SMEAR! - A Short Story Collection (Vol I)

By Crugi Smear

SMEAR! Vol I collects ten short stories by Crugi Smear, an independent London-based writer. These stories recount some of the events in the life of Roger Prandelli, a compassionate multi-faceted individual who confronts his own defeats with zany, dark humour, but never despair. The insanity of the modern world is presented with a fast narrative pace that is every bit as deranged and hilarious as a work by Bukowski or Vonnegut.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Crugi Smear
• Release date: Aug 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311665928

Crugi Smear

Crugi Smear is an independent London-based writer who strongly believes in the power of the internet, coffee, and long intermittent writing sessions. He is currently working on a second short story collection.

Book preview

SMEAR!

A short story collection

VOL I

by

Crugi Smear

Copyright 2012 by Crugi Smear

Smashwords Edition

SMEAR! A short story collection, VOL I

Copyright © 2012 Crugi Smear (londonunpublishing)

Smashwords First Edition

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical (including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system) without prior written permission of the Author. Your support of author's right is appreciated.

Cover art by the Yours Truly

Photography by Ramsey Pietro Nasser

To a Muse

with a strange kind of humour

Table of Contents

1. Angels

2. The Emerald Vagina

3. Foo

4. The Satanic Hall of Manchester

5. Family Life

6. The Gun

7. The Stanford Law: or, Don’t Upset the Experiment

8. Socratic Dialogues

9. FINE THEN!

10. The Source

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Angels

When I woke up I felt really good.

I mean, as if the previous night had never existed.

What happened was that I’d got locked up by accident in one of these humongous industrial freezers, like a whole room filled with butchered bodies hanging all over the place, and busy hooks, and empty hooks just resting there. There were 23 unused ones. I know, because I had the time to count them before I froze stiff completely. But it doesn’t really matter what happened. The main thing was that now, I mean right now, it felt like everything that ever bothered me up to that point in my life was just gone. Like dust in the breeze. Not even dust. Just empty space, filled with the Present. I was clean. And it felt sooo good...

But then I became troubled for a moment. The first smear on my newborn soul, I guess. This whole thing did not feel normal. It happened to me before: waking up from devastating drunks and feeling like a baby born again, and it felt like the Virgin Mary had begotten me. But then that usually passed, and the memories and the past emotions re-emerged as if inevitably. But now what I had were just sketchy memories from my previous life, and no regrets, nor anger or joy for it.

So that’s how it feels like… I thought while contemplating the idea of being dead. Matter-of-fact.

Good morning Roger. – said the voice of an Angel. Would you mind following me?

I turned my head toward the voice, and I saw this most remarkable of things: Beauty and Grace fused together to form a blissful being. Human eyes have no experience of such things on earth. I felt so very special just because I was standing there, by her. She was the round perfection of the Pearl; her limbs were whispering Harmony; her legs were screaming constantly: SUBLIME! literally; and her ass yelled at me abruptly: GRAB ME! like an imperative. And I was for that most joyful moment the luckiest guy in that dimension, or so I thought.

I followed her screaming limbs like a dog chasing a piece of bloody meat from the master’s hand. I was a puppet, but I knew it was for my own good, and there was nothing else I could do! I was drooling expectation, and fire was all over me, inside of me too! Literally. And we turned many corners, and strode down very long corridors; it seemed like it would go on and on forever and ever, and it didn’t matter, as long as I had that screaming ass in front of me:

GRAB ME!

Eventually she made me sit on this couch, and I was worried for a moment that it might catch fire. Then she took this sphere out and gave it to me. It’s going to make you feel better. – she said, her tone very neutral. I took it, breathed on it, rubbed it a bit to polish it, and then slipped it into my pocket. Then I forgot about it.

Everything seemed promising.

But then, as soon as I tried to slide my frolicking hand under her divine garment, I started to hear a hum: a low drone that seemed to come from a distance so far out that I figured it must have been crouching in a remote black hole of cosmic proportions, or something in that category. The sphere started vibrating, and so I realised that the hum and the sphere were one and the same thing. And so, to my surprise, all of a sudden, the fire was gone, and my desire for the blissful lady had vanished, and in its stead was a moderate sense of euphoria and an unmediated will to obedience. I was again at peace with the world. No passion was convulsing my mind any more.

And it felt puzzling.

You see? – she said. It’s already saved your life.

What you mean? – I asked mechanically.

One more move, I’d have killed you. – her tone was neutral again. No hard feelings.

I see… – I said, a bit confused.

So I started wondering whether, after all, this place where I had landed was Hell. But no hard feelings either, not really.

Over time I learnt a bit more about the practices of those exotic places. After the Introduction, where they gave to each of us that tiny curious sphere, and where they confirmed that we were dead, the Angels would scatter us all over this new environment like Parmesan cheese. I shall digress shortly about what this place looked like, for the moment I will emphasise that many more of us would arrive from time to time, but also, many of us would disappear every now and then. No one understood the logic in the demographics of the place. After all, we were all humans, and pretty dead already. It was beyond our scope. Some said there was some sort of Judgement going on at our backs, and the people who disappeared maybe deserved some other place. I asked many Angels, but the usual response would be a gentle smile spruced with silence.

It took a while before I started going to this local place. It was called the Calypso, and it was a dome full of fellow departed souls who went there just for one thing, and for one thing only: to screw the HELL out of anything that crawled or walked, or breathed or choked!

Heaven like.

There was this gigantic sphere in the middle of the room. And it was pounding, and POUNDING! Constantly, sharp as a laser. And the room was massive, astounding! A triumph of architecture like I had never seen in my previous existence on little earth. Not the Ziggurats of the Babylonians, nor the contemporary skyscrapers would do justice to the magnificence of this place. The arches went on and on