The Open Callers & A Surreal Gallery

Steven Cline from Hermetic Tardigrade's Plumbing Collages

This gallery of surreal collages by Steven Cline of

Hermetic Tardigrade

open the portal to SUM FLUX’s supernatural plumbing systems. His water closet dreamscapes capture the spirit of this volume’s prompt: “Plumbing.”

Welcome to the world of banal infrastructure—the pipes and drains that keep the filth at bay—and the things that sometimes live or get caught inside them.

Huge thanks to

Will Boucher

for planting the initial seed of inspiration for this theme. Go read (or re-read) the piece that, to me, contains this volume’s stardust: Old Times by Will Boucher.
Read it here: Old Times by Will Boucher.

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And here are the brave souls who chose to answer our call and dive into the SUM FLUX plumbing system.

Drew Valdez

of Meat Sandwich: Blood Pump

"I got caught up in the right circumflex for about a week. Someone needs to tell Dick Bean to take it easy on the Mickey D's or he's going to blow the whole joint."

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Sean Thomas McDonnell

of Automatic Reader : Henry's Best Day

…he likes to sit there and look at the poster directly across from the toilet. “GRATITUDE,” it reads. There’s a snow-covered mountain with a magnificent waterfall spilling over the side of it. He feels calm when he looks at the poster. Maybe he’ll go visit a waterfall someday.

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Jeannine

of Teeny Tiny Tales: The Incubator

The recovery room nurse asked if I wanted to see a photo, before handing me an eight-and-a-half by eleven glossy sheet featuring an image of an oblong, spiky, golden creature. It sort of looked like a hedgehog. I was almost sorry that it had been vaporized. It was kind of cute.

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Keith Long

of Loser’s Fiction: Plumb Crazy

I was staring down this fish, this one-eyed fish, and it wouldn’t flop or nothing, it was just breathing, mouth opening and closing, one wide eye fixed on me, smelling like Jack…

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P. K. Anthony

of : Grunge in the Pipes

He says all the bad’s been washed away. When sacred steam blooms to the ceiling, carries my filth away on plumes of Irish Spring, then pools and slides down the drain, my thoughts finally run clear.

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Zani D

of Entropic Absurdity: Pompeii

She would have been little more than a sweated pipe to me, but her eyes wandered over my body as I stared at her feet and awaited permission to find exit from her presence.

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Antoine

: How to Fix a Water Leak (Drawing)

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Matthew “Hugh” C. Williams Jr. of

The Untenmensch

Call us "The Plumbers"

“This is but one of many mysteries in the customer that confronts the plumber in between his plumbing.”

Brock Eldon

of Null Point: Drain

The motion was imperceptible at first, just the slightest drift, the way water eddies around the lip before being claimed. But the pull deepened. The whorl of it grew, gathering momentum, until the world outside the spiral became a smear, indistinct, distant.

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Sandolore Sykes

of the Inversion Field: Tomorrow Will be Jealous

I imagine the water, the grit from my body, the dried tears all filtering into the pipes. Bits of me, streaming into the other apartments, like parts of me were in their rooms.

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Huge Thanks for the writers who participated in the open-call!