What is Absurdism?

Overtly Absurdism seems to me to be about imagery and incongruity and the illogical extension of logical conclusions.

Secretly, it's a matter of putting the correct badgers in the correct desk drawers.

Tethered (NSFW)

The idea of atomic funerals has always captivated Willow-in-Clay. There's the reek of brimstone about them, the feel of a dark and disfigured god laughing at Man's latest doomed attempt to avoid the Plague's spread. She prayed her way through her share of gravesites, back before she came to realize that it was all for nothing. The bomb is just the next evolution.

So now she lays naked in the lead-bottomed gondola of a hot-air balloon over Mad Hat Canyon, waiting for the updraft. Her companion of the moment, a deceitful little mandroid named Silas-of-Truth, slumps barechested in the bottom of the basket across from her, picking at his fingernails with a rusty pocketknife. She wishes she could hate him, but he's just a generic Bad Boy Survivalist package, not even real enough to despise.

Flames flare above them, and the balloon bobs at the end of its tether.

"What I mostly hate is how cynical it's made me," she tells him, continuing a conversation they'd never begun.

Fears of a Clown

In the bed before him, her hands were thrown above her head as if she were a drowning woman in need of salvation. With the portal's green light washing over her in waves, it was an apt comparison. Chuckles couldn't help but smile, but it wasn't a happy smile at all.

He took a breath and bent near, painfully aware of the sour tang of his own sweat and the greasepaint's bitter odor. But the drugs had done their work, and she did not so much as twitch at the smell of him. Chuckles carefully placed the white knight on her nightstand for her family to find, and let the breath free.

"Here we go, then," he told himself, and picked her up. He stepped into the portal.

On the other side, Dr. Mendoker waited, gowned and gloved in the gleaming operating theater. "I was worried," he said gently.

Love Underground

The vampires drop in flights, their shadows blocking the starglitter as they fall. Cameras capture the images but no one watches the cameras anymore.

Tonight in the shelter, Sumi huddles with Allison, bodies pressed together in the dark, breath mingling.
"At least it would be over," Sumi breathes.

After the Plague (NSFW)

If it was only the memories that the Plague stole, we could have found a way through. We could have talked for days, watched all those videos we never quite got around to playing back, read all the notes that we wrote in the days before it all came apart.

But instead, the Plague stole him from me, left me with the thrashing body, the stream of vulgarities, the piss and the shit, the erections he'd pound until his hand was slick with blood. It stole him and left me, and I stayed, and I stayed, and I stayed.

And now he's dead, this glorious man I gave myself to until death do us part, now he's dead now he's dead, and all I can think now is thank God now I'm free.

~end~

-- 

This one from a /r/WritingChallenges challenge - "Move me in 5 sentences." How'd I do?

One Last Stitch

Given that his operating theater was an open casket, Alvin Marks thought he was actually doing a damn good job. If Oretty Whiting hadn't been so determined to find fault with his technique that she ripped her late husband's arm off, no one would even have noticed the way the flesh gave beneath your fingers like squid sushi. And that could hardly be blamed on him.

Besides, Alvin wanted him whole.

"Is this the best you can do?" Paul S. Whiting, Esquire, asked from the casket. "I can pay more, if that's the concern here."

The concern wasn't Paul Whiting's payment schedule, though. It was the smell. Paul Whiting smelled like . . . well, he smelled like a dead man too long in the coffin, was what he smelled like. Alvin only hoped the body would hold together long enough to sew.

Scene from a Post-Apocalyptic Amusement Park

On the ninth day west of Des Moines, the little company came across a crumbling Ferris wheel tilting drunkenly above a starveling cornfield. Here and there, crows picked among the scant remnants. They showed no alarm at the squeaking wagon's approach.

 Angler flapped the reins and Missus Hammeril's pair of horses came to a halt.

 "Oh," Missus Hammeril said, a little sadly. "Orry and I rode one of those, when he was first courting me."

Angler, facing forward with his mistress behind him, rolled his eyes. Exactly who he was rolling them for, he could not say. The crows, maybe.

Crawling Back (NSFW)

When Chrysta's eyes rolled back, when she warned us about the storm, she'd said nothing about dildos rising on the floodwaters.

Resistance (Incomplete)

Haven't done a Chuck Wendig challenge piece in a while, so here's something.

This one's incomplete, more of a scene than a story - I'm not sure where to take it in 1000 words or less in the time I have available, so I'll leave it sitting here at 500 words or so and pretend it's a whole story.

--


The pickup bounced by, not on the road but in the high brown grass alongside. Its driver, a Melp with a bunched hairy face and a fat pair of lower lips--typical Melp ugly--clutched the steering wheel in its hair-knuckled fist and squinted into the afternoon sun. The pickup left behind a trail of molten stone. The prairie burned.

Fucking Melp bastard.

Jurgen Jonson watched the truck disappear into a cloud of its own smoke, and with an effort that almost hurt, he relaxed his grip on the battered Bushmaster.

The Felesin wouldn't let the prairie burn, that was sure. Which meant that soon enough there would be the saucers hovering in the sky, the heavy poisonous foam, the unbreathable air.

And everyone would  see the digging.

Miks pulled herself from the hole in the ground. "Monkeyshit," she said. She was wearing a half-shirt and a sunburn and about thirty pounds of dirt and sweat.

"Cover it over," Jurgen told her. "We'll come back tomorrow."

"Bollocks to that," she said. "I need half an hour. Less, maybe. You think the Felesin will get here by then?"

"It's not the Fellies I'm worried about. It's the drones from down Durban way."

Her hand fell to the pistol at her waist and for a moment he thought she was going to draw on him. He might be able to get the Bushmaster turned on her in time, but she was snake-quick.

"You've got a rifle," she said.

He spit. "And they've got the army."

"I do like their hats. You could get me one, if you loved me."

"But I don't love you." He came closer. She smelled rank, dirt and sweat and the too-sweet reek that told them both that she was digging in the right place--the cache her old cellmate had planted there. Before he'd killed himself in a Joburg alley with three shots to the back of his head.

Filthy as she was, his cock still throbbed with the heat between them.

"You're a terrible liar."

Something roared behind him, saving him from a reply. He turned. A lion had burst from the high grass, bolting away from the flame. An old, toothless thing, half-dead, still refusing to die.

Like us.

The old verzetsman had told her what he'd buried would be useful to the Resistance. A burr under their saddles at least. And if it went better--if they could get a sample to the lab buried outside of Pretoria, and if the brainsmen down there could tear it apart and build themselves vast quantities of enhanced synthetic--then maybe they'd end up with a Melp invasion force drugged to the gills, or even better, detoxing all at the same time.

It wasn't much of a weapon. But it was all they had.

"Can you do it in fifteen?" he asked. Already scanning the sky. Nothing, but that meant nothing. Already, satellites could be focusing in.

By the time he dragged his gaze from the southwestern skyline, she was back down the hole.

--

Prompt was to write something based on a picture from the  Secret Door website, which is awesomeness. Having no clue what to write about a pickup truck seemingly spreading fire behind it, I used a random character goal - "to grind something". Jurgen apparently wants to grind down the invaders. Sure, why not. If I was going to pursue this piece, I'd probably start at a different point and put the motivation in conflict with Miks.

If anyone still reads this blog, feel free to finish the story in the comments.

Haiku, and you?

Haven't done a challenge post in a long while (been working hard on stuff to send out to paying markets), but this one (3 linked haiku, combining to tell a story) seemed too easy to pass on. 45 minutes and 15 versions later...

 Titleless, for now.

 ---

the Visitors fell,
yes, you say that i saw but
i can’t remember–

how could i lie to
a jumper cable with my
legs bound apart dear

god i would tell but
the black-jacket man had such
forgetful needles