"max"

@ringworm.bsky.social

4664 Followers 376 Following

kick damn ass and rock on!!!!!!!!!! check this out infinitegossip.ghost.io linktr.ee/maxlavergne

Stylised image of a bridge
THERE SHOULD BE A GUY, by Max Lavergne. There should be a guy who every morning rides his bicycle down to the main street and sets up a small glass case of beautiful cakes he has made. He should sell the cakes at a reasonable price to whoever comes. The cakes should be both beautiful and inspiring. They should be sumptuously iced and decorated with fruits and sugared flowers which are not only lovely to behold but genuinely delicious. He should sit on a low half wall and read a newspaper folded into quarters until the cakes are all sold. As soon as the last one is sold he should tie the glass case to the back of his bike and cycle to the market to buy fresh eggs and flour, chocolate, fruit, all the things he needs to make cakes for tomorrow. And then he should ride his bicycle home, where he should kiss the top of the low door frame leading into his widower's cottage because it will always remind him of her. And then he makes the cakes for the next day. Now that's what should happen. It should be happening already, in towns all over the country. Hell, all over the world. If it's not then fuck it. Let the bombs fall. Let them turn the beaches to glass. Return us to hunter gatherers, cowering in caves. Miserable dirty people dying of cold when it rains for too long. Let us slowly work our way back up if we can't get even that part right when it should be so obvious. See if the next crop are smarter. And if they aren't then try again. As long as it takes. Let our distant descendents hide in the shadows of the brick walls we built. I don't think that's too extreme.
INLAND FROM SEAWORLD by Max Lavergne. We left Seaworld and headed west, out past the dune-swept ruins and rusted towns where worn sandstone flowed into clay ponds and not a single dolphin reminded us of our blossoming. In a bar we met an old hand, a down-on-his-luck roustabout, faded denim and faded glory, and he told us about how his sweetheart had kicked his aquarium glass in when he'd cheated on her. "Tetras thrashing among the shards," he wept, "colours you've never seen before." We've seen 'em, pal. And like that, too. Out further they caught frogs and, not knowing what to do with them, made them into princes and folk heroes. We told them about the seal show and the shark tank and they listened half-interested. By a creek we baited a line for turtles. A long angle away in the dim afternoon. Its ripples marched on ahead of us.
THE END OF THE PARTY by Max Lavergne. The party was so good that, by the end, no one was able to leave. Beginning in a blaze of virgin enthusiasm around eight o'clock, gathering speed and excitement at nine, becoming focused and wilful as the clock struck ten; then the crunching router of substances whizzing minds into elegant shapes through eleven, twelve and one; the gilding of each look, each gesture, each implicit sexual invitation at two and three; the sublime regret of four; the anticipation as five ticked over; the day and, it was unanimously felt, all of us, reborn as six gave way to seven and eight. At 9am, as a trembling gratitude for the privilege of the life that we had been given to live and to enjoy passed over us the first nervous partygoer struggled to his feet - it was Alex H - and tried to make his apologies. No more than a sentence in was he when he burst into tears, rested a sweating hand on the coffee table and sank once more to the couch. Hours passed. Initially immobile, we tried to remember the form and rhythm that a normal day followed, to destroy by willpower the new template set by the party, and were unable to. We raged around the patio and the garage. Helplessly, we tried on clean t-shirts and attempted to find the ingredients for toast. We stood in tremulous awe of the bathroom's toothbrush cup. We ordered McDonalds on Uber Eats and sat in an anxious circle eating burgers and trying to remember if it was normal. Surely - surely - burgers must be normal. Then, as the shadows lengthened in the yard we drifted once more to the stereo, and turned the music up, and then we opened some wine, and it was as though a goddess of inspiration had reached an elegant hand into the clearing and created a door for us to step through. The full text is available at https://infinitegossip.ghost.io/the-end-of-the-party/
Blurry image of a running boy
MACGUFFIN WORLD By Max Lavergne We touched down on Macguffin World, where every key unlocked another key, and every symbol was referent to another symbol, and each piece of map was missing a piece of map, including the pieces that themselves fit into larger pieces, which was all of them - and the atmospheric conditions were controlled by the alignment of a talisman and the native fauna responded to the sounding of a mythic horn and the shapes on the sand were formed by the movement of the tides, which were shaped by the phases of the moon, which waxed and waned and superwaxed, from time to time, and also its corresponding inverse in accordance with the secret meanings of the shapes on the sand and the acidity of the water increased or decreased in relation to the will of seven angelic birds inside of seven crystal orbs in seven ancient temples and every piece of detritus was the antagonist in the hero's journey of another piece of detritus and in landing on the planet we had set in chain a cascade of events that had been prophesied millennia hence - although no one noticed, because everything else that happened had also been prophesied millennia hence, and our landing on the planet had been just one small link in something else's TEXT CONTINUED IN NEXT IMAGE
This is what I learned about publishing short stories online in 2025: worth doing if you get the chance but don't be too critical of yourself if you can't. Fun as a low cost hobby but remember to keep your expectations realistic. All the websites you're thinking of posting to are either unethical or expensive or user unfriendly so just try and pick the least bad one. As you progress through 2025 your life might change around you. Just try to keep posting short stories online. You can write ideas down in your notes app on your phone. You might spend a fair bit of time looking at the sentence "Superhero whose power is luck" and trying to make it work but there's probably no way to do it that doesn't feel gimmicky. All you really need is three good sentences but you really do need them. If you're publishing short stories online and you have less than three really good sentences your story probably won't work out. Even if every part of the short story you're publishing online is dissonant there should still be a melody between those parts. You can probably also ignore the one that says "Macguffin world", unless you get really crazy with it. And most importantly, have fun
An image of a 4-tonne truck.
short piece of writing called "out on the dungeon floor". subscribe for more at https://infinitegossip.ghost.io/out-on-the-dungeon-floor/
A beautiful image of an electron microscope
headline of a story entitled "LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY SAAB X", including an image of a Saab car over a slime lake