THE IRONIC FANTASTIC #2
edited by
Rhys Hughes
An anthology of fantastic fiction
Copyright 2013 Rhys Hughes
Table of Contents
Dialogue Between a Prawn and Salesman by David Edwards
Ice Cold, Red Hot by Aliya Whiteley
Oriental Nightmares by Sissy Pantelis
Me Time by Steve Dodd
The Education of K. in the Land of Falling Fish by Trent Walters
Missing Gautam by Gaurav Monga
DaniilIvanovichKharms by Joshua S. Walker
A Very Unusual Request by Paulo Brito
Raju and Kishore by Gaurav Monga
Farthest Thing from Mind by Tantra Bensko
Hunted by Bridget Neate
The Telescope by Jason E. Rolfe
Eighteen Steps by Jason E. Rolfe
The Telephone Call by Jason E. Rolfe
Misanthropes by Kristine Ong Muslim
Crab Apples by Lou Antonelli
Black Stuff by Jonette Stabbert
The Iron Age by Rhys Hughes
The Honker Sting by David Gerrold
The Amazing World Inside a Woollen Ball by Fiona Funda Duffin
FOREWORD
Welcome to the second issue of The Ironic Fantastic, which like all good news and most bad girls, is late in arriving, very late in fact, about eight months late. Mind you, I have sometimes had to wait much longer for one of my own books to appear. It is not unknown for a publisher to accept a manuscript and then do nothing with it for five years. Nonetheless that doesn’t make it right and in fact the waiting is now over. Here it is.
Was the wait worth it? Only you can answer that. The Ironic Fantastic is a free ebook, so you might waste your time but never your money. As it happens I believe there are delights in store for you that will make you jump up and shout, “Free? But I wish I had paid for it!” These delights include a never-before-published story from David Gerrold (who wrote the ‘Trouble With Tribbles’ episode for Star Trek all those years ago, a particular favourite of mine in the long lost innocent days when I watched the show).
I suspect that this will be the last issue edited by me. As I said in my Foreword to the first issue, I’m just not cut off for the editing lark. I’m not even cut out for the editing owl. I do believe, however, that The Ironic Fantastic project will go from strength to strength under the helm of other editors and indeed two guest editors have already been secured for issues #3 and #4. So remember: be ironic, be fantastic and stay safe!
Rhys Hughes, August 2013
Dialogue Between a Prawn and Salesman
David Edwards
Salesman: Hello sir, would you like to buy this shoe?
Prawn: No, it is an ugly shoe.
Salesman: If you’ll allow me to contradict you, sir, I believe that it is a fine shoe. It was made in France.
Prawn: It is ugly and I will not buy it.
Salesman: Perhaps you didn’t hear me correctly with your tiny, primitive prawn ears — this shoe was made in France. Everything made in France is beautiful; croissants, the tower of Paris, Brigitte Bardot, francs…
Prawn: I was made in France and I am ugly.
Salesman: Oh, I am sorry to hear that, sir.
Prawn: It is fine. Knowing that my ugliness has fatally undermined your stupid little theory is more than sufficient compensation for my terrible and permanent ugliness.
Salesman: Nonetheless, I do not believe I am mistaken in maintaining that this shoe is a beautiful shoe.
Prawn: It is your word against mine, salesman, and my word is “no”.
Salesman: What if I were to tell you that the shoe is half price?
Prawn: You have yet to establish what its full price is so I can't say it makes a great deal of difference.
Salesman: Twenty pounds.
Prawn: Is that how much it was or how much it is?
Salesman: I don't understand.
Prawn: Nor do I. What a pickle.
Salesman: What if I were to enhance the shoe's already considerable beauty?
Prawn: How?
Salesman: I could attach a small bell?
Prawn: No.
Salesman: Or any sort of adornment or trinket, really.
Prawn: Your liver?
Salesman: I beg your pardon?
Prawn: I will buy your ugly, smelly shoe...
Salesman: It's smelly as well, is it?
Prawn: Yes. It smells of wee. But I shall buy it nonetheless if you were to whip out your liver and stuff it inside the shoe. Then it would not merely be beautiful, it would be art.
Salesman: But I would be dead.
Prawn: That is what makes it art.
Salesman: And you promise, truly promise, that'd you buy it if I do that for you?
Prawn: Absolutely.
Salesman: I'm still not sure. I like my liver.
Prawn: I like art.
Salesman: I like being alive.
Prawn: You like money as well, don't you? What is the value of a salesman's life if he does not make sacrifices for the sake of currency?
Salesman: Will you tell my wife I love her?
Prawn: I might consider it if you were to reduce the price to a more reasonable fifty pence.
Salesman: Anything to secure your custom, sir.
Prawn: Here, use this knife.
Salesman: It's plastic.
Prawn: I know.
Salesman: Isn't it for picnics and children's birthday parties and such?
Prawn: Yes it is. This could take hours. I'd get started if I were you
Salesman: Ow. [approximately nine hours later:] Th... that'll be fifty pence... please... oh god, please... call an ambulance... losing... so much... blood...
Prawn: Oh, I shouldn't worry about that now. You've got about five minutes tops by my reckoning. Now, let me just leisurely rummage about in my coin purse. I don't suppose you've change for a fiver? No? Oh wait, twenty, thirty, thirty five, forty five, forty seven, forty eight, forty nine...Oh no, that's a button. Dear me, it looks like I'm two pence short.
Salesman: You... you can have it... for forty... eight
Prawn: Oh, well that's most generous of you. You have yourself a sale, sir.
Salesman: I die... a happy man.
Ice Cold, Red Hot
Aliya Whiteley
Grímsvötn has exploded, and Robbie stands in the foyer, gazing up at the giant ice sculpture of a swan, thinking about the scarlet lipstick he is holding in his fist.
Red Hot, it's called. He took it from his wife's handbag; reached in and grabbed it while she was in the shower. And then, later, when getting ready to leave for the airport, she said, 'Where's my lipstick?', and he said, 'How can you give a flying fuck about your lipstick at a time like this? Hurry up, Liz, for Christ's sake, or you’re going to die, you do realise that, don't you? Or has that not percolated through your teeny tiny lipstick-obsessed brain?'
And all the time he had the lipstick in his pocket.
How could he be so cruel? - he wonders now. But in the next minute, before Grímsvötn’s lava reaches the beautiful ice hotel at the speed of 30km per hour, Robbie will come to understand that he has always been cruel to Liz, since their very first meeting, and she is better off without him. In fact, the whole world will be better off without him. It’s a very important minute.
Robbie strolls around the lobby, taking a circuitous route around the many sleek armchairs and groomed pot plants that appear to be necessary fixtures in every expensive hotel in the world. He struck deals in Karachi, Dubai, New York, Moscow. None of the pot plants in those hotels ever impressed him, no matter how tall they grew, how green they looked.
The ones in this lobby
look dejected; their leaves are downturned, drooping. Maybe it's the cold.
'It's cold,' he remembers saying to Liz, upon arrival, walking around the suite, fancying a martini without any bloody ice in it.
'Of course it's cold, darling, it's an ice palace.'
Liz, red-hot-lipped Liz, forced to flee her Icelandic holiday with her naked mouth on show - she must have hated that. Makeup had become her armour a long time ago; just after their marriage, in fact, when he told her she couldn't go to the Sheikh's party because it was for men only.
'Why?' she had said.
So he had, in the spirit of truth and goodness and all the concepts of morality he was still trying to hang on to back then, told her about the prostitutes.
'They're provided free,' he said. 'If I take you, you might get mistaken for one.'
After the party, when he got back to the hotel suite, she was in red lingerie, blonde hair pinned in place, and the lipstick-covered mouth smacked and stretched as she said, 'I'll be everything you need, Robbie.' Like an actress in a play, saying lines with eyes fixed on the crowd, desperate for attention.
And he had let her try to be everything, that was the cruellest part. Knowing it could never work, he had watched her stroke on her make-up every morning and face down the barons with whom he did business: oligarchs, billionaires, sons and grandsons of despots and dictators.
Robbie picks up one of the armchairs and carries it back to the swan. He stands on the armchair and examines the curved neck of the swan; it has been sculpted as if caught at the moment of take-off, wings stretched, body tilted upwards. Maybe it could fly up to heaven, given the chance.
He leans forward, and tries to grip the neck of the swan. Ice is slippery stuff, but he manages to hold on as he swings his leg over to sit in the space between where the neck meets the body. The upraised wings bolster each thigh and keep him in position, and although it's a chilly sitting position, he tells himself that pretty soon he'll be under a lake of lava, so feeling a bit shivery for a few moments probably isn't such a bad experience.
He was cold on the night he met Liz. He can picture her, outside that bar in Tokyo, lost and confused and a foot taller than any other person in his line of sight. He had commanded one of the staff to bring her to his VIP area, and she had refused. So he had gone down amongst the plebeians to meet her, shake her head, offer her a ride home. She was a teacher of English as a Foreign Language, and her students seemed to have left the bar without her. Cruelty descended upon Liz from all directions; it was drawn to that pale pink face, so naked, untouched by fashion.
He had introduced himself, and his name and face had obviously struck a chord, probably from one of those 'most eligible bachelors' features in those glossy magazines that women liked.
'I've got to go,' she had said.
'Why? We only just met. I could buy you a drink or two. Or five thousand.' He'd thought such jokes were charming. What an idiot he had been, back then.
'I can't. I'm pro-world.'
That was how she'd put it. Pro-world. Making him anti-world. Anti-future. Anti-kids and anti-fluffy bunnies and anti-holding hands and hugging trees. But he had talked her round with promises of change. She could teach him too. Maybe Humanity was his Foreign Language.
So her own gullibility was to blame. And his, too. He'd almost believed in his own bullshit. When he put her in the limo and told the chauffeur to go, to drive, to not come back, he couldn't even look her in the eye. Mainly that was because of the tinted windows, but even if they'd been as clear as ice he wouldn't have managed to tell her goodbye.
Why didn’t he go with her? Because, he realises, this is the revenge of the world, coming to get him. He could outrun this lava flow, but something else would find a way through his defences. Skin cancer, tidal wave, earthquake. He did deals, dug into the land and under the sea looking for the black stuff. It had only ever been a matter of time before the world became anti-Robbie, and retaliated.
There is a fateful rumbling from Grímsvötn. It seems the time is at hand.
The thought of the money, the shares, the control of the company all ending up in Liz's pro-world hands is not enough to see Robbie through this final moment. Even though he will undoubtedly improve the planet's lot by dying, he can't rejoice in that knowledge. He feels scared and little, and his trousers are wet. The swan is beginning to melt. It seems it's not going to take off and save him after all.
He feels the need for armour. He pops the top off the lipstick and smoothes Red Hot over his dry mouth. 'Come and get me,' he tells Grímsvötn. 'I’m ready. Be my everything.'
The rumble becomes a roar. The swan gracefully expires as the lava swallows up the earth, the sky, and the ice palace with its greedy, glowing mouth.
Oriental Nightmares
Sissy Pantelis
(1) Dream Sultan
No, you cannot have a harem, said the butterfly-witch to the handsome warrior. Harems are forbidden nowadays. Why don't you just stay with me? I know how to make you so happy and fulfilled that you will never need even to look at another woman.
The warrior was not one to be easily discouraged. He went to see another witch - there were plenty of them in the nightmare realms. A harem will be a difficult thing to realize, said the firefly witch. But there is another solution.
She taught him how to enter the dreams of the young girls and steal a kiss from them. Every time he did this, the young girl turned into a doll that became his slave. She would dance for him or sing for him or do whatever else he asked.
So the warrior ended up having the most beautiful doll collection in the dream realms. There was nothing wrong with this; nobody would punish him for loving dolls. He was the only one to know that his doll collection was the most beautiful harem in the dream world. In the real world so many lovely women were in love with him. They longed for his visit in their dreams like the beautiful captives imprisoned in underground palaces waited for their jinn masters in the old fairy tales.
(2) Veiled Woman
I am in the living room; it's dark. I know that somebody is standing outside even before anything happens. Someone knocks the door; it opens on its own and the person enters the house — a veiled woman dressed in a beautiful caftan, like the daughter of the Khalifa in the book with the Oriental stories I love so much, and the gauzy veil covers entirely her face and her head. I know that she is here for me; she came to take me and she is up to no good. I am scared to death; I try to shout but no sound comes out of my mouth. She laughs scornfully and forces me to follow her...
She takes me to an eerie house and pushes me inside it ignoring my protests. We walk through two or three corridors; we don’t stop at any of the lovely rooms along them. I am brought into a room hidden in the cave. This room is made out of flowers; it gives me the creeps. My captor compels me to enter the ghastly place that makes me think of a graveyard. I have to stay among plants as I am sick, she says. I have a virus and my place is among those other giant viruses. She laughs and pushes me inside. I reply weakly that I am NOT sick. She does not pay heed to me. The flowers start shaping into something too weird to recognize at first. Then I see that this is a dragon. I am alone in this damned room with a DRAGON!
Something evil is happening to the dragon; it seems to suffer...The dragon bleeds badly; it's dying! Someone has killed him. SHE did. The veiled woman killed the dragon. She is now cutting his tongue and eating it. She laughs like a madwoman. God, she is scary!
"Who are you? What do you want with me? "My voice trembles, I am so frightened I think I will faint. She turns her head toward me and stares at me behind her veil. I shiver as if a frozen finger ran through my spine. She is about to take off her veil and reveal her identity to me...
It's at this point I always wake up: when she is about to unveil herself. I believe that deep inside me I don't want to know. The things she does to me are always horrible, but they are nothing compared to what I will feel if she unveils herself. I prefer to let her keep her secret ev
en at the price to be tormented every night.
(3) Jinn
The dreams with the veiled woman started soon after my parents divorced. Actually, I think it was at the period when the shrink gave mom her sleeping pills. I remember this because at that moment she used to yell less at us (Ellie- my older sister- and me). The good time did not last; I think that the pill that will completely calm mom down has not yet been invented. Mind you, ever since she drinks gin and has the pills, her sleep is sound. Ellie and I are always cautious not to wake her up. We have become such experts at walking noiselessly that we call ourselves “shadow people” just so, to have fun. This is why I never get out of bed when I have nightmares. I only switch on a dim blue lamp and I try to forget the dream. Tonight I am lucky; the full moon gives enough light in the room. I hate the veiled woman in my dreams.
There is something familiar about her, but I am not sure what it is. What I know for sure is that if this goes on this way, I will need pills too. Maybe Oriental-themed dreams are fashionable nowadays for some reason. My best friend told me that she often dreams of a handsome young man dressed like a prince in the Arabian Nights. He does not come in her dreams as often as she wants him to, but when he comes, it is really awesome and he even kisses her. My friend would be happy if she could dream of him every night; I replied that we could do an exchange and she could have the veiled woman, who is bound to be there every night and to leave me some of her dreams where she waits for the lovely prince. My friend laughed at this. She says that we cannot exchange dreams, but I could ask the wind spirits and maybe my wish would be fulfilled as they have powers in the dream world. What are they called again? —Jinn. It sounds quite like the spirit in mom’s bottle. It sometimes makes her laugh, but mostly gives her headaches and red eyes and it also tastes dreadfully (I have drunk once; I will never do this again. It tastes like poison — or what poison should taste like, I guess). I hope that the wind spirits will be more helpful than mom’s gin.
Watching the moon, I mentally pray to the Oriental spirits to make me dream of the lovely prince. My eyes close, I hear some buzzing noise. A mosquito has probably entered the room. I don’t care; I am too tired to fight it. Before I know I am in the dark living room and I know that someone will come there for me.
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