Fiction: Selections From Daniel Schulz

Reality Check

Daddy wants me to fuck a woman so he can have children. Daddy wants me to do hard work, because he used to fuck like a factory worker in bed. The mattress is a conveyor belt, a steel frame that Is just as cold and hard as he is. His bed is made out of the same cold steel the factory is. Mommy knows what I am talking about.

 

Daddy poses in front of the mirror with his AK-47 because he has erectile dysfunction. Daddy makes friends with squirrels in the woods, shooting them. Daddy likes doing stuff like that. Daddy goes out on the weekend with his friends to shoot off a load. As a child his best friends were dead, stuffed animals. That is his definition of friendship. He did not have a Teddy but he had them. 

 

He is very fond of people with button eyes, people that give him emotional confirmation. Because there is a stillness to those eyes that calms him.

 

When Daddy comes back home in the evening, we stay silent. When Daddy comes back home in the evening the only thing that talks back to him is the television set. 

 

The television set tells Daddy all the things he does not want to here. Daddy shouts back at the television telling it what he believes is real and what is not. He is his own man. No one gets to tell him what he is supposed to think. Again, he is the one who selects what’s real and what’s not. The world is ruined, he rants, because so much isn’t.

Wasteland

It was relentless, the way that the mills of the factories still kept turning, wide open like mouths, swallowing all resources left on this earth and shredding them into shit sold for gold. Now that everything else was gone, the gold standard was the only principle left governing the earth as the smell of money became as easily recognizable as the smell of soap that managers used to wash their hands of responsibility for anything else but themselves. Property, after all, was power. Erect like cigarettes the chimneys kept burning holes into the open sky, until the ozone layer was just about to collapse. You could see it when the birds started going aflame mid-flight.

 

Gertrude looked into the distance and used the hands of her child as an ashtray. The fact that the abdominal pains she had once suffered turned out to be a child she was giving birth to was proof enough to her that the brunt at her feet was a little shit. Always pulling at her skirt, the shit stretched her hands out with a broad smile, while extending her tongue, almost as if to taste snow flakes falling from the sky. Nothing else was left of the world. The climate was like her mother, a personality split between floods and drought, which explained the brittle state of her eyes. The bleakness of life had become a refuge from the suffering that had proceeded it. Ash, in other words, was as snowy as it would ever get here as the world kept burning to a crisp.

 

Gertrude sighed with sweat on her brow and nothing else to give. The world she had inherited to her abdominal pains was a wasteland, barren soil kept alive by air conditioners most people could hardly afford. You needed money to survive, after all, or so she told herself. You needed money. And so she handed her child a dollar bill instead of something to eat, not understanding what was about to happen, as her daughter greedily stuffed the bill into her hungry, hungry mouth.

Daniel Schulz (he/him) is a German writer known for his work on Kathy Acker and his publications in journals such as Gender Forum, Fragmented Voices, and the Milton Review, and the catalog Get Rid of Meaning. He has published two chapbooks WelfareState and No Change to Abuse. IG: @danielschulzpoet