“The earworms are the worst part,” she was saying.

Ivan looked up from his beer.  She was staring at him with a nervous half-smile, her eyes wide black holes in the dim of the bar.  Her fingers interlocked around a glass of cranberry juice that she still hadn’t brought to her lips.  “What?” he asked.

The suicide machine was created as a mobile unit, an in-home service available with just a phone call or an online order.  It rolled on treads, and features many attachments that get the job done.  Pincers, hoses, retractable lengths of rope, needles, and bludgeons come out of the stout body of the machine when summoned.  It was a machine designed for the utmost practicality, which makes what happened to it all the more surprising.

Omnibucket co-founder Scott Lambridis was interviewed about our series of staged readings, Action Fiction!, for Fourteen Hills, the literary magazine of San Francisco State University.  

Take a look!

Learn more about Action Fiction! here - including our next show - and see clips.

Every night, around four in the morning, on the rue Benoit Bunico in Nice, there is a shouting match between a man and a woman and though they are not always the same man and woman the shouting match always ends with a gunshot. The man is the one clapping and laughing and his voice is much stronger, but the woman shouts more and it is the shrill pitch of her voice that first invades the minds of the two foreigners, a husband and wife, sleeping four stories above the street.

The ants always burned too quickly for their adolescent pleasure. The three of them would spend weeks building the miniature metropolis in Sam’s back yard, and it was all over in a matter of minutes. It wasn’t fair. Or fulfilling. It would have to change.

“Milagros, la verdad ó te atreves?”

“Truth”

“Did you make-out with the panadero on Monday?”

We all giggle. Rumor has it that half of the seventh grade has been fingered by the baker during
recess behind the basketball court. Rumor also has it that Milagros was seen running out of the
bakery, fixing her skirt after the bell rang on Monday.

You’ve been one-legged since the lasso trap.  Your personal ad says “Kids: undecided” even though you desperately want two.

When the maître d’ shows you to your blind date’s table, you are pleased with her prominent forehead and symmetric face.   She has potential.

Before you can sit, her eyes drift to where your missing leg would be and snap back to your face.  She forces a smile.

You talk menu.

She likes the braised shank.

You are relieved they have salads.   “I ate barbecue last weekend,” you lie.  “I’m in a tuna salad mood.”

That I was six years old and in the company of my father, whose inapproachability was increased by certain spatial proximities such as that which our weekly drive to the old-age home involved, with me seated next to him, silently counting the telephone poles flitting by my hand-cranked window, from whose glass I was all crew cut, forehead, and conveyant eyes which, due to a congenital neuromuscular defect, bulged unnaturally, making me appear as if I were in a continuous state of shock about what- or whomever I was looking at, which expression my father described as endemic to a category of

Abstract Art tends to get bad press, routinely calling it “inaccessible” when it can be beautiful. 

Omnibucket co-founder Dave Senecal has taken a step to correct the record, opening an exhibit at the City Art Center in Delaware, Ohio, that serves as a 101 class in abstract art. 

Aimed at people who don’t know what to look for when approaching pictures that don’t look like something, the exhibit “Color, Line, and Shape” also features the work of Jay Moffett, Peggy Mintun, Michael Bush, and Tom Dewey.

I can picture the faces of the executives as the film begins.  It’s the first time they’ve seen it, the first time the director’s let anyone with money, or marketing savvy, or a neck-tie enter the screening room.  The director’s taken precious care with this cut, with this sound mix.  He personally supervised yesterday’s dry run to make sure every seat in the house is comfortable and free of squeaks, that every line of dialog is audible and every low tone rumbles the house (but doesn’t blow the speakers.)  The projector has been calibrated, the lens cleaned, the bulb (or Blu-Ray laser) tune