A Non-Commercial Decade Of Dominance!
Cosmoetica Bylines 1 2 3 4 5 6 Schneider Online 1 2 3 4 5 Archives GFSI Essays Seek & Destroy Books Schneider Fiction True Life Cinemension
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Webliography: Title/Subject/Author
NEW FICTION!
22) Summering/Jessica Schneider When young, only the summers counted as time. They were all that mattered. Summertime meant valuable time, where the days were long and lush, like hanging gardens where the growth is constant. Summer was when everything changed, as opposed to winter, where the trees remain as small stunts of sameness, glued over eyes in the form of the short duration of days that feel so long. To a farmer, summers matter. Often it was when Mr. Wicker would think back to a year and refer to it as one summer ago, or thirty years past as thirty summers past....
Estivation rules!
23) Blame Bradbury/Jessica Schneider Everyone always wants to know what it was that brought you to a particular place. And for me that thing was Ray Bradbury. The man is so arrogant -- to think that at the end of Fahrenheit 451, the movie, that there would be some red haired kid that would memorize his entire Martian Chronicles. Okay, so there were lots of book people at that place. But did he really have to go and insert himself for more publicity?....
Oy!
24) Fat Nasty Bitch/Jessica Schneider People, when they thought of torture, only thought in the extreme. They thought of having to endure the lack of food over several months, like the survivors of the Fairchild, who had to resort to cannibalism to save themselves amid the brutal Andes Mountains....
Superbitch!
25) Notoriety And What It Is/Dan Schneider Kate Topps always seemed destined to be the kind of person whose career would be involved with helping others. Granted, this was technically true, now, as she had become a collections team manager at a large telecom company, after several years as a phone rep. She had never even worked on telephones before starting at the telecom, but had found that she enjoyed talking to others....
Death again.
26) Kiss-Ass Andy/Jessica Schneider "I would do anything to protect my job," Paige could remember her co-worker Andy muttering upon one occasion. They had been at break, and Andy (or Kiss-Ass Andy, as how he was referred) sat across from her in one of those formless office chairs as usual, polishing his apple onto his jeans and then biting into it with his smile....
Fudge-licking good.
1) Potential Isn't Power/Jessica Schneider I recall my dad telling me once that the distinguisher between the young and the old came down to one word: energy. What was it and would we ever be able to see it? In physics, the word means nothing more than the capacity of a physical system to do work. And that physical system could be anything- a plant, a bird, a human, young or old. And how much we have is what really makes us....
Musing philosophically.
2) O For Art's Sake!/Jessica Schneider A Floridian evening, sky full of clamor, grass filled with sharp stickers that like to cling to socks and anything cotton when walking through. If barefoot, such circumstance can be painful, quite, as each pointed side sticks into the baby laid flesh within the sole of foot...
Kickin' some ass!
3) Apoptosis/Jessica Schneider When I asked my dad what he thought of right before leaving for Vietnam that summer at age nineteen, he told me that he was looking forward to killing some gooks....
Hands & all....
4) The Shallows/Jessica Schneider These are the places you are told to roam. Fearful of submerging, you leave your ankles exposed, partly parched by warmed sun and pricked with the glow of sand. So here you stand, knowing you would become part of them, knowing it is easy not to question category, for category is the thing that prevents pulling you under to that place where safety is no longer found, seeing yourself according to their compartment of knowledge.
Deeper'n deep?
5) The Day Old Dream/Jessica Schneider It is the oldest dream of man, this glimpse of the buzzard in mid-flight, recognized by one witnessing: creature with wings hanging over yesterday and each day since. It is the oldest form of man: the thought, and all that composes it. The bird glides by. I look to it....
On wings.
6) Beyond Amber/Dan Schneider Amber Merrick was still the most beautiful woman that Tony Layden had ever known. It was over ten years since they’d been together, but he’d never gotten over her. It was silly, it was vain, it was childish. Amber was a spoiled brat, who had leached off him for the whole two years they had been together. Yet, he did not mind. She was gorgeous, and that made it alright, at the time....
Babeoliciousness defined.
7) The Myth And The Mountain/Jessica Schneider “Both our tones flow from the older fountain,” the poet Robinson Jeffers said, at the end of his poem, Continent’s End. And so this is what I am left with: the image of the continent, and all it contains, and feet pressing upon it, a solid earth all its own, only to arrive at its own end- the ocean. And it is this ocean that is large enough to be called a body- a collective term implying something that is both large and vast, yet also containing its own systems. Large and vast, is the ocean when set beside this continent, yet equal in viability to that of land....
Peaks and valleys of a man-made map.
8) The Security Of Shared Recipes/Jessica Schneider To think there are places that exist. That should be enough. But to think there are places that exist a mountain so high in elevation it has the ability to block rain from neighboring towns—that is something to think of. To think too, a wave infinitely falling, as though being on the cusp of something greater, as you try to slide down the face of that wave, that will keep you sliding, never reaching the bottom. That is something to think of....
What passes....
9) Limits Of Love/Dan Schneider Joey Faust had dealt with it all his life- the name: Joey FAUST. He heard all about that German guy who wrote some story or something about some punk who sells out his life to the Devil, or some bullshit like that. Every time the flatfoots hauled his ass into the precinct for the least little thing one of the little shits would pick up on his name and the guy from the story and comment on how ironic it was that a gangster was named Faust. The worst time, though, was when he was hauled in front of a judge on racketeering charges when he was eighteen, and the fat old fuck lectured to him by quoting some lines from the book....
Pass the vino!
10) I'm Gonna Do It/Dan Schneider It’s funny, Hannah. When I pulled up here, to the cemetery, I wasn’t even thinking about you. I mean, I was thinking about you in the sense that that’s why I was driving here, a hundred and twenty miles, to see your final resting place on your anniversary. Of your death, I mean. Well, I don’t know if you call it ‘an anniversary’ when referring to death....
They're coming!
11) The Security Of Shared Recipes/Jessica Schneider To think there are places that exist. That should be enough. But to think there are places that exist a mountain so high in elevation it has the ability to block rain from neighboring towns—that is something to think of. To think too, a wave infinitely falling, as though being on the cusp of something greater, as you try to slide down the face of that wave, that will keep you sliding, never reaching the bottom. That is something to think of....
What passes....(Redux!)
12) Soft Like The Moon/Jessica Schneider The first I met her, that is what I noticed. Connie, getting out of our family car, dressed in all white. My dad extended his hand (in more ways than one) to help her out, and she gladly took it. She was Connie, my new step mom, not even a year after my mom’s death. Dad and Connie got engaged six months after my mom died, for my dad was not a man who liked hesitation....
Divorce woes.
13) The Day After That Monday/Dan Schneider A rather dull Sunday. Did some work around the home. Greenpoint is lovely in the twilight- it really is, despite what others say. All my life I’ve lived either here or in Williamsburg, but I cannot imagine living any place else. I’m the quintessential New Yorker. I’ve never even been farther north than Yankee Stadium....
Humans or cats?
14) Bubbly/Dan Schneider Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a racist. It’s just that I sort of get nervous around white people. It’s not that I fear them, per se- this is the 21st Century, after all. It’s just that they’re so lame, y’know? I mean, think about it- what have white folk contributed to this nation’s culture? War, racism, disease, death- in general. I know....
Not really about Lawrence Welk!
15) Sandwiches From Home/Jessica Schneider It's like that topic that keeps surfacing with your mom or dad, and every time it appears both you and them get upset by it -- they don't like your girlfriend or think you wear your hair a little too long these days, and please, are you ever gonna finish what you started and do something with yourself? You listen because you have no choice, and you leave, slam a door or two, probably say a few things you wish you hadn't, and you're off to that place you like to go, to do the thing you most like to do....
Not really about sandwiches!
16) Letters From Mercury/Jessica Schneider Dear Mom, I just wanted to let you know that I have been living on Mercury for the past six months now, and things are going well. The aliens are treating me right, and give me lots of food fed through a tube....
Hi mom!
17) After The Tone/Dan Schneider “We see in color, but we remember in black and white,” was what the old saying was, but although it had little bearing on himself or the way he had lived his life, to Desmond Penniston, on this day, the saying seemed to be the wisest words he had ever heard uttered, because if there was anything that Desmond hated more than getting messages from solicitors on his answering machine, it was hearing the inane messages of people he barely knew, or those who left longwinded messages for people who did not reside in his home, especially when they uttered apothegms like the aforementioned....
Rinnnngggg....
18) The Solitary Hunter/Jessica Schneider "The sky is full of birds," the boy said to me. "It is full of birds and they are all dead- watch how they are eyeless in their flight, and they are full-grown and yet without feathers of any sort," he added....
Scary?
19) To Go Unsaid/Jessica Schneider Timothy John had two first names. They were easily interchangeable, the first from the last, but most of the time this only occurred at doctor appointments. The nurse would slide open the door and announce, “John Timothy?” and Tim would get up, knowing who she meant. He’d gotten so used to being called by his last name first and his first name last, that he no longer bothered correcting people. Even though he lacked the creative ability to think this on his own, the names acted as different aliases he could reveal to different people. Not that he went around introducing himself as ‘John,’ but more metaphorically speaking, he could be one way to some and another to others, but the bulk always in question was this thing called Tim that existed not independently, but only within the fluttering impressions of others....
Double the pleasure.
20) The Dentist/Jessica Schneider O how I've hated them. Ever since I've had memory, I've hated them. Back when I was smaller than the chair itself, the chair that seemed to go on forever into the wall, with my feet not large enough to make any sort of kick or dent in it, despite how angry or how fearful the experience all seemed. And then like that's not enough, they have to go and put those obnoxious posters upon the walls, pictures of teeth, or that of a single tooth, with arms and legs and a large toothbrush in hand, smiling the whole time....
Open wide.
21) The Fish/Jessica Schneider She had become so embarrassed when she began growing her boobs. Her friends had all been excited, for now they could wear bras, and be taken seriously by that of the boys. But she was only embarrassed. “I didn’t ask for them,” she’d think to herself, as she’d look herself over in the mirror. After all, she was only eleven, and the little things just sort of sprouted up overnight, like shrubs, or like those mushrooms her dad was always trying to kill with pesticide. But nothing ever worked- they just kept on sprouting....
Or a loaf?
Characters, Narrative, Poetry!