WRITER IN THE MACHINE
Years of trying to be the writer I wanted to be after reading the Marquis de Sade, Clive Barker, Dennis Cooper, Jack Ketchum, Bret Easton Ellis… Mere gruesome images devoid of wit came out of my computer keyboard. “Something’s missing,” they would sarcastically tell me every time I showed one of my micro-stories. And they were right. Lots of blood, steamy sex and guts, but zero talent. They seemed like insults uttered by a child in his early childhood, seeking to shock his parents.
I decided to stop writing when I had my first bank account and was assigned an alias for transfers. Three random words spit out by a computer system.
ORGANS.BABY.TRAFFICKING
Even a machine could do it better than me.
JUST A SUNNY MEDIEVAL COVEN
The one symbolized by the most basic instincts has sprung from the fly-ridden gourd. As expected, he takes the form of a billy goat. He blinks with yellowish eyes and delicately rises on his hind legs, anchored in the grass of the meadow that serves as the retreat for this sunny medieval coven. The eight little girls look at him, standing in the middle of their huddle, under the shade of the trees.
Amazed by the straightness of his manly gait and his wise gaze, two of the children lead the Evil One by the hand to the tablecloth where the snack has been laid out.
Sitting on the grass on this summer afternoon, the girls laugh and gossip, aware of their mischief, while they offer the fiend a cake of human fetuses and cow dung, and drink from a wineskin the pee they stole at dawn from their parents’ chamber pots.
Once the snack was over, and once everyone had made a wish to the horned Beelzebub, it was the plumpest child who, exalted by the success of the meeting, uttered, with great effort and by heart, an unavoidable ‘In nomine Satanas, Lucifer excelsis Dei!’
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Matías Bragagnolo, Argentinian, is the author of the novels Petite Mort, El brujo, La balada de Constanza y Valentino, El destino de las cosas últimas, Dormiré cuando esté muerto, and Cloacina. He’s a scholar of the work of William S. Burroughs and the cut-up technique, and a researcher and essayist on matters related to rock, literature, and cinema. His short story Your Body as an Assembly Line for Public Humiliations has just been published in Tormented Flesh, an Anxiety Press anthology.
Image generated on openart.ai
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