www.watermelonstump.com
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
we've moved to a real site!
it's still way in progress, but the new site is up and coming. make it a favorite, check it regularly, and don't forget to submit.
Monday, June 16, 2008
update!
Howdy,
Got a snucked doozie of a new story for you (and fear not, there's an even better version in the pipeline, though we'll save it for the winter drearies). Thanks, C. Fids! Moreover, we've got a real website address: www.watermelonstump.com. The old link still gets here, but this address is snappier and flashier and easier to remember. What is a watermelon stump, anyway? We've also added a section at the very very bottom where we can share some fun sites you guys uncover (already =ab has delivered a gem of an online novel).
Thanks to all you cool cats who have sent in stuff. The rest of y'all, get your asses in gear. It's summer and we know you have nothing better to do. Write us a quick and bad story, you'd be surprised how fun it can be. And while you're at it, share the Stump with your friends so they can write stories too. And don't forget art, poetry and whatever else is cool with us too. Pieces,
-(tito)
The Good Life
Submitted by C. Fids
I lay my head on the windowsill and watch the world flash by. The metal of the train presses into my skin no matter which way I turn, as if trains were designed to hate me. The passengers glare at me and I glare back, hardly lifting my long legs to let them by. They think taking up four seats is a big deal? The train is taking up my life. Where the pretty young woman who boarded is, who knew how to smile, I wish I could tell them. But suddenly all the noise goes out of everything, and I am left with a dull buzzing, the throb in my ears that only comes from sheer panic. And then I lose sound altogether, and the only sensation on this fast train is my heart gulping back down my throat, as we pass the first sign that says home.
It wasn’t easy coming back to the lush greenery. Leaves pulsed with a peridot fire as sparkly as all the gems in a street vendor’s cart. I pushed through the doors, wondering how my slick converses would do on a real road. More hills in this country than virgins. No one helped me as I lugged my duffel off the commuter rail. I was all alone.
Finally I made it across the tracks and, panting, to the station. My mother had sworn to meet me, but she was always late, and the sun beat down on my neck like an executioner. A hot, beautiful summer.
Just like last time.
I punished one of my shoulders with the cutting weight of the duffel, shrugged the other one, and started up the hill. As long as I’d been gone, I still didn’t think to check the station; it had been empty for years, and, according to the old lady who used to live next to us, was owned by a lesbian.
There were no townspeople to see my thin straggle up the hillside. Cross the border and you run into people hanging Christmas lights all year round, but none of that here, no one outside of these rolling lawns hiding rolling mansions. No one to hear you scream.
My head started to go numb again, brain brushed with cotton, but I opened my eyes wide and remembered the exercises.
This is where you are. Count the colors. Green green more green Christ this damn town
Ok you are here. You are not in the past. You are right here. Avoid triggers. Avoid
The outdoors
Night time
Being alone
Being with anyone
Touching
Love
Your past
Sometimes listing the triggers is a trigger itself. I forget for a moment if I’m on the train, still avoiding strangers, and am surprised to find myself tensed in a body fighting up a hill. My nails, dug into my palm, have drawn blood.
It’s a beautiful summer day.
I rip the door open, slam the bag down, but still have enough breath somehow to scream, “I’m home!”
As usual, no one hears me. My mother is partly deaf but denies it. If she can’t hear you, it’s your fault.
From behind I’m seized by two strong arms. I whirl to face my attacker, but stop my hand an inch from his throat.
“Frank!”
He hugs me instead, and I tolerate the touching, because he’s Frank.
“I didn’t know I’d see you, where’s my mom?”
He steps backwards, the open doorway falling between us, his face crinkling in confusion.
“Don’t you know?” Frank’s voice is always gentle, even when I’ve done something like ask where my mother is in my own house. He lives down the way. Always did.
I shrug my shoulders, which feel whipped from carrying the duffel. When I reach to lift it, he helps.
“Why are you here, I mean I’m glad to see you,”
God city people are not like suburbs people at all. I try to remember politeness.
“Would you like a glass of water?”
“No thanks, Rainy.”
And with this, my world comes crashing down. A hot day such as today, and my friend Frankie, born two days before I was, always squinting at the world as if it were slightly blurry except for me, and taking everything as it comes and drinking all the water I brought us when I snuck the whole gang into a club one time so that I thought gee, he will never be boyfriend material, but he was sweet nonetheless, our Frank, everyone’s Frank even though he kept to himself up in the woods with his mama, he would never, ever refuse a glass of water. Because Frank was always hungry, and always thirsty. The kindest giant of a kid anyone ever knew, but when there were refreshments, Frank didn’t know the meaning of the word ‘No.’
I sank a little into the house’s shade and said, “What is it Frank? What did I come home to?”
He answered, “Rain, it’s happened again.”
Happened again.
I fled home from this, and then found it wherever I went, in that night that stretched out around me no matter which apartment I lived in or job I worked or play I saw, my brain is on fire with darkness, so I lose my job and my apartment and I come home, thinking maybe, maybe it was all in your head. Maybe you can hide from it in the very place it started, cuz you have no other place to go.
“He’s here?”
Frank drew a deep breath, put a hand almost on my shoulder before my stiffness helped him remember not to. “He’s here. I’m so sorry.”
“I thought he was in, South Beach or, Philly or fucking Europe,”
“No Rain, he’s back. Like you are.”
Like I am, I chattered bitterly in my brain. Frank sighed.
“I think I’ll take that glass of water now.”
And I knew it wasn’t over.
“Tell me what happened.”
He made me get him a glass of water first, in the kitchen I didn’t remember and felt meek in among all the modern metal.
Frank tips his glass slowly, as afraid to break it as I would be. The beads on the body remind me of something, suddenly everything is reminding me of something, lightheaded and nauseous.
“Are you sure you want to know?"
I paused. “I have to know.”
He told me then, about a girl, not one like me, popular as I had been, but shy, and younger—always younger, as young as the me in my head I reach towards in my dreams sometimes, trying to protect. A girl who had told no one but Frank’s sister. Telling people didn’t work, I thought. Not for me. But for her, maybe, it would, because she was telling me.
“So what do you think? I mean he,”
“He did it again.” I groan with the pain that it is not all in my head, and I don’t know if it’s worse or better or worse again.
I’ve been waiting for this four years. Half a year of college, a year of transiency, a year of six juggled jobs, another half year of…well, things it’s best to forget right now. Always a fear of the phone call, or even a newspaper article, to say, he did it again. Because you didn’t stand up. Some other girl is a piece of what she ever was, because of him. Because of you, not warning her. Not protecting another girl, not able to protect that younger girl in your head, with hair the color before you dyed it, the real color, screaming in that one night even though all these other nights have passed. Every dream I try to protect her, and in the mornings she leaks into my life, slipping away my chances and work and attempts at loving.
I don’t know where Frank was or how long I drifted, but when the attack stopped, he was still there, waiting for me. I looked at the only friend, of all of them, who had walked through fire for me, and knew what we had to do before I did what I had to do.
“Frank,” I said, “Let’s get baked.”
Brownie mix is easy to find in our supermarket. Liquor, sadly, is not. So we are forced to break the law with pot brownies, because there is no alcohol for miles in this dry town of dry towns. He let me wait in the car while he ran in, even as I cursed myself for cowardice, muttered the whole time I sat in the dark, “It’s not like you’ll get raped in the middle of the supermarket.” Of course muttering these hearty words to myself never make things brighter.
When Frank returns we hightail it back to my house, hoping my mother isn’t home and we have to share. His stash is pitifully tiny. Frank is fiercely against drugs, but he loves getting high with me.
I was straight edge myself, until I left this place.
The only good thing in the world is fudge on your tongue when you’re high as a kite.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
HELP THE STUMP
Our first-ever update involves a fantabulous self-pee description by the one and only Ninker. But first:
We really need some fresh content. There is some material in the pipeline, but given our arbitrary statute of limitations on "stolen" content, the first month or so really ought to be comprised of original greatness. It only takes a moment to toss together a poem (limericks and haiku are encouraged as well, perhaps even a collection) about anything, and a story will only cost you an hour or so. Art is cool too, draw a picture and scan it, or do it on your computer from the start. The next planned submission in line is art, so that can give you a template of awesomeness. We love you and you love us; so support the fun (speaking of support, click the link at the bottom of the page a few times, as each click gets The Stump like a hundredth of a cent). As always, if anyone is interested in literary criticism, the Blue Book is open for readering. We expect you all to subscribe to or at least bookmark this site. Eventually (when money and time collide in surplus) we'll have a real site, with even more fun, but this free blogger site needs your love first. Read it often, submit, and pass it to your friends for some good, old fashioned fun.
Heart,
-(tito)
Birthstuff of My Nether Nexus
And forsooth! He glared at his gleaming rod of a stream as it burst forth from his nether nexus. He glared at it as she had not, for she had been more interested in the waitress-Jezebels which tempted that nexus but she had not foreseen such occurrences as had occurred. And so he pissed! He pissed with reluctance into that pit which had turned into the nether regions of his relationship, the toilet of his troubles. Gleaming rod! He wished it could ice over into some weapon which would aid him in the quest back of his manhood that that malfeasance had wrought upon his very being.
His being had been wrought upon, surely, by that Jezebel herself, the wench! She had wrought him but good, that whorely wench, by having slept upon his moorings and the postholes of his soul. She had dug deep there, in the clay of his makeup, that was where she had chosen to erect her structures and build the buildings by which she had wrought the laws by which she had compromised the inner structures of his soulstuff. As he pissed his laser rod of gleaming urial uddertude, he contemplated the chaosastic beneficence by which she had betrayed him.
Surely she had, he contemplated! Surely she had done him such great wrong! That Nazi of his innertude, that Jezebel had surely Jewed him out of his rightful inheritance from the world. He wished to have already unplugged the massive black talon of the cord that connected to the life machine which glumfully pumped the wasteland of his heart through his meager, weak veins. The very veins which had so closefully meandered through the heart of his past on their way toward the desolate future which had compromised his being.
And so he watched his father, nexus of his birthstuff, which had birthed him, and he pierced his gleaming sword of piss through that nexus to the soul of his troubles, and though he didn't maintain that by which he had loved, he retained, still, that by which he had been wronged and by that which he loved his soul he felt restored and his mien once more restored to that recalcitrant ineptitude which it had so long forsaken.
His being had been wrought upon, surely, by that Jezebel herself, the wench! She had wrought him but good, that whorely wench, by having slept upon his moorings and the postholes of his soul. She had dug deep there, in the clay of his makeup, that was where she had chosen to erect her structures and build the buildings by which she had wrought the laws by which she had compromised the inner structures of his soulstuff. As he pissed his laser rod of gleaming urial uddertude, he contemplated the chaosastic beneficence by which she had betrayed him.
Surely she had, he contemplated! Surely she had done him such great wrong! That Nazi of his innertude, that Jezebel had surely Jewed him out of his rightful inheritance from the world. He wished to have already unplugged the massive black talon of the cord that connected to the life machine which glumfully pumped the wasteland of his heart through his meager, weak veins. The very veins which had so closefully meandered through the heart of his past on their way toward the desolate future which had compromised his being.
And so he watched his father, nexus of his birthstuff, which had birthed him, and he pierced his gleaming sword of piss through that nexus to the soul of his troubles, and though he didn't maintain that by which he had loved, he retained, still, that by which he had been wronged and by that which he loved his soul he felt restored and his mien once more restored to that recalcitrant ineptitude which it had so long forsaken.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Zombie Penguin Shumi Attack Spree: Episode One: Time for a Little Story about a Zombie Penguin Attack Spree
submitted by Waldor Smeme
-San Diego, California
Little Jim sits on the topmost submerged step of his family's kidney bean shaped pool. He pushes his little tug toy around the water, humming little toot-toot sounds as he does so. Jim's father, an eBay powerseller who deals in amphibian and reptile spermatozoa, and his mother, a high profile dolphin trainer at Sea World, sip gimlets on the stone patio. Unaware she'd left the underwater dolphin gate connecting their pool to the Pacific Ocean open, Jim's mother paws at her husband's leg lovingly and offers to make him breakfast.
Little do any of the family members know that just below the surface of the pool, hungry for human brains after a long journey across the briny Pacific, a rotting avian corpse is careening toward little Jimmy like an undead torpedo of doom! From whence was this menace coming?
Little Jim sits on the topmost submerged step of his family's kidney bean shaped pool. He pushes his little tug toy around the water, humming little toot-toot sounds as he does so. Jim's father, an eBay powerseller who deals in amphibian and reptile spermatozoa, and his mother, a high profile dolphin trainer at Sea World, sip gimlets on the stone patio. Unaware she'd left the underwater dolphin gate connecting their pool to the Pacific Ocean open, Jim's mother paws at her husband's leg lovingly and offers to make him breakfast.
Little do any of the family members know that just below the surface of the pool, hungry for human brains after a long journey across the briny Pacific, a rotting avian corpse is careening toward little Jimmy like an undead torpedo of doom! From whence was this menace coming?
-Okidoki, Japan
Three thousand miles away and three months earlier, disgruntled zoologist Hiroshi Takotama finishes hatching his nefarious scheme, literally, with gentle taps of his white gloved fingers. He had reanimated a dead chunk of penguin by altering its DNA and stuffing it into an aborted penguin egg. With the final block of sea turtle DNA, his beloved pet emperor (-ress?) penguin, Shumi, would rise again. And with his ingenious modifications to her genetic makeup, her cloned self would be invincible from death! How he'd missed her companionship, her oil-slick feather-like things, her cooing chirps. In the long year since her original drowning, he'd toiled during all his free time to bring her back, stopping only when the sake had tired out his brain. He'd look tearfully at the chunks of her he'd rescued from the zoo's chum bucket and placed in a jar in the center of his ancestral shrine, while he masturbated between the couch cushions with violent thrusts.
Out of the egg his neo-Shumi emerged. How small and delicate she was! How beautiful! A month passed and Hiroshi was in bliss with his new fatherly duties for the penguin. He had, after all, added a little of his own seed to the test tube from which she was conjured.
In only another month, Shumi was larger than he, even though she rarely ate. In fact her size was almost paradoxical, since he'd never really seen his precious baby eat anything of substance at all. She'd only pick at the fish he offered her, and only then when they had sufficiently rotted; she waited for their insides to dissolve into a putrid goo encased in the scaly sacs of their skin. She'd then peck the fish open, and play with their middles, but never feast.
It was when he took his beautiful pet for a stroll by the seaside one night that he learned of her ghoulish and insatiable hunger for human brains. He slipped in a puddle, stumbling to a single knee. His back kivvied as he felt his precious bird's beak penetrate the back of his skull, he cold bird tongue dart around inside his head, behind his eyes. She pulled out is brains in slowly, in long strings like the inside of a herring. His last thoughts were spent thinking of how his carefully concocted DNA brew could have instilled in his dearest Shumi a taste for nothing but human brains. As he blinked his last, his body relaxed blissfully as the penguin's tongue repeatedly penetrated every wrinkle of his dying brain. His bowls released with a soothing plop and his genitals, when her tongue pulled at the right cortex, expelled his sticky ejaculate one last time as the climactic explosion of death spread through his veins and arteries.
Three thousand miles away and three months earlier, disgruntled zoologist Hiroshi Takotama finishes hatching his nefarious scheme, literally, with gentle taps of his white gloved fingers. He had reanimated a dead chunk of penguin by altering its DNA and stuffing it into an aborted penguin egg. With the final block of sea turtle DNA, his beloved pet emperor (-ress?) penguin, Shumi, would rise again. And with his ingenious modifications to her genetic makeup, her cloned self would be invincible from death! How he'd missed her companionship, her oil-slick feather-like things, her cooing chirps. In the long year since her original drowning, he'd toiled during all his free time to bring her back, stopping only when the sake had tired out his brain. He'd look tearfully at the chunks of her he'd rescued from the zoo's chum bucket and placed in a jar in the center of his ancestral shrine, while he masturbated between the couch cushions with violent thrusts.
Out of the egg his neo-Shumi emerged. How small and delicate she was! How beautiful! A month passed and Hiroshi was in bliss with his new fatherly duties for the penguin. He had, after all, added a little of his own seed to the test tube from which she was conjured.
In only another month, Shumi was larger than he, even though she rarely ate. In fact her size was almost paradoxical, since he'd never really seen his precious baby eat anything of substance at all. She'd only pick at the fish he offered her, and only then when they had sufficiently rotted; she waited for their insides to dissolve into a putrid goo encased in the scaly sacs of their skin. She'd then peck the fish open, and play with their middles, but never feast.
It was when he took his beautiful pet for a stroll by the seaside one night that he learned of her ghoulish and insatiable hunger for human brains. He slipped in a puddle, stumbling to a single knee. His back kivvied as he felt his precious bird's beak penetrate the back of his skull, he cold bird tongue dart around inside his head, behind his eyes. She pulled out is brains in slowly, in long strings like the inside of a herring. His last thoughts were spent thinking of how his carefully concocted DNA brew could have instilled in his dearest Shumi a taste for nothing but human brains. As he blinked his last, his body relaxed blissfully as the penguin's tongue repeatedly penetrated every wrinkle of his dying brain. His bowls released with a soothing plop and his genitals, when her tongue pulled at the right cortex, expelled his sticky ejaculate one last time as the climactic explosion of death spread through his veins and arteries.
-San Diego, California
Jim's father looked to his son who was playing in the pool with his toy tugboats, still unaware that two hundred pounds of brain-hungry reanimated penguin was zooming at his son underwater at about mach-3.
"Sonja, babe,, let's go inside and have sex like irresponsible teenagers in an eighties horror movie," he said to his wife.
"Frank, stop it. We can't just leave Jimmy alone in the pool."
"He'll be fine. I'm horny."
She looked down to his penis-region and imagined his manly rod slowly engorging beneath his fuchsia swim trunks. She nodded in assent.
"Jim, honey," she called. "Put on your water wings for Mommy, okay?"
Before Jim could return even a "Yes, Mommy," a black blur of carnage breached the services and clamped its vicious jaws around the child's head. The gigantic penguin easily dragged Jim beneath he surface. Jim's parents watched in wretched terror as the calm blue surface of the pool was flooded with a bloody red Rorschach of their child's brain fluids. Jim floated up from the depths. His muscles twitched with spasm and he looked almost as if he were trying to doggy paddle to the edge, which he would have been doing if he wasn't dead. Unfortunately, most of his head was missing and what remained served as a mere cavity where his forming mind had once dwelled, encased in his young brain which was no little more than penguin feed. The tug toy floated into this cavity, bobbing in the goo like a real tug in a jetty enclave.
Frank darted forward to pull his son's limp body from the red tinged pool water. As he did, the gargantuous undead penguin burst forth from the water and landed gracefully on her enormous webbed feet. She tuxedo-shuffled along the poolside, tucking her rotted wings behind her body. Those wings were useless out of the water anyway.
The psychotic zombie penguin emitted a gurgling caw before tearing off Frank's left arm with her razor-sharp beak. Sonja ran forward to her husband's aid, but was too late. Shumi was already feeding from his skull like a monstrous humming bird guzzling nectar. His body flopped forward and the excess blood and brain juices poured through the bung torn into his head, slowly flowing over his son's open wounds and melding the fluids of father and son atop the pool's surface water.
Sonja pulled a crossbow from beneath a lounge chair. Frank had annoyed her when he'd decided to stow various weapons around their home. She already missed everything about him, though, and whispered his name as she unloaded bolt upon bolt into the giant zombie penguin's barrel-like chest.
With a howl, Shumi plopped back into the water and out the dolphin gate into the ocean. Sonja cried with her head in sad hands, while the bloody carapaces of her family bobbed in the water before her.
Sonja's life had been permanently altered forever. She would no longer study the porpoises; one single purpose was left for her to live her life for. She would spend her every living breath stalking the gigantic zombified penguin that had mercilessly devoured the grey matter that had once been her family's brains. She picked up the crossbow, then searched the house for other weapons Frank had had hidden: whips, mines, poison, a few spears and daggers, amongst other things. She would have her vengeance or die seeking it.
The next installment of Zombie Penguin Shumi Attack Spree:
Shumi at the Fish Market
Jim's father looked to his son who was playing in the pool with his toy tugboats, still unaware that two hundred pounds of brain-hungry reanimated penguin was zooming at his son underwater at about mach-3.
"Sonja, babe,, let's go inside and have sex like irresponsible teenagers in an eighties horror movie," he said to his wife.
"Frank, stop it. We can't just leave Jimmy alone in the pool."
"He'll be fine. I'm horny."
She looked down to his penis-region and imagined his manly rod slowly engorging beneath his fuchsia swim trunks. She nodded in assent.
"Jim, honey," she called. "Put on your water wings for Mommy, okay?"
Before Jim could return even a "Yes, Mommy," a black blur of carnage breached the services and clamped its vicious jaws around the child's head. The gigantic penguin easily dragged Jim beneath he surface. Jim's parents watched in wretched terror as the calm blue surface of the pool was flooded with a bloody red Rorschach of their child's brain fluids. Jim floated up from the depths. His muscles twitched with spasm and he looked almost as if he were trying to doggy paddle to the edge, which he would have been doing if he wasn't dead. Unfortunately, most of his head was missing and what remained served as a mere cavity where his forming mind had once dwelled, encased in his young brain which was no little more than penguin feed. The tug toy floated into this cavity, bobbing in the goo like a real tug in a jetty enclave.
Frank darted forward to pull his son's limp body from the red tinged pool water. As he did, the gargantuous undead penguin burst forth from the water and landed gracefully on her enormous webbed feet. She tuxedo-shuffled along the poolside, tucking her rotted wings behind her body. Those wings were useless out of the water anyway.
The psychotic zombie penguin emitted a gurgling caw before tearing off Frank's left arm with her razor-sharp beak. Sonja ran forward to her husband's aid, but was too late. Shumi was already feeding from his skull like a monstrous humming bird guzzling nectar. His body flopped forward and the excess blood and brain juices poured through the bung torn into his head, slowly flowing over his son's open wounds and melding the fluids of father and son atop the pool's surface water.
Sonja pulled a crossbow from beneath a lounge chair. Frank had annoyed her when he'd decided to stow various weapons around their home. She already missed everything about him, though, and whispered his name as she unloaded bolt upon bolt into the giant zombie penguin's barrel-like chest.
With a howl, Shumi plopped back into the water and out the dolphin gate into the ocean. Sonja cried with her head in sad hands, while the bloody carapaces of her family bobbed in the water before her.
Sonja's life had been permanently altered forever. She would no longer study the porpoises; one single purpose was left for her to live her life for. She would spend her every living breath stalking the gigantic zombified penguin that had mercilessly devoured the grey matter that had once been her family's brains. She picked up the crossbow, then searched the house for other weapons Frank had had hidden: whips, mines, poison, a few spears and daggers, amongst other things. She would have her vengeance or die seeking it.
The next installment of Zombie Penguin Shumi Attack Spree:
Shumi at the Fish Market
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