Telecommunications III
Last week Alexandra N. posted a selfie on X.com, the everything website from which much good cheer emerges. It was a good selfie. It featured a fashionable dress and a full-length mirror and all kinds of other small objects of a similar nature. Seeing this, a tungsten-heavy desire to post my own fashionable selfie crushed my soft, custard-like brainorgan. So I went into the bathroom and took seventy-nine selfies in eighty-six minutes. The selfies were horrendous. My strange and alien garb hung creased and ill-fitting from my long, lumpy body. My attempts at a humanoid smile resembled the menacing upper-lip undulations of a small yet splenetic manul. Hours later, my wife slammed her powerful fist against the bathroom door and asked me what the hell I was doing. In a panic I dropped my phone in the toilet. I depressed the chipped silver handle and held it there for sixteen minutes. I mashed my blunt cheekbone against the thin door and said, I’m trying to show the world that I exist.
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Cleanliness II
There are thirty-three wild manuls living in the labyrinthine, parking-lot-sized garden behind our house. Thirty-two of the round-bodied cats sport the same endearing forehead dent as our beloved pet manul named Ref, who has lived inside our house with us for the last 232 years. The 33rd manul is the color of fresh magma, as if he was extruded from a jagged fissure in the earth’s warm and plasticine mantle. Each day at high noon, my wife and I bring Ref to our unpapered bedroom window so he can watch his feral brethren below take crazed sand baths in the dirt until they pant with ecstatic exhaustion. But the mysterious orange manul does not join them. Instead, he lounges in the center of the garden like a stone, his firelicked fur absorbing the continent-distorting light of the corybantic sun.
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Extemporaneousness
There is a metal folding chair sitting beside a railroad crossing in the forest on the edge of town. A man wearing a full-body rat costume sits in the chair every night from 11:56 p.m. to 4:16 a.m. Between three and six trains roar past the trembling ratman each night. Amid the screech and clatter of the trains, the ratman gnaws on a five-pound bag of fuji apples and recites from his squeaking memory the ancient and esoteric history of the North American ratmen.
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Steve Gergley is the author of a bunch of books and a lot of weird writings of an indeterminate nature. His new novel, Stone Cells, will be published by Translucent Eyes Press on August 28th, 2026. He tweets @GergleySteve. His fiction can be found at: https://stevegergleyauthor.wordpress.com/. He’s also the editor of scaffold literary magazine.