Madame Bonair, great grandmother of the gypsies, wandered around her apartment berating her dearly departed spouse. There was no escape for him, not even in death. The idea! Thinking he could simply pass away and spend the rest of eternity haunting a strip bar or hovering around street corners, peering down women's tops. If he was going to see any skin in the afterlife, it would be hers, or her name wasn't Madame Bonair, which it was. So that settled it. The poor disembodied spirit had to accompany his sharp-tongued wife everywhere, even to the tedious séances she held. If only some visitors from beyond would pop in to hang out with him. But that never happened. Her spiritist sittings were such a sham it made his protoplasmic blood boil, all the while wishing vehemently that he could evaporate. He observed his wife at the hocus pocus, the crystal ball she stroked so mysteriously, seeing nothing but a distortion of her own gnarly reflection; and that annoying, nasally-pitched voice spewing forth in her phony trance, the same voice that had nagged him all those years of his life and past his deceasement. Enough was enough! It made him so furious he'd lift up the table and hurl it across the room. But even in death he couldn't win. All that he achieved was a generous tip for Madame Bonair and an increase in her reputation as a mistress of mysticism.

Story #258

Thanks everyone for your story contributions for this photo, all reposted at indeterminacies.blogspot.com.

Stella and Starla paused and posed for the shoplifting camera. They had nothing to hide. They'd just come from the men's department, an innovative idea the store was trying out, where women could pick out a man most to their liking, complete with booths for quick kisses and sample layaways. The conditions were competitive: no money down, heterosexuality guarantee and if you applied for the store's credit card, twenty percent less fat. After trying nearly all the men on the racks, they wandered off to the ladies trinkets department. Not that they weren't satisfied with the men. These were girls who knew just what they wanted when they entered a shop, and never allowed themselves to be seduced by all the flashy offers one usually encountered while shopping. Stella selected a scarf and Starla took a cute headband. They planned on returning to the store next weekend, though they hadn't yet decided what it was they would buy. "I think I'll get a tie for my boyfriend," Stella speculated. "Oh yeah, me too," echoed Starla, "that's as good as anything."

Story #257

Everyone came to the party to touch Atoma. She lay on the bricks and they touched her. One by one. Tingling sensations zapped into her brain like dots and dashes of a telegraph signifying sensual words; the words metamorphosing into a male and female figure of electrical current. They mingled in the gray matter inside her skull, did dances, slung themselves around, twirling on the magnetic perpetuity of their attraction and repulsion, neither force winning out in the end. "Touch me harder!" she cried, and the boys all came to clench fingers around her extended limbs, to induce the feeling through her nerves and into those centers of ecstasy hidden from the outside eye. A smile of pleasure formed on her lips as mental cyclones whirled into each other inside her, yin and yang uniting in a flash of lightning that shot the sensation back through synapses, out of the threshold of thought, surging along myelin to extremities, waves of galvanic voltage discharging into the hands clasping her so severely... The physics professor looked up from his lectern to see the entire class panting heavily. This always happened when he read the chapter on nuclear fusion.

Story #256

Apart from the scene's sensualities, the sight of three playful girls, lips enclosing around the strawberries, tongues fondling the redness while the assisting suction of indrawn breath convinced the fleshy fruit to release the fullness of its juices to mingle in the mouths, there was also something horrific about it. The boys at the party, of course, felt wildness rising in their blood at the oral-erotic sight of it. Captain Phrang, on the other hand, shuddered while watching his men die by such devourment. An hour earlier they had all cheered with euphoric glee as their cantaloupe-like space vessel swooped in over the strawberry patch. They saw row after row of their kind, lined in the traditional parallel lines signifying welcome in their green watermelon world. They landed in a garden, their cantaloupe blending splendidly with the abounding floral colors. Through the wide patio window of the nearby structure they located the bowl of their fellow beings. Captain Phrang sent his three ripest men to make contact. They had commenced mingling in the bowl of strawberries, when one by one, the huge voluptuously-lipped creatures began plucking them from the coliseum-like container. He winced with each enclosure of lips around one of his men. Pacing nervously up and down his cantaloupe craft he wondered how in the world he would ever explain this to their wives.

Story #255

Harvey clicked the send button, dissolving his e-mail into a flux of electrical impulses that zapped through the hubs connecting the World Wide Web with God knows what. But he really wanted those love pills. Seconds later the doorbell rang.

"I'm the Spam Fairy," the girl at the door said, but she didn't smile and gaily wave her wand about like those fairys he'd seen in Disney movies. She looked at him with those big, consternated eyes of hers and waited for him to tell her what he wanted.

"Is something wrong?" Harvey asked her, sensing that this was his big chance, showing sympathy to a fairy, maybe even doing her a good deed. No telling how she might repay him. She might even be willing to grant some especially personal wishes.

Tears welled in her eyes, "It's so awful in our world," she cried, "Streets paved with college degrees, mortgage money raining from the skies, hailstorms of little blue pills." She leaned her head on his shoulder while her shoulders bobbed up and down accompanying her stifled sobs. "And the diet supplements, the cheap real estate everywhere..."

She looked up again and he saw the tears running down her cheeks, "And those pick-up bars filled with girls yearning for Christian dates. They're so shameless! We're working round the clock, sending e-mails trying to find someone to take all these abominations off our hands."

Harvey looked into her eyes and stated with all the sincerity he could muster, "I wish I could help you."

"Do you, really?" she asked him, eyes sparkling with magic. Harvey nodded. The Spam Fairy waved her wand. The next thing Harvey knew he was in a room filled with PCs, and at each PC was huddled some wretched person, moving a mouse and typing in e-mails with shaky fingers. A burly sumo wrestler with sweaty muscles and a whip strolled gaily about the room, randomly lashing the stooped figures. "Type faster! Get that spam out! Longer! Harder! All night long! You!" he bellowed grabbing Harvey by the arm and accelerating him into a hard, empty seat. "What do you think this is? Disneyland?!? Get to work!"

Story #254

Thanks for contributing your stories. They have been reposted at indeterminacies.blogspot.com.

After weeks of coaxing diplomatic enough to bring peace to the Middle East, if it had not been so selfishly applied, she still said no. It was the third glass of whiskey and soda, smuggled into her like sugar candy in a pack of birth control pills, that finally bared the camel's back, if the soft, revealed skin of a woman could ever remind anyone of a camel. He danced around her with the camera trying to capture breasts owning contours he had so often admired stretching the cotton tops she wore. But her top-heavy torso dragged her into a graceful spin, perpetually stumbling against something, hiding all the fleshiness he had hoped to immortalize digitally. If ever he did get an open shot at her the result was so blurred as to frustrate even a minute examination of the enlargement. All this gyroscopic rotation in pursuit of exposed breasts magnified the effects of whiskey and soda in the photographer's system. He became dizzy, wobbled in directions his feet wouldn't take him, and finally stumbled flat onto the floor, where he fell asleep. The girl caught herself on the door, pressed up close, adoring the feel of gentle wood on her tender skin and the sensation of blood circulating in whirlpools of excitement. She took up the camera, undressed her unconscious host, and continued to fill the camera's memory with male positions of appealing delicacy. As a souvenir for her photographer she left one picture of herself.

Story #253

Bruce was the only man in the world who understood women, a quality that made him quite popular among men, not to mention women. Mondays and Tuesdays he graciously set aside from his grueling routine of lovemaking to advise other men in the complex intricacies of getting along with their female: when to kiss, when to listen, when to immediately remove oneself to the safety of a barricaded basement. He knew it all. The grateful men did anything for his advice. They shined the shoes off his feet. They ironed his pants for him. They carried him around on his suavely-surfaced seduction sofa, while Bruce himself indicated the direction with a quick twist of the thumb. He should never have allowed the delegation from MAMAS (the Macho Man Society) into his house. When he gave the signal to put him down they dumped him from the sofa and slammed the weighty piece of furniture right down on top of him. Bruce wasn't good for business.

Story #252

They set up the virgin sacrifice in the car port. The willing volunteer poised herself on the swing, ready to release herself to the gravity that would draw her into the salivating mouth of the beast before her. In these, her last moments, her life flashed before her. She saw the sweet boy in grade school who had held hands with her, that first awkward kiss with an unacquainted brother of a friend, the first tingling of tongue against tongue. She relived the first dance in which stiffening manhood pressed against her in all its titillating mystery. Breathless moments vaulted visually before her, heart beating fast, spurred on by forbidden sensation. She became vaguely aware that the images flashing were new, yet unlived. She lay with a dark-eyed boy, embraced him passionately, feeling her innocence slip into blissful oblivion. Then her vision cleared. Her orientation found her on the swing, ready to surrender to the gravitational forces that would draw her mercilessly into the quivering mouth of the waiting beast. But the beast sensed a change which disagreed with him violently. It shuddered, throbbing from pale to red to violet, finally popping into a cloud of nothingness, like a soap-bubble condom playfully inflated past its bearable tension. The girl arced back and forth on the swing, ever higher, enjoying the summer breeze against her cheeks.

Story #251

Clara blew into the bottle giving life to a cosmos. This made her a Goddess. The miniscule beings in their new existence began worshipping her. They swam in their fluid waters singing hymns to her beauty and imagining how it must be to see her perfectly before them, to be nestled in the sacred softness of her skin. She was so large to her creations that even the unfathomed thought of perceiving her overwhelmed their senses into imbalance. They would splash about in disequilibrium until her tranquility steadied the waters. In the end they had no real concept of who she was or what she was, yet they unconditionally longed to enter her heaven. For Clara was a thirsty Goddess. It wasn't long before she raised the bottle for another sip, drawing scores of her minions back into their origin, to be digested by the holy juices and to flow in the blessed blood. This was part of the eternal cycle of life.

Story #250

Orca: There he goes, diving into the pool again.
Orco: What a show off! Evolving from a beach ball into a human.
Orca: Your brain's a beach ball if you believe that evolution nonsense. Everyone knows the Great White Whale created us by breathing dust into our inflatable forms.
Orco: Sure, but still, there he is, coming and going as he pleases. And all we do is float aimlessly in the water.
Orca: But it's a great life, isn't it?
Orco: I don't know. Sometimes I'd just like to swim across the pool to the other side, to be in the sun. Or sometimes, if the sun is hot, I'd like to swim into the shade. But we can't move!
Orca: There's more to life than just moving around.
Orco: Well, I wish he'd stop moving.
Orca: Basically, he's nothing more than a bacterial conglomerate. If they'd only put a little more chlorine in the water, he'd go back to being a beach ball.

Story #249

Thanks to Mrs. Weirsdo for contributing a story: see indeterminacies.blogspot.com

Sorry. I'm on vacation now until mid-July. Please page down for my vacation goodbyes.

Jules, Jim and Jonah sat in the living room, four walls, a window, no door. Their words to one another were sparse, though their thoughts ignited at the focal point of Catherine. Jules thumbed through his telephone book finding Catherine on every page, more times than he had ever called her. Jim perused his paper from story to story, each exposing another facet satisfying the obsession: stories of her first kiss, editorial opinions on her beauty, the allure of her face in every advertisement, and her intellect sensed behind every contact announcement, a new woman described each time. Jonah was trying to get her on the television but there was no picture. Usually she was present on every channel, walking avenues, sitting in the park, a book on her lap or a care-free swim in the open bosom of the sea. He shifted his efforts to the radio. Perhaps he would find her singing a chanson, or speaking at a press conference announcing the owner of her heart's affections. And he did find her. He listened as Catherine sang a song of farewell to men, voice fading in and out owing to the widening distance between her and the opposite gender. She had decided for the moment to concentrate her attentions on women. Jules, Jim and Jonah found themselves in one whale of a limbo.

Story #248

Note from Indeterminacy: Thanks go to Sylvain Chuzeville of the band Ex-Magnolia for kind permission to use the photo. Check out their song "On a Shelf," a title which kind of goes well with this story.

VACATION GOODBYES
Ladies and gentleman, I have to announce now that I'm going on vacation for two weeks. This will be the last post until I return. I've also posted a photo at indeterminacies.blogspot.com for all of you to contribute stories to while I'm away, like we've been doing on weekends. I still have to select a winner for June. I'll do that next week and announce it somehow. And don't forget that Michael at blogin_idiot.blogspot.com is doing this story thing every Friday.

I have to apologize to everyone who commented in my guestbook or at one of the stories, because I haven't been able to respond to all your comments yet, and to all my blogging friends, because I haven't been able to keep up with all your blogs as intensively as I've wanted to this past months. I hope to make good on that in the next weeks.

I keep finding these cool sites and want to share some with you. Please do take the time to check them out. I think I've fallen in love with all these ladies:

www.geeekgirl.net
www.moxiegrrrl.com
arterium.blogspot.com
barofsoap.blogspot.com
omnamaste.blogspot.com
seizethenite.blogspot.com
ostrichspeak.blogspot.com
colettesgrave.blogspot.com
livingwellornot.blogspot.com
northerndeath.blogspot.com
atomicvelvetsigh.blogspot.com
fromsunshinetosuicide.blogspot.com
spaces.msn.com/members/unrequestedopinions
(Sorry if I made a mistake and put a guy in here)


Not ladies, but also well worth checking out:

beerhaikudaily.blogspot.com *creative*
fuggettaboutit.blogspot.com *funny*
gimmesomemoney.blogspot.com *original*


And this is my staple of favorites (I'm in love with all these ladies, too, except the ones who are guys, and there it's more of a manly type feeling):

jamiesmindlessblather.blogspot.com
princessdominique.blogspot.com
rambling_chicken.blogspot.com
saddlesorereview.blogspot.com
alixinwunderland.blogspot.com
hauptundneben.blogspot.com
oldtommyboy.blogspot.com
bitterbierce.blogspot.com
thealienguy.blogspot.com
askthedevil.blogspot.com
falafelsex.blogspot.com
pansifiles.blogspot.com
cmarie88.blogspot.com
coveries.blogspot.com
kellykell.blogspot.com
deryke.blogspot.com
sabem.blogspot.com
tinadupuy.com/wp


I know I've forgotten somebody, so please don't have your feelings hurt. I'm throwing this together in a hurry. One more thing. Check out the latest issue of the Practically creative e-zine. I'm in there somewhere.