The Big Stupid Review
- Routine
- By Felipe de Oliveira
- One more day begins. Night badly slept and without dreams. Got up three times to piss. Pissing like an old man these last two weeks. Two or three, not certain. Wake up with face bloated and enormous shadows around the eyes. If I were whiter and shaggier, I'd look like a panda. more...
- Automatic Transmission
- By Warren Buckles
- Junk has been my downfall. Greasy junk, rusty car parts, bolts, screws, shafts, bearings, manifolds, curved sheet metal bearded with curling paint, gauges with needles pointing to hot or cold, empty or full, zero or thirty, charge or discharge. I was a scholar of junk, a perennial student of the unmade, the abandoned and the obsolete. more...
- Axiom of Choice
- By Jim Chaffee
- When the Lord called me I wasn’t ready. I protested. I resisted. I went on a long vacation. No, I said. Why me?
- Jehovah is tough to convince. When something fixes there it stays there.
- I remembered my predecessor, Eli James. He'd had nothing but trouble with Jehovah. He’d been an investment banker, been in politics. I’d seen the old photos: buttoned down and pinstriped, lace-up wingtips. The real thing. more...
- A Pleasure Jaunt with One of the Sex Workers Who Don’t Exist in the People’s Republic of China
- By Tom Bradley
- Sam Edwine and his presumably contagion free rent-a-date were being Red Flag Limousined through the very mountain forests where, in times gone by, Coxinga the Pirate once paused to hold a funeral for his baby, knowing he’d be overtaken and wiped out.
- It was impossible to tell whether the chauffeur was smiling unkindly through the rearview mirror at Sam’s cramped knees and low pigmentation. Despite the sweat guzzling heat and humidity, the guy had covered the lower half of his face with one of those white surgical masks affected by Asians with colds or halitosis, real or imagined.
- How could this operator of heavy machinery have known in advance that the whore was bringing her little greasy balls of poppy tar? And, if he had known, why hadn’t he felt compelled, in his capacity as the joy-ride’s on-board representative of the provincial government, to blow the whistle on the tart, instead of merely taking passive measures to protect his own mouth and nose from the seductive fumes? And why hadn’t he brought a mask for Sam? more...
- Making the Switch
- By George Sparling I'd read, "tear the mask from error is to establish truth," something a minor Enlightenment philosopher named Maurice Falconet pronounced, quoted in Peter Gay's The Rise of Modern Paganism. Not a required book, but I was a procrastinator. I'd read a solid overview of the Enlightment, the era named by Kant. I relished stray pieces of information, unable to link them except when drunk or on a caffeine high. No amount of Red Bull would push me through college. more...
