While I attempt to dig myself out of my depressive funk, enjoy this thing I wrote years ago that I re-read the other day and didn’t hate.

—

When I write my story, there will be no hero.  There will be no happy ending.

There will be an infinite sadness, a streak of pain painted across the night sky, an arc of red against a field of black.

There will be blood, and a wailing, and a gnashing of teeth.

And ponies.  There will probably be ponies.

* * *

My main character will not be a white male.  No, my protagonist won’t even be human, or sentient, or recognizable as a character.  It’ll be a bacterium, or a fugus, perhaps a particularly plucky protozoa.

There won’t be a determined, independent woman in the story, either.  No humans at all, except maybe as the setting.  Or the antagonist.  We’re pretty antagonistic towards every other living thing in existence, it seems, so we’d make pretty damn convincing antagonists.

* * *

I don’t really think I’ll have a theme, or follow much in the way of writing conventions.  Everyone’s done pretty much everything you can with stories that make sense, that follow narrative structure.  Hell, everything’s been done with stories that don’t follow narrative structure.  I’ve read Joyce and Bely, I know all about that whole stream of consciousness nonsense.

My story will be told through pheromones and suggestive twitches of flagella.

* * *

It won’t be a long story.  There’s no need to go on for thousands and thousands of pages, hundreds of thousands of words stacking up like bricks in a wall or CDs on a club kid’s nightstand.  There may only be a single word to my magnum opus.  It’ll be a word that rolls over the tongue, one that lolls about in the mouth, coating everything in a thin film.  Something like “lugubrious,” or “gibbous,” or possibly “sumptuous.”

Or maybe it will just be a description of some hardcore bestiality for a thousand pages.  I’m not set on anything just yet.

* * *

Ultimately, no one will read my story.  It will exist only in my head, if even there, and only for a short while if at all.  I’m not entirely certain the world is ready for my work of speculative flash fiction featuring an unknowable protagonist and us as the antagonist.  It’s a bit of a stretch, really.

Also, I haven’t found a publisher, and I’m sure as hell not gonna self-publish this mess.