Nikita Linivenko

“Do Androids Dream of Designer Brands? ” by Nikita Linivenko

Submitted to Contest #82

The yellow sheets of Giallo, the rough, finger-razoring cardboard pages of crushed pulp - now discontinued - were phased out by slick, glossy high-end journals. Fletch rubbed her slim, bare legs on the duvet as she leaned heavily into the pillow, flicking through a reprint of an Ursula K. Le Guin story. Ursula le Guin had been dead for half a century, but they still ran her stuff. Anthologized them. Dumped them in sci-fi rags. On the screen embedded into the wall in front of her, Harrison Ford guns down an escaping droid, sending it crashi...

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“Night Talk” by Nikita Linivenko

Caryn White lived up to her name. Mostly. She was frigid with her husband, howled and clawed like a hellcat in heat when her son’s friends were around, and dutifully notified other absolutely irreplacable and societally indespensable lebensborn like her when followed by something a shade too dark or a tad too twitchy, only later realizing it was her own shadow. Only time she couldn’t be bothered was when her foot was pressed firmly to the peddle, tempting dangerous curves to make up for not having any herself. The time is tomorrow. The plac...

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“O.S. TK” by Nikita Linivenko

Submitted to Contest #82

When people, few that there are, ask me if I see the irony, I say: no, I refuse to see the irony in the fact that I was skimming through a reprint of  ‘I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream’ when we launched The Imitation Game.  At first, it ran something like this: ‘Hello. I am Wintermute. That was a joke. Ha ha. Did you like my joke? My name is OK COMPUTER.’ Baby steps. Through interactions with the users, it got there. People would join, and the game was, they’d either be paired with another user, or the program itself, and the...

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“Pink & Blue ” by Nikita Linivenko

Submitted to Contest #81

Felix goes by Felicia now. They pumped his chest with silicone or something, though they bounce natural enough. Maybe they got something more natural now. I make a note to ask him later. He still has his John Holmes though, thank God, like two coke cans stacked together. We’d sometimes hang after school and I’d fantasize about doing to him what those two blokes did to Joey Lauren Adams in Chasing Amy that got Ben Affleck all bent outta shape. It’s been half a decade, but when I saw him at the mall last week, I thought, eh, fuckit.  As f...

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“Come On, My Selector” by Nikita Linivenko

Submitted to Contest #80

“What does a scanner see? ... I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart?… into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does…see clearly, because I can't any longer… see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because…if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again… and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.”-Philip K. DickA Scanner DarklyMurphy chucked aside the paperback co...

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“Scotty Beam Mich Hoch” by Nikita Linivenko

Submitted to Contest #80

The Banners hung up on either side of the stage spelled out: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised – It Will Be Streamed. Huey tapped his clipboard with a ballpoint watching a throng shuffle into Radio City music hall. Cameras set up to cover an incoming trainwreck from every conceivable angle, streaming live. In the next few months, the taping will garner millions of views for the full video alone, and tens of millions collectively for clips and soundbytes.  It started like all great things do, by getting shit-faced with your buddie...

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“American Hammer” by Nikita Linivenko

Submitted to Contest #72

“Some call me producer, director, filmmaker. I prefer to call myself pube-king.” - John Waters “Nothing is obscene, providing it is done in bad taste.” - Russ Meyer “I think people are perverts. I’ve maintained that, that’s been…that’s the foundation of my career.” - David Fincher “The camera is rolling.”  “This isn’t, like, a porno or anything?” “No. No, this is a legitimate role – though it is rather…Grindhouse” “Great. I love schlock. The pulpier the better.” “Any favorites? From the Grindhouse era, I mean.” “Sure. Fast...

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“Detroit Circles” by Nikita Linivenko

Submitted to Contest #70

Cadillac - Broadway - Grand Circus - Times Square - Michigan - Fort / Cass - TCF - Joe Louis - Financial - Millander - Renaissance - Bricktown - Greektown - and back to Cadillac.  These are the stations of the People Mover.  Uno shifts in the plastic seat and turns his head to the window. Bobs along to music only he can hear. Droplets condense on the plexiglass from the front comin’ off Eerie. Zero, hunched over, stares at the floor - tappin’ his thumbs together.  Bricktown slides away behind them. An empty car all to them...

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“Everyone ” by Nikita Linivenko

Submitted to Contest #69

CLICK.  Nothing.  I feel the cool metal barrel leave my temple.  I open my eyes to the blue glow of the screen.  My sister applauds.  My uncle grits his teeth.  Step-dad forces a smile.  Mom looks tired.  Step-sis rolls the cylinder. Her turn now.  Heavy breathing. She craps out. Lifts the barrel away and gives’er another spin.  We all whoop and holler.  “Cheater!”  “She can’t do that!”  She hedges again. I get impatient. She spins a third time.  Step-dad’s knuckles turn w...

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“The Friends of Cousin Vinny” by Nikita Linivenko

Submitted to Contest #69

Cousin Vinny. There’s always one. In every Italian family, there’s always one. He leans back on the sun deck, breeze comin’ off the Atlantic. He’s almost finished with The Friends of Eddie Coyle, on the last couple pages, when Aunt Ada calls us in for the meet.Vinny, disrespectful little shit, takes his seat at the table in his trunks. Fuckin’ Jersey wap, glowin’ tan, a shade above Donald Trump.Uncle Vinny, Vinny’s dad – an’ I know how this all sounds, an’ if it soun’s like Jackie Collins tryin’ her hand at writin’ a dime-store pastiche, so ...

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“Pancho and Lefty, Eternally is Here! ” by Nikita Linivenko

Submitted to Contest #68

This is it. The sweat’s lashin’ off your arse, slippin’ between the crack, and all you can hear is the Gun Club’s “Eternally is Here” poundin’ through your head. The .44 Magnum in your stubby little grip is, despite what the gun-slinging copper on TV said, not the world’s most powerful hand-cannon. You slide the duffel to Walden. He pilfers it for dye packs. You stare out the floor-to-ceiling windows. Hell or High Water country. Wide fuckin’ open.Seconds.Breath.Breathe.Back to seconds.No, scratch that. We have time.The long arm of the law on...

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“Bezdelniks” by Nikita Linivenko

Submitted to Contest #68

I. SUMMER…and again the Black Sea turns toward a star called Sun. And on and on for a billion years.…So what?“You awake?”I look over at the lawn chair next to me. Kirill’s on his stomach, his legs up at the head of the chair, his head hung over the foot of it, lifted to another sunrise, challenging the ball of atomic radiation to burn his corneas through his shades.  Kirill shifts and slides out a quarter-read hardcover of Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle from under him, which he’s been making his way through the past two-and-a-h...

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“The Texas Chainsaw Master Race” by Nikita Linivenko

Submitted to Contest #65

“Y’know, I could be on my couch right now watching the Dark Shadows marathon”, sez Blair, squeezing her tight little ass through the rabbit hole under a wrought-iron fence. The Bagdad cemetery in Leander, Texas is a minor tourist attraction, being where Toby Hooper shot the opening to Texas Chainsaw Massacre; as such, security is top-notch -- One semi-lard-ass, keeping in shape, eating only one donut, tapping his five-toed hoof listening to Bowie. He leans back, eyes on his phone, blankly staring at the music video to ‘Blackstar’. Nothing ge...

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“Midnight in the Desert” by Nikita Linivenko

Submitted to Contest #58

They dropped acid in their backyard, the California desert. The power at Barker’s’d gone out, so Charlie and the girls went out and spent the night in the scrub. The arroyos of the scrubland, wolves kickin’ up dust in the ditches chasing a desert hare, the goddam Solar system spread out above, and a flat boulder, a stone alter to this Bizarro-world version of the Merry Pranksters, to copulate. This was a little over a year before Van recorded “Into the Mystic” when he was doin’ ‘Moondance’ at A&R in New York, but at that moment, this mu...

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“White Knuckles” by Nikita Linivenko

Submitted to Contest #53

In spring, some pretty boy singer shot up on smack and blew his head off. I’d been keeping this VHS that I taped various news segments onto. I started doing it years back after Budd Dwyer stuck a .357 Magnum in his mouth and blew his brains out on live television. Sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall, Tanks piled up in Red Square during the August Coup, Ruby Ridge, the ’93 World Trade Center bombing, Waco, and I especially got a real kick outta watching news footage last October of Yeltsin’s tanks shelling the Russian Parliament, so onto the tap...

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