lightning Travel In A Straight Line

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Why is geometry often described as “”cold” and “”dry?” One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline, or a tree. Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.”

― Benoît B. Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature

Union Station, Dallas, Texas

Short Story Of the Day (Flash Fiction) – Taylor Swift, by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

Posted on by Bill Chance

You’re in love; it’s great, you swipe on your phone and order: the next day a Taylor Swift clone shows up at your house. It’s not awkward, it’s everything you want.

—- Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Taylor Swift

Banjo Player on Royal Street, French Quarter, New Orleans

Are you social distancing? Are you quarantined? What would be better than going online and ordering your own Taylor Swift?

A crackerjack piece of flash fiction. Click on the link and read it… it’s short and I know you have the time. That’s all we have right now is time. Ordinarily, I am not a big fan of writing in the second person… but in this case, it works. What do you think?

Read it here:

Taylor Swift, by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

 

From Electric Literature

Yesterday Anymore

Posted on by Bill Chance

“It’s not yesterday anymore”
― Talking Heads

Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas

Get Your Shit Together

Posted on by Bill Chance

Morty [to Summer]: Well then get your shit together, get it all together, and put it in a backpack, all your shit, so it’s together.

[pause]

And if you gotta take it somewhere, take it somewhere, you know. Take it to the shit store and sell it, or put it in the shit museum. I don’t care what you do, you just gotta get it together.

[pause]

Get your shit together.

—–Rick and Morty, Big Trouble in Little Sanchez

Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas

What the Hell Are Those Things?

Posted on by Bill Chance

“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.”
― Anais Nin

Back in the heady days of the Leaning Tower of Dallas (now, sadly Long Gone) I had to stop by to see the thing up close, commune with a group of people (also, sadly, now long gone) and get my traditional leaning tower of Dallas photo.

Leaning Tower of Dallas, Dallas, Texas

While I was at the fence you see in the photo above, as close to the tower as was allowed, I noticed four objects hanging from cables on the side of the tower. “What the hell are those things?” I asked the people around me.

At first I thought they might be vending machines left behind and hanging by their electrical cords out over the void. That is sort of what they looked like. It looked like glassed in rectangular objects with stuff at the bottom. I imagined a vaporized break area on an upper floor with the vending machines left behind clinging for life against the concrete core.  I imagined bags of chips and candy bars hanging out there for the birds and brave squirrels to plunder. I put the telephoto lens on my camera and took a shot.

Mysterious objects on the side of the Leaning Tower of Dallas.

A small group gathered around my camera to look at the mystery on the tiny screen on the back. That gave enough magnification to be sure they weren’t vending machines. At any rate three of them looked exactly the same. I was disappointed.

It’s obvious that they were some sort of electrical things that probably supplied power to the elevator shafts in some way. Relays and capacitors and transformers and such. They are hanging by the stout high-voltage cables that electrical things have attached to them. Still a mystery, but less of a cool one.

Plants Do Not Feel Pain

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding.

Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life.”

― William S. Burroughs, Junky

Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas

Fruta Bomba

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Then there is the tamarind. I thought tamarinds were made to eat, but that was probably not the idea. I ate several, and it seemed to me that they were rather sour that year. They pursed up my lips, till they resembled the stem-end of a tomato, and I had to take my sustenance through a quill for twenty-four hours. They sharpened my teeth till I could have shaved with them, and gave them a “wire edge” that I was afraid would stay; but a citizen said no, it will come off when the enamel does” – which was comforting, at any rate. I found, afterward, that only strangers eat tamarinds – but they only eat them once.”
― Mark Twain, Mark Twain in Hawaii: Roughing It in the Sandwich Islands: Hawaii in the 1860s

Mural, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas

The Means Of Our Own Destruction

Posted on by Bill Chance

“The haft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagles own plumes. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.”
― Aesop

Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas