86 - One time on the morning of the Apocalypse

One time on the morning of the Apocalypse, which used to be the name of a city you know, Roxy Zefa woke up early as usual but between her morning coffee and her shower she heard something happening outside she couldn't believe.



Opening her balcony door (she lived in a block of flats) she looked out on a Spielbergian scene of utter and total devastation. Building in the distance had been knocked flat, those nearer her block remained standing but devastated, her block alone seemed untouched.



Real people don't follow narrative continuity and neither did Roxy, the immense scale of the disaster made her think two things:

1. The last dream she had had, in which about a hundred of her friends had followed her into a famous volcanic cave to practice walking on water.


2. The fact that since the view before her was impossible, she must be having a delusional episode so she should ignore it and try to get ready for work.

She followed her advice and tried not to pay attention to the world outside, because true to her prediction, as the hours passed (she enjoyed very early mornings) the buildings righted themselves and the destruction reversed itself and the world put itself slowly back together like the tides.

She went to work in an ordinary world.

The very next morning though, it happened again, she could ignore it better this time, and again, work was were she'd left it.

The third day was more interesting than the first, change-day was what she was calling it in her mind, because the third day was the first day she took a morning walk.

That day at work, the blasted artifact resting on her computer like an anthropological trophy, she couldn't stop smiling.

87 - She made me - Teaser story for Memory Project #2 written and directed by Ilir Pristine

Lying under the hot summer sun with rough sketches by the banks of the river Seine and going mad on sunshine and wine, my mind drifts, time eats my memories into dust, I practice the art of forgetting.

I have already forgotten the smell of her, under which eye was the tiny white scar? No doubt she has forgotten me too; yet as I lie here surrounded by a moveable feast, I can imagine better what I first had to forget, because this is a place we shared in time, a place we will always share in time.

In time I will haphazardly forget everything, before that happens I have planned a trip (calling it a journey is pretention) I do not go in search of her, looking for her is the first thing I forgot to do, I do not go in search of myself, because I can always be found wherever I am, I do not go in search of lost time, time can never be lost, it is always in the same place you left it.

I go to build a better fiction, a concordance as my father puts it, coincidences no longer a coincidence.

I will visit the places we shared, I don't know yet if I bring concilliation or the sword, I am building better memories, better than the events they refer to, only the present is unmalleable, the future and the past are both choices.

She made me, now can I make her as well?

88 - Downcount Station Uprising

At-Five, a cyborg (@5) and part-time troublemaker, reached for the small vial of poison which he planned to use on his boss, First Player (1Up), a cyborg manager who, in At-Five's opinion, was a monkey short of a wrench, Pathy Hedron, a vat-grown sythnetic person (and new-arrival-in-general-with-no-first-hand-knowledge-of-cyborg-speech-patterns) felt stupid, she didn't understand the references these cyborgs were alluding to, all she could get out of First Player was that they were ancient human metaphors which their original programmers had installed for verisimilude, like any manager, his answer had come after a long pause (She could only assume that's when the 'thinking' happened and simultaneously she noticed her addition of the quotation marks around 'thinking.' Whoops, it happened again.

Were it not for her electronic train-of-thought completion plug-in, she would have lost her way by now.

As it was, she rattled off the second and third criteria in a flash: the answer will be perfectly correct and one hundred percent useless.

One-Hundred-Percent (100%), a maintenance droid and choir boy, luckily never found out about this. He had been nursing a flame for Pathy for hundreds and hundreds of nanoseconds and would have short-circuited in instantaneous shame.

A string of violence and blood-letting

Gnashing of teeth and gears and blood. Bent metal and broken glass, hands reaching for anything find nothing, fingernails torn from the roots, chewed limbs as though sent through a man-sized meat grinder.

Organs failing but not soon enough. Death takes its time.

Gossips are train wrecks waiting for a headline.
Gossips have empty lives they somehow need to fill, fill with pieces of other peoples lives.

Gossips are the wreck described above inside.

Pity them, do not despise them, they set traps for themselves everyday.

While it appears that everyone (including the author) have abandoned this site, fear not for I have a question to ask that might yet explain anything

Dear readers who are not there, here is a question that does not matter to anyone but you and I:

I am putting these stories into a book and wonder if I should leave them online? Moreover, should this blog exist at all? In what form if I cannot write what I want to write, in other words stories? I invite your comments.

Who is the one who is reading me now?

After a month of inactivity, major changes coming soon

It's been a roller coaster, having gone on strong for 18 months onlyto have a publisher reject me not because the material was deficient but because they consider this humble little blog qualifies as 'previously published,' I can't believe it, this pebble of a site on the limitless seashore of the internet which hasn't even racked up 1000 visits (likely the same 6 people) qualifies as published? What was the name of the planet the web programmer said he or she was from? You know, the gal or guy who wrote the bot which crawled the web and found my submitted story...and then summarily rejected it since it was, in fact published; but only in the most narrow minded, insensitive and unapplicably-in-the-real-world sense of the word.

What to do? I don't what it to happen again but on the other hand I've missed giving my fiction away for free to my 6 readers, what to do? Tell you what, I'll keep writing the stuff offline, what gets rejected by publishers can end up here, fragments and ideas can go here, from now on however I cannot in good faith post finished stories here until they're been rejected by somebody somewhere.

Nothing ever finishes, nothing.

A new game.

Friends can play a new game! With enhanced reality hardware and tools, friends can leave their memories of places virtually in several european cities for their friends to find. Originally a mashup of google maps and GPS technology. The latest offering boasts immersive 3D enhanced moments which load automatically into HTC or Nokia visorphones (other OEMs coming on board soon) so stay tuned for the latest updates!

It doesn't always come to you.

"Hello Johnny, why do you want to attend our 'business for teens' class this year?"

"I've always been interested in the stock market but I could only talk to my dad about it, my friends aren't into business. I wanna meet other teens who're into having ideas and making money."

"Are you prepared to work hard? We have a lot of ground to cover, we'll be making a general introductory survey of all areas of business; managerial finance, human resources, logistics, to name a few off the top of my head."

"I'm prepared, I don't know enough to know what I'll like or not, I'd like to think I'll enjoy finding out."

"Thank you Johnny, we'll let you know our decision by the 15th."

"Thank you."

The man consumed by a disembodied hive mind.

I still remember the terror I felt as I was cornered by the collective and absorbed.

I found my personality remained distinct, only my perception of the world changed: now under my theoretically total control.

One day on a beach created by consensual hallucination, I let myself dissolve into the manufactured moment.

I became the sunshine.

I spent three weeks on that day.

Had I known how burdensome a body is to a man sooner, I would have welcomed the collective from birth.

The exam.

It's only half what you know, the rest is pure stamina.

This is the end

This concludes B8A as a short fiction site. Having recently had a short story rejected for having already been published (on this blog) B8A has decided to collect the best stories from B8A into one volume and repurpose B8A to mobile blogging as the literary equivalent of a sketchbook: story ideas and fragments to be developed later (sadly, off-line).

It was a great almost two years, thank you for reading, special thanks to everyone who contributed comments.

Regards, B8A