EXTREMELY WEIRD SPLATTER: Teaser Quotes from the Stories
PART ONE: Extremely Weird Sex
- Tom Johnstone. “Debbie Does Delos…?”
Whenever she called him to arrange an assignation, she always signed off by saying, I’ll get myself ready, turning up to meet him with a little bag of make-up to touch up the candyfloss-pink lipstick he always kissed away and a bottle of lube to counter vaginal dryness, because even though his touch and even the sound of his voice made her wet, at her age she didn’t always stay that way. But she never asked him to abandon his marriage and always took second place to it without complaint. She was so compliant sometimes, he almost thought of her as a delightful, if somewhat elderly, flesh-and-blood sex doll.
- JG Faherty, “The Fishhook Prophecy”
Richard Stone’s naked body lay on his bed. Hundreds of fishhooks pierced his skin. They went from his toes to his face, some longer than Shea’s index finger, others smaller than a paper clip. Not an inch of his flesh had been spared.
- Dan Scamell, “MySkin EverFlesh”
Madeline grimaced, pulling away from the one-man firing squad, hoping her hair would be spared too much shelling. As Hector fumbled with the condom, trying to pull it off, Madeline shut her eyes and awaited the inevitable.
Gasping and groaning in the idiotic throes of ejaculation, Hector wildly tugged at the condom, but it remained on his prick. “Fuck,” he said. “Fuck!” He came and came and came into the reservoir tip of the condom he’d gotten from a gas station bathroom vending machine.
- Maxim Volk. “My Love, Like Moss, Envelops You”
I don’t suppose Jonny ever stopped loving me. He certainly did not stop loving me when I told him that I hated seeing his face every morning when I woke up. How I wished that I could take a match to his fiery red mop of hair and watch as his skin melted off his skull. How I would love nothing more than to pluck out his stupid eyes that closed when he smiled too big and pop them beneath my shoe. He only told me that he knew I didn’t mean it. That I was just venting. But I did. I meant every word of it.
PART TWO: Weird Splatter Magic
- Christine Morgan, “What They Deserve”
“Okay, then … this reptile place, you can name a cricket after him and they’ll feed it to an iguana.”
“Hmm.”
“Or, for a bigger donation, a rat fed to a python.”
“I like that,” Tonia chimed in. “Gluk-gluk-gluk swallow the sucker whole!”
“Nooo,” said Marcie. “I’d feel bad for the rat.”
- L. Andrew Cooper, “Sam the Cat”
His thrashing made loud bangs, likely of his head and feet against the trunk of my car’s pitch-black interior, and I didn’t resent his efforts as I drove to the cemetery. Far from hefty, he nevertheless would have been impossible for me to get to the graveside had I not wedged the wheelbarrow into my surprisingly spacious backseat along with the shovel, which I used to dig a rectangular hole in front of my wife’s headstone.
- Nick Badot, “The Copper Merchant”
This is the closest I have come to my old form since it was taken from me. Longing turns almost immediately to rage in my chest. I resist the urge to claw off his face and instead lay a reassuring hand on his nape. The gesture is almost maternal.
“I… I won’t…,” the Copper Merchant mumbles. His teeth have started to liquefy and leak out over his shriveled tongue.
- Thomas C Mavroudis, “Adoration of Evil”
She continued with the other three sections of skin and muscle until her right thumb peeled like a small banana. The bump of synthetic epinephrine gave her the strength to complete the maneuver, while her own adrenaline helped override the pain. The tip of her thumb glistened with blood and fat. It tempted her. Or she salivated over something else. With the wet bone, she drew a sigil on the blue, motionless infant.
PART THREE: Extremely Weird Self-Splatter
- Steve Rasnic Tem, “Dermis”
Sometimes lying in bed late at night I overheard their faint conversations, soft as a lullaby. Mine is the last house on a dead-end street with quiet elderly neighbors as isolated as I am. “I can’t quite hear you,” I whispered into the darkness, hoping to hear something comprehensible back. These might be my only friends, I thought, these things living in my skin.
- Suvajeet Duttagupta, “The Weight of the Dark”
Mr. Chatterjee’s breathing hitched. His milky, desperate eyes rolled back, fixing on her face. They searched her stoic expression for a mercy she didn’t possess. Poverty had scraped her hollow long before this moment.
- J. Rohr, “A Parent Sacrifices”
Other blood vessels burst throughout her body as well, especially her eyes. Not the red cracks of any ordinary bloodshot peepers, but smears of red like little puddles in the sclera. She looked like the survivor of an apocalypse, hollowed out and now unimpressed by Death.
“It was supposed to be beautiful,” she said, a tear running down her dead face.
PART FOUR: Weird Splatter Production
- Leonardo J. Lamanna, “How to Build a Meat Radio”
This one was a good specimen. A tourist. I can’t remember his name. Timothy, maybe. About thirty. Tall. Straight nose. Large teeth. As it says in Leviticus: Do not bring anything with a defect, because it will not be accepted on your behalf.
A strong heart, too. I hope so. Or I’ll have worked so hard for nothing.
I already opened his chest. His torso hangs from a hook above my head, ribs spread open like a red shutter.
- Vox Villalobos, “Soup”
This time, the supervisor’s door opened, and we all held our breaths. He marched past our rows, dressed in a crisp navy blue suit and head held high. Eyeless and noseless, his face was a blank mass of flesh with a gaping mouth lined with sharp teeth. A tongue dripping with saliva flicked from side to side.
- JB Corso, “Scenarios”
Overwhelming grief locked her into emotional submission. The scent of fresh entrails wafted deep into her nostrils. Thick, warm tears diverged around the drying gore, painting her cheeks. One tear rode a strand of her partner’s brown hair down onto her shoulder.
- Etta Wynn, “The Architect of the Soft Circuit”
The clouds no longer drifted or gathered; they hung over the city like infected tissue, swollen and purple-black, veined with lightning that pulsed too slowly to be natural. Every few hours, enormous filtration organisms dragged themselves across the atmosphere on suspension cables—vast sheets of engineered lung tissue cultivated by the municipal biofoundries to clean industrial toxins from the air.
PART FIVE: Extremely Weird Trips
- Angelique Fawns, “Highway to Hell Fan”
The blades, rather than stuttering to a stop, sped up. “Driiiivvveeee,” it hissed.
Mia threw her scissors across the room, cringing as they bounced off the crooked metal bars. The fan rocked back against the wall with an echoing clang and then settled back on its dented base.
“I’m done doing all sorts of shit I’ll never recover from,” Mia said. “I’m going to hell because of you.”
“Driiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive,” the fan droned, a little louder.
- C.M. Saunders, “On the Fringes”
So yeah, I try to keep my drug habit in check these days. I’m in my forties and have a responsible job. That said, I do still like a blow out every now and again. And why not in a different city after a shit day at work? How many good friendships have been formed over the decades or centuries under similar circumstances?
- Jason Nickey, “Portal”
He wasn’t sure how long he had been asleep on his couch, but he was pretty sure it was the sound of a door slamming that startled him awake.
Was that real, or did I imagine it?
He had recalled reading about the phenomenon of being startled awake by a sound that didn’t actually happen. It was called EHS, which stood for Exploding Head Syndrome. He mostly remembered the name and acronym because of how absurd it sounded to him.