Petra Fried: A Story

By Mary Fewko

A boiling mix of feudal fantasy, the post-modern, sensual tango, rebellious Dadaism, dark erotica, & so much more seen & unearthed in this tale, centering around a small group of friends trying to embrace art in the world, whilst the world tries to displace all art straightaway: brainchild freights all coming to a complete smash when all the while their big LSD trip has the right-of-way...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mary Fewko
• Release date: Jan 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370442690

Mary Fewko

I truly hope you all enjoy your time spent with my work! Thanks for visiting my Smashwords page!"Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for." -RAY BRADBURYALL RIGHTS RESERVED for any published poetry or short stories by Mary Fewko.

Book preview

PETRA FRIED

A story written by Mary Fewko

For Ryan, out walking these days,

in New Hampshire

&

For Ian, the great welder of time and space,

forever merging

This short story is a work of fiction.

All content was provided by the author's imagination.

The story of PETRA FRIED brings a boiling mix of feudal fantasy, the post-modern, sensual tango, rebellious Dadaism, dark erotica, and so much more seen and unearthed in this tale, centering around a small group of friends trying to embrace art in the world, whilst the world tries to displace all art straightaway: brainchild freights all coming to a complete smash when all the while their big LSD trip has the right-of-way...

Copyright © 2016, 2017 by Mary Fewko

First SMASHWORDS edition © 2017

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ® 2016, 2017

"We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters

would one day use art itself as a way of

deadening men's minds." -Hans Arp

Part I: a guided tour of talent

The speech of the sick was best explained by the mad. Was this that Hollywood syndrome where the serial killer was the source of solving the unsolved murders? None could tell and none surely supervised. Even serial killers had their bouquets to flail, be they mad or mean or clean or nobbled.

Sick and mad and killer were approvals, besides.

Louise was mad. She had a master’s degree in business, an obsession with glittery eyeshadow, a preoccupation with Israeli feta cheese, and her own cure-all boutique in the central part of the city. Most of the time. The shop was prone to relocating. Nightly. Somehow...?

Kindness was not a uniquely human trait, but one that gave humankind hope. Even some burnt-out writers saluted the idea that the miracle of evolution was to bring life on earth to a point of unpolluted kindness. One kind soul worked in the city. The moondust-shielded Louise was explaining to some male-to-female transgender shopper the top natch tactic for her transition. Louise had crammed up the lady's wicker basket, encouraged for future visits, with capsules of magnesium, zinc, milk thistle, flax seed oil, a small packet of seaweed, some actual weed of the Colorado woody creek strain, dandelion, princess bulb, lynx hair, fish oil, L-Glutamine, edamame, a few jars of rice from an undisclosed location, a supplement bag of 5-hydroxytryptophan, keep a spry eye and a tufted ear on any listed symptoms, oh, and listen bombshell, you may experience some lucid dreaming under the supplement. Just a heads up! Won't be worse than that apple vinegar shot you took earlier.

Will my sleep-talking be more articulate? The shopper replied, head tilted, voice low and faintly raspy.

Mmm, Louise then placed a small ampoule of peppermint in the shopper's basket, and then placed a small drop of the peppermint huile on her middle finger. Open up, Louise said as she rubbed the oil along the roof of the shopper's mouth. You may end up interacting with your dreams, to a strange degree. Possibly to the point where you can even silence your somniloquy. I teach classes about parasomnias each Thursday at dusk. If you're interested. Louise also had a room where trained cats licked the faces of clients, a pioneering sort of exfoliation treatment.

One could get lost in Louise's boutique, pertinently baptized as True Calm Spell, the door emblazoned with a sexy llama logo. The wood trinkets, the plasma carpet, the lanterns and ornaments, the vials and little purple-bottled potions all over the shop with iridescent papyrus notes fastened with hemp around the cork of the canteens. Louise went over to a shelf, using the stepladder to reach a particular potion though the shopper was nearly double Louise's height and could have snatched it herself. Louise placed a potion labeled 'Pallas!' into the wicker basket along with the shopper's receipt, which was in fact just a simple tree leaf, though in Louise's city trees were limited to the lawns of the rich or the parks inhabited by fundamental tree-hugging eco-terrorists. Did anybody expect a future where trees were so rare? Sure tigers, mushrooms, Bangladeshis, Hawaiians... but trees?

Read the instructions about that last potion. Brace yourself for womanhood, bombshell. Louise stood solid and glam and purely cute. The shopper nodded, almost wishing Louise had an actual wing she could crawl under for the next 3 years of her neo en femme time. Want some garlic chicken wings? I'm about to eat lunch. You're welcome to have a few!

Part II: a prescription for gifts

There is the story of the hand of glory, severed from the hung corpse of the greatest thief ever known to civilians and sentry captains and wise folk of center-earth residence...

The thin and tall timber tower stood in the ground like a massive stick declaring one's land. It's upper half splattered in red, like a regular baton rouge though if this tower represented a post implanted as a boundary marker for settlement, then the settlers were among the most giantlike to visit this mythic empire of fable, magick, of third eyes and eyes cut-out and sold. Where having vision was a status symbol.

A small tavern was anchored along the waterfront district of the city. Anchored was the most honest description, giving the ship had crashed into land one morning drunk to hell, thus the ship couldn't be removed but calling it anchored added a nice suspense to the patrons. Smalltime investors saw the potential in turning the ship into a restaurant though the drunken sailors out moonlighting for escorts and hard liquor paid no mind to the food menu. Even the odd sentry captain, once shield and sword were retired for the day's or night's shift, could be seen drinking alone at a table, ignoring the crimes since their pay would never extend to such pledge of crime fighting.

One sentry captain after changing out of greaves and gauntlets and helmet and cuirass came to the bar counter at the Tomb Cruise tavern. His normally fervent bookings and inquiries had been halted like a comet hitting an unseen planet,