How they get you
fiction by Luke O’Neil
Collecting my child's ravaged corpse from the school crater
No no it was a mistake on the computer actually. The missile. A.I. they said. I don’t know how it works either but they messed up the targeting somehow. So all in all just one of those things. Come. Help me lift her here. Gently now.
Motto 2
We were singing about the dark times during the dark times and no one gave a shit. Shut the fuck up they said.
Persons living or dead
You have to imagine the last guy he ever drank margaritas at the mall with was like what hell Dave? Whole time I thought we were having a few laughs there. Talked mostly about the game. I didn’t know you were thinking all that.
The other day you asked if I had been tromping out through the heavy drifts of snow in the backyard for some reason and I had to think about it for a minute to be sure. No it wasn’t me I said. We went out to inspect the scene together and learned that it had instead been a good-sized animal of some kind. Perhaps a bobcat if we have those here. Just going about its business. Taking a short cut.
I used to try to explain to my friends and family that the characters in my stories are not literally them. Giving a brief unwanted lecture on what writing is. How things can be real but not true and true but not real. I think the disclaimers just made it worse.
Keep us breathing fire!
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