salshep

#CommunityLit

705 Watchers131 Deviations

162.7K

Pageviews

Gallery

All

131 deviations

Featured

63 deviations

Poetry

49 deviations

Literature

Juggers

Ant, You're not going to believe this. Unzip the folder and check out image 14, number 227. Yes, that's a jugger you're looking at, only ten times the regulation embryo mass. And yes, that is an illegal frontal lobe. Look at those EEG printouts. That says sentient-level brain activity, or I am a monkey's nutsack. And get this - according the dates, he's two and a half years old? Still in prenatal phase. Oh yeah, and zoom in on that dark spot on the left. #227 also seems to have grown himself an eyeball. Our whole agenda here just took one giant leap into workable human rights territory. So let Jim know the plan's changed. Getting this jugg

Prose

25 deviations

Literature

FFM 16 - Kallista

Kallie felt nothing. Her insides were a black hole, a vacuum that sucked up every scrap of feeling and then spat it all out again. But to where? Somewhere she wasn't. She wondered at times where it all went, the love, the hate, the anger, fear. All Kallie knew for sure was that she felt empty most of the time, and this was a terrible way to be. Being alone drove her mad. It was then that her inner void echoed most loudly, so she did what she could to fill her life, her time: hobbies, obsessions, people. But when time was her own, when there was nothing and nobody to preoccupy her, she felt her own vacancy acutely. It was a pain that wasn't r

Five Points

6 deviations

Literature

Rehab for Roleplayers - Intro

Welcome to Rehab for Roleplayers, a series of articles aimed at helping roleplayers more successfully make the transition into writing fiction. Introduction: How to Spot a Drow Illusionist I can identify a habitual roleplayer from fifty paces. Those who've been spooked by my asking whether they're a roleplayer within ten seconds of reading their fiction will know what I'm talking about. "But how did you know?" they gasp. When I'm done chuckling, I explain that I know they are a roleplayer, because they write like a roleplayer. There's usually a pause, then, while the writer decides to what degree they're going to feel offended by this sta

Rehab for Roleplayers

7 deviations

FFM 2010

25 deviations

Literature

The Suitor

Don Emilio calls on us each week. My sisters watch him like hungry cats: Juanita, so thin she pokes holes in the sheets, sour-lipped Pilar, and poor Ines with her crooked back. But it is to me his black eyes most often wander. Mama serves him coffee, and tightly rolled flautas. Our guest picks at the food, boasts of his villa in Guanajuato; immaculate hands dip and hover like jewelled birds. I have begun to suspect that Don Emilio is not looking for a wife. .

Published Stuff

10 deviations

Amigurumi

10 deviations

Visual Art

10 deviations

DDs

10 deviations

Scraps

35 deviations

The Suitor by salshep, literature

Literature

The Suitor

Gentleness and Its Enduring by salshep, literature

Literature

Gentleness and Its Enduring

All Gentleness And Its Enduring People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us. ~Iris Murdoch Pothilas set his briefcase down on the hallstand and paused to appreciate the afternoon light that lent his white-on-white decor an almost sanctified air. The apartment was warm. Too warm. He hung up his Director’s robes and hurried toward the biotank in which Sverta lay limply, sunk deep in her fluid, her tubes and filaments rustling. The sun was unseasonably hot, and it wasn’t as though she had the freedom to shift away from its glare. He frowned and clos

The Hard Work of Poetry by salshep, literature

Literature

The Hard Work of Poetry

Poets are constantly crippled, creatively. It's the way it works. You write a line and, just now, right now, it seems like it's the best line in the world to date. It's a shiny, beautiful line, a thought, an image so remarkably profound that you are in awe of yourself, or (if you are a seasoned poet) in awe of that angelic being which sits on high in your mind and occasionally drops little scraps of poetic manna into your head. Now, you only need to write a poem around it. And fail. Because the poem takes over, sprouts a million legs and scurries in directions you had no real intention of it going – and now the Wondrous Line of Glory a

Pain by salshep, literature

Literature

Pain

Hangs from your spine like an incomplete, conjoined sibling with no mind of its own but enough of yours to make you fear it. Comes when you are sleeping to perch on your face and dip its beak redly into your dreams. Shucks its claws on the upholstery of your flesh. Is a fog-eyed poet, reading aloud to you endless reams of his own passionate, excruciating verse. Squats in the waste it has made of you, a basilisk-child you dare not look in the eye. Remembers the body when it moved with the ease of light across a lake’s delicate skin. Watches your babies grow skins so thick they can’t feel you. Is an illusion overcome

Mammoth by salshep, literature

Literature

Mammoth

You're on the lawn, pickled as a paper-bag philosopher, mouth full of copper and oxidised vinegar— eyes oystering ant-sand and your cheeks wet as the tracks of unhappy snails. It's almost dawn, it's cold. The bastard left you, and you've fallen over in the garden coming up the path to home. By morning, frost crackles across the black hump of your back - soon you'll be glaciered to the grass, face iced to your coat-sleeve, and the great, frozen spectacle of you will grind its way, ten inches a year, toward the porch. Some day they'll discover you, the remains of dandelions stuck in your teeth, fresh as ten thousand years ago.

Homesick by salshep, literature

Literature

Homesick

Do not let them see you blink, Mother said, so I am careful to turn away when my eyes dry out. My grip on the brush is clumsy. Colours speck and dazzle, slop like foam on rocks; the teacher dabs their brilliance from my flaking arms. Children whisper behind starfish hands; they go to play in the bright, hot yard but I stay in, as Mother told me. Below the window there’s a tank of golden fish that circle, circle, following their own reflections. I dip my fingers in to scoop one up, watch it flip and shine, cool in my palm, and press my face deep into the water. Membranes slide across my thirsty eyes. I breathe, and breath

Witches by salshep, literature

Literature

Witches

Witches So you thought we were gone when our blackened bones had burned to coals and you'd washed our ash from the back of your throat. When you exhale into the face of your wife, does she smell us? Lately at night, familiar as cats, we've taken to creeping about your dark home reeking of bonfires, empty-headed pumpkins, poppets of wormwood and rue. In dream you consume us, come morning, you dare not pass a hedge or linger where three roads meet. We are slowly collecting your fluids and fallen hair, diffusing our dust into all of your meals. Soon we'll leach like salt from your skin, fly on specks of spittle, out of your

Field Notes by salshep, literature

Literature

Field Notes

. I: Insecta I snap: a sling-shot of sinew, tendons whipped to joints that buckle in lines as cleanly creased as an origami crane. Poised on a tripod of paper tips, I anticipate the wind but there is only steel shearing bone and then it all unfolds with a scritch-scratch and tickle of segmented limbs sprouting, barbed as berry-canes. II: Hymenoptera My skin once fed on your skin; sipped at honeyed pores with a thousand tiny, hollow tongue

Slough by salshep, literature

Literature

Slough

It starts with a metronomic drip-splat, each drop a bastinado blow on the feet of sleep. Floundering from our half- cold bed, I navigate the room like a blind albatross until the bitch of a stubbed toe stops me. Something gurgles, deep in the house. Rust runnels down walls we painted ivory. I find the sink choking, the refrigerator dead, puddles rising, like stigmata, on the lino. The kettle boils itself. It's been three weeks since you left this house. I thought by now it would have stopped grieving. . .

The Art of Un-Knowing by salshep, literature

Literature

The Art of Un-Knowing

Give your burden the mane of a lion. Of yourself, make a kraal. Split your heart and fashion its two halves into a pair of goats. Tether one to a stake. Then pull all the shades for darkness, barricade the door, listen for a nervous bleat, a skitter of hooves in the mind's dirt. Feel nothing when the animal screams. Believe: it's only a goat. And here, the art - a bloody thorn, a twist of hair will show you how the lion gets in, where to dig the trap. When it is dead burn the carcass. When the winds have drunk the last of its ash, you'll still have one good goat.