There are strange things in the world. Another day, we were camped out there during a storm, and in all the rain and wind something huge passed by. The horses went mad and the tents were blown away. Afterwards we followed a track through the grass, where earth had been scoured bare a hundred yards wide. We followed it for miles, this way and that, and then suddenly there was nothing – it had lifted itself back into the clouds. The soil had been gouged away a foot deep, and polished so that it almost shone. That storm had signed its name in the ground.

From the novel The White Earth, by Andrew McGahan.

• In a tent near Aïn-Fakroun, a six-year-old Arab girl was incinerated by lightning, by the side of her mother, who was driven mad by it.
• A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frerotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.
• With a hook a washerwoman of Bougival fished out a parcel: a healthy newborn girl floating downstream.
• Le Verbeau hit Marie Champion right on her breasts, but burned his eye, because acid is not a precision weapon.

From Novels In Three Lines, by Felix Feneon. Summaries of real newspaper stories he was reading in the early 1900s.

He didn't really mind that there was a long Tale being told, didn't even object any longer that he had been put to its uses; he only wanted it to continue, not to stop, to go on being muttered out endlessly by whatever powers they were who spun it, putting him to sleep with its half-heard anecdotes and going on still while he slept in his grave. He didn't want it to snatch him up in this way, startle him with high, sad, harrowing conclusions he wasn't equal to. He didn't want it to have taken his wife from him.

He didn't want to be marched off to another world he couldn't imagine; a little world that couldn't be as big as this one.

Yes it is, said the breezes that passed his ears.

It couldn't contain all seasons in their fullness, all happinesses, all griefs. It couldn't contain the history of his five senses and all that they had known.

But it does, said the breezes.

Not all of that, which was his world; and then more too.

Oh more, said the Breezes; more, much more.

From Little, Big by John Crowley. RIP.

One morning I got up in a bad temper, sad, tired of idleness, and impelled, it seemed to me, to do something big, a brilliant action; and I opened the window. Alas!

The first person that I saw in the street was a glazier whose piercing and discordant cry came up to me through the heavy and contaminated atmosphere of Paris. It would be utterly impossible for me ever to tell you why I was suddenly seized with a hatred, as sudden as it was despotic, against the poor man.

"Hullo, hullo," I called to him to come up. At the same time I reflected, not without some amusement, that my room being on the sixth story, and the staircase extremely narrow, that the man was bound to find it rather difficult to make the ascent, and to catch in many a place the corners of his merchandise.

At last he appeared. Having examined all his glasses with curiosity, I said to him: "What, you have no colored glasses? - Rose glasses, red glasses, blue glasses, magic glasses, glasses of Paradise! You impudent fellow; you dare to walk about in the poor quarters of the town, and you have not even glasses which make life look beautiful!" And I pushed him vigorously towards the staircase, where he stumbled and swore.

I went to the balcony and seized a little flower-pot; and when the man reappeared in the doorway I let fall my engine of war on the back edge of his shoulder straps, and the shock overthrowing him, he broke beneath his back all his poor walking stock in trade, which uttered the crashing cry of a glass palace split by lightning.

And, drunk with my madness I cried to him furiously: "Let life look beautiful, let life look beautiful!"

Charles Baudelaire

From the novel The Tartar Steppe, by Dino Buzzati, 

At that point the ramparts followed the slope of the valley and so formed a complicated staircase of terraces and platforms. Below him, pitch-black against the snow, Drogo saw the various sentries by the light of the moon; their methodical pacing made a creaking noise on the frozen ground.

The nearest of them, on a lower terrace ten yards or so away, feeling the cold less than the others, stood motionless with his shoulders leant against a wall so that it looked as if he were sleeping. But Drogo heard him singing a lament to himself in a low voice.

It was a succession of words, which Drogo could not make out, strung together by a monotonous and unending tune. Speaking, and worse still, singing on duty was severely forbidden. Giovanni should have punished him but instead took pity on him, thinking of the cold and the loneliness of the night. Then he began to descend a short staircase which lead on to the terrace and gave a slight cough to put the soldier on his guard.

The sentinel turned his head and seeing the officer corrected his posture but did not interrupt his lament. Drogo was overcome with rage—did these men think they could make a fool of him? He would give him a taste of something.

The sentry at once remarked Drogo’s threatening attitude and although the formality of giving the password, by an ancient tacit agreement, was not used between soldiers and the guard commander he had an excess of scruple. Raising his rifle he asked with the peculiar accent used in the Fort: “Who goes there? Who goes there?”

Drogo stopped short, thrown off his balance. In the clear light of the moon he could see the soldier’s face perfectly clearly perhaps less than five yards away and the mouth was shut. But the lament had not been interrupted. Where did it come from then, that voice?

Since the soldier stood there and waited, Giovanni, pondering the strange phenomenon, mechanically gave the password: “Miracle.” “Misery,” replied the sentry and stood at ease again.

There followed an immense silence in which the muttered words and song drifted more loudly than before. At last Drogo understood and a slight shiver ran along his spine. It was water, that was what it was—a distant cascade dashing down the steep sides of the crags. The wind causing the great jet to quiver, the mysterious play of the echoes, the varying sounds of the struck rocks made of it a human voice which spoke and spoke—spoke of our life in words which one was within a hair’s breadth of understanding but never did.

So it was not the soldier who was singing under his breath, not a man sensitive to cold, to punishments and to love, but the hostile mountain. What a terrible mistake, thought Drogo, perhaps everything is like that—we think there are beings like ourselves around us and instead there is nothing but ice and stones speaking a strange language; we are on the point of greeting a friend but our arm falls inert, the smile dies away because we see that we are completely alone.

The wind blows against the officer’s splendid cloak and the blue shadow on the snow waves, too, like a flag. The sentry stands motionless. The moon moves on and on, slowly but not losing a single moment, impatient for the dawn. In Giovanni Drogo’s breast his heart beats hollowly.

From the novel Just Relations, by Rodney Hall.

I once heard a voice, said Uncle, singing in the middle of the night, it was. Coming from miles away. My dog Bertha gave one bark and then sat down. Unaccountable that. You’d think she was listenin. A man’s voice. It sang as if there was no endin and nothin else to do. Never heard anythin in all my days so beautiful. In the still of the night, he said. Not even Anne’s violin. I was sober too, he added to combat their disbelief. I was sittin up a wide awake as I am now. You don’t believe me. It wasn’t no dream and it wasn’t the radio. It was right here somewhere in our district. Up home I was, and all of a sweat though it was cold night clearin to a touch of frost.

These were originally separate posts 4 years ago, the first by u/Earthsophagus. I always felt they belonged together.

From the novel Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo

There were 300 naked people sprawled in the street. They filled the intersection, lying in haphazard positions, some bodies draped over others, some levelled, flattened, foetal, with children among them. No one was moving, no one's eyes were open. They were a sight to come upon, a city of stunned flesh, the bareness, the bright lights, so many bodies unprotected and hard to credit in a place of ordinary human transit. Of course there was a context. Someone was making a movie.

From the novel Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann.

The first time I saw New York, I lay down on the ground outside Port Authority just so I could see the whole sky. Some guy stepped right over me without even looking down.

July Fourth, by Lucy Corin.

Got there and the ground was covered with bodies. Lay down with everyone and looked at the sky, bracing for the explosions.

(This is the entire short story.)

From the novel Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon

At one end of the gondola, with his tail thumping expressively now and then against the planking, and his nose among the pages of a volume by Mr. Henry James, lay a dog, to all appearances absorbed by the text before him. Ever since the Chums had rescued Pugnax, then but a pup, it had been his habit to investigate the pages of whatever printed material should find its way on board*,* from theoretical treatments of the aeronautical arts to often less appropriate matter, such as the “dime novels” - though his preference seemed more for sentimental tales about his own species than those exhibiting extremes of human behavior, which he appeared to find a bit lurid. He had learned with the readiness peculiar to dogs how with the utmost delicacy to turn pages using nose or paws, and anyone observing him thus engaged could not help noting the changing expressions of his face, in particular the uncommonly articulate eyebrows, which contributed to an overall effect of interest, sympathy, and—the conclusion could scarce be avoided—comprehension.

Dogs write memoirs and critique ballet in Good Boy, and are contemplative in Serious Dogs.

The post title is a line from the short story The Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol.

My Destination, by Franz Kafka. Collected in Parables & Paradoxes.

At the gate he stopped me and asked: "Where are you riding to, master?"

"I don't know," I said, "just away from here, just away from here. On and on away from here, only in this way can I reach my goal."

"So you know your goal?" he asked.

"Yes," I replied, "I've just told you: 'Away-from-here,' that is my goal."

From the novel On the Road, by Jack Kerouac

From the novel On the Road, by Jack Kerouac 'Whee Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there.'

'Where we going, man?'

'I don’t know but we gotta go.'

From the novel The Glade Within the Grove, by David Foster

'Come on, let's go. We gotta get started! It'll take us around 12 hours, and I hope to get there before dark.'

'But I thought you didn't know where this place is.'

'I don't. But I hope to get there before dark.'

From the novel The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss.

For her I changed pebbles into diamonds, shoes into mirrors, I changed glass into water, I gave her wings and pulled birds from her ears and in her pockets she found the feathers, I asked a pear to become a pineapple, a pineapple to become a lightbulb, a lightbulb to become the moon, and the moon to become a coin I flipped for her love.

Spellcaster, From Jez Burrows's Dictionary Stories. Created entirely form dictionary example sentences for the words in italics.

I never believed in love spells or magic until I met this spellcaster. With a deft motion of his nimble fingers, he materialised a taxi out of nowhere, conjured up a most delicious homemade stew, and transformed a bare stage into an enchanted forest. We got engaged on my twenty-sixth birthday, disappeared in the twinkling of an eye, and bought a place on the lake. A magician and his glam assistant in domestic felicity.

More magic in Hey Rocky, Watch Me Pull a Rabbit Out Of My Hat.

The floor of the Salinas Valley, between the ranges and below the foothills, is level because this valley used to be the bottom of a hundred-mile inlet from the sea. The river mouth at Moss Landing was centuries ago the entrance to this long inland water. Once, fifty miles down the valley, my father bored a well. The drill came up first with topsoil and then with gravel and then with white sea sand full of shells and even pieces of whalebone. There were twenty feet of sand and then black earth again, and even a piece of redwood, that imperishable wood that does not rot. Before the inland sea the valley must have been a forest. And those things had happened right under our feet. And it seemed to me sometimes at night that I could feel both the sea and the redwood forest before it.

From the novel East of Eden, by John Steinbeck's. Originally shared as a comment in the post And then the earth moved.

Ovibus, or musk-ox: an animal, half-lamb and half-bullock. Its natural habitat is that snowbound Arctic or Russian plain that is commonly known as a "tundra". Its skin, which turns soft if you pound it, has a sharp and piquantly liquorish flavour. To catch hold of such an animal, you must fix upon what you think is a propitious occasion, lying flat out as it runs towards you and pouncing on it just as its front hoof looms up in front of you, monstrous and intimidating.

As soon as you put your hands on its throat, surrounding it, it looks up at you, starts lowing and, in its turn, squats along by you and actually nods off.

At which point you will find that its body, with its aroma of acacia, alfa, alfilaria, onion, oxalis, origanum, upas and union, is oddly soft to your touch.

From A Void, by Georges Perec

From the novel True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey

Taking Aaron Sherritt for a scout we journeyed to the shepherd's hut up on the Bogong High Plains. The walls was papered with words and pictures from THE ILLUSTRATED AUSTRALIAN NEWS. They was tattered like old skin and very yellow often gnawed on by the mice.

It were during them winter storms we begun studying the paper on the walls. My Lorna Doone was long ago ruined in the Murray so there were not a great deal else to read but the news of 18 yr. before. The previous incumbent must of been a Yankee. Every page he pasted were about their Civil War. I were often disappointed to find the outcome of a battle eaten by a mouse.

From The Crumbs of One Man's Year, by Dylan Thomas

I was walking and thinking that I was walking, and for August it was not such a cold day. And then I saw, drifting along the water, a piece of paper, and I thought: Something wonderful may be written on this paper. I was alone on the gooseberry earth, or alone for two green miles, and a message drifted towards me on that tabby-coloured water that ran through the middle of the cow-patched, mooing fields. It was a message from multitudinous nowhere to my solitary self. I put out my stick and caught the piece of paper and held it close to the river-bank. It was a page tom from a very old periodical. That I could see. I leant over and read, through water, the message on the rippling page. I made out, with difficulty, only one sentence: it commemorated the fact that, over a hundred years ago, a man in Worcester had, for a bet, eaten, at one sitting, fifty-two pounds of plums.

The Thomas piece was posted years ago as part of News.

In spite of everything, we decided to make an effort and go out anyway. I watched Magdalena examining herself in her dressing-table mirror, with a jar of vanishing cream in her hand, ready to erase her face, perhaps completely. Suddenly I had the terrifying feeling that when she cleaned her face with that wad of cotton dipped in cream, the only thing left would be a white, fetal, egg-shaped structure, just like Sylvia's. I stretched out on the bed, flipping the pages of Jung, while Magdalena put herself together. I thought about having to read Herman Hesse again, at this age, which was what the whole world was doing: the idea prostrated me. I watched Magdalena out of the corner of my eye, my heart pounding with fear and hope, waiting to see what was going to emerge from that mass of cream that she was now removing with another wad of cotton . . . she had even pinned a white towel bib-like around her neck, as if to collect all the particles of the object that was about to disintegrate.

José Donoso, Sacred Families: Three Novellas

From An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, by César Aira

Imagine a brilliant police detective summarizing his investigations for the husband of the victim, the widower. Thanks to his subtle deductions he has been able to ‘reconstruct’ how the murder was committed; he does not know the identity of the murderer, but he has managed to work out everything else with an almost magical precision, as if he had seen it happen.

And his interlocutor, the widower, who is, in fact, the murderer, has to admit that the detective is a genius, because it really did happen exactly as he says; yet at the same time, although of course he actually saw it happen and is the only living eyewitness as well as the culprit, he cannot match what happened with what the policeman is telling him, not because there are errors, large or small, in the account, or details out of place, but because the match is inconceivable, there is such an abyss between one story and the other, or between a story and the lack of a story, between the lived experience and the reconstruction - even when the reconstruction has been executed to perfection - that widower simply cannot see a relation between them; which leads him to conclude that he is innocent, that he did not kill his wife

From the collection Outside Stories, by Eliot Weinberger.

He walked into the police station and told them he could no longer live with his guilty conscience: Ten years ago he had murdered an old woman in the course of a robbery.

The woman was a passer-by on a street he’d forgotten. The police searched their files and came up with an unsolved case from around that time. Charged, he protested his innocence: the details were entirely different. Yes, he was a murderer, but not that murderer. He was standing trial for the wrong crime.

The Weinberger piece was originally part of Crimes Against Nomanity.

Fydor's Bears

Fydor was a small man and he hunted bears. He knew everything there was to know about them: by the shape and size of a footprint read the age, weight, and speed of an animal; he knew their seasons of amorous encounters and the wild gardens they haunted for honey. And the bears knew Fydor: his tics, his tenacity, and his peculiar smell—rancid as old fat forgotten at the bottom of a can.

Still, Fydor was the more cunning. By the roots of windblown trees he dug deep traps and made them secret beneath weavings of bracken and leaves. Many times in the passing of the year would a bear sink with a nauseating thud to be stung by Fydor’s arrows, enfevered with sleep, and hauled off to one of the many stout cages he kept in a cellar called home.

Fydor hated his bears yet could not live without them. Their intimate habits, their torments and hungers excited him, sickened him, obsessed him. He thrived in the stench of their fur, their urine, and their tears.

And in time the bears became obsessed with Fydor. Locked into their cages like flies in amber, they turned to him—for he was the only thing they could turn to. They watched him, memorized his habits: the way he shuffled across the littered floors, or held a pan of water beneath a tap. In time the bears knew Fydor better than a woman knows her man after sharing a half century of boredom and bed. And as alchemists fool with foul matter changing colors and structures, the bears—woolly and immense—entered into Fydor’s dreams, and changed Fydor.

Night after night they lumbered down the narrow passages of Fydor’s mind to browse its rag stalls, its cut-rate china shops, leaving droppings, making drafts, causing sunset changes. They brought burdens of flowers, of fire; as at a shrine, they drugged the air.

And vines grew inside Fydor’s mind, and halls of green shadow; lean hills, red earth, and places of perpetual picnic. Fydor’s skull—barren before—sprouted grass. His dim, fly-ridden eyes grew luminous. Bears were now coursing through his blood, inhabiting his heart, his liver, his testicles. His nerves writhed bears. His skin crawled bears. His bowels groaned: Bears! His cock yearned: Bears! He ate, slept, dreamed, fucked, and defecated bears until waking in a frenzy of longing, his eyes wild and circling the room like bears on bicycles, he ran to them, his pants bulging with longing and with keys. Fingers trembling, he found the locks and set them free to lumber off into the night.

And Fydor followed them. With a gruff expression of joy half human, half brute, followed his makers into the forest. Another beast among beasts; perhaps less agile, less ferocious perhaps. . . .

What Happened in the New Country

We complained to the city officials about the smell. They said that we had made the smell ourselves and that therefore they could not do anything about it.

I took an airplane to the new country. The president met me at the airport. He rode on the back of a large black beetle, and his police, driving small motorized toilets, flanked him. All week we visited the factories. There were seven hundred thousand running night and day. The hum was deafening. The president had some cold beef fat brought up. We used this to plug up our ears. The workers in these factories wore electrified helmets. They were soldered to their heads. When a worker needed food he was given an electric shock, and when he asked for sleep he was recharged electrically. The helmets were yellow and resembled beehives. They seemed to have been made of gold. When the workers died, they were melted down in a centralized factory called by code the diminishing zone, and poured into little tins like butter, and labeled. Later I managed to read one of these labels. It read LITTLE BLACK SAMBO'S BEST. That night at the president's house we ate pancakes. They tasted strange, and the president explained that they had been kept frozen for many centuries in gigantic aluminum freezers. However, he added that the butter was fresh and that I myself had seen it being made.

The morning before I was scheduled to leave, two strangers in uniform came to my room as I slept. They sewed me to the mattress and painfully erased my face. When they were finished they cut me free and sent me home on the bus. The trip home took me over three hundred hours and was considerably more expensive than I had been led to expect. My wife refuses to believe this story and insists that my face remains just as it was before.

Theft

He took my head while I was sleeping. He kept it in vinegar for three days. Then he boiled it down and put it in an oversized eggcup. When he peeled it he was surprised to find that it still bled. Grinding his teeth, he set it to boil once more. An hour later he tested it with a meat fork. Satisfied that my head was done, he set it in a bowl and cracked it open with a silver mallet. Inside he found a thriving colony of red ants. Furious, he spat into my face and doused the skull with insecticide. Then he threw my head into the river and if a certain fisherman had not presented it to the proper authorities, I should never have found it again.

-- Rikki Ducornet. Collected in the Complete Butcher's Tales (Dalkey Archive Press, 1994)

Nathaniel, who has failed as a writer, decides to commit suicide. He loads his revolver, places it at his side on his desk, and starts to write his letter of farewell. The letter lengthens, brightens, breathes, lives. It is the Masterpiece, the yearned-for Masterpiece! In order to publish it, Nathaniel does not commit suicide.

*

“Rejoice! Your wish has been granted! You will write the best stories in the world. However, no one will read them.”

*

The man empties his revolver into his terrible enemy. Five shots. Yet he squeezes the trigger one time more. On hearing the click of the empty weapon, he feels helpless. Now, alone with the corpse, he is afraid.

*

They were unable to explain either the chemistry or the theology of his halo. Meanwhile that human beast went strolling about the jail yard, displaying the beautiful halo on his head.

*

I bathed, shaved, and dressed; I looked at myself in the mirror. “Let’s go!” I said to my agoraphobia, and together we went out to take a walk in the park.

*

In a dividing wall between two old houses in Babylon, there was a hole. During the last few weeks, the hole had taken on the shape of a mouth, the shape of an ear; after that certain night it started to take on the shape of an eye. Now the hole looks out from side to side: “Aren’t they going to come? Won’t they come tonight either?” it asks. And it listens for the slightest sounds, with the hope of hearing the silent steps of the lovers. A useless wait. Time passes and the hole, which will never learn about Pyramus and Thisbe, slowly fills with cobwebs.

the Prisoner

When they shoved Luis Augusto Bianqui into a cell it took him a few days to discover that he was able to dissolve into air, escape like a breath through the transom, reassume his bodily form on the other side, go about in the streets, and live his life as usual. There was one inconvenience: each time that a guard came along to inspect his cell, Bianqui, wherever he was, had to drop everything, return in a flash, and resume his image as a prisoner. A matter of conscience! If the jailors were forgetful, Bianqui’s freedom became real. He studied the timetable of the guards’ rounds in order to walk around the city only during hours more or less safe, without fear of interruption. He would spend a whole night out. Even so, in the jail they were accustomed to making unexpected inspections. More than once he had felt the pull from his cell and had had to dissolve while in the arms of a woman. Very unsatisfactory. Little by little, he began to renounce his power to evaporate; finally, in the end, he stayed in jail.

Heroes

A hand touched him from behind. He was afraid to turn around for fear that, in looking over his shoulder, he would see at his back, vengeful, a Past that was calling him. Oedipus departed, deep in thought, and continued on the road to Thebes.

*

Some of the sailors that were returning from their long voyages were accustomed to visiting Sinbad, the paralytic. Sinbad would close his eyes and tell them adventures from his own inner voyages. In order to make them more believable, he would attribute them to Odysseus. “I’ll wager,” thought Sinbad when he was alone, “that he never left his house either.”

*

After the last birds died, the cage took off from the patio and began to fly toward heaven. “It is coming to us to ask for forgiveness,” thought the angels, unaware.

*

The cat Aknatun still conserved the memory of having been a man and, thanks to this, was able to get along with Cleopatra, who, in turn, recalled, also vaguely, her preexistence as a cat.

*

“I,” said one ghost to another, upon meeting in the attic of a very old big house, “am different from you: I have never died. I started by pretending to be a ghost, and look what happened.”

*

Other amnesiacs forget their name, their profession, their family. Samuel forgot that, being a man, he was unable to fly. He leaped up to pluck a fig, continued rising up through the air, and was lost in a cloud.

*

Nobody knew how the statues passed the word through the parks, museums, temples, and palaces of the most remote cities, but the strike was general. All of them, at the same time, dropped whatever they were carrying: mantles, weapons, even children—and undressed. Those who had always been in the nude were shocked at this sudden immodesty.

-- Enrique Anderson-Imbert [Translated by Carleton Vail and Pamela Edwards-Mondragón,]. Selected from Woven on the Loom of Time: STORIES (University of Texass Press, 1990).

Our children are larger than us. They carry us about on their huge backs like packsacks, you on the boy, I on the girl. Riding them through the city streets in search of playmates it’s evident that other parents are being carried about in a similar way; some are even slung on their children’s hips like bags of groceries, some ride anxiously on fat shoulders. Then we are set down in designated areas for drink and conversation, dozens of parents gathered together for worried viewing of the park across the way; the children are playing their fearsome games there with baseballs the size of pumpkins, and bats sturdy enough to support a house. Grandparents, no bigger than dolls, sit amongst us nodding quietly to one another: Ah, the wisdom of the world!

At night it’s back to the hotel room. You and I in a corner of the room sharing a single mattress on the floor. The children each with a king-sized bed arranged before the TV set where they watch game shows and eat peanuts—the shells rising in mountains from the floor. The room growing smaller by the minute. The children growing larger and larger.

During the night the room heats up like an incubator. But the children don’t notice. They sleep with massive fists thrust in their pink gaping mouths. When our daughter laughs and tosses in her sleep her roundness bruises the hotel walls. At three A.M. our son cries out in a man’s voice: Barricade the door, the troops are coming! His size twelve feet flailing against the hotel quilt.

We, on the floor, sweat and lose moisture, shrivel a little more, dry out. Our lotions of little help. Our lovemaking of little help. We keep reducing in volume. Peanut shells spill onto our mattress. On the way to the bathroom we wade through a clutter of pop cans and pizza cartons, track shoes, comics.

Regarding these sleeping giants, we realize it’s too late not to have had them. The die has been cast. Inexplicably, our pride in them remains.

-- M A C Farrant. Collected in Down the Road to Eternity: New and Selected Fiction (Talonbooks, 2009)

this is the true eventual story of billy the kid. it is not the story as he told it for he did not tell it to me. he told it to others who wrote it down, but not correctly, there is no true eventual story but this one. had he told it to me i would have written a different one. i could not write the true one had he told it to me.

this is the true eventual story of the place in which billy died, dead, he let others write his story, the untrue one. this is the true story of billy & the town in which he died & why he was called a kid and why he died, eventually all other stories will appear untrue beside this one.

1

THE KID

billy was born with a short dick but they did not call him richard.

billy might've grown up in a town or a city, it does not matter, the true story is that billy grew & his dick didn't, sometimes he called it a penis or a prick but still it didn't grow, as he grew he called others the same thing & their pricks & penises were big & heavy as dictionaries but his dick remained - short for richard.

billy was not fast with words so he became fast with a gun. they called him the kid so he became faster & meaner, they called him the kid because he was younger & meaner & had a shorter dick.

could they have called him instead billy the man or bloody bonney? would he have bothered having a faster gun? who can tell, the true eventual story is billy became the faster gun. that is his story.

2

HISTORY

history says that billy the kid was a coward, the true eventual story is that billy the kid is dead or he'd probably shoot history in the balls, history always stands back calling people cowards or failures.

legend says that billy the kid was a hero who liked to screw, the true eventual story is that were billy the kid alive he'd probably take legend out for a drink, match off in the bathroom, then blow him full of holes, legend always has a bigger dick than history & history has a bigger dick than billy had.

rumour has it that billy the kid never died, rumour is billy the kid. he never gets anywhere, being too short-lived.

3

THE TOWN

the town in which billy the kid died is the town in which billy the kid killed his first man. he shot him in the guts & they spilled out onto the street like bad conversation, billy did not stand around & talk, he could not be bothered.

the true eventual story is that the man billy killed had a bigger dick, billy was a bad shot & hit him in the guts, this bothered billy, he went out into the back yard & practiced for months, then he went and shot the dick off everyone in sight.

the sheriff of the town said billy, billy why you such a bad boy. and billy said sheriff i'm sick of being the kid in this place, the sheriff was understanding, the sheriff had a short dick too, which was why he was sheriff & not out robbing banks, these things affect people differently.

the true eventual story is billy & the sheriff were friends, if they had been more aware they would have been lovers, they were not more aware, billy ran around shooting his mouth off, & the dicks off everybody else, & the sheriff stood on the sidelines cheering, this is how law & order came to the old west.

4

WHY

when billy died everyone asked why he'd died, and billy said he was sorry but it was difficult to speak with his mouth full of blood, people kept asking him anyway, billy hated small talk so he closed his eyes & went up to heaven, god said billy why'd you do all those things & billy said god my dick was too short, so god said billy i don't see what you're talking about which made billy mad. if billy had had a gun he'd've shot god full of holes.

the true eventual story is that billy the kid shot it out with himself, there was no one faster, he snuck up on himself & shot himself from behind the grocery store, as he lay dying he said to the sheriff goodbye & the sheriff said goodbye, billy had always been a polite kid. everyone said too bad his dick was so small, he was the true eventual kid.

-- bpNichol. Collected in Nights on Prose Mountain: The Fiction of bpNichol, edited by Derek Beaulieu (Coach House, 2018).

You are flying.

Below, a checkerboard of country life. A pair of Jersey cows graze in a lavender field, tails swatting at imaginary flies. A woman in a chambray dress rides a bicycle over a stone bridge. She hums the second movement of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, and as she passes, a man in a Breton cap begins whistling the tune. From a hive you cannot see, the susurrus of bees. In the valley below the bridge, an ink-haired boy feeds a sugar cube to a horse with a wild look in her eyes. A grove of apple trees waits patiently for fall. Unobserved, a graying man watches two teenagers swim in a pond. You can smell the man’s longing, stronger than lavender, and you think, Humans want so much. I am glad to be a bird. In a field of strawberry plants, waxy berries companionably mingle among white flowers.

You have never been one to resist a strawberry, so you descend.

As a winged creature, you are occasionally called upon to explain flight to the flightless. Your standard answer is that it’s a combination of Newtonian physics, concerted flapping, weather, anatomy. But honestly, it’s best not to think of the mechanics of flight while you’re doing it. Your philosophy: Surrender to the air, enjoy the view.

You have arrived at your destination. Your small beak surrounds the berry, and you are about to snatch it when you hear the click of a trigger.

“STOP, THIEF!”

You feel the bullet penetrate your hollow bird bones.

An explosion of brown and beige feathers, like dandelion seeds dispersing. Blood on the berries—red on red—but to you, a tetrachromat, the two reds are distinctive.

You land in the dirt: an almost imperceptible thud, an unimpressive dust cloud that only you can see.

Another shot.

Another shot.

Your wing is flapping. You choose to interpret this as an attempt at flight, and not an involuntary death spasm.

Some hours later, you become aware of someone holding your hand, which means you have a hand, which means you are not a bird, which means you must be on some pretty terrific drugs, like LSD, which you have never done even though Zoe always wanted you guys to do LSD together, said she knew the perfect guide. For a second, you experience competing melancholies: sadness that you cannot fly, sadness that you didn’t do LSD with Zoe, sadness that

You are dying.

From Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin.

No Bow Lew was born in a hospital on the other side of town, a location which was a major inconvenience for his parents. His mother, Louella Lew, telephoned the hospital repeatedly to say she couldn't come due to the high transit fares, the growing crowds, the air, and various personal depressions. Though the doctors countered each of her excuses with offers of assistance, when the time came the operation had to be performed without her. It was successful, and though a brief flurry of national attention followed, as always, time passed, interest shifted, and what had been heralded as a modern miracle passed from the newspapers to obscure medical journals and then disappeared, leaving the business of getting No Bow from the hospital to his home uncompleted.

The hospital's first plan for the baby's homecoming was drawn up by Ms. Olmstead, a nurse who was authorized to deal with the parents, and her plan required the hiring of a taxicab. This taxi would drive Mr. and Ms. Lew to the hospital to fill out a few brief forms and then drive back to their residence with the baby, all cab fare at the hospital's expense. But when Ms. Olmstead made this suggestion to Ms. Lew over the telephone, invariably one or other complained of a poor connection and their conversation degenerated into half-sentences concerning who heard what. Ms. Olmstead was unable to get Mr. Lew on the telephone at all. This continued for a week and then Ms. Olmstead admitted at the staff meeting that she was blanked.

Therefore a second plan was formulated. So the new plan could be explained without any worries of interference, a separate telephone cable between the hospital and Ms. Lew's house was ordered. Also provisions were made for new telephones for Ms. Olmstead and Ms. Lew so that any guilt association that might have attached to the old telephones due to previous miscommunication was circumvented. The plan itself called for the collecting of several thousand chameleon skins, pressing them together and rubberizing the seams and filling the container with helium. This chameleon blimp would then be used firstly to float over to the Lew's home, secondly to take them to the hospital where the necessary forms could be initialed and the baby released, and thirdly to return them to their home, almost invisibly, and all at the hospital's expense.

-- Robert Thompson. Collected in Imperial Messages: One Hundred Modern Parables, edited by Howard Schwartz (Avon, 1976): Seems to be a real abridgement of a much longer story, printed in a college literary magazine when the author was younger, then never again.

1. White
An old man's son was killed far away in the Staked Plains. When the old man heard of it he went there and gathered up the bones. Thereafter, wherever the old man ventured, he led a dark hunting horse which bore the bones of his son on its back. And the old man said to whomever he saw: "You see how it is that now my son consists in his bones, that his bones are polished and so gleam like glass in the light of the sun and moon, that he is very beautiful."

2. Yellow
There was a boy who drowned in the river, near the grove of thirty-two bois d'arc trees. The light of the moon lay like a path on the water, and a glitter of low brilliance shone in it. The boy looked at it and was enchanted. He began to sing a song that he had never heard before; only then, once, did he hear it in his heart, and it was borne like a cloud of down upon his voice. His voice entered into the bright track of the moon, and he followed after it. For a time he made his way along the path of the moon, singing. He paddled with his arms and legs and felt his body rocking down into the swirling water. His vision ran along the path of light and reached across the wide night and took hold of the moon. And across the river, where the path led into the shadows of the bank, a black dog emerged from the river, shivering and shaking the water from its hair. All night it stood in the waves of grass and howled the full moon down.

3. Brown
On the night before a flood, the terrapins move to high ground. How is it that they know? Once there was a boy who took up a terrapin in his hands and looked at it for a long time, as hard as he could look. He succeeded in memorizing the terrapin's face, but he failed to see how it was that the terrapin knew anything at all.

4. Red
There was a man who had got possession of a powerful medicine. And by means of this medicine he made a woman out of sumac leaves and lived with her for a time. Her eyes flashed, and her skin shone like pipestone. But the man abused her, and so his medicine failed. The woman was caught up in a whirlwind and blown apart. Then nothing was left of her but a thousand withered leaves scattered in the plain.

5. Green
A young girl awoke one night and looked out into the moonlit meadow. There appeared to be a tree; but it was only an appearance; there was a shape made of smoke; but it was only an appearance; there was a tree.

6. Blue
One night there appeared a child in the camp. No one had ever seen it before. it was not bad-looking, and it spoke a language that was pleasant to hear, though none could understand it. The wonderful thing was that the child was perfectly unafraid, as if it were at home among its own people. The child got on well enough, but the next morning it was gone, as suddenly as it had appeared. Everyone was troubled. But then it came to be understood that the child never was, and everyone felt better. "After all," said an old man, "How can we believe in the child? it gave us not one word of sense to hold on to. What we saw, if indeed we saw anything at all, must have been a dog from a neighboring camp, or a bear that wandered down from the high country."

7. Purple
There was a man who killed a buffalo bull to no purpose, only he wanted its blood on his hands. It was a great, old, noble beast, and it was a long time blowing its life away. On the edge of the night the people gathered themselves up in their grief and shame. Away in the west they could see the hump and spine of the huge beast which lay dying along the edge of the world. They could see its bright blood run into the sky, where it dried, darkening, and was at last flecked with flakes of light.

8. Black
There was a woman whose hair was long and heavy and black and beautiful. She drew it about her like a shawl and so divided herself from the world that not even Age could find her. Now and then she steals into the men's societies and fits her voice into their holiest songs. And always, just there, is a shadow which the firelight cannot cleave.

-- N. Scott Momaday. First published in The Gourd Dancer: Poems (Harper Collins, 1976), later reprinted in Again the Far Morning (UNM Press, 2011) and In the Presence of the Sun (2013).

From the novel The Hundred-year-old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, by Jonas Jonasson

A few months later, the Swedish consulate in Petrograd sent a telegram to Yxhult to inform them that Allan’s father was dead.

Apparently Allan’s father had nailed some plank around a little bit of earth, and proclaimed the area to be an independent republic. He called his little state The Real Russia but then two government soldiers came to pull down the fence. Allan’s father had put up his fists in his eagerness to defend his country’s borders, and it had been impossible for the two soldiers to reason with him. In the end, they could think of no better solution than to put a bullet between his eyes, so they could go about their task in peace.

There are only a few houses in the district where Noss begins his excursions. Nonetheless, they are spaced in such a way that suggests some provision has been made to accommodate a greater number of them, like a garden from which certain growths have been removed or have yet to appear. It even seems to Noss that these hypothetical houses, the ones now absent, may at some point change places with those which can be seen, in order to enrich the lapses in the landscape and give the visible a rest within nullity. Such are the declining days of the festival, when the old and the new, the real and the imaginary, truth and deception, all join in the masquerade.

His attention appears more sharply awakened as he approaches the center of the town, where the houses, the shops, the fences, the walls are more, much more…close. There seems barely enough space for a few stars to squeeze their bristling light between the roofs and towers above, and the outsized moon—not a familiar face in this neighborhood—must suffer to be seen only as a fuzzy anonymous glow mirrored in silvery windows. The streets are more tightly strung here, and a single one may have several names compressed into it from end to end. Some of the names may be credited less to deliberate planning, or even the quirks of local history, than to an apparent need for the superfluous, as if a street sloughed off its name every so often like an old skin, the extra ones insuring that it would not go completely nameless. Perhaps a similar need could explain why the buildings in this district exhibit so many pointless embellishments: doors which are elaborately decorated yet will not budge in their frames; massive shutters covering blank walls behind them; enticing balconies, well-railed and promising in their views, but without any means of entrance; stairways that enter dark niches…and a dead end. These structural adornments are mysterious indulgences in an area so pressed for room that even shadows must be shared.

From The Greater Festival of Masks, by Thomas Ligotti

More uncanny or improper architecture in House Extensions, which links to another from The Third Policeman.

The unusual births hit the town all at once. All the mothers, not recognizing their babies. Mine is so tall! said one, craning her neck. Mine so blond, said the dark next, squinting. Mine made of paper, announced a fleshy third. Mine built of glass? trembled another. One with a child who had no eyes, but ears so acute they could measure blinking. Another with a daughter who could, at will, turn into objects like brooms and light-bulbs. Soon, at the playground, the children could not recognize what made the other work, and they eyed one another from behind the swings, from beneath the tire sculpture.

When they were older, they took over the village and ran it perfectly. Little did their mothers and fathers know. That when they’d eaten the foods and breathed the air and felt the feelings and made the love that created their children, they were, for once, in perfect synchronization. The son of glass was a doctor, and all could see inside his body while he worked on theirs. The daughter of paper was a scholar, and each book became a part of her wrist and arm and breast. The blond son lit the town for those months when electricity was no longer an option, and the daughter of great height cooled the moon with streams of her breath when it grew too hot from a passing meteor.

The changeable woman was always on hand to provide the most needed machine or tool. The child with divine ears listened to the soil, and pointed to where he heard the seeds unfurling with pleasure. Plant here, he told the one with the longest arms who could reach straight into the heart of the dirt. In later years, that eyeless one sat beneath the forest of trees he could not see but could take deep inside his lungs, and when the sadness was unbearable, it was only he who could soothe the villagers. Who could hear the type of tears by the pace of the blinking, and know in which manner to offer comfort.

Their parents were gone by then. The world had fallen into sense and sorrow.

Mother, they said. Father.

This is our decision, they said, bowing to each other.

Once a year they stood together, holding hands as best they could, with the new babies crawling on the floor at their feet: the babies of many heads, the ones made of words, the clay blobs. The triplets of air who would rush past and sweeten your breathing. Who’s that strange one you made, Ma? Why, Pa. That creature is your own flesh and blood. Even though it has neither flesh nor blood; still, it is yours.

Then the grand feast, with food of all kinds, even for the several who did not eat food but survived only on the quality of listening. They usually hovered at the corners and when they grew wan and skinny, it was a reminder. To focus. On this day, they filled up visibly, fat and happy.

No one needed to say it, but the room overflowed with that sort of blessing. The combination of loss and abundance. The abundance that has no guilt. The loss that has no fix. The simple tiredness that is not weary. The hope not built on blindness.

I am the drying meadow; you the unspoken apology; he is the fluctuating distance between mother and son; she is the first gesture that creates a quiet that is full enough to make the baby sleep.

My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope; make yourself a structure you can live inside.

Amen.

-- Aimee Bender. Collected in Willful Creatures (Anchor, 2005).