Beach Sloth

The Best Alt Lit Stories of 2012 by Various Artists

                This is the finale, the end of the lines. Happy that there are so many new things I’ve never seen before. 

                Richard Chiem survives a car crash. This is good. Cars are evil metallic creatures. A hospital experience comes forth. From the hospital an entire family is summoned. Reading how the car crashed re-affirms my simultaneous awe and fear of cars. I like the approach for the Halloween party. The ability to handle the accident in a rather strange way is definitely a positive feeling. Rather than simplicity let the event or accident define, one can define what occurs around them. 

                Spencer Madsen writes about a lovely young bored couple. Dilan manages to get himself excited talking about possessions. Amelia looks at the freckles on her hand. While he talks in frenzy she calmly figures out a way to remove freckles from her hand. Neither person dies. These are minor problems in a larger world.

                Matthew Donahoo gets into my head. This is a scary story. Everything depicts the dull Zen of office work. Dull Zen is the best emotion. It stems from the simple, repetitive tasks commonly referred to as work. People pay Abigail money to be bored at work. Parts of her life come really close to home for me. When one has a poetry blog there are few they can tell about it. Writing anonymously in a blog becomes a subversive, secretive act; a celebration of all one wants which is too far away. 

                xTx describes a 13 year old experience. Her clothing never fits. I had that living the ‘hand-me-down’ lifestyle. More people live this way than one could ever imagine. The sweet creepiness of Mister Dean is quite nice along with very slight pieces of foreshadowing. ‘Suzy Qs’ are the problem of a poor girl named Tinkerbell. Her mother doesn’t understand. No one understands Tinkerbell as she goes to the pond to search for remnants of things that disappeared long ago. 

                Lucy K Shaw fakes her death for insurance money. Just kidding, she’s a twenty-something, like most twenty-somethings, she is probably more in debt than a normal human being. The twenties is the overrated part of one’s life. Everything else seems about right. But the twenties, that’s a gruesome, grueling, never-ending saga of poverty and boredom. If one had the ability to go to one’s funeral it would sound like this. After reading this I realize I need to make a MIX CD for my death. I refuse to have sub-par music at my funeral. Play harsh abrasive music way too loudly at my funeral because to be alive is to suffer. 

                 Timothy Willis Sanders travels around the Midwest. Destructive weather makes everyone calm. Rather than worry about the Tornadoes they make small talk. A sense of space comes up with Oklahoma. Everything is far away. Little details (such as the cats, random mentions of Israel, and a skunk mailbox) make it feel folksy. Wonder how folksy people act. Observing down to Earth people seems nice. Wish I could do it more often. Feel they would probably ‘feed me’. 

                Michael Inscoe knows love will exist at the end of the world. When the sky bleeds out into the ocean and the tumbleweeds have been eradicated, remember everybody you love. You’ll all be going through the same thing together. As long as the internet holds up it will create a giant Wi-Fi cloud that can suck up our souls and protect them forever. Heaven has the ultimate internet connection. With God the wireless signal is always strong. 

                Ben Brooks digs holes and fills them with soil. This is his goal in life: to dig holes and fill them with soil. It is a slow life. Somehow he slows down time. Nothing moves quickly. To slow things down even more he avoids any heavy thoughts. Most of the story is him alone. With distance people are easily to deal with but near people ‘Larissa’ he grows sad. Intimacy is scary. 

                Megan Boyle gets vulnerable with the reader. Childhood is dissected and shown to the reader. First she shows the class charms of faces and calls them ‘tiny people’ saying they are ‘special’. Show and tell is the product of a bourgeois society. People talk to her as a child asking why she wasn’t paying attention. I remember those many, many talks. Nicholas Cage is an attractive actor. Who isn’t a little attracted to Hollywood’s #1 Hulk? Acting is tough. Acting on the internet is easier though. No spinning is necessary on the internet, only in news articles. 

                Like this collection bunches. Think this is the definitive alt lit collection of 2012 probably. I’m excited to see Alt Lit Gossip getting into the literary magazine game.