Hello everyone… I am the opening act in the blog-fiction game “Consequences,” a sort of “Exquisite Corpse” game where an awesome writer writes a 250-word fragment and then hands it off to another awesome writer, and so on… See below for the complete rules and participating writers, pulled together by the steady curatorial hand of Wah-Ming Chang. The theme is “Abandoned Landscapes.” And here we go…

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Abandoned Landscapes

Round One, Chapter One

I’d tried the trick a ton of times before, with generally solid results. Try it sometime: stumble out of the restaurant or bar, long after midnight and right before last call, so drunk you can’t hold more than one thing in your head at a time, and find a car with unlocked doors. Get in the back seat and shut your eyes. Half the time you’ll have a warm place to sleep and wake up with the sun harsh in your eyes. The other half of the time you’ll get a ride home when the driver, generally also drunk, arrives. They’ll be mad, and then they’ll get into it. The mysterious drunk man; the late-night mission. Worst worst worst case scenario they’ll threaten to call the cops and you’ll have to get out and find another car. Anyway I was due for something dreadful, after a couple dozen or hundred times of pulling this prank.

Birds fighting woke me up in a field of cinder blocks, surrounded by a suburb that could be post-Soviet or post-apocalypse. Sagging brick buildings. A long scorched school or hospital. Graffitid slogans from horror movies. Wind throbbing down from a lake or bay or river. Little glimpses of last night: two sturdy frat types shouting at me from the front seat, then conferring, then giggling. Landscape scrolling past for probably hours. My head hitting a tuft of soft dead grass; a door slamming; howls out windows as the car screamed off.

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THE FULL LINE-UP, IN ORDER….

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