Monday Will Never Be The Same: Short Fiction

Monday Will Never Be The Same
By Brian James Spies
When I was a child, there was an old abandoned house by the creek that ran past the park. We all called it Freddy Krueger’s house. One summer, when I was eleven my friends and I dared another kid to go inside it, he wouldn’t so we teased him. We had spent most of the mornings that summer painting the bathrooms inside the arts and crafts shed with characters from Bloom County. In the afternoon, we would ride our bikes to the bunny trails and do tricks while we smoked Camel Wides. The evening before the fourth of July, we blew up Black Cats and got drunk in the park, I met an older girl who said she was a lesbian. When it would rain, we would hide under the pavilion so as not to get wet. We would drink Zima and fight for no reason in particular. We would never be that young again. Sometimes I wonder how we survived those hot summer days and cool summer nights, then I remember that not all of us did.

The Dancer: short fiction

The Dancer
by Brian James Spies
The metal of the gun had a cold dull colour to it, no sheen, or polish to be found. As he pointed it at me, he trembled. Martin again flashed his brass knuckles as if to say he had my back. Whom was he kidding, brass knuckles don’t mean shit against a loaded handgun; if it was even loaded, not that I could know or even wanted to find out. I acted in a manner as to convey fearless abandon, but was really just self-destructive aggression. “What are you waiting for” I raged. “Pull the trigger, be a man… I don’t want to live anyway.” With cool detachment I said, “You be doing me a favour.” This dance continued, me challenging him to do something that I hoped I was right in believing he didn’t possess the courage or stupidity to actually do. I don’t know how long we went on like that. At times, when I think back, it seems likes it couldn’t have been more than a minute. But then, there are times, often late at night when it seems we are still dancing that dance even today.

Monday Morning, After The Party Ended

Nitemares and Dayscape

History is a process, not a series of events.

I was just watching the 8pm rerun of last nite’s The Daily Show and the guest, Pakistani Ambassador to the United States made a very good point that got me thinking. He said that the process of abandoning alliances with pro-Taliban / pro-Al Qaida tribal forces along the Pakistani Afghan border is just that, a process, not an event. This struck me as particularly true as well as extreme relevant. This is in fact I believe the biggest problem with how we view and thus how we teach, history. From primary school onward we teach children that history is a series of events. In other words, a long time ago X happened, it was followed by Y and ultimately Z. This is the single most fundamental flaw in how we approach history and quite possibly the single greatest impediment to our complete and total inability to understand why history seems to repeat itself. History is NOT a series of events. It is not even a series of related and interconnected events. It is a process. It is a process with a beginning, middle and end; all of which are ambivalent to us. Imagine a very long book with one letter missing from one word from one sentence. Would the narrative of the book be inextricably altered by that one typo? No, of course not. However, imagine that this book is the only book there is and your task in life was to read and re-read this book. You would undoubtedly be irked everytime you read that particular passage of said book. Furthermore, although as you got further past that passage you might begin to forget about it and get back in to enjoying the flow of the story. This is history as we perceive it. We view history through the eyeglass of the not so distant past. Things like that typo we perceive with the most intensity when the are current but seems dreamlike and unreal the further we are from them. We also believe that they are unique. That they possess a special importance and that this importance is the reason they stick in our collective minds. In reality, it their closeness to now that actually makes them so significant, not any special characteristic that they possess. No war, no revolution, no terrorist attack possesses anymore significance than it’s timeliness gives it. At the end of the day every human life lost, every inhuman display of courage and every mind stirring speech given possesses no more or no less significance than that typo. It’s only importance lies in its proximity to now. This is the process of human history, a process totally ambivalent to us and our very shallow experience of it. We are not the reader, we are a fraction of the typo, an uneasy annoyance in the grand narrative of time.

The Tulip Wars

Angelsdust

Electric Lemon Magnolia Drawstring Pants