SNAP One

SNAP ZINE

O N E

A Short Story & Literature Zine Showcasing the writing talent of

ONE

Joe Briggs Gabe Bullard Jack Burston Jak Cardini Hildemar Cruz Mandi Goodier Liam Jones Jamie Lee Dan Taylor Neil Wykes

AND SO...

W e l l , we're back.

After a bit of a hiatus (sorry to everybody involved for taking so long!) we're in business. For those of you who picked up SNAP ZERO, our prototype issue, you will know that this is a zine of short stories and literature, the prospect being that all the stories in SNAP can be read in one sitting.

We've tried to collect a number of different styles and genres here, so that if you're used to reading one, you are quickly introduced to another too. This is the concept at least. I'd love to know what you, the reader, thinks about this.

Since ZERO, there's been a number of changes. Now there are a few longer stories, with the original concept that no story to be longer than 800 words.

We've now opened this to slightly longer stories, but still kept a number of short stories. We're looking for extremely short stories, so if you think you can fit this bill, please get in contact with us.

Okay, we'll stop here.

Enjoy this issue of SNAP, it's been a long time coming but we hope you enjoy the stories and images of some wonderful writers, photographers and illustrators. And we hope you like your badge!

I HAVE A PLAN

Your typical boy meets girl tale of two wandering hearts, who one night, meet adventitiously in some kind of pseudointellectual speak-easy. The kind where groups of friends huddle around a low table, wine bottles and whiskey glasses, and each pontificate to one another.

The boy and the girl were both in their circles, deep in conversation when a glancing look evolves into a staring competition. They meet at the bar, playing a chess-like game, trying to anticipate one another’s next move: he walks to the bar, she notices and follows suit.

He orders two glasses of red. She watches in a daydream, awoken when he hands her the glass. They see an empty booth in the corner, move steadily towards; she before he.

At first there is a sense of unease between them, but as time passes and sips are swallowed he plucks up the courage to tell her his name. She reciprocates, adding the genealogy of what is to her a weird name: her parents were lovers during the summer of love. Later shouted ‘Maggie is a Twat’ from rooftops. He finds it exciting but doesn’t dare to ask more in fear of alienation.

She asks him what he does with his days. He tells her he is studying continental philosophy at the university, second year of his MA. She is doing the same course but is a year his younger. The joke and kid about their seemingly homogeneous lives, but how it would be absurd to ascribe any meaning to this. Bringing in discussions of Camus and Sartre. Discussing existential motifs literature, and how He and Hers research field is highly influenced by twentieth century French philosophy, from café existentialism, through deconstruction, to the conditions of Badiou. A fire is lit in them and they talk and drink for hours, ignoring the goodbyes of their groups of friends, simply transfixed on each other’s gaze.

The night turns from twilight to moonlight and in twenty-four hour bars they talk until they notice the sky becoming light again.

They would walk to a frost-damp bench at the pier head and watch the morning gulls swarm in circles around ferry terminals. Hips gently rubbing as, arm in arm, they try not to let go.

This night would be the first of many for two random people inextricably linked.

OSIE PRELUDE

Last night, the closing act at De Lol-factory was a female comedian who set herself to quirky and made it so. She read from notes, archived in a colourful notebook. She was blonde and pasty, with an appealing bend in her nose. She’d been with her boyfriend for seven years, but only used this as a passing reference to life perspectives. Her jokes were truly laugh encour-agers, they didn’t solely ask for titters; they rubbed them out of your belly.

Halfway along, it hit me that this was a fictional character; she probably entered data all serious in a black wig when she wasn’t doing these things. No jokes, just a behaving pencil skirt. Her name was probably fictional as well; a suitable title for her would be Rosie Prelude.

A Prelude for the evening’s end -- I wanted to speak to her, but settled for some tap water and a conversation with the barman about the ready made, single speed bicycle that I desired. †

The following week, I sat in a fashion pub, using its wi-fi to find the location of an interview for a proper job. The pub’s name was Pink Thirst. I’d heard of it before, it was ran by a na-tionwide über-magazine.

The pub was empty, apart from the barmaid, a balding man in a loosened suit and myself. The suit man’s head was bursting with gin, his eyes were on the verge of becoming lemons, and his saliva approached the realm of tonic water. There were two drinks in front of him; he tended to both of them, mercilessly.

Suit men always arrive in these places in an attempt to remember being their mother’s little lost teenager, in the wrong place with a thirst and a girl – maybe he did just have two drinks though – no, a slim, crispy black haired girl crossed from the toilet to suit man’s table. They thought I was browsing harsh record reviews, but I was browsing every last segment of their encounter.

Their conversation broke as I was staring intently at a mole above the girl’s left eye, she caught me and smiled at the laptop newt in her net. It was a moment later, after I’d thought of myself as the newt, that I realised whom the girl was, it was Prelude and her fingertips appeared raw from entering data.

I imagined that suit man would rub lotion into her that night, seeking to redefine the meaning of baby’s bums and Nivea girls. I imagined

her laying in a warehouse conversion, the suit man dancing around her, applying talc to pelvic red spots. Did he know that she performed stand up in the evenings? No. Did she know that the flat used to be occupied by some other data entry female? Yes. Prelude knew whole truths; her stand up conveyed this to me.

from or how he’d moved so close without my knowing. He looked at me intensely, mirroring my movements, thrusting a smooth haircut into the ruffled collapses of my wig. His expression reminded me of my own as I prepared to say goodbye to my parents before a primary school camping trip. But this was a goodbye without any prior hellos or relations. He didn’t even † say goodbye, he was simply in the process of meaning it. Suit man hadn’t revealed much of a

At the following Lol-Factory, the stand up face to me, and now he was saying farewell as if meandered again, from bad to mediocre. I spent he was taking the job I’d failed to interview for. most of the punchlines thinking about Prelude He stood up. and suit man.

As he left, Suzie Postprell joined him; they Intermission. linked arms as they left. I looked across to Rosie, she was still there, still wearing ankle warmers,

It was Prelude, entering the room once maintaining a grip on a kitsch notebook, but again, this time in her data entry mode. She it was clear that we weren’t ready for an arm wasn’t called Prelude here; she introduced link. I settled for a tap water and left the pub herself as Susie Postprell. I looked around for with a mind full of bicycle components. the suit man, I wanted him to be here, and for him to be preparing to laugh at a girl who he had considered to be one of the least humorous he’d met. He was absent.

Postprell’s act wasn’t funny. It was just her reading a list of data, the data that she spent her working days typing at the same tempo as her clicking heels. She was wearing heels.

Rosie and Susie were now amalgamated, wasn’t this the contemporary fantasy, for a woman to be a freak in the evening, but a lady in the nine ‘til five? No, suit man didn’t let Roz/ Suz do anything; she did, and does, achieve all of her daily processes without the permission of a warehouse conversion dweller. Not fantasy, but reality, Roz-Suz was the reality of a woman stuck between earning and creating, and she existed to show me such dualities.

ROSIE PRELUD

Roz-Suz finished her act, it was nothing but data, but applause still occurred. As the claps died, I realised that I didn’t want a ready made fixed wheel bicycle, I wanted to build my own.

In hindsight, this was an odd consideration, but it allowed time for a change in the room.

At the side of the stage, Roz-Suz had become Rosie and Susie. They were separate, talking like old friends who’d taken different paths and wholly decided that they could still communicate.

Across the table from me, suit man took a seat. I couldn’t work out where he’d arrived

We Can Still Be Who We Wish We Is On a register, in the afternoon, counting things and placing them in weirdo external stomachs, I sanitize my hands, your receipt and the counter. All while being watched. While having everything about me counted. While having everything I think about us come true. You are reorganizing yourself, in counted stacks of things, all over my counter. There are selected representatives of all your wants, passing from your hands to mine. You’re a prepackaged ruin of candy bars, magazines and nail polish. I’m counting, scanning and rebuilding you. Our instinctively abstracted talk is the smallest. We’re “trans-acting”.

We should drink hand sanitizer. We should admire coupons.

We should reprogram the reader board. It should say something about. Gallons of plastic easter chocolate. We should be together. You, me and your receipt would count the seconds between each message. The awkward carts behind you would count how long they’ve been waiting. How long it took for us to notice them. How many curse words flashed and died in the reader board. No one would ever be allowed to buy anything ever again.

Behind you, a millepede of wheels, arms and toilet paper, wobbles. It’s gilded hull usurps nutrients from the cold, neon light. It is substantial. And impatient. All my plastic bags wait, anxiously, to smother it.

I’m holding your credit card. I’m contemplating never giving it back. Thinking how bitter being inconvenienced with you would be. Holding this card, you and this line, up, forever.

You take everything I’ve just given you out to your car. I shout after you. “I’ll wait here!”. Another uglier you slams all the things you forgot to buy on my counter, waking up my register, spilling my hand sanitizer.

6. REDUNDANT SOCIOLOGY LECTURER DISCOVERS ALL TRUTH IS POISON Dear sir or madam, You may prick my sides with your yards of countless demanding letters, but never shall I yield to your blunt arrows or cowardly entreaties.

We have mapped utopia, for God’s sake we have mapped liberty, mind, heaven, hell, love, hate, women’s buttocks and men’s breasts, the four poles, the seven seas, the five needs and the one human desire; come now, stir, let us map THE IMPOSSIBLE, let us stake a claim to it, this once, we ragged possessors of absence, fridges full of only cheese and beer, empty bellies and blistered anonymity.

Necessity now permits us to steal life in all its bathos and hubris. We corrupt counts with gilt-coined eyes are in bed with obsession and we will donate our spare, spent and unending lives towards nothing, such as the cartography of THE IMPOSSIBLE, or the surveying of the space of one who goes back to sleep after the alarm clock has rung.

But I must first apologise for every single one of my caustic and camphorous crimes, all fifty-one of them (in prison one has time only for mathematics).

Having recently discovered that FOREVER was either postponed, forgotten or abandoned, I have been lost, like that peeping pink-arsed baboon on his escaped polar icecap, drifting up to the crest of the Great Wave off Kanagawa.

I’m sad that you’re here and I’m not and we grew older without realising it but I accept it. I’m happy that I once heard your laugh, whoever you are. It sounded simple and what some would call innocent, though I’ve always been sceptical of the motives of that word.

Don’t speak to me now. Don’t add me on TheirSpace or Facebore, or send a text from out of the distant blackness of blue. Bedecked in tresses of tinsel and swaying hands, we blunder along the stations of this life in what can only be called progress, however absurd such a notion seems.

We ourselves are maps of strange and sinister districts of towns yet to be constructed. We suffer misery proudly as the crowning accomplishment of our priggish cynicism. We witnesses, silent, motionless and only ever reacting in the negative, we are the ones who suffer the fates of strangers. The one thing I can be sure of is that this is all I have to say.

Yours in wine, Dan Taylor.

P.S. this letter has taken several years to write, and may be said to be the summary of my entire life and thought. It does not make sense because nothing possibly can make sense.

Back. They step hard and lean. In steam and waste they scramble and crack and stomp.

The two men trade blows and then grapple and tussle then split and trade blows and embrace again, the coming apart and coming together like tentative lovers learning the rules of their relationship.

A small audience lounge on backdoor steps and perch on large industrial bins. I walk up to the bookie amongst them. I can spot a bookie from thousand yards in a sandstorm. Their aura of grubby money and quick maths is a tangible presence.

I am not allowed in this place, I am transgressing, I suppose am one of those fucking cunts but my father always told me to treat buildings the opposite of women, always go in the backdoor and it’s okay to punch them when you’re angry or drunk. I fade a little, walk with purpose and move quickly and noone notices me.

I grab a plate of something and whirl out of the kitchen through the big swinging doors. She sits over by the corner, just inside the veranda.

It must be cold where she is. I walk over and put the plate down.

What’s the action on the little one?

Tuck in.

Five gets twenty.

Hello Jack.

Here’s ten.

Carla.

Seven or eight minutes of grunting and violence later I collect my winnings as the gathering disperses.

She is wearing a long red dress that looks fantastic but sits awkwardly on her to me. But that’s just to me as I am accustomed to her in cold-blue uniform, bulked up from kevlar and wired to the nines. We eat the stolen entrees while we talk.

The world is ending, but alleylife is eternal and money lives forever. All those shithead anarchists and commies going on about property is theft and commodities are unnatural. Idiots. Money is heft and blowjobs.

It’s survival. Walking down the street and a billfold is an armoured car with a hospital bed inside it. Comfort and shield.

I follow a couple of the watching crowd into one of the noisy doors, they flick cigarettes to the side at the last second before they enter like a chorus line doffing hats.

Up narrow stairways and into the bustle of the kitchen. I stalk through. More steam, less waste. Smells and shouts. I love these sort of places, warehouses, kitchens, backrooms.

The little hidden places in public buildings where masks drop and the air is a hot haze of profanity. Smiles and quiet deferential courtesy exhibited to paying patrons burst into shards of laughter and resentment, countless stories full of the phrases like “And then this fucking cunt has the fucking nerve to...”

They’re gonna be here, she says.

I know.

You know?

I didn’t think you just wanted me here to see me again.

That could happen, I mean, the world is ending.

So everyone says. People here don’t seem to be taking much notice. I gesture at the full dining room.

They’re rich, they just assume they can throw money at shit and it’ll stay away. Like they’ll beat away demons and oblivion with the size of their wallet.

Where’s the borderline now?

The whole of the east side has gone black, but it’s Nope. holding there, we’re holding it there. For now.

No? A cackle of gunfire and the place dives for cover. A gang walk into the room holding No. large guns and wearing black uniforms and balaclavas. They shout something horribly Huh. He seems put out. Who’s your friend by clichéd like EVERYONE ON THE FLOOR. THIS IS the way?

A HOLD-UP! They bustle round the room lifting jewelry and cash from the assorted diners.

This is Jack Kemal. She points to me.

When do you want me to fly? I say.

You can’t fly, she says.

Then they get to our table. The leader comes over. I can spot a leader from thousand yards in a shitstorm. Their power-trip delusion of strutting colossi bursting in their heads and out of their skin. He takes his mask off. He is thin and good-looking. Blue-eyed.

Ah, Inspector Ponticelli, their leader says to Carla.

Hello Peter.

So you caught on to where we’re heading.

Yes. How? Do I have a snitch in my britches?

Nah, I just detected.

Good job. So I assume that you’ve got your boys surrounding the place, that anyone under the age of thirty in the room is a cop with a gun strapped to their taint, that this is going to endup with a rather nasty siege.

Nope.

His eyes go wide and he pulls the gun onto me. He’s quicker than I thought he would be. Smarter too, I thought he would try some pathetic cocky banter about my supposed death or non-existence before I let things loose, but he’s learned lessons from stories told in backroom crap-games and criminal whisperings. Even if those stories are exaggerations. Mostly.

I dive to the left and draw and fire one while rolling. A shift within and we’re on. I am on my feet and running up the wall, weightless and dancing across the light-fixings as machine-guns chase my nimble feet and the noise is full and godloud. I shoot guns. I throw knives. I drop from the ceiling into their panicked mist and slit throats and open heads.

Blood leaps and fountains. Noise, grind and scream noise. You wanted the black, the dark.

Have it now, fuckers. Whirring round I see that I felled them all but still I cannot stop moving, the fury is in me now. Carla stands over Peter’s leaking corpse and watches me go, she’s got that look on her face. Disgusted but awed. I tear from the room, I slide across the polished lobby, legs wheeling, burst through the doors with glass in my ears, jump down the steps outside and sprint across the road and down the street.

To the east of me black is in the sky, faultless empty black, feral worlds are in this city, war rolls westward, and a police car zooms past me No, I kept things to myself, and besides, the whole wailing in the strange night. I turn left and run force that hasn’t deserted is roped in restraining down an alley where the walls run high. Steam the animal darkness that you unleashed. and waste. Mazy nets and old maps open from done memories in my head. My feet pound the Yes, I did do that, didn’t I? Do you want to concrete. East I run. And I grin. know why? If you managed to work out that I was doing it then you know this silly little crime spree is not the point. So, how about the big reveal?

No?

The

Wolfman’s divorce was hard on him. After Claire left, the hirsute bachelor just ambled around the house, peering into the bottoms of beer bottles and dusting underneath knickknacks that hadn’t been moved in months...

Dracula tried to help. “Look Wolfie,” he’d say. “The girl was wrong for you. Sure she had a body, but she never really ‘Got You,’ you know?” No matter what Drac said, the reaction was always the same–the Wolfman would nod, avoid eye contact, and then let out a whimper that only other wolfmen could properly hear.

He started wearing more capes. They were his signature wardrobe item. He bought some flashy ones. His favorite black velvet lined with a more purplish hue. He called that one reversible. It fell to about his knees.

But there weren’t any other wolfmen in Los Angeles–they just couldn’t find work.

Eventually Dracula gave up on his friend.

There was only so much someone could do before depression became contagious.

After about six months, interaction between the two once-great pals was limited to obligatory invitations to nights out, which neither ever accepted.

He used to button his shirts all the way to the top, but after a few weeks of beachcombing, he loosened his collar. He considered going shirtless altogether on the weekends, but the sun was too much for his bare chest most days.

Sunglasses were his favorite accessory.

This period in Dracula’s life culminated with Stacie, a perky grad student who one day complimented the vampire’s motor scooter outside of a Starbucks. Drac liked Stacie’s smile and Stacie liked the way Dracula pulled Dracula knew how the Wolfman felt. In the his cape over his face when he entered a late nineties, Drac went through something of bright room. a midlife crisis. He changed his haircut to hide his widow’s peak and he got his coffin redone The two dated for three months and Dracula in cherry-red satin and polished chrome. He said they were the best 90 days of his 900 started sprinkling garlic on his food. He sold year life. But nonocentaurians can only keep his castle in the hills and rented an elegant up with twenty-somethings for so long, and but modern two-bedroom number a few eventually Stacie left. Drac didn’t take the blocks from the beach. He wanted to be, as he breakup well, and for weeks he stayed up said, “Where the action is.” until sunrise calling friends to ask if they’d

seen Stacie around any of the couple’s old haunts. The hardest part, he said, was going to the laundromat and seeing the panties in the lost and found. They were dainty skivvies with frilly waistbands, labeled in cursive writing with gold thread. Stacie used to wear underwear like that, and seeing the lost and found reminded Dracula of their relationship.

He thought of her, sitting half-naked on the couch reading Proust or smoking.

Two years after giving up on the Wolfman, Dracula was doing well. He was steady with a brunette he met at the deli counter of Whole Foods. Her name was Gwen. It was the first full moon after Gwen moved into the twobedroom that Dracula saw Wolfman at the hardware store. Wolfie looked good. He’d shaved and lost a few pounds and said he was making breakthroughs with the Cryptkeeper’s shrink. Dracula and the Wolfman chatted politely and made plans to grab a drink It was hard, but Dracula got over it and sometime. They never did. settled down. He enjoyed bachelorhood and eventually developed something promising with a flirtatious cashier at the local bookstore. It didn’t work out, but he tried.

Dracula wanted the Wolfman to learn from this example.

Now Dracula spends his days working real estate. He sets his own hours and hasn’t put on one of his capes in years. His candelabras are in storage and Gwen routinely clears out the cobwebs from the apartment. He hasn’t seen the Wolfman since that day at the hardware store. It was rumored that Wolfie went back to college. The Mummy said he saw him with Claire, and Claire looked pregnant.

No one was sure where he went. He had just stopped calling.

Drac had tried to get the Mummy and Frankenstein to help cheer Wolfman up, but they were no help. Frank had been married for years and ever since the couple had hosted an intervention for the Mummy, the whole lot of them had been unbearable. The Mummy lived with his girlfriend and they rented a duplex with the Frankensteins. Their lives were an endless rotation of day trips, brunches and doubles tennis matches. It Fire, silver bullets and wooden stakes are all made Dracula sick. fine, but there are other ways to kill monsters.

AS I WAS As I was in full and celestial flight of my midyouth I heard a voice to say that it was my fate to lose all that I had made or won just to sink into an unforgiving grave.

I doubted this like any other rumour of youth and carried on so far above all others whom I now know dealt in death so poorly - all of them accepting the servitude and not the mastery of their own peril.

They were so convinced, in fact, that they would have me believe it too, to spread their wicked fates more thinly and thus less hard to bare and conspired, as plague, to rob me of my very life which was so bounteously alien to theirs.

Their phantom lies of life and death proposed so confidently sung – a choir of idiots - handing pilfered lessons from a cardboard box.

Live! Die! they wail, missing teeth.

I refuse to live your folded life and die in the flames of your own death because I do not accept them!

I am the master of my own creation.

I am my own crooked messiah; I have saved myself from simmering damnations in a sea of sodden fools and I do not reside above or below your conjured rivet-less stage.

I am too far away for that.

You are the string-less puppets of my own ordained screen and you are performing very well indeed. Play on! Play on! Touchstones, play on!

The wolf is a good friend and he travels too through the night.

Hiding in shadows of the faint moonlight spread like a quilt over the parched hot earth.

He is well adjusted to this world during which most are asleep and elsewhere; his soft pads caress sand and stone and fibre and his sobriety seeks and feels each thistle hair, each hidden player of the cricket choir, the course and the current of the wandering air and all others, the beetles hopscotch journey through hell; architect of sand like mountain boulders, and though he is not of man, he knows there is something lurking in the dark, some thing that makes him tread quickly over the open road and peering down a heavenly corridor of corn and suspect the worse, then spooked, moves on.

Stalked by some unknown enemy behind the darkness and beyond the light of red dawn.

With a single breath, he knows the majesty of our unreason.

The small Red Indian girl’s neck and breast makes me swell with love, with night, with her grey brown ancestors.

I taste the pines and conifer needles beneath her skin, the icy spring and fresh pools full of glimmering trout.

If they do come looking, tell them this is where I lie.

And to those who are do not play at theatre; the malcontent, the malevolent, the mad.

I beseech you to toss off these tailored robes If that is a metaphor then it is a sad one. that fit your rounded shoulder too well and I will be a tyrant of my own proclamations and pick up your drum to beat out the sound of the a pike-man at Bannockburn. death of everything before their vacant eyes.

I will sell you jack rabbits a’shack Mississippi Everything that is plain, that is grey must Moon sky plain full of night-less wonders. perish.

Sweet tasting super juice among reeds and the To make your humble creator proud that when skirt of a young banished girl flying wild in you fell bloodline to the stars and inherited the technicolour plumage high on a cool Delta red sky, the earth and the heart of all that is that moon breeze. you sounded the first call to arms.

The same brook breath that chimes in and The call to bring on the death of everything so wrestles with the branches of trees and the fur that we will no longer have to conjure our own of prairie creatures. illusive heavens.

The dust of the bedroom floor is the dust of the road too.

Have you seen the motorcar magazines?

Sentence Extracts Re-Assembled From 02/03/10-16/03/10 (Misogynist/Misandrist/Misanthorpe)

There is a Ghost on the bridge and so with the bridge down I am sat alone in the corner of a bar. Be safe, process everything.

A deep gulp.

Be safe - it only takes someone loosely wired.

A deep breath.

And with the moment passed I am biding my time. My mind is set to process everything. What is it? The ghost on the film of my retina, what is it? I was thinking about you, how you should come with a public health warning - be safer that way.

A deep gulp.

I will just stand back so that they can turn up in tears on your doors step, hungry and lost. I am the one sat alone in the corner of a bar with a ghost on the film of my retina. I am the one walking at an inconspicuously slow pace through the rush of pedestrian traffic. I just stand back. I am the one that is biding my time. With the bridge down, time is all I have contact with. So drastically I am unable to return to my starting point, to stroke your ego. Your address. Your house. They can turn up hungry, lost I am the one biding my time.

A deep breath.

What is it? Contagious. It is fucked and screwed. It is fucked screwed and God Damn contagious. You are fucked and screwed and God Damn contagious. The ghost on the film of my retina. It only takes someone strong or brave, someone loosely wired. Be Safe, process everything.

Bridges are burnt. With the bridge down. All I can do is bide my time, stay safe.

A deep gulp.

A deep breath.

She lay there She lay there for a long time thinking about the color of a lion’s mane, she imagined it would feel velvety and soft. She imagined it would smell of butterscotch or buttery popcorn based on its shade. She wondered if it has always been that shade of gold, or after a time of dominance, if it acquired that shade.

Is that why we value gold so much? Which came first, the praise of gold or the lion’s mane? Or was that color a choice of evolution to aid this predator in its hunt in the dry desert fields? Then why on earth would a tiger be orange with black and white strips? What kind of disguise is that? Is a tiger so fierce it can alarm with its intense patterns and still capture its prey?

She lay there for a long time thinking of flamingos and why their knees bend backwards. And pigs, with their high intelligence yet they serve no operational purpose on a farm but to fill the farmer’s belly.

Humans in disguise -those pigs.

She lay there for a short time thinking of how she got there in the first place but she really couldn’t make out what occurred. So she continued to think of animals. She wondered the amount of hair needed to create a hairball in a cat’s throat. Or how ants got to be so strong. And if the length of a spider’s legs help it balance itself while tiptoeing across its web.

this warmth was sticky and musky. This warmth tickled her check in waves. She found her mind chasing after it until she found its rhythm, her body wanted to identify it. She smelled it as it reached her skin. Still she could not identify it. It now had her full attention, pulling her away from zebra’s patterns and the genetically advanced platypus. A platypus is part bird, mammal, and part snake all mixed up in what looks like a drawing from a 5 year old. But she couldn’t imagine it anymore; her face was on fire and distracted her mind.

She lay there convinced her head was being eaten by an enormous cloud of bacteria that collectively united to rhythmically devour her. She allowed this thought to satisfy her mind’s eagerness to discover this intrusive interaction.

So she lay there wondering about sea slugs.

Were they able to stick to the sea floor even if they are wet? She wondered if the albino dolphins that snuck into the lakes of the Peruvian rain forest feel naked by their pinkness.

She lay there and a sudden sense of nudity ran down her body like a liquid slowly being poured over her. As it worked its way down she became aware of each part. She became aware of all of her body, as if examining a strange object and its purpose. She suddenly She lay there and drifted away, unaware that grew uneasy. A feeling of awkwardness grew she was thinking. Unaware of what laying or near. A marching army of embarrassment standing consisted of. For a fleeting moment was charging at her. Defiantly and armed with she became aware of the sensation of standing. pain, these emotions were rushing at her.

But she couldn’t recall that feeling; her body was behaving very different. She was not erect She lay there with nowhere to run, paralyzed yet her body was not sitting down. She felt by the intensity of what was approaching pressure all over. her. Time paced itself so she can take in every detail. She remembered now; why she was She lay there and felt a warmth around her lying there and why she didn’t want to get up face. It was soft and moist like the steam and why she refused to recognize the musky impatiently escaping a cup of hot fluids only breathe around her.

CREDITS I HAVE A PLAN w Liam Jones organswithoutbodies.tumblr.com i Jason Oberichler jasonoberichler@gmail.com

MONSTERS OF LOVE w Gabe Bullard www.gabebullard.com i Nicola Rowlands www.nicolarowlands.co.uk

ROSIE PRELUDE w Jack Burston jackburston.tumblr.com

AS I WAS w Jamie Lee jamie.j.lee@live.co.uk i Daniel Cooper http://cargocollective.com/dacooper

WE CAN STILL BE WHO WE WISH WE IS w Jak Cardini www.thegoldcountrypapermill.com i Lucy Vann lucy-vann.blogspot.com 6. REDUNDANT SOCIOLOGY LECTURER DISCOVERS ALL TRUTH IS POISON w Dan Taylor spectrecular.blogspot.com Y’ALL DON’T WANNA STEP TO THIS w Joe Briggs joebriggs77@gmail.com i George Sarell http://karatechopgeo.blogspot.com/

SENTENCE EXTRACTS RE-ASSEMBLED FROM 02/03/10-16/03/10 (MISOGYNIST/ MISANDRIST/MISANTHORPE) w&i Mandi Goodier mandigoodier.co.uk SHE LAY THERE w Hildemar Cruz i Niki Duffy nikiduffy.blogspot.com 100 WORDS w Neil Wykes neilwykes.tumblr.com

MANCHESTER TO GLASTONBURY i Joshua Rothery orangebikeride.wordpress.com

Created by Matt Sidebottom http://www.mattsidebottom.com Leave a message after the tone, hello@mattsidebottom.com Typeset in Droid Serif & Bebas Co-starring Fette Fraktur

100 WORDS She was a natural born badge wearer, born with a bob haircut and a head perfectly formed to elegantly support a béret, and her short, but thin posture was ideally suited to a smokey bar, which was where I met her. She kept the badges on her sackcloth handbag, the rustiest of which read “Save the Whale”, the shiniest: “Fish have no word for brine”. I sat at the bar a few stools from hers and said “Hi.” She nodded slowly and pointed to a yellow badge. Squinting, I read it out loud, “Your one hundred words are up.”

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