Fiction Fragments Weird fiction pieces by Clark Humphrey 4/7/90-11/15/90 Cartoon: Three middle aged women, nude, in a suburban kitchen sipping coffee. A Swing World magazine is on the table before them. #1: I'd say four men per party is a good range for a beginning swinger. How about you? #2: Of course we all use condoms these days, but I'm still on the pill. It's so I'm not flowing during the same week as a BIG party... #3: I just remembered where I first saw the woman my husband's with right now! I set her hair just last week!... Long ago, when movie theaters were large and grocery stores were small... eros one-shot story: him: your voice, your eyes, your lips, your breasts, your skin... her: my voice, my eyes, my lips, my breasts, my skin... IDEA: Old-fashioned story of a loving nuclear family, including the young sensitive writer trying to write what she knows, as her teacher always advised. Only thing is, the autobio is not "nice" like Waltons or I Remember Mama, it mentions what really goes on in the family, the father beating up on and/or raping the kids, the mother ignoring or patronizing away the kids' pain while she stays busy forming committees of prominent respectable ladies to keep Negroes out of the neighborhood, the crusty grandfather can't stop telling obscene stories, the "failing" grandmother rattles on about radio soap opera characters as if they were real, nobody's talking about the older sister who moved into a "hotel" in the next town. As for the writer, her manuscript pages are found, read, and burned by the parents and never gets anywhere in literature, settling down to a nice job in secretarial work, eventually getting her boss to leave his wife for her. The older sister becomes a madam, then a "legit" bar owner and finally a motel owner who retires comfortably after selling her land for a freeway. The younger brother, who at the end turns out to have been the real narrator, marries a local factory heiress, squanders the money in an investment scheme, and now lives in an adults-only mobile-home park. He likes to think that he can spot the children whose parents are still having sufficient sex. He sees a good sex life as a key to a healthy, supportive marriage, and says he can spot a child who lives in a well-adjusted home, in a reasonably happy family (as opposed to a family that tries too hard to pretend to be happy). He can see it in their eyes, their self-confidence, the color in their faces, the respect they have for their own pre-sexual bodies. Teen comix hero: A streetwise kid who knows the smarts and knows the ins and outs of everything in his town. He also knows how to do all the cool things. He knows the risks of drugs, and their long-term downer effects; but he also knows the violent hypocrisy behind the conservative lifestyles touted in school as the only alternative to drugs. What's ultimately disappointing about sex mags is that invariably the women's hair, make-up, settings, and expressions don't really turn me on. Attractive nude female bodies seldom fail to affect my hormones, but the more slutty of the skin-mag pix come close to not raising my temperature a single degree. I've finally figured why -- these women, these images, are meant to capture the hormones of some other guy, some more "average" guy. Not me. Even make-believe women reject me. Good Boys, Bad Girls: Abandoned, mistreated husbands who sit alone wallowing in self-pity while their high-powered wives go on a drunken driving spree to every bar they can find, picking up basketball players and engaging in petty crimes for the hell of it. Companies you wouldn't expect to have the Christian "fish" symbol in their yellow pages ads: Escort services, small-loan companies, 50-cent-on-the-dollar tax refund cashers, plasma centers, hit men, adult bookstores The downtown historic district where everything is named after what used to be in its building: The Old Bank Cafe, the Old Slaughterhouse Mall, the Old Brothel Bookstore, Old Opium Den Sandwiches 'n' Things, the Old Marketplace Industrial Park, Old Courthouse townhomes, the Old Townhouse law offices, etc. Crusty small-town newspaper: The friendly "Pastor Bob Sez" advertorial column that starts out friendly but ends up a weekly tirade against godless sex education and satanic ultraliberals; the editorial that starts out to be about almost anything but turns out to be a plea to support your local merchants and not to shop in that new discount mall just over the county line; the folksy neighborhood gossip col. that is so incomprehensibly written it could conceivably contain code messages for one of the conspiracy groups "exposed" in lengthy letters to the editor from one old blind man; the hobby corner all about macaroni art, landscape painting, knitted beer-can hats, and knit swimsuits with quite large knit-holes. It could be a 1974 edition, full of blistering defenses of our hero Nixon. Fanboy to troublesome fangirl: You're just like one of those Transformers that looks like an Autobot but it's really a Decepticon. Whatever happened to the Blasting Cap scare? Hanna and Barbera are in hell, running from the Devil, only they can't make their feet reach the ground. They keep running in place, suspended two feet in the air... A woman is discussing the shift in energy she feels whenever a man walks into a room of women. How she feels like stopping her conversation in mid-word, even when it's about a totally co-ed topic such as office politics. Some people live their lives in the memory of a year. Others live their lives in the memory of a single moment. Which are you?

2001 COLUMNS 2000 COLUMNS 1999 COLUMNS 1999 COLUMNS 1998 COLUMNS 1997 COLUMNS 1996 COLUMNS 1995 COLUMNS 1986-94 COLUMNS ESSAYS FICTION X-WORDS 'THE BIG BOOK OF MISC.' THE BOOK 'LOSER' MISCmedia, THE MAGAZINE FUTURE PROJECTS CYBER STUFF THINGS I LIKE 'MISC. TALK' DISCUSSION FORUM CLARK'S CULTURE CORRAL: BOOKS, MUSIC, MOVIES REVIEWED AND SOLD Books Popular Music Classical Music Video (Support MISC. Media; make your Amazon.com purchases thru this link.)