Category: Bad Survivalist

The couple that camps together gets mauled together. Never ask for directions but plead for outdoor sex? Every pool is safe for swimming. You are a bad survivalist; blaze your trail for HFR.

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…
Two Bad Survivalisms by Zedekiah Gonsalves Schild

Good in a Crisis I can elevate that glassfoot above your heartapply unflinching pressure to that chain of woundsthat began with bitter cactus rind balm for the sun. I am good in a crisis a Swiss army knifeof bullshit I know / the plastic seat of a squad car feels likeit has space for cuffs…
Bad Survivalist Short Story: “Progress” by Derek Fisher

TurtlePhone and Positively Pete! roll across a hellish expanse of the Mojave Desert. Roll, and drag. TurtlePhone, equipped with wheels under his plastic frame, is rolling comfortably enough. Positively Pete!, wheel-less, and without autonomy or propulsion, is dragged by the green tail of TurtlePhone, an appendage of hard plastic and pointy at its tip, which…
“There Is No Answer to the Simplicity of Weather,” a collaborative poem by Leigh Chadwick & Mitchell Nobis

My dreams are nothing but a wall of owls. I wake up all eyes and twisted thumbs. The birds are back in pre-dawn spring. I’m stuck in an alarm clock of sweetness and tweets as the river pushes heavy with dead winter and trash. Benches are free unless you’re poor. I think about church, but…
Bad Survivalist: Three Poems by Ryan Clinesmith

Apocalypse I ——An apocalypse is an enzyme of separation, salt turned sugar, apples oxidizing, blue death, survival as the catalyst to enjoying sunsets, closing your eyes in a Mecca-crowd, a 42nd-St-New-Year’s-Eve crowd, closing your eyes only after looking around to see you are the crowd—— or it’s the time, a block before we got back…