W. Jordan's picture
W. Jordan from somewhere in Texas is reading The Shining by Stephen King September 20, 2012 - 5:43pm

Be it Heaven, Hell, nowhere, etc., I don't know. This could be fun! Remember in your writing style. Get serious now!

Or you can be boring and write: I was born again. I woke up in a hospital.

 

W. Jordan 

Jonathan Riley's picture
Jonathan Riley from Memphis, Tennessee is reading Flashover by Gordon Highland September 20, 2012 - 6:53pm

Moo. Moo. Think in syll a bles now. used to cut beef. drain blood. bolt to brain. kill cow. feed.  said I did good. meat taste right. I wait. man cut beef. man drain blood. bolt to brain. kill cow. next time hope. grass hop. 

Emma C's picture
Class Facilitator
Emma C from Los Angeles is reading Black Spire by Delilah Dawson October 6, 2012 - 5:16pm

It's quiet now, the sounds muffled and distant as though being heard through falling snow. The cats remember me; they twine themselves about my feet, crooning in soft whispers that sound like words to me now. I like to hold my hands to my face and look at the world through the undulating shimmer that used to be flesh, everything familiar suddenly new and glistening. Thoughts fall away, replaced by sensations. The smell of grass and the whisper-soft velvet of butterfly wings, the laughter of a kitten are my musings now. A profound stillness settles within the gently turning bit of light that is my soul, nestled in my chest where once a crude muscle pumped blood. Time, like all concepts, means nothing here where I stand at the intersection of all things. With one hand I reach out for the grandfather I never knew, my infant mother in his arms; with the other I trace the line of a starship's flight. I step, and go on.

Bob Pastorella's picture
Bob Pastorella from Groves, Texas is reading murder books trying to stay hip, I'm thinking of you, and you're out there so Say your prayers, Say your prayers, Say your prayers September 20, 2012 - 8:47pm

Nothing worse than waking up in some alley behind the bar with some hooker's panties clinched in your fist. The sunlight is too bright. Turn that shit down, Mr. Sun, some of us are trying to sleep. Of course, Mr. Sun keeps on shining. I force myself up and stare at the g-string in my hand. A quick look around tells me the hooker is long gone. I pull out a crumpled pack of Lights from my pocket and fire one up, taking my first drag of the day. A few more drags, hoping to get a little taste, but it's like I can't get any flavor out of the cigarette. Smoke drifts from a hole in my shirt. I poke my finger into the hole, pull it out like a dipstick, only I'm checking for blood, not oil. Apparently I'm running a little low on blood. I puff my cig again and watch the smoke curl from the hole in my chest. 

There's a bullet casing next to my foot. That's when I realize I don't care, it doesn't matter. Good thing is I now know why I can't taste my cigarette. 

 

W. Jordan's picture
W. Jordan from somewhere in Texas is reading The Shining by Stephen King September 20, 2012 - 9:01pm

I can't wait to hear more! Imagine Bob's story and Emma's story somehow intertwining, what do you think? Mix Bob's grit-alley, fantastic world with Emma's spiritual province, you get this world of depth.

Seb's picture
Seb from Thanet, Kent, UK January 16, 2017 - 8:17am

It's a bit cold.

OtisTheBulldog's picture
OtisTheBulldog from Somerville, MA is reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz September 21, 2012 - 4:23am

I became a smoke monster. I terrorized a bunch of inhabitants of the island I live on, but nobody really understands me. I can do a bunch of cool stuff, like making noises that sound like a t-rex mashed up with a fog horn or I can take the form of a hand and smash people against trees if they piss me off. I can take the form of other humans if I so desire, maybe hit on Kate or something. But really, I just want to get off this damned Island and party a little. They say what happened on the island actually happened on the island but then they have some similar cliche for trips to Vegas so who the fuck knows? My brother Jacob is kind of a prick.

bryanhowie's picture
bryanhowie from FW, ID is reading East of Eden. Steinbeck is FUCKING AMAZING. September 21, 2012 - 8:16am

I pull the hooker's knife from my back and roll over on the stained mattress.  This is so unsanitary.  I reach for my erection, but my hand passes right through it.  God hates me so much.

Stacy Kear's picture
Stacy Kear from Bucyrus, Ohio lives in New Jersey is reading The Art of War September 21, 2012 - 4:59pm

Falling over you, tripping through you, standing in the space inside of you. My senses numb as I watch you curl up in pain. See the red of your swollen eyes. See the heat burn your cheeks, wet with tears. There is only silence as I watch your body convulse, choking on my name. 

Profunda Saint-Sylvain's picture
Profunda Saint-... from Calgary, AB is reading Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy Series September 21, 2012 - 5:25pm

Seriously, asshole. You have to shut up. Yes, the car rolled. Yes, you're still trapped in it. No, you're not moving. Have you really not realized you're not in there anymore? Just shut the fuck up. Your goddamn nattering is what made me drive off the road in the first place, and now you can't shut your fucking mouth for one fucking minute? Just be glad the windshield didn't slice off your face. I'm starting to regret the open casket clause in my will. Oops.

drea's picture
drea from Rural Alberta, Canada is reading between the lines September 21, 2012 - 8:02pm

A garden party of the most foo-foo-shi-shi-la-la variety; tables lit by candles in glass hurricane lamps under a white pavillion. She is wearing a blue disney princess sort of ball gown and me in pink, our men folk tuxedoed and talking to one another, leaning against pillars a little ways off while we stand forehead to forehead under the branches of a weeping willow tree. She takes me by the wrist and leads me into a moat illuminated by lights recessed in the concrete walls under the water. We wade in and plunge under and I am wet and I am baptized. She coils around me and we shoot forward, propelled by her jet propulsion, our dresses and blonde and brunette hair twining out flowing behind us like weightless octopus tentacles.

We stream through the depths with no resistance, wrapped up in one another's arms, limbless, twirling, leaving bubbles in our wake, and when she opens her mouth to speak, the words flow out on ticker tape, ribbons of the longest fortunes of fortune cookies and I open my mouth to receive them, swallowing her words and I am filled with all that she has to give, filled with who she is to me, who she is to the world and I know fully where I am, the entrance to my own path, and in that moment I have what I have needed, from her and from the universe. 

 

(this was stolen from a dream and has been previously shared with the woman in the story) 

Covewriter's picture
Covewriter from Nashville, Tennessee is reading & Sons September 21, 2012 - 9:52pm

If I try to explain where I am now you will not understand.  It would be like explaining the Internet to your great great grandmother Gracie that one time. She could not get  how to pull down a movie, or figure directions from my phone. Trust me when I say I am right beside you, just in another dimension. I'm excited. It's way better than getting a new Apple phone or anything like that. It's not your fault but you don't know very much now.  None of us did. i'mhere, just a deminsion over, but right beside you too. I see you crying my half-grown son. And you sense me, I can tell.  Come on, perk up. Don't be sad long. Trust me.  All your fancy smart things look to me like Gracie's black and  white TV. Oh I can't wait to show you  this new stuff.  You don't need a device.  You don't need a monthly  internet fee. Science will figure it out someday in your deminsion, maybe, who knows maybe you will figure it out. But you've  got a while to go. Meanwhile study hard, make contributions to the world, help others, have a blast and enjoy every moment of the quaint old-fashioned  world.  -- Love Mom

jyh's picture
jyh from VA is reading whatever he feels like September 22, 2012 - 1:13pm

This house is too fucking small.

Casey Dee's picture
Casey Dee from StoneyHell is reading The Brothers Karamazov October 3, 2012 - 5:18pm

Blinking. My eyes. I am blinking my eyes. Thought. I have a few. Also opinions. Alright, not much of a change.

What now? Breathing. Still doing it, although unnecessary. Old habits and all that I guess.

I know I sure as hell am smirking; in this afterlife, am I a good witch or a bad witch.

So much mischief, so much meddling.

Courtney's picture
Courtney from the Midwest is reading Monkey: A Journey to the West and a thousand college textbooks October 3, 2012 - 5:52pm

Whenever I dreamt about dying, it was painful. This is like the time I dreamt about my grandmother and I walking between immense scores of trees, stocky and buff with limbs hanging limp with the weight of their apples. My stomach warmed from the cider and we watched orbs of light float from the trees, those paper lanterns I saw on the Discovery Channel.

But then one of the sparks caught me and I was lifted from the ground and felt my back snap in two as I burnt, I burnt so quickly and cleanly that it snapped me in two and I began to rise, not my soul but my body, my entire body lifting and floating and flying but this isn't like the flying dreams it's like the dying dreams I died and my body cracked on its fault line where I was split and suddenly it's just pain, just immense pain, and then it all went black and I woke up.

This time, though, it's just the blackness. No waking up. No cider to heat my belly, no grandmother to watch me fly away in two pieces. I open my eyes and it's so beautiful.

Stacy Kear's picture
Stacy Kear from Bucyrus, Ohio lives in New Jersey is reading The Art of War October 4, 2012 - 4:31pm

Cut off cracked open, the realization that everything that was real is false. Storms of anger and desperation, my blank stare, swollen tear stained eyes not understanding. Blackness will be my bed tonight. Nightmares of his dead eyes looking away, expressing what he couldn't say. What I wouldn't have heard anyway. Deafened by my love, screaming, being pulled away.

I plan on dying without saying a word.

I can hear the whispering and howling of all the dead that are lying beneath me now. The sound envelopes and shakes my body, I am silence. Death my only consolation. To take away the fear and panic that suffocates me. Collapse the painful memories that have left me empty and alone. Cut through the air that is so thick and heavy now, pinning me down to this cold damp earth. My mind wills my limbs to move, the death surrounds me now and I am paralyzed. The chill of the black night becomes a dull ache that I can feel. That I can feel pain, I will always be dying.

I raise myself without saying a word.

vespr's picture
vespr from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia is reading everything Daphne Du Maurier and Haruki Murakami October 5, 2012 - 2:42pm

from the sound, i knew i've fractured something. it would've been a miracle had i not, having hit concrete pavement from the fourth floor of an inner-city apartment. the very fact that i was still alive was a miracle. but i squelched my rapidly rising relief: not yet, it's still too soon to feel this lucky to be alive.

was i breathing right? yes. thank god, no broken ribs punctured the lungs. i heaved myself into sitting position. now, i'm sure i sustained no spinal injury, either.

but when i tried to stand, the world started tipping side-to-side.  

i gave up. a dull pain reverberated in my head, in diminishing waves until it became the ghost of an echo. i pressed my fingers into my skull fearing the soft dent, the wet, tangled patch of hair where i'm sure the fracture must've split through the skin. i should pass out any moment now never to awaken again. my probing fingers  found neither. not even the sharp pain that signalled a hairline fracture.

something is very wrong. there is not a single fracture on me.

some old fear reared in me and i leaped to my feet. the world started tipping left, right, left then spun 45 degrees. then the whole world turned to its side and i found my cheek lining up paralell to the pavement. with nothing but air for three feet between cheek and pavement.

this is when i see the blood. the blood making like a river on the pavement into the gutter. such a lot of blood... from such a small body.

i think i know who that is.

i'm flailing in midair no longer bound to the laws of gravity. how long before i discovered that with some control, i could bring myself right side up, again? i honestly don't know.

from the open window four storeys up what used to be my apartment block, i saw his face peering down. i'm almost certain he could see me as i am now. then he winked at me as if this was all a big joke. and a hot wave of anger swept over me.

i uttered my first words in afterlife: "you perfect son-of-a-bitch."

Flybywrite's picture
Flybywrite from Rocky Point, Long Island is reading The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, by Stephen Crane October 11, 2012 - 9:22am

Ah, to be stretched so thin, to be spread to everywhere; I'm remembering everything from the sound of falling guillotines, to being drawn and quartered so many millions of times.  And now, as if those bloody nightmares about torn friendships and shattered couplings and each one's agonized and lonely end collecting inside me aren't keeping me busy enough, here and not evem half way through my own death's door, comes fucking essence. 

That's just swell.  I, however, am not quite all the way through to the bright side, thank you very much.  It remains a devout feeling that many a complete idiot lives always on the bright side; and I do not have either the time or the strength required for examining goddamned emotions.  They do not after all exist, in any objective sense.  Oh, sure, space wants to tear me right open.  We'll see about that, space. I particularly refuse to examine any genitally attached sinful emotions at any level of depth and then get on a merry-go-round ferreting out their mother-laying truth.  I'm too busy making shit up, and so sick of all that jazzy and psycho talk that I could easily puke. I did the best I could I reason on the way through, so how about that endless nap I've been dreaming of? 

I take a deep, celestial breath, and then as if in answer, there goes a speeding Jupiter right down my black hole.  I realize its too late to bargain.  I have begun my first step through and then through again to the other side.  I am stretched so thin, I am quaking, shedding, reabsorbing into everywhere, and then I realize my fear of getting sick was unnecessary.  Malodorous exhalations aren't permitted or even possible, here, where all the molecules from sick to sweet smelling have apparently been pre-dispersed.

They are all flying now beside me now: the living in the dead.  As promised all the other gorgeous and brilliant and statuesque and ever so witty and interesting little particulars of everything, that I once so frantically fought to distinguish myself within, are now a part of my very own personal electric firestorm.  What a weird sensation, better than even cloning; they are me and I am them as I flare and vanish into the Living eternity. There's no peace.  I realize i am not yet through.  What a Love and Hatefest Memory and memory are; who remembers what I wonder and what about the wheat from the chaff business.  I wonder things like never before and feel hatred too to the thousandth power here at the threshold, as the last of my viscera burns away.

I am flame and electricity and feel no toes to speak of midway throught the taking of this first step.  I regret the loss, but here feet seem a lost idea.  I am torn and thirded by a quick memory of the unsightly, five-headed things. A stupid outcry, feels here where I have been suddenly projected, like my final trace of crudely captured corporal nostalgia.

"God how I loved those ugly, smelly bastards that used to carry me about toward one possibility after the next, the space around me seems to whisper, but it's not fooling me.  That was the last of me, whispering. Now these others, the living and the dead have all risen and converged.  They, they are the ones formed into the red and blue storm coming for me.  What a show it apparently is once everything becomes finalized!   You black-screen dwellers, you atheistic ragers, just can't imagine what I see, and still only a little more than half way through the door.

Oh, but I,I,I... I see devils and angels from hot red to cool blue take form where there was once, only nothing.  Emotions are real!  They're real!  Somebody, anybody back there behind me on the wrong side of death's door, please spread the word  Why, hallelujah (sp?): I feel sin again.  What a pisser.  Sin does exist, after all.  It feels like an anchor burning in the center of my thousands of advantage seeking lies, and that will not let me be whisked up to a place where there are no advantages: only Love.  It will not let me live by giving away, and it burns, it burns.

Oh, yeah, right, that place; is that place full of great gifts the one I'm being torn to shreds toward?  Yes, well, how lovely; and what does science say?  I feel/see myself burst into concluding, unscientific quarks that go fucking away into the stringly, wiggly, wingely mix; flying so erratically that even here on the verge of the other side, my new beggar in a new land eyes start screaming for that One who rumored to be All, in the hope I might be drawn on high.  The summation of my chariot seeking essence right before the first step is nearly done, consists of loosely stated questions and observations regarding my crazy predicament, like: "Where the fuck are you?  For someone supposedly with good eyesight, don't you seem just a little coy and slow on the uptake.  And etc. and etc. about how I'd do it different with an eternal noob.

Boxing with God: scared little trembler, with his back up, who in life likely wore a bumper sticker across his expressions about how big dogs do it better.  It's too late to bargain, while being shredded.  It's too late for pitiful threats and fists at the sky.

Pure red hate and pure blue love have become somehow tangible as my first step makes progress toward its end, and I begin to disperse past light speed.  Goodbye, my leg-dead, putrid, immobile shell; goodbye my goddamned fancy too; no one's going to step on my green goddamned grass anymore.

The unexpected happens here; the mysterious is everything.  This stretched thin and spread everywhere sudden lens intimates to me, at first sense, a sense of eternity.  No, where is the dread miasma, the dead blending into it?  Could this one, be a True Body Electric; in this love at first sense, that I feel, in these initial moments of big banging around, in this feeling and nothing more just yet that I, I, I, the god-blessed eating and drinking and sinning I, will in less than the width of a second become so more than my blasted senses.  That's just swell, and how the firestorm of essence closes, so fast.

 It is already on me; a swarm made of essentials from before I was born has come for me and is coming all through me. I leave all the dreary world-concerns that above made me burn, far behind now.  Eye-blue and blood-red gamma storms one after the next, storms made in the essential cauldron of pure emotion, nuclear emotional storms existent on the essential level, strip away my remaining connection to flesh.

However invisible they were in the world behind me, in my just gone newly burning form I recognize things.  Even as I near the end of my very first step past light speed, I can watch and feel what the blue and red flames pouring through me, want to do.  Oh, am I being taken, There?  Swell, just swell, just what i needed to know.  Can it be possible?  Is it, really There, and all the billions of dead men and women never really dead, and there too, and Love presiding.  Emotion likes to say it is the only real thing, and now we'll just have to see about that; and if i will need to fight Clark Gable for Carole Lombard's hand in Heaven.   

How nearer to the miracle of one bread will it be, if I end my first step pointed in Love's direction?  How a part of the miracle it will be, to be stretched back in time beyond the furthest galaxy and yet still present, at once.  Will I ever end this first step, right.   It feels like it will never end, but when it does will I, also, merge to the light?  Am I to begin again, God-like there, and alongside the Lord also able to complete every last living other's taken then finally exhausted.  And then past all those films and home movies, what of the steps with my heart?  Shadows and the muted sensations of each beloved's experience, left behind in pain, waiting ahead in peace, will they be reborn in me? 

What a great question.  I notice it seems a lot easire to pray while being torn apart.  Why, once-upon-a-time, prayer seemed such nonesense, but now that I have left the actual I am actually feeling pulled that way.  I will be able, I tell my my increasingly space-lost quarks, or they tell me, to live the steps of all the infinite living others all over and from inside to out, this time around.  Once all through to Love I will live from human being to saber-tooth, from long gone to only just crawling, an own a thorough now playing and always will be review of every step they have ever taken or will take and what they were thinking and feeling therein.  This information will soon be available to me, and I feel the quantum secrets whispering all around me as at long last the completion of my first step sends me flying faster than I ever imagined would be possible away from myself.

I begin to pray.  Now there is a miracle; I pray as I detach from death's door and surge into my second step, to be drawn near to all of those who have ever fought their way in the direction of the Good.  I cry not for a goodie, but to be brought near all these silent and courageous ones spread out so thin and everywhere who fought toward the Good all through to the end of their lives.

Ah, to be spread so thin, to stretch out over everywhere along the trillions of light years, in some crazy dream of Love's. I am free by the third step, and accelerate; I am drawn away from the threshold I've crossed in a few quick steps through all the hot and cold wars of divided emotion, toward Love  I am done with the teeming swamp; I am beyond the nutshell world that once bound me, and infinitely done there.  The white and red and blue fires keep guiding me like  pulsars, and roar that Love is the capitol, Here. 

Here an eternity past where Love can only be watched like it's a blue-black star spangled bird of prey, Here where nothing can any longer storm me, there seems to be a new philosophy where the quarks used to rage: screw the flesh. 

Flybywrite's picture
Flybywrite from Rocky Point, Long Island is reading The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, by Stephen Crane October 11, 2012 - 9:24am

Sheet, that was fun.  But I can't believe it went on for so damn long and feel like i ought to be working on my short story.  So, gotta get crackin.