“So,” I said, eyeing the card festooned with a seemingly random series of punches, “what the heck do I do with it?”

“Well, you stick it in the machine and hope that it gives you the response you’re looking for.”

The machine, of course, was an obstinate hulk of steel, looming over us in mute omniscience, glaring down with its handfuls of malignantly glinting gauges, like some perverted mechanical spider face festooned tangles of multicolored wire-bundle hair. Near eye-level was the input slot, a featureless orifice framed with burnished brass, perhaps a sardonic attempt at a belly button by whoever had birthed this mechanical monstrosity. But it fed the hungry city above, so who was he to complain?

“And if it’s the wrong response?”

“I’m sure it will be fine.”

“But we don’t even know what that card means, or what it does...”

But it had been in the case with the shiny otherwordly markings, and when the glitches had begun, all anyone had been able to think of was to send them down here to feed the machine once again.

The haunting opening strains of the orchestral version of “O Canada” played waveringly from the trumpet of the archaic, hand-wound phonograph. It would play, perhaps, through once more before winding down, and I could hardly find the strength to crank it back to life. The cold exhausted me - the cabin, while still standing, provided only marginal protection from the outside, and the guttering candle - one of my last - provided little in the way of comforting warmth. I had run out of firewood days ago, and there was too much snow to try gathering more. I curled tighter under the heap of blankets and hoped for a change.

“It’s just you and me, now.” I leveled my pistol at him, the center dot of the sight wavering crazily across his face as my hands trembled. He leaned against the wall, a thin shaft of light cutting across his body, illuminating one eye, a bloodied corner of a mouth, a sliver of grey shirt with a dark spot quickly spreading downward from his abdomen. His own pistol hung by his side, half-shrouded in the gloom, its silver frame glinting every so often as his hand swung in and out of the light, trying vaguely to raise the weapon but failing to find the energy to do so. I could see his chest heaving, his breath coming in ragged gasps, his face knotted with pain. “It’s over.”

“It’s never over,” he said, and pulled the trigger, the round ricocheting wildly off of the concrete, missing one of his feet by inches. He tried to pull the gun up again, but quickly grimaced in pain, his arm slapping back against his side, as his fingers released the pistol from their slackening grip. The weapon clattered to the ground with an oddly hollow metallic clanking, and as the gun slid into the sliver of light, I could see that its slide was locked back on an empty chamber.

The aliens were delicate, spindly things, bent at odd angles, twisted geometric absurdities hobbling about like some sort of origami gone horribly wrong. They came down in a ship with walls as thin as they were, shimmering in an ever-changing assortment of colors, bright and flashy in comparison to the occupants, who seemed to have a different shade of grey across every plane of their body. They were powerful, though - one pointed, and the barn went up, consumed by strange, blue-green flames, and another pointed when my cousin Jeb got too close, a bright beam of something cleanly severing and cauterizing his left arm at the shoulder. From my hiding place in the tool shed, I watched as they used their beams to butcher half our cows (and I mean really butcher them, like seasoned slaughterhouse workers), and chase the chickens back and forth across their pen with the terrible weapons. They were so engrossed that they didn’t even notice the clouds swelling up across the sky, although they started at the first crack of thunder. The rain came next, buckets and buckets of it, raining down on the corrugated metal roof in a frenzied drumbeat.

This story was one of my submissions for everydayfiction.com. Sadly, it didn't quite make the cut, but it was praised for "interesting characters and natural sounding dialogue," and "solid prose." In any case, it's no longer restricted from publication, so you can now read it here.

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"So, you're stuck here too?" The man asking the question was standing outside the bus shelter, the rain running in rivulets across the folds of his translucent blue poncho. Despite the stormy, grey expanse of sky above, the man’s eyes were mostly obscured by a pair of CHP-style sunglasses, and he had chosen to do away with the poncho’s hood in favor of a floppy, soaked-through boonie hat. Even with the poncho, he was soaking wet, and water even dripped from both sides of his thick, drooping mustache. I was almost afraid to ask him why he was standing there, instead of taking cover inside.

Warning: The following "story" is highly experimental.

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Muscles hurt.

Daily inventory of fears and loathings – parked cars, moving cars, cigarettes, loud and obnoxious, hectic states, overwork, boredom, televised depression, politics.

“Time for class! Time for class! Time for class!”

Does this make any sense to you?

A cut-up: Yeah, even though I think Neway, the way to a debt-free life, I posted last I was going to do a follow up matching domain for your email address!

Does his make any sense to you?

Corrugated steel roof. Fluorescent lights gleam, bare bulbs unobscured by diffusion gratings. Significant large speakers that appear in the shape of TV screens. Ancient iMac keyboard. Figures that Microsoft wouldn’t know how to spell the word iMac.

“Time for lass! Time for lass! Time for lass!”

Someone once stated that the key quality in all music is repetition.

LOVE. MOTHER. FATHER. COUNTRY.

ME

It’s not a poem, even though you think it is.

Encryption – the NSA looks for things that aren’t there. Reading between the lines-

Daily inventory of happiness – projects, pornography, distractions, procrastination, sleep.

Cold. Endless expanses of cold.

Walking the place like this, it's inevitable. It's not a unique feeling when you're patrolling the grid.

Fleeting images of happiness flickering by your soul, wrapping around you like an errant gust of wind...

The grid is imperfect. It leaks. Neural impulses seep from its intricate weavings.

Somebody's got to patrol the grid.

The sense of disconnection is almost overwhelming. Sometimes your optic nerves stimulate themselves for lack of stimulus - blinking images of neon brightness flash and linger as false afterimages of a light that never was.

The only touch is the chill - it beats against you, palpable, overwhelming the thin rustle of cloth and synthetic fabrics rubbing against skin, taut insulation trying to damp out all cold and feeling but only succeeding in one.

It wouldn't be so bad if the damned thing didn't leak.

Like a crack in the shroud of a sensory-deprivation chamber, it focused you, drew you forward, made you wait for each glimpse of light. Each leak focusing your entire comprehension towards it.

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The following is an unusual style of modern writing called a "cut-up," a technique I learned in a fiction-writing class some years back (in fact, this piece was actually done for that class). It's basically created by cutting up random things into small snippets of phrases, mixing them all up in a hat, pulling them out one by one, and seeing what results. I suppose, in a way, it's the literary equivalent of certain types of electronic music - an unusual premise with often surprisingly interesting results.
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"Can you tell me what time it is?"

She's seventeen, and cute as hell. I turn away from where I've been staring at my own reflection in the shop window and humming dance music to myself. "Boom, boom, boom, like a hammer through the heart..."
My watch's four minutes fast. A little mental arithmetic - It's 7:15 A.M. God, I haven't done math in ages.
"It's, uh... seven-ten."
"Thanks." She walks away. I can't remember what I had been staring at.

"Excuse me, young man, can you please tell me the time?"