Defenestrationism.net

We’re pleased to announce the posting dates for our

2015 FLASH SUITE Contest

December 25-27th: Indigenous Trinity by Misty Ellinburg

December 28th- 31st: THEATER STAR by David Giannini

January 1st-3rd: winter(verb) by Laryssa Wirstiuk

January 3rd- 17th: Fan Voting (fan voting works American Idol style, so

!vote early and vote often!)

January 19th, MLK Day (US): Winners announced

home

by

by

We are pleased to present our judges for the

2015 FLASH SUITE Contest

defenestrationism.net adheres strictly to CLMP contest ethical models of visibility (not of sight/blindness, of see-through-ness).

Our contests are judged by a four person panel, with two weeks of online fan voting counted as an additional judge vote.  Finalists are selected by ed., publisher, owner Paul-Newell Reaves, and monitor, ed. eatstuf.  In the event of judge and fan votes being equal, Paul-Newell Reaves becomes tie-breaker.

Introducing our Judges:

The winner of our 2013 !Short Story Contest!

Christian McKay

has been published in journals the likes of Bewildering Stories, Danse Macabre, Well Told Tales, and Everyday Weirdness.

Singer, rapper, radio-host

Lady Moet,

calls herself the Beast from Southeast D.C. and is co-host of the Cruddy Corner on Cruddy Rite Radio , broadcasting Tuesdays 8-12pm, Eastern Standard Time.  Read about her life in music, here.  Her current musical project, the Cruddy Crankerz, co-stars her husband Ty “the Monster”.

A.B.W. graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in English.  Among other jobs he has worked as a boat captain in Maine, a Military Policeman in Germany, a brokerage clerk in Philadelphia and New York, and restaurant owner and bartender in Washington, DC.

Martha Hubbard lives on an island in the North Baltic, off the coast of Estonia. A place of strange gods, mysteries, tragedies and wonder, it provides the perfect bed-rock for a writer of dark fantasy. Her stories have appeared in the Innsmouth Free Press’ anthologies, Historical Lovecraft. Candle in the Attic Window and Future Lovecraft and Lisette’s Tales of the Imaginary. She has also served on the jury for the annual ARESFFT (The Association for Recognition of Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation) award, as well as regularly reviewing books on her own Live Journal blog: http://saare-snowqueen.livejournal.com/

Fan Voting begins January 3rd, once all FLASH SUITES are posted, and ends January 17th.

Winners announced January 19th, MLK Day (US)

home

by

by

We are honored to announce our finalists for the

2015 FLASH SUITE Contest

only at Defenestrationism.net

Daily posting of the Suites begins December 25th, 2014

Fan voting begins January 3rd, 2015

Winners announced, January 19th, 2015

What is a FLASH SUITE, you may ask?

Meet the Judges.

And the finalists are…

In order of First Submission:

Indigenous Trinity by Misty Ellinburg

Misty Shipman Ellingburg is a Shoalwater Bay Indian from the coast of Western Washington. Her passions include teaching English (writing & rhetoric), social-justice blogging, and participating in Tribal Journeys. Currently, she is blogging about Ferguson at mfaconfessions.wordpress.com, curating for an American Indian literary journal, Four Winds (fourwindslitmag.org), and desperately cramming for finals at the University of Idaho, where she is obtaining her MFA in writing, class of 2016.

THEATER STAR by David Giannini

David Giannini’s most recently published collections of poetry include AZ TWO (Adastra Press,) a “Featured Book” in the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival; RIM/WAVE in 2012;, and  five chapbooks in 2013, including  INVERSE MIRROR, a collaboration with artist, Judith Koppel; and his full-length book of selected prosepoems, SPAN of THREAD, will be published before the end of this year. His work appears in national and international literary magazines and anthologies.  Awards include:  Massachusetts Artists Fellowship Awards; The Osa and Lee Mays Award For Poetry; an award for prosepoetry from the University of Florida; and a 2009 Finalist Award from the Naugatuck Review. He has been a gravedigger; beekeeper; taught at Williams College, The University of Massachusetts, and Berkshire Community College, as well as preschoolers and high school students, among others; and he worked as a psychiatric case manager for 31 years. He lives among trees in Becket, Massachusetts with his wife, Pam.

winter(verb) by Laryssa Wirstiuk

Laryssa Wirstiuk is a writer and writing instructor based in Jersey City, NJ. She teaches writing and digital media at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. Her collection of short stories The Prescribed Burn won Honorable Mention in the 21st Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards (Mainstream Fiction category). Her writing has been published in IthacaLit, Hamilton Stone Review, and The Stockholm Review of Literature and is forthcoming in Barely South Review. You can view all her work here: http://www.laryssawirstiuk.com.

Books and Bonafides

by

by

We are pleased to announce our judges for the

2015 FLASH SUITE Contest

defenestrationism.net adheres strictly to CLMP contest ethical models of visibility (not of sight/blindness, of see-through-ness).

Our contests are judged by a four person panel, with two weeks of online fan voting counted as an additional judge vote.  Finalists are selected by ed., publisher, owner Paul-Newell Reaves, and monitor, ed. eatstuf.  In the event of judge and fan votes being equal, Paul-Newell Reaves becomes tie-breaker.

Introducing our Judges:

2013 !Short Story Contest! Winner,

Christian McKay Heidicker

has made a handful of accomplishments outside of video games.  His first book, Cure for the Common Universe, will be released by Simon & Schuster in the summer of 2016.  He published a short story called ‘There Are No Marshmallows in Camelot’ on Cast of Wonders and co-created a website called foxingbureau.com.  He lives with the love of his life in Salt Lake City … and he often wonders how in the hell he did it.

Lady Moet Beast

the Beast From Southeast

What can’t be said about this interesting lady? Godmother of D.C. Rap, multi-genre lyricist, producer, poet, musician, writer, singer, actress, and the list goes on. Performing live since the age of 5, determined to be heard, adored and admired, Lady Moet Beast has performed all over the U.S. for the past 25 years. Not your average HipHop Femcee she has grown along with her husband obtaining her own band The Cruddy Crankerz, Beast & Monster Ink,  Drama City Records/Draztick Measurez., Cruddy Rite Publishing, Cruddy Rite Radio, Monster Graphix, and Lioness Filmz. Lady Moet Beast has set a lot of trends from green dreadlocks to hardcore femcees in Washington, D.C. and abroad.

A.B.W. graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in English.  Among other jobs he has worked as a boat captain in Maine, a Military Policeman in Germany, a brokerage clerk in Philadelphia and New York, and restaurant owner and bartender in Washington, DC.

Martha Hubbard lives on an island in the North Baltic, off the coast of Estonia. A place of strange gods, mysteries, tragedies and wonder, it provides the perfect bed-rock for a writer of dark fantasy. Her stories have appeared in the Innsmouth Free Press’ anthologies, Historical Lovecraft. Candle in the Attic Window and Future Lovecraft and Lisette’s Tales of the Imaginary. She has also served on the jury for the annual ARESFFT (The Association for Recognition of Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation) award, as well as regularly reviewing books on her own Live Journal blog: http://saare-snowqueen.livejournal.com/

back to 2015 FLASH SUITE Contest

home

by

by

We are pleased to announce that

2014 FLASH SUITE Contest finalist

Rhonda Eikamp

and her flash suite,

 Our Ghosts Read us Bedtime Stories

are now a part of the Flagship work of Defenestrationism,

the Art of Throwing People Out Windows,

check out some exerpts, or

tune in over the next two weeks for the four posts of the suite.

home

by

by

Welcome to the Defenestrationism reality.

The inaugural FLASH SUITE Contest was a smashing success,

with an average of 200 hits each day of fan voting.  So,

drum roll please…

The Fan favorites:

Amy Severson’s Human Error with 48% of the first place votes;

and a tie between

Julie Duffy’s Broken Toys

and Andrew Leon Hudson’s The lines, the trees the cliffs, the eaves

both with 20% of the second place vote.

Our prestigious, non-financial, Darkhorse Accolade goes to,

Andrew Leon Hudson’s The lines, the trees the cliffs, the eaves

And our second place winner by our 4 judge panel is

John Vicary’s the End of the World (as we know it)

And our grand prize winner:

Barry Basden, We Are Frantic in Baton Rouge

Meet the Finalists

The Suites

Be sure to check out our multi-media content,

with readings from Paul-Newell Reaves and Thomas Matthews of

the Zoo Illogical Gardens,

and coming soon

poetrymanusa Michael Lee Johnson reads

Linda Cancer

by

by

Hello, and welcome to the Defenestrationism reality.

We are pleased to announce our celebrity judges for

the FLASH SUITE Contest.

The winner of our 2013 !Short Story Contest!

Christian McKay has been published in journals the likes of Bewildering Stories, Danse Macabre, Well Told Tales, and Everyday Weirdness.

Lady Moet, the Beast from Southeast D.C.

is co-host of the Cruddy Corner on Windcradio.com ,
broadcasting Tuesday and Thursday 7-10pm, Eastern Standard Time.

Read about her life in music, here.

Her current musical project, the Cruddy Crankerz,

co-stars her husband Ty “the Monster”.

Our two non-celebrity judges choose to remain anonymous.

by

by

This work is a finalist in our FLASH SUITE Contest.  What is a

FLASH SUITE you may ask? defenestrationism.net does not support an actions or opinions endorsed in this contest.

Important to Read the Suite in Order

Rhonda Eikamp is originally from Texas and lives in Germany. Stories of hers appeared up to 2001 in venues such as Barrelhouse and The Urbanite, after which she climbed out the window for awhile. Since refenestrating in 2012, she has published fiction in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Birkensnake and Apocrypha and Abstractions. When not writing fiction, she works as a translator of German legalese, which is as crazy-making as one might think. Favorite story with defenestration: Village of the Mermaids, by Lance Olsen.

Falling from Grace

I tried to touch you once. This was when we were falling, you up and me down, or maybe it was the other way around. There’s only one shaft here for those who’ve slipped and started falling, but two directions to fall in, so maybe it was inevitable that we pass each other at some point, floating in that fell grace of a moment when everything seems to slow, synapses not lightning anymore but a soft dreamy thunder in suddenly hushed air. Face next to face, unexpected, close up and personal. Passing like that, it became every moment of us, all at the same time: we were in college, you were telling that professor about Kabul and I turned to see who was talking and fell in love with your hair, then we stood in the back stacks at the library, crying, and you said, Get rid of it. You took a book from the shelf and spied through the hole you’d made because you’d heard something in the next aisle, you thought someone was listening on the other side. I don’t know if I can do it, I whispered. You said, I’ll pay for it. You did. Another moment, and we were married, walking across the dunes at Ocracoke and the salt air was an ellipse in our lungs, a long line of dots making it hard to breathe or talk because we were already getting our divorce, making ellipses of ourselves to each other.
That’s when I reached a hand out to touch your face and time sped up again. It faded, we passed, me going up and you going down or vice versa. The rush of air booming back into place, and you were gone.
I saw you once in the least likely place. I shouldn’t have been in Paris anyway, because it does things to me, the miasmic canyon air above, stoned cliff buildings that march on forever, a labyrinth, so I always flee down into the Métro, where the air is hot in winter and uriney and somehow comforting. I was waiting for a train there to take me to Boucicaut, when murmurs rose and heads turned and I saw that a man who was either high or drunk or both had slipped down into the track well and was trying to cross to the other side. I felt that slippage in my gut; I’d never seen a live disaster, death or even injury close up. Most people haven’t and never will. Others were rushing to pull alarms, there was nothing I could do anyway, and I was going to look away so I wouldn’t see it happen if a train came in, I was going to look away, when I saw you standing on the opposite platform. It was so improbable – so many points in time had had to come together to get me from Charlotte to Europe that they formed a labyrinth themselves – but I wasn’t mistaken. You’d seen me too. There was that same Belstaff jacket that must have had antique value by then. Your disheveled hair. I took it all in, and all the moments that had ceased to have meaning did again. We did things wrong, went about it backwards. Forever falling in love, but never arriving in it. Talking, until we had nothing left to say, or what there was to say had become trapped in the ellipses.
The man down on the tracks had reached the other side, but he couldn’t climb up. Too drunk or broken. He’d make it halfway up and slip back down. Other men had converged on the spot but you were closest to him and you knelt and grasped his arm, dragged at his clothes. He kept making it hard. Seconds went by. I didn’t know where the third rail was, there was a rumbling in my ears, soft thunder, starting up from the tunnel.
I thought, We’ll never be here again.

E n d

have you read all the suites?

then vote here

by

by

This work is a finalist in our FLASH SUITE Contest.  What is a

FLASH SUITE you may ask? defenestrationism.net does not support an actions or opinions endorsed in this contest.

Important to Read the Suite in Order

Rhonda Eikamp is originally from Texas and lives in Germany. Stories of hers appeared up to 2001 in venues such as Barrelhouse and The Urbanite, after which she climbed out the window for awhile. Since refenestrating in 2012, she has published fiction in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Birkensnake and Apocrypha and Abstractions. When not writing fiction, she works as a translator of German legalese, which is as crazy-making as one might think. Favorite story with defenestration: Village of the Mermaids, by Lance Olsen.

The inspector with a knife in the library

“Another faller, boss,” Kolpinski informed him.

McElroy crouched beside the junior officer examining the corpse, felt the pain in his knees. Like dice banging around in there. Snake-eyes you lose, age calling his number, though he wasn’t that old. Just bone-weary of it all. At least the body in front of Detective McElroy was a worse mess than he was. Head shattered to a purple pulp, the rest of the guy like a rag doll, most of the turquoise robe ripped away during the long fall down the shaft, probably by protruding objects: broken railings, flagpoles, dinosaur bones – hell, who knew what they got up to on the higher levels. McElroy used a handkerchief to tilt what was left of the corpse’s head and saw the crusted black slice along the throat.

“Wake up and smell your morning breath,” he told Kolpinski. “Mushhead here didn’t fall. He was thrown.” McElroy stood and stepped to the borough’s central shaft. “Someone getting rid of the evidence.” He gazed up into the hexagonal dark that yawned like a beast maw above and then peered down into the maelstrom of nothing below and as always it made him dizzy. Not good to contemplate the depths that exist both ways. A guy could lose his breakfast that way, which in McElroy’s case would be no loss – milky coffee and a filter-tip, thank you – but he pulled back before his stomach could make it reality.

“So murder,” Kolpinski mumbled.

No accelerating-at-9.81-m/s² shit, sherlock. McElroy was bored with all these corpses. The bounce factor, he called it. Bodies fell. If you hung around a shaft for an hour, you’d see at least two whistle past. Pure chance was going to throw one now and then against a balcony rail at just the right angle to land it on the level below. Splat. A college professor who’d helped McElroy on a case once had had a theory that if the levels were infinite, then the number of people tossed or offing themselves or just accidentally slipping must be infinite too, so that at some point further down every shaft must accrete into an unmoving bung of corpses. The detritus of death blocking itself up.

McElroy’d understood that. He knew from constipation.

“From how far up you think he come?” Kolpinski asked. From his crouch beside the corpse the junior officer gazed upward with his mouth open. He looked like a primitive from prehistoric times, told the shaft was a god.

McElroy shrugged. “Ever talk to Carson in pathology? He’s got this theory you can tell how far a body’s fallen. Something to do with the nitrogen in the blood.”

So it was boredom sucking the life from him. The city, laid out like a honeycomb, always the same, a logical labyrinth, nine million people – or six or eight, the census always vague on that – in their gray iterations, forever repeating their boring sins. Get that number of people together and you’d think he’d be able to find someone for himself. Her. The her. The woman of his dreams, an idea only, as non-existent as some stuffy professor’s theory. That’s what he needed. McElroy pulled a clementine from his pocket and began to peel it with a lino knife. Someone for everyone, they said, so why not for him. He felt her sometimes at night, when the beast’s maw was close, when he became its tongue, whipped about until he curled into a ball and screamed because the goddam bed was empty.

He was about to put a section in his mouth when Lopez ducked in from a side hall wearing a look.

“I’m busy,” McElroy said.

“Hate to take you away from your first love –” Lopez glanced at the body and rubbed his nose – “but patrol just picked up this nutjob wandering the trash hexes. Almost dead, had nothing but a book with her. Kept going on about some murder. Said she come down through the empty zone. Captain wants you to talk to her.”

McElroy put his knife away. He’d have to take a look at her.
So boring.

by

by

This work is a finalist in our FLASH SUITE Contest.  What is a

FLASH SUITE you may ask? defenestrationism.net does not support an actions or opinions endorsed in this contest.

Important to Read the Suite in Order

Rhonda Eikamp is originally from Texas and lives in Germany. Stories of hers appeared up to 2001 in venues such as Barrelhouse and The Urbanite, after which she climbed out the window for awhile. Since refenestrating in 2012, she has published fiction in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Birkensnake and Apocrypha and Abstractions. When not writing fiction, she works as a translator of German legalese, which is as crazy-making as one might think. Favorite story with defenestration: Village of the Mermaids, by Lance Olsen.

Deconstructing

The text is a mirror with which we may view ourselves. The many ways in which we are embedded within a system of signs (= life) ensures that our own experience is the carrier of significance in our reading of any text, the contextual noumenon the only thing holding us back from the perfectly valid assumption that it was all written by a monkey with a keyboard. We understand a text by our axiological choices, which in turn allow us to order the text’s meaning along continua – mind/body, interior/exterior, sane/mad, love/hate – in accordance with the position we assume along those lines. I write words on a page and these words are the bridge between your eyes and mine. And yet are they? From what vantage point on the continuum do you the reader view the words? If there is no fixed focal point, there can be no absolute truth, no intrinsic meaning informing a particular text. Meaning becomes a moving target. The monkeys are banging away, our designata askew, authorial intent a crock.
The lover writes I love your throat, your disheveled hair in the morning, but the woman who reads his note sees only – what? – a stalker, a one-night stand gone bad, and rushes into the arms of another man.
Fuck this.
This is unpublishable. Fuck this cycle of madness that is academic life. Publish or lose tenure. Publish or die. Derrida my derriere. There is nothing outside the text. Nothing outside my office but the hallway, that short stretch to his office. C.’s over there banging away at her right now, probably got her bent over his desk, while I hold idiot conversations on paper with dead white men. “Are we animals, Uexküll, trapped inside our functional circle? Is there a message independent of us both, dear Jacques?” Couldn’t she feel her environment laced with significance when we lay beside each other, the barrier between signifier and signified severed by my cock sliding into her? How could a love note be so misconstrued? What does “moving too fast” mean if I love you in a million universes?
I want to move fast.
I want to break down all the doors, every wall in this desiccated turd of a college, shoot down the silence with a gun.
Are you over there? Did you know I fingered your skin like a reader caresses words on a page, soaking in the sandy pulse of your blood, the electric, the god/devil continuum in your eyes, your presence?
Are you there?

by

by