by submission | Nov 25, 2021 | Story |
Author: Sakib Shahriar
Thanatology was a hotly-disputed conceptual art movement from the moment of its inception. Artists who identified themselves with the movement often explored feelings and sensations of death and decay, whether through paintings and visual art, performance pieces, or self-experiments.
Art critic Oscar Ries argues that thanatology formed in response to widespread ecological and economic collapse taking place in the modern world. Thanatologist Mildred Rosters often addresses the fear of death and disappearing from the world in her work: “Many of our oppressive institutions still in place today function on the fear of death—on the desire for permanent security from decay. If we can let go of this fear, if we can accept our eventual disappearance from the life of the Earth, perhaps we may yet save ourselves from the climate disasters we currently live, or perhaps we may at least stop inflicting systemic violence against our own people.”
Many of thanatology’s founding members, including Rosters, Michel Gagnon, and Agnes Toyokawa, were accused of promoting and romanticizing death and suicide. Gagnon in particular gained infamy when he was arrested in Highland Park, California on loitering and public indecency charges; he was running a streetside public art installation where he pretended to be bleeding out on the sidewalk for three hours.
Hayatul Rahman was much lesser known outside the insider artist circles of thanatology. Rahman was interested in beginning processes of decay and necrosis on her own body while she still lived. Though many thanatologists experimented on themselves, Rahman was notable for how much farther she pushed her own experiments compared to her contemporaries.
Many of Rahman’s pieces fall somewhere between art and science. Initially trained as a molecular biologist, her early pieces involved viral engineering, often having a virus localize to a specific body part or organ to create a controlled zone of necrosis. In later works, she explored extreme living conditions, including month-long fasts and extended sensory deprivation.
Rahman first gained recognition among other thanatologists through “Opposable,” a 3-day private art demonstration she held in July of 2057 in her New York apartment. Invited friends and fellow artists spent the 3 days living and feasting with each other, while Rahman’s thumbs slowly decayed via a localized virus until they became unusable altogether. Rahman wanted to explore the possibilities of communal life in the face of decay: “I slowly grew incapable of simple tasks like gripping things in my hands; more and more I had to rely on the people around me to do chores I was used to doing, like cooking and cleaning.”
Rahman’s most recent performance piece, “Infinite Life,” involves creating and injecting into herself a venom that cuts off her brain-body connection and slows her oxygen consumption to a minimum, entering her into a prolonged and indefinite death-like state without her body immediately decaying or becoming necrotic.
In her artistic statement for the piece before she entered into dying, Rahman mentions growing fascinated with jewel wasps producing a similar venom for cockroaches, so that their larvae can incubate near and feed on the incapacitated cockroach’s body. She also notes: “The length of this performance piece is indefinite. My body will sustain itself for an unknown period of time, and I’ve asked my partner to note the date and time at which my body finishes dying, after which point I will be buried under special request without a coffin at Centennial Park Cemetery, Pasadena, California.”
Conceptual artist and experimental thanatologist Hayatul Rahman entered into dying on October 14th, 2075. She leaves behind her wife and two children.
by submission | Nov 24, 2021 | Story |
Author: Alex Valdiers
“Where did you get these fruits? They look… magnificent.”
“They are.” Marec slices the cantaloupe and takes a bite. “I got them from Belmondo.”
“The actor?”
“Yeah. He works at the local grocery store.” Marec takes a bit and talks with his mouth full. “He’s in between jobs.”
I squint to find out if my friend is sick, as if squinting could shape my eyes into a medical scanning device. It doesn’t.
“Taste this cantaloupe.”
“Nah, I’m fine.”
“Taste it.” My friend shoves a piece of yellow fruit down my throat.
“It’s delicious.” I take the time to chew it down and savor the cantaloupe. “Belmondo?”
“Belmondo.”
So on the way home I stop at the grocery store and here I am, scouting for a Belmondo look-alike, as if I hadn’t seen Ennio Morricone’s orchestra play his obituary on TV a few months ago.
“Cobra? Yes, that’s right. A man from Japan calls my house one night and asks me if it’s okay to use my face for a character based on me for a cartoon. I said, Chucho, make me proud, but don’t make me too Japanese, I’m Bebel.” A group of people are gathered around the fruit salesman by the watermelon stand. The salesman who just called himself Bebel has a boxer nose and a broad smile. He sure looks a lot like the real thing. “That’s surely why they made Cobra a blondie.” Belmondo grabs a watermelon and yells out his fruit merchant sales pitch. I want to pinch myself and wake up from this surreal dream. “Did you know they used Cobra’s pilot episode to write Total Recall?”
I’m squinting again, the man really sounds and looks like Jean-Paul Belmondo. A teenage girl wiggles through the crowd and opens up a poster. I’m intrigued I get closer and I see the mysterious man signing ‘JP Belmondo” on a Cowboy Bebop poster, right over Spike’s face.
“I never saw a penny from that one.” His smile is so broad and so genuinely warm. “I’ll tell you who was nice, though. Jacky Chan. I first met the kid on the set of ‘The Tribulations of a Chinaman in China’. Ten years later, he’s a movie star, he calls me up to ask permission to use my stunt coordinator and re-create my stunts. I say, Jacky, anything you want, just do me proud!”
I stand there motionless, actually buying this shit. Jean-Paul Belmondo is standing in front of me, with a store apron, by the watermelon stand, helping customers pick their fruit whilst telling them anecdotes about his life.
I leave the store without daring talking to him. As soon as I get home, I scout my old boxes for my copy of “The Magnificent”. I dust my old Blu Ray play and put the film on. Bob Sinclar is there, not the DJ but Belmondo, laying on a beach in Acapulco, sipping margaritas whilst shooting goons by the hundreds. My friend Marec is the background, with a plate of fruit, and a person who looks a lot like me prostests and refuses to eat the cantaloupe.
I’m afraid to switch the movie off. I’m afraid I’ll disappear if the movie stops playing, and Bebel keeps smiling.
Belmondo never came back to sell watermelons in my local grocery store, and I watch his films regularly. I buy my fruit from a chubby old lady with an easy smile and a kinky pink nose. All is well, life is magnificent.
by submission | Nov 21, 2021 | Story |
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
I jumped off the boxcar just in time because one of the bo chasers was slinging his matraque and almost cracked my dome. But it was my town, Simcoe, and I was home.
For once I actually had a purse, enough for a cup of joe and a dog, so I found an all-night gas ‘n go where I drank a bitter cup and who knows how old the dog was. The button pusher at the damper was an odd cat, I saw him eyeballing my bindlestiff, probably expecting me to have fanny packed some of his goods and I saw him cogitating whether to call a Harness Bull, but now there was a picture of the Queen in his hand, and I walked out with the dog and shoved it in my bazoo.
The Last Time I Was In Simcoe is a song that should have reached the heights like By The Time I Get to Phoenix, it’s one I wrote but never got the rights to, and everywhere I looked the neon was gyrating like a bo-ette. Kyle was her name; we rode all the way out to Vancouver and split up at the Victoria ferry. I met her in Regina; we were the same age and from the same town, Simcoe. But I never went to school so we never met; I taught myself the world’s ways at a dark track, but she said she was in pre-med at U of T and she reset my shoulder after I popped it trying to catch a Crew Car.
“How d’you end up livin’ the life?” But before she could answer I started chawing about my time down in the states in the aftermath of that vigilante verdict where citizens no longer had to make arrests, they could just shoot, and I ended up with some lead below my knee. “I coulda used you then,” I said, and she nodded. “You ever been down stateside?” But before she replied I took a swig from my flask and passed it to her. “What your name anyway?”
“Kyle,” she said.
“You mean like Kylie?”
“Kyle,” she repeated.
“No wonder I never knew you, you must be a baby.”
She nodded and we huddled up against the cold. Canada is frigid but citizens don’t pack, they don’t do militias and we have R-camps on horseback with their wide brims, red shirts, who say stop before drawing their shotty. Then in Calgary we played the part of some Doughtnut Christians which kept us fed for a time, but in Vancouver I let her slip away like Bobby McGee.
The streets of Simcoe don’t look familiar. The motel on Highway 3, where I had my cherry popped is now four hundred loons a night. And I swear I see Kyle everywhere. The Queen Street Motel has a 30-foot-tall androgynous salve regina stretching their hams on the roof, and its proportions match Kyle if she stood ten metres high. I hadn’t missed Kyle as much as I did just then. And when the neon started whispering words I’d heard he ruse, I knew I was left with two choices: it was either Kyle having freighthopped my poetic mind, or it was that all-night lamp dog talking to my guts which is where nightmares come from. I hadn’t toked from a Gonger since Winnipeg.
There’s no more freight yard in Simcoe, no more coal pile either so I had to find a spot on an old rail trail to build a fire, where I warmed my mitts. There was a light snow falling, tiny neon flakes that glowed like Christmas ornaments on my clothes. Kyle told me that William Blake said that if you clear your doors of perception, snow crystals and the integrity of every raindrop comes to you pristine like an angel speaking, or a vestal virgin having just sworn on the Bible before giving barrister testimony. The snowflakes on my pullover were these angels, virginal, talking to me and then I heard Kyle’s voice.
“Your life begins and ends here. God is a deity with a great heart whose mind has taken over.”
And Kyle came walking down the rail trail then. When she entered the fire light, she had an aura, glowing exactly like the Queen Street Motel stripper sign beckoning me, and other toms, to enter her doors.
“Are you dead?” I asked Kyle, but she didn’t answer. I handed her a can of beans that had been heating on a spider I built over the flames, and she spooned them barehanded, their molten skins not bothering those LED fingers that lit the night with an illumination surpassing my small furnace.
“You got any Whiteline?” I asked, thinking what I really wanted was some Jazz, but Kyle had more to say about William Blake.
“Blake used to walk around naked. He had a vision of a tiger while lying in bed. The tiger was lit up like neon, but Blake didn’t know anything about electricity, so he couldn’t patent it and make a fortune on sign futures.”
She finished her beans and walked over to me, laying her hand on my shoulder. I had to close my eyes otherwise her light would have fried them.
“There’s a concession road a short way north of here. That’s where you’ll find me. But if I were you, I’d find a sink, clean up, and become a citizen. Stay in Simcoe. Simcoe is the centre point of the world’s hoop, and you’ve done enough hoop jumping.” Then she walked off, dissipating in the penumbra of my fire.
I did wash up, but I also found the concession where her body lay. There were coyotes in the night, beating the buzzard that come by day. I bent down and pulled at the lapel of her coat and discovered a note pinned to the lapel:
“And may God deny you peace, but give you glory!” Miguel Unamuno. I asked a coyote whether she wanted it, but she sniffed the paper and turned away.
by submission | Nov 20, 2021 | Story |
Author: John Overwood
Mr. Smith slinks slowly into his seat. His eyes dart around the room, bulging slightly. His demeanor is awkward, his shoulders bunch together making him look small and compact. His hands are neatly folded into each other on top of his lap – strange how such a tall man could melt down into a nervous husk in mere moments. This, Rachel thought, must be the effect of a doctor on her patient.
She is so deep in her observations, that she nearly forgot their reason for the meeting.
“So, Mr. Smith, you’re here for –” She pauses to read the screen in front of her “persistent brain and earache?” She raises an eyebrow at him. He shuffles uncomfortably in his seat and then nods vigorously. Rachel counts one, two, and finally, three full seconds until the nodding stops.
“Right, is there any more you can tell me about your symptoms? Any discharge?” Says Rachel.
Mr. Smith looks at the ground by his leather loafers, his brows furrow. The rest of his clothes are equally smart; he wears a crisp black suit, complete with a waistcoat and a crimson red tie. He looks up at the ceiling, slightly to the left. The light from a fluorescent LED overhead bounces off his bold head and cascades down his gaunt, angular face. His leg starts bouncing furiously.
“Okay, I think we’ll go through some medical records quickly if –” Says Rachel
“My heart isn’t beating,” says Mr. Smith.
“It says here, you haven’t had any previous medical issues and you don’t have any allergies, is this still the case?” Says Rachel. Mr. Smith nods again, but more slowly and deliberately this time. His face is being pulled with an intensity that seems inappropriate, confusing Rachel.
“And can I confirm that your legal name is John Smith and that your address is –” Rachel pauses? She notices that the age is listed on the screen as 6 years old.
“Sorry, did you hear what I said earlier?” says Mr. Smith. His face blushing. Rachel stops gawking at the screen and then looks up at him blankly. Her eyes slowly widen.
“Sir, that can’t be the case,” says Rachel, “You look fine.” She is visibly shaken, leaning forwards in her seat, making deep, wild eye contact.
“I think I noticed it about a month ago. At first, I thought I was dying, and then I thought I was already dead, but that can’t be the case,” says Mr. Smith. His eyes start welling up. “That’s when the earache started. It’s unbearable.”
Rachel pulls up a chair next to Mr. Smith and puts one end of a stethoscope to his chest. She listens intently. She is expecting to hear something at least. But all she could hear was the beating of her own heart, speeding up rapidly. She gasped.
“Is this bad?” Says Mr. Smith. He begins to cry upon seeing the panic on Rachel’s face.
“Let me call the front desk for help, don’t move.” Says Rachel, taking a big step towards the door.
“Wait,” says Mr. Smith. “Can you at least have a look at my ears?” His grey eyes are droplets of desperation and pity. Something in them makes Rachel consider this idea.
Glancing through an otoscope, she is nearly blinded. There is no ear canal as such, but a smooth wall of flesh where a red light slowly blinks. Next to it, a QR code. On impulse, she retrieves her phone and scans it. A warning pops up
‘This android is property of the US government, please return now.’
by submission | Nov 19, 2021 | Story |
Author: Alexander Condie
A long time ago, when the vertical world was full of water and wonder, I lived in a city. A city perched above an endless void, made of white ore, and sustained by a God that lived above us. Though we do not remember exactly how we got there, and who began the city, all who lived there remember with complete clarity the words God spoke to us. Only twice did God speak our tongue, the first time gifting us the name of our home: Drain.
It was here, when the world was young and the people ever-moving, that I came to be. I remember the rains that brought our life, the community we fostered and the structures that we built. I remember watching as new life came to us, seemingly out of nothing, as I believe I had once done. They joined the city, and helped it grow into a place of greatness.
The Great City of Drain, as we would begin calling it, earned every accolade and praise that could be given. It was a marvel in its existence. Despite living above an edge to dark unknown below, the city prospered. With all that sustained our lives coming from above, the people of Drain focused only on what they could create with the life they had. The empty white walls that surrounded the city and made up the houses became canvases. Etchings of our past, present and what genius minds envisioned for the future were made on every flat surface. The city was no longer a place made of buildings, but of art. The paths we walked, the ceilings above our heads, even the beds we slept on were testaments to the creativity our God allowed us to foster. Drain was a city of dreamers and visionaries unlike anywhere else, whether in the vertical world or beyond.
The city was perfection, and the people grew fat and weak from the bounty that rained from above. In time, the canvases were full, and the itch to create had been scratched. Never a day went by without the water of life from above. We wanted for nothing and wondered if this bliss could truly last forever.
Looking back now, we were foolish to think paradise could ever be eternal.
I am fortunate to be one of the few to escape, and I believe God allowed it so that I could tell this story. To keep the legacy of the Great City of Drain alive, and to warn of the power God can have on those who become lazy and stagnant. More than this though, I must speak aloud the words of God, so that they may never be forgotten.
Which brings us to the end. In the moments before the fall of Drain and the destruction of the vertical world, God spoke to us again. The second and ultimately last time, God spoke our tongue, and said:
“Don’t worry babe, I’ll clear out the drain before I shower. You’re right, it’s definitely clogged with something.”
