Category: Bad Survivalist

Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “The Cheese Wheel Race” by Will Musgrove

Shirtless, you stare down the steep, grassy hill. At the bottom, men dressed as referees wait to catch you and the other competitors. Swinging the cheese wheel between bent knees, the mayor practices his launch. You scan the crowd for your personal trainer Terry. All week, he had you rolling and tumbling. He’d sneak up…
New Poem for Bad Survivalist: “Dishes” by Lane Devers

I am telling you this because I have nowhere else. In my teens, I don’t cry for years at a time. In one of the first home videos I find, we had just bought a new washing machine. I still don’t know how to swim, never learned properly. I try to cure the dry spell,…
Original Bad Survivalist Short Story: “The Mall” by Duncan Rivers

“Die in a field and tell me what rots first, you or your clothes. When the crows swoop down from the peaks of the barns they roost on, where will their beaks be persuaded to strike? Will it be the nylon handbag you carry over your shoulder, or the sunken eyes that wilt away in…
Bad Survivalist Short Story: “Rules and Suggestions for Surviving on a Deserted Island After Your Plane Suddenly Loses Altitude and Crashes” by Keith J. Powell

Stay Hungry.Begin each morning with a meticulous inventory of the finite morsels scavenged from the wreckage. One duty-free bag full of tiny liquor bottles begging to be twisted open. Thirty-two plastic packages of broken pretzels, each containing approximately seven pretzels per package. Six mini-cans of Diet Pepsi. Remember, this is all you have until rescue.…
Bad Survivalist Original Short Story: “Eating Ass and Getting Eaten” by Aaron Timms

The bikers pass my apartment every afternoon, rising and falling in their seats like dolphins stitching through the waves. I observe them from my window, moved each time by the acrobatics, the revved wheelies and breakaways, the marriage of these swaddled bodies to the howling machines. My line of sight stretches down a long straight…
New Fiction for Bad Survivalist: “Runoff” by Alexander Fredman

I learned to wait for rain. I learned to smell sickness in tinny bits of trash. I stuck my face in the trash. I inhaled. I split for some new terror. I dreamed of ways to evade capture. I evaded capture. I began all my sentences with I. Then I decided not to. Who was…
Bad Survivalist Poetry: “The Dark Knight Contemplates the Metaphysics of Pleasure” by Raza Ijaz

“You’ll leave me?” —Bruce to Alfred, The Dark Knight Rises What is pleasure, I think, as I beat up this goon of Bane. (I’ve been thinking a lot these days, as I beat people up, since Alfred kept his word and left). Is pleasure something I felt when I first started beating this deadbeat thug,…
Bad Survivalist: “Under the Orange Tree,” a short story by Emily Unwin

“Everyone in America has an agent,” Judy says. Mary Virginia has just picked up Judy from the Seville, Spain airport. Judy sits in the passenger seat. MV is trying to sell a Christian self-help book. Her knuckles are turning white. Her boyfriend’s mother, Judy, fiddles with the meditation beads around her recently remodeled but still…
Miriam Gershow: “Nature Stories,” a new nonfiction for Bad Survivalist

1. The GPS gets us lost on the way to the boat launch. We backtrack and I take out Google Maps on my phone. We argue, but familiarly. My husband says he’ll know it by sight. I tell him when he’s on the wrong road, but get left mixed up with right. Turn here, I…