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Slam Fiction now accepts work of 113-355 words (or less?). Submission guidelines are >>>>
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Last update: 19 September, 2011
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How’s Mikey? (189)
Foy Migado
I go to the post office and send some poems, when I get home there’s a rejection already on the door mat. We have a good and fast postal service, we can rely on it though sometimes when someone has posted some exotics from, say, Amsterdam, I worry that the postman might have a very thin drill bit that he pokes into packages from, say, Amsterdam, so he can smell the probe when he withdraws it.
Today, I wait nervously by the post box and am thinking fuck it’s 8:15, the postman never comes this late. But wait, it has rained all day and maybe one or two of them couldn't get into work and so the round is being done on overtime and the package will still arrive. I can hear loud laughter. It seems to be coming from St George's Road where the sorting office is. Oh come on, it might be coming from the pub.
Yeah, it might be. It might just be that the fucking postmen are all in the pub smoking my parcel. Cunts. Have they skinned up my weed using my poems as papers?
Dirigible (147)
Marshall
I got home early Sunday morning. I didn’t take a shower at my friend’s place, after all. He had a party and told me I could spend the night if I wanted to not drink and drive. So I packed some of my dirigibles (I think they’re called) and a change of clothes just in case.
I had gotten there early so I hung around a bit and checked out the bathroom that I’d probably use the next morning. I tried to make it seem more like mine or at least that the shower was one that I had used before, so I unpacked my dirigibles and left them on the sink cabinet.
The next morning I woke up kind of early (for someone who had stayed up until three in the morning) and decided to just head home. I didn’t have to let my friend know.
Showtime! (285)
Darren Banks
I didn’t have any more shampoo left. I’d run out of body wash before and used shampoo as a good replacement. It lathered up pretty well and smelled similar to body wash and I really didn’t feel any dirtier or less fresh after using shampoo to wash my body. But conditioner didn’t lather up and I wasn’t sure how it would work as a replacement for my shampoo which would have worked as a replacement for my body wash. I turned on the shower to give the water time to warm up and sat down on the toilet seat and read the directions on the conditioner bottle.
After shampooing with (product name) shampoo, apply (same product name as shampoo) conditioner liberally from roots to end. Rinse and repeat if necessary.
I took the shampoo bottle out of the trash can and compared the shampoo ingredients to the conditioner ingredients. They looked of the same type but different enough to confuse me. I peered inside the bottle to see if there was any shampoo left that might have slid down to the bottom. There wasn’t much but I did see a film of liquid down there. I poured some of the conditioner into the shampoo bottle and then I filled the shampoo bottle with some water. I shook it up, took my clothes off, and went into the shower. The mixture didn’t ooze out like shampoo or even conditioner did. It streamed out. Something about it made me feel rushed about taking a shower. I didn’t feel the same comfort on my skin as I did with the spring meadow body wash. The water was hot and steamy but it was a dry and unfulfilling shower.
Stasis Report (196)
Arthur Straum
1) missed every deadline i've self imposed so far.
2) having had having having had having had had having trouble transitioning back into writing mode so
3) getting caught up with reading submissions.
4) feel new respect for these people who send us things... not really for that but the work they put into it and i like all their quirky little stories even though i don't like them at all from a what'sitcalled standpoint.
5) am pissed off. am determined to do an apocalpyse issue now that it has vexed me. have a morsel typed. need moresos. will. grit. tongue.
6) deadline: soon but not tomorrow. okay... Monday Tuesday Wednesday. No later!
7) to you email recipients: create something apocalyptic or fucking the apocalyptic or recast something you've already done. me am will too.
8) get to work.
9) send it to me.
10) or i'll do it all.
11) i don't care.
12) i've decided it's going to be good. maybe i'll get lucky.
13) somebody make an apocalypse list. you all used to be good at lists.
14) maybe i'll do that. everyone should do that. not for the issue. for your futures.
I Think Her Name is Alice (328)
Shane Brill
She wanders in like a person, fumbling and graceless. I have her shoes. She’s come to fetch them and take them down the road to put in the last phone booth in town to see if anybody’s going to walk off with them. She watches from the bus stop where bus after bus drives by before she gets fed up. But nobody uses the phone so she grabs her shoes and brings them back to my place.
I don’t know anybody in this town. Ain’t got no lads on the corner. Or a Sally come by for the occasional and proper. Just her. Fumbling and graceless. Coming and going for her shoes. I don’t even know her name and after a time I don’t want to. I think her name is Alice. She didn’t look like an Alice but after a few weeks she grew into the name. Now I’m afraid she’s a Janet or a Carla. Not that there’s anything wrong with Janets and Carlas but I’ve grown into Alice too. So I don’t want to ask her. It would be like ruining a fine painting with a ball-point pen.
She calls me ‘man’. Hey ‘man’. I come to get my shoes ‘man’. Getting a drink ‘man’. The word sounds young in her mouth. Like she’s practicing. I don’t call her anything. Just say ‘sure’. Or ‘yeah’. Or ‘go on’. I sometimes wonder if I care about her—that if one day she doesn’t show up I would worry. Yeah, I probably would. But I don’t feel like I’d be able to do anything about it.
She goes to the sink and drinks straight from the faucet. She doesn’t ask anymore. After she leaves I drink straight from the faucet too, worried she’ll walk back in and catch me, and I'm overcome by a feeling of disapproval because I think people--people who don’t drink straight from faucets--would see something vulgar in it. There might be.
Wheat Snack (171)
Robert Westdorp
Whenever he walked into the home of a potential customer he always felt like a dying pet. You couldn’t say that he liked selling but it was the only thing he’d found that he could make enough money doing to keep a roof over his head.
A wheat snack salesman, more well known to the dry cleaners down the street from his apartment than to his own brothers and sisters. He was a short man, whose shirts were always pressed and pants creased down the middle.
Whenever he’d finally ask “may I come in for a few minutes?” at the end of another sales pitch, he often wondered why anyone would even bother with him. But he asked himself into many a living room, unlatching his square brown briefcase, and laying out pamphlets and glossy brochures along a table that had to be cleared of old magazines and TV guides. Then he’d take a small box of sample wheat snacks and lay them out on a plate provided by the homeowner.
