Ovenlike

Something ovenlike washed up on the grounds of the building last time it flooded and now the waters have receded and we’re all standing around looking at it. We sent the boy in first because of his thin arms but he couldn’t get the door open and said that the knobs wouldn’t turn. There wasn’t a smell of cooking but there wasn’t not a smell of cooking either, if you know what I mean. I said this out loud and somebody half nodded so I knew I was on to something. The next to try was I suppose the building’s janitor inasmuch as it had one. He was always around anyway and seemed to own a tool box. He produced this now and with a wrench of some sort he set about the object, managing to damage the exterior but not in such a way that any contents were revealed. Since he seemed the most capable of us, we shrugged and left it alone. A fortnight later, the floods came again. We woke up to find the thing was gone, and with it our curiosity. I only record this now in case it washes up somewhere else and the people of that land go onto the internet searching for answers. If such an enquiry has led you here, then I apologise. But please know, you are not alone.

Mysterious Pan Nedrex Occurrence Event: Evidence Display

Media received in post. Explanations not received in post. Suspect conspiracy. But by who. Or whom?

Object #1: Envelope

Object #2: Manifesto/Audio Recording

Object #3: Window Sticker For Car Or Other Vehicle Display

Object #4: Pre-tattooed Flesh Sample

The Darkening

It was some time after midnight when it happened. Your blue shirt became your dark blue shirt. Your lime green wallpaper took on the shade of the forest. The fluffy, white clouds took on a gray tint.

And that famous cave, where you took that famous tour? Where you remarked in the haunted silence that you had never truly experienced complete darkness before? It has been closed down. Nobody should ever visit that place again.

A Void

It was the work of months, years, lifetimes, plus or minus a week, for accounting purposes. But now, finally, we had achieved what had always been considered impossible, unattainable, mythological, illogical – the creation of a true void.

Not simply a vacuum, but a full, total, all-encompassing nothingness. Matterless, energyless, structureless, lightless, pointless. A cube of perfect nothingness, six feet wide by six feet deep by six feet high (all the measurements had been changed from metric to fulfil the new patriotism in science criteria).

I was the one chosen to unveil it to the assembled crowds. I smiled, pointed. From the crowd, gasps, cries, shouts, moans. A muffled weep. Three swoons soon followed, plus two faints, one feint.

“It is impossible,” said a voice.

“It is illogical,” said another.

“It is incomprehensible,” said a third, which might well actually have been the first, again.

“It is… unavoidable!” said a fourth, or third, or maybe just the second again, who knows. What I do know were the hoped for laughs their pun had been designed to elicit were not forthcoming. Laughter was not permitted in the hall. We all knew that. Not since the incident.

The owner of that voice was ejected, barred, tarred, shamed.

Yet soon he returned.

“I wonder what it feels like,” said Toby, as he silently emerged from the wings to take his place beside me on the stage.

“It is a void,” I said. “It is by its nature sensationless.”

Toby reached out a hand.

Toby breached the border between the not-void and the void.

“Ha, it tickles,” he said, with a slightly coquettish giggle not becoming of a man of his size, stature, nomenclature.

And with that he stepped inside. That was the end of the void.

The Ticking

There was a ticking.

I waited for it to stop but it would not stop (except for the momentary pause after one ticking and before the next ticking, without which there would be no tickings at all but simply a hum).

But there was not a hum. There was a ticking. And then a subsequent ticking.

It was not the clock (I checked). It was not the printer (the printer was broken). It wasn’t even the brass crow (sleeping), and that was usually the source of at least 84% of all known occurrences of tickings (assuming you ignore the drum machines).

The ticking persisted.

I positioned myself here, there, and also there (by the stove), so as to be able to triangulate the ticking’s emergence vector to an accuracy of at least 107%.

It was the drum machines.

There was a click.

Combinatrix

“Toby’s brain,” says the scientist, pointing directly at my exposed and delicate brain, “is what is known as a combinatrix.”

A hum trembles through the audience.

“Push in information through any or all of his available input sockets,” [the scientist points to, in turn, my eyes, ear (left ear only), microphone, x-ray absorbor], “and it will all be transformed, via the combinatrix, into… this!

The scientist whirls on the spot and thrusts her cane towards the shadows.

Silence.

A spotlight switches on.

My latest CD is revealed. (Also available on tape and cylinder).

The audience gasp, weep, cheer, liveblog, dance, fume.

The serving

I had made something. It wasn’t quite a cake, nor exactly a biscuit. More like an inversion of a cake. An uncake, perhaps, existing solely between realms.

I served it with a void of tea along with a couple of molecules of antisugar arranged in a complex geometric shape that was neither platonic nor solid.

I poured the tea into mother’s best cup and put the uncake and the nonsugar in a saucer I fed the cats their food on, and placed by the side of the cup a spoon with a hole in it a magpie once brought me, and once the presentations were complete I carried them into the anechoic chamber and handed the unternoon refreshments to Ted.

I hoped and prayed and laughed

UNDERGROUND AND UNDER HERE

Amemorable news purveyor “The Guardian” have published a list of 50 “underground albums” that “you” have “never heard of” LINK FOLLOWS

A Guardian

Poring over the list for old favourites I note that they have
A) included several albums that “I” have heard of, and dismissed as one-dimensional or “phoney”
B) failed to include any of the best albums that I have not heard of, which I am unable to list here for the same reason

If I had heard of them, I suspect they would be as follows.

Edgar Winifred: The Egg is on Fire

This hard-to-find record by Edgar Winifred was only released via fax machine, the ink compressed so deeply as to form grooves that could be played on most readily available record players. Recorded during one of his fugue states, it contains eight brief songs, each made up of two distinct movements, which the liner notes record as “before” and “after”. Winifred could not (or would not) remember what any of it meant, and during at least two interviews utterly refused to claim responsibility for the album at all, although notably both journalists made record of the fact that he “left the room loudly humming his own melodies”.

The Underwater Seal Experiment: I Was Outside, You Were Hiding

This all-girl band formed in the 1920s but didn’t make their first recordings until they found themselves unexpectedly reunited in a nursing home, having lost many of their capabilities. Immediately returning to music, they recorded seven albums in as many months before all dropping dead from exhaustion within hours of each other. As each of them had willed the master tapes to another member of the group, they briefly fell into a disputed state, held on a boat that traversed international waters until their surviving ancestors could agree a deal. The subsequent release, which was only available via a costly phone line, was hailed as a masterpiece by all that heard it.

Hova Stanta: No Means, No (?)

The genderless, ageless Stanta compiled this late-period release by splicing together rehearsal tapes from their one-person band. Confusingly high on harmonies and polyrhythms, the result was instantly denounced by the Catholic Church, which led to a brief sales spike that independent record stores struggled to keep up with (only four copies having been made available, each hand-decorated by the artist and their small army of insect pets). AllMusic.com refers to the album as “literally inaudible”, but it should be noted that the review was published during the deafness plague of ’08.

BRIIIIIIIIINE: Briiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine

BRrrriiiiiiiiiiiiine

The transformer

The stone appeared in the middle of the town and anyone who touched it was transformed or at least improved in some way.

Ted touched it by mistake and his eyes regrew and a few of his fins receded.

A seagull landed on it and became a crow and a crow landed on it and become a raven and a raven landed on it and became a new bird that was exactly the same as a crow and a raven but even bigger again it was huge.

A man playing a trumpet leant against it and his trumpet became one of those huge tubas that wrap themselves around you and it wrapped itself around him and wouldn’t let go and also his lungs doubled in size so he he could play all day long he changed his name to Simon Fourlungs he was a great success.

A cat brushed up against it and was unchanged (cats are essentially unimprovable).

I danced and tricked my way to the front of the queue and looked up at the stone and then I touched the stone and the stone exploded and everyone was furious with me for the rest of the year.

Toby Vok Reveals The Secret Secrets Behind His Successful Successes

“I got this lucky penny off a lad today in the hotel,” Toby Vok said, rolling the coin between his fingers then up and down his sleeves before it emerged from below the hem of his skirt. He picked it up and made it disappear behind his ear.

“A travelling merchant and his son came to me and asked if it was okay to take my soul. When he’d finished syphoning it off his son said: “Let me give you a lucky coin. It’s not cursed at all!” and then they went off with a chuckle that sounded a bit like a duetted scream.

“Here it is,” Toby said, revealing what appeared to be a sweet to the crowd, before closing his hand and then opening the other, from which a dove flew out. “I had it in my pocket, all along.” Then he withdrew it from his pocket and spun it between his fingers. It looked like the moon. It looked like the sun. It looked like a coin again. “I used it and I won and then I won again. It’ll stay with me forever now. It feels like I can’t lose.

“I’m not really superstitious, I just love coins.” he added. “Here, let me show you how it works.”

And with that he put it in the machine in the corner by the bar. A random assortment of shapes came up, and the coin was gone.