Balance: The Dark and Strange entity that is "The Sunglasses Girl."

Let’s get hardcore.

Just to let you know that I write a wide variety of stuff, after the subtle surrealism of the micro-fiction piece a couple blogs back, here’s a snippet from my story, “The Sunglasses Girl,” which was published in the paperback anthology, Peep Show, Volume 1, from 2004--a worthy venture if you can find it, I was in good company, including John Everson and Shaun Jeffrey. The two main characters are Trane, a guy just out of a relationship, messed up and cheated and can’t find his way back to the woman he loved, and the woman of the title. He’s wallowing in sex and self-pity disguised as freedom. She‘s a prostitute and wears sunglasses at all times because, well…you’ll see. If memory serves me correctly, the sequence below, the big paragraph of descriptive darkness, was pointed out by the editor, Paul Fry, as particularly potent.

So, after hours of sex and still wanting more, Trane wants to see what’s behind those sunglasses. Shhh, let’s join the scene in progress:

…She smiled, all teeth, vicious, gleaming with disgust, and took off her sunglasses.

“Remember, you made this choice,” she seethed.

The moment was brief. Description was useless, but Trane’s mind flashed with unexpected images: vast gulfs of infinite, starless space; yawning abysses where the lost tumbled for eternity; black scars that oozed blindness. He felt an oppression begin to suffocate him. She had no eyes, per se, just the empty sockets where they should be, empty sockets that defined the word “empty” in new, disturbing ways: fathomless wells in which the echoed response of the dropped stone would never speak. They epitomized nothingness, a vast, turbulent nothingness that indicated that there was no soul within her, no self, nothing of substance--nothing!—but something of unspecified definition that roiled like a cavern of agitated bats. The nothingness started to leak like viscous black rivers from a whirlpool of resentment and hatred and loathing and spite and so much more negativity (negativity, that was what he witnessed; the whirlpool writhed with an omniscient negativity) that Trane’s head pulsated with the pummeling weight of her wrath. He gasped, his erection went south, and she put the sunglasses back on. It was only one moment…

“Happy?” she hissed, this time with a vehemence dripping with revulsion, like viscera from a sated hyena’s laughing snout.

Fun stuff, eh? Every story picks its own path. I’m only there to scribble madly, trying to capture these often dark words for others to read and enjoy. From the subtleties of magic realism, to hardcore horror, to any fantastic path between, hey, I am but there gleeful messenger.

Hope this works: the link will lead you to a page featuring the art used for the cover of Peep Show, Volume 1. It seems impossible to get the actual cover online, I'd just assume right click and save the art, post the painting here, but the page doesn't allow right clicking. So...here we go.  Enjoy!

 http://www.caniglia-art.com/viewer-slideshow.htm?17