Back?

Story Horde is a collection of otherwise unpublished weekly updates by unestablished and wacky writers. The Horde was started in 2008 when I was in high school after reading Richard Brautigan’s The Abortion. If you’re not familiar, a character is the story owns a library of unpublished unwanted stories. I wanted an outlet for my own flourishing collection of teenaged gook and hoped friends and other young writers would be interested. In the same vein as Transmission-X.com (which is daily updates of different online comics), each Story Horde writer is assigned a day and theoretically, they update on their day, keeping the reader in… constant suspense! But the Horde slowly slipped out of our consciousnesses as we entered college and became actual people. However, recent interest has resurrected this old site and now we’re back, baby. Take a look around! The writings you’ll find here are fantastical, insane, mystical and mythic, with lots to offer and nothing to lose! If you’re a writer and are interested in helping out, let us know!

Thanks,
Birdie and The Horde

Leave a Sleeper Be I

The voice begins somewhere far beneath, where root meets core, a dark and sacred space where its words presumably fall clear and free from crumbling ancient lip. At such a depth, even the smallest of ears may tune in to the eternal noise unimpeded, but here, where sun breaks canopy like a cat in a china shop… too deep, too quiet for human ears. It resonates. Starting at the seed, it travels slowly down root and up branch to hum through bones. Earthquakes on a sub-molecular level.

Those gathered between two house-sized buttresses of root flare have faces pressed to the bark, ears flattened to the sound. The voice is saying slowly something that sounds like, “He hasn’t been to see me yet, but the other, the tall pale one who thinks himself of the cloth, he tiptoes around the borders at night. Perhaps he feels I do not pay attention in the Earth’s darkness. Perhaps he dreams. Perhaps.”

Maroon boats of leaves sail silently around three gathered heads. One, face hidden in a ragamuffin tangle of desert floor hair, begins quietly, “I saw them at the playground, the other-” but stops short to examine his friend’s wide gray eyes. And even quieter, “They were talking about your… your return, I guess.”

Softly, but clearly and unshaking, a voice issues from nearly unmoving pale pink lips in a twinkling monotone. “It’s alright, Scal, you don’t have to dance around me. I won’t to break anymore.”

“He-”

“You mean Dyon?” The question comes without hesitation, any tremor or waver flattened under the stone of need in Ash’s voice.

“Yes. Dyon. He wanted to know what ‘woke little Ashley up,’ as he put it. He thought it was Red Calla.”

“No, not that one,” the vibration felt in the teeth interjects, if anything said in such an even, calm tone can be called an interjection. “She came to mourn your missing within my branches, but never mentioned looking for you. She knows enough to know to leave a sleeper be.”

-I'm back!

Bargain Puppy

The Timing of Intimacy

The clock towers above the city, her
Moon face freckled by Roman numeral
Red and bruised gears churn inside like          anxiety
And drop tremors her steeple, dress for a funeral.

Speaking of trees, sweet amber caroline
is in a bottle of whiskey
rolling inside a purple suitcase, with his sinister buddies
and burping over multi-coloured cobblestones, that no horses walk on.
For today is Sunday;
The sun makes a prism out of everything
and you smile and the winter landscape smiles back at you (pl.)
flecks of white light reflected on your face like snowflakes
Black fleece cover linked arms and wind, love, musses your (pl.) hair.

 The clock towers above the city, her
Moon face freckled by Roman numeral
Red and bruised gears churn inside like          anxiety
And drop tremors her steeple, dress for a funeral.

Otherwise, there are no fish in the river,
The fishermen are at home with their slimy wives
whose bellies they slit open and rub grains of salt into the fishy flesh.
Mother collapses,
like the chickens raised for food on factory farms
mammoth bodies fold in on slender limbs.
Smells of straw and decomposing muscle tissue
Lethal squawking racks the rafters.
Father Christmas and his nine ghoul dancers
squirt through the skies and sit in the shadowy parts of the room
while your family traditions unfurl like a flag
and sitting cross- legged in your pajamas on the floor
you can only see His eyes
and their tiny, shiny, bloodstained hooves.

The clock towers above the city, her
Moon face freckled by Roman numeral
Red and bruised gears churn inside like          anxiety
And drop tremors her steeple, dress for a funeral.

3 Poems

College

They come from home: swamps, sewers, and airlifts
Dragging with them their stench, mothers, and premature behavior.
“Class of 2012!” all pumped up.
What a great “New Ivy League” school
You should be proud to be here
Clearly you tried your hardest
And deserve a real. college. experience.
Close your eyes and breathe it in now.
Fill your fucking faces.
Turn on the showers and wash the shit out of your hair
And watch it float across the floors and down the drain.
Welcome to your personal institution-
Oh pardon me, I mean-
We accept your differences,
(actual intelligence doesn’t really count)
Natural selection doesn’t exist here.

 And gyrate your way to the quad!
Mod! Blod! Sod!
You’re in the Real World, guys!
So hip and horny,
Silent sodomy ailed by urine-barley-brew
The old Grecians whose letters we use
would be ashamed to their gods if they knew

 And mamas look me in the eye
On orientation day so divine
Searching for that kid (the one I’m not), the perfect example
They’re paying 50K for their own to be.
 
Well you’re getting ripped off, mom,
And you don’t care
‘cause everyone deserves their own taste of Princeton.

Sluttery

a rose is a rose,
to a hand is a hand
to a face to a kiss
to asleep beneath trees
with the fluid sliding, manic meaning
sounds like hydraulics and wind up doll
hey. hey there.
because the embrace is such a surprise
every. goddamn. time.
and my smile isn’t fake it’s just
an imitation of yours
and it’s not that I don’t feel, my dear
or cannot see you warm my hands with yours
but once everything starts, like clockwork, to fly
and alarms become redundant to the ears
and it takes so much more to wake up in the morning than a
             fall out of bed
             a beating to the head
             poisoning with lead
as I walk with you,    and he
and she
and he
and all, in good timing, are
alone with me.

 

After the Frat Party

He plunders, face drenched in ale
And over his shoulder he swings the girl
And carries her whooping victory cries
Her blood streaming down his back
With the rain, all the way up the hill
to Susan B. Anthony 
And in his drunken delight
That impromptu wedding night
Strewn between textbooks and roommates’ fright
He hears cheering from outside the window (thanks bros!)
And she, too delirious and panting and silent
Does not remember how quickly he came.