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dennycore.bsky.social
@dennycore.bsky.social
310 followers 780 following 92 posts
Dennis Conrad. English/special ed teacher, aspiring weird fiction author

perennially working on a genre-confused psychic spy thriller and distracting myself from it by writing horror shorts

Author website: https://dennisconraddotcom.wordpress.com/
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dennycore.bsky.social
tbh I just got 1 beautiful demon plotting a coup and 1 terrifying idiot plotting a coup
tiny adorable evil cat plots in the morning light FAT GOBLIN
November 4, 2025 at 2:12 AM
dennycore.bsky.social
#WIPSnips #WriteSky #weirdfiction

the classic psychic brain-fry in action
And she dove in—his memories unwound in a confused tangle, he felt it all unravel, a childhood slipping like smoke through his fingers, impressions of names places all there at once, a bark of laughter, tears, streaking snapshots of Tokyo on fire and blasts of sand and blood and screams on Juno Beach and the black of night in a winter Alaska sky the inhuman sounds ringing out from the grim monolith behind and the redwhiteblue of the flag draping Goodhawk’s coffin, the cold of the pounding rain, a thousand boardrooms and a thousand barracks and a twirling mayhem of the masses looking up at him and shouting and screaming in what might have been excitement and might have been horror—he could no longer distinguish between such specificities—impression of a void-black shape looming, searing agony spiderwebbing through his head, the flashes and burns of synapses being snapped, connections being severed, dancing lights of nothingness as it all came spiraling apart. He couldn’t even feel himself screaming.
October 16, 2025 at 2:34 PM
dennycore.bsky.social
#WIPSnips #WriteSky #weirdfiction

the aftermath of an Akira-style psychic freakout, and an attempt at doing the whole run-on sentence thing that I can never stop myself from trying
Down the corridor from the ripped-down reinforced door there’s a long blood-trail that starts on the left-hand wall, a great splatter followed by a long, thick line of red showing where the second guard’s face had been slammed against the concrete with extraordinary force then agonizingly dragged along, face being pushed so hard into the wall that soon the blood-trail becomes mixed in with solid remnants of what had once been that face, bits of flesh and bone and brain and eye-jelly flattened into the mad stretched impression of a visage and after a twelve-foot run of such mess the body lays crumpled against the wall and even the hardened masked forensic team that’s surveying the scene has not yet deigned to turn the corpse back over to see what horrid ruins remain.
October 13, 2025 at 4:15 PM
dennycore.bsky.social
#WIPSnips #WriteSky #weirdfiction

turns out "prize" comes up once in what I hope is a solid "redshirts POV" scene

and you know what? I see that it thinks "firing" is a grammar mistake. What if grammar was the mistake?
Then a sudden sibilant sound from one of the Peruvians behind; immediately the grab-ass atmosphere was gone, and each of the six soldiers was peering about into the jungle, rifles raised. “Think I saw…” the speaking Peruvian slipping into Spanish for a quick “¡Mierda!” and firing a shot into the trees; Artyom saw what he saw in a blink, the flash of someone sliding through the jungle ahead. And all at once they were plunging through the brush, Artyom squeezing off a burst that obliterated a whole treeline. He saw that shadow, that unmistakably humanoid shadow slipping through the trees again. The void of an eyepatch over one eye. “It’s her!” He started pointing wildly after the form as it vanished into the brush. “The empath!” The rest went crashing after, knowing their prize was near, firing loose potshots through the foliage at every twitching leaf. Corporal Konstantin crashed through into a clearing first, the four Senderistas moving somewhat more subtly in his wake; and behind, Artyom, feeling a sudden trepidation, flickered a glance over his shoulder. When he turned back to the clearing it was just in time to watch the top of Konstantin’s head shear off.
October 10, 2025 at 2:54 PM
dennycore.bsky.social
#WriteSky #WIPSnips #weirdfiction

replacing dungeon with its nautical brother "brig"
It didn’t take long for the commandos—mostly native Senderistas, with a few fish-out-of-water Russians mixed in—to determine that the five Americans in the brig were turncoat bandits, all of whom professed an immediate enthusiasm for communism and a readiness to join with the Soviet cause. The Peacemaker asked them all to pledge their intention to fight for the working-class and gave them a few lines of the Communist Manifesto to repeat back to him; he had them line up to be uncuffed and, once nicely arranged, had the five commandos assigned to them unceremoniously shoot each of the bandits in the head and dump them overboard.
October 8, 2025 at 12:48 PM
dennycore.bsky.social
#WIPSnips #WriteSky #weirdfiction

and next they came for the academics, but the academics were packing
“So just what are you in it for then?” Deckard asked, punctuated by thunder and a bolt of lightning throwing them all into the flicker of the mansion’s shadow. That light reflected in the Professor’s eyes. “I dunno.” Seeing Deckard’s blinking disbelief he continued: “I should be teaching, man. I’m supposed to be giving a class on the European Romantic poets right now. I wasn’t even one of the political ones. Maybe that’s why the kids started coming to me when they started rounding up radicals—I was safer. And when they came for the kids…well…we defended ourselves. And after that…” pausing, he gestured around at the assembled partisans and their weapons, at his own tank that rumbled steadily behind them. “Repeat that same story in a thousand varieties across the city and…” gesturing finally to the General’s barricaded mansion looming over them like a Gothic cathedral as a wordless end to his tale.
October 7, 2025 at 11:51 PM
dennycore.bsky.social
#WIPSnips #WriteSky #weirdfiction

the downsides of being an empath become clear

CW: suicidal ideation
Laying down to listen to music she reflected on the other things that had made her decide to take her stepfather’s pistol that was now laying back behind her pillow just out of sight, so heavy and shining and metal, laying back there like a dark stone absorbing the sludge leaking from her brain. She thought of how she had always noticed this funny little pink tinge around the auras of a few men when she was young—some obscure uncle she hadn’t seen since she was ten, the elderly neighbor down the street who’d been around since she was eight, the guy who ran the convenience store—the first person she ever noticed that pink on when she was four—and how it had taken her until the relatively recent experience of puberty, along with her extended contact with pubescent fellows, to make her realize just what that pink aura represented. Four. She remembered the shine to that convenience-store owner’s eyes and shuddered and thought again of that pistol, that pistol she could swear she smelled some kind of metallic oil on growing stronger, stronger in her nose.
October 5, 2025 at 5:30 PM
dennycore.bsky.social
#WIPSnips #WriteSky #weirdfiction

succumbing to synonyms for the first time. Little weird to find this fish in the river
The river-drinker said his first words in a long while: “Found a fish.” Tossing the fish in question over his shoulder to splat onto the ground between Condori, Liana and Eric. Eric was no marine biologist, but he was fairly certain the translucent, semi-phosphorescent sharptoothed anglerfish that thrashed at his feet should have been nowhere near this river. Finally, Condori said the words someone should have said a long time before: “What the fuck is this.”
October 2, 2025 at 4:11 PM
dennycore.bsky.social
#WIPSnips #WriteSky #weirdfiction

hard to narrow down cause the whole middle section of my way overlong WIP takes place on an otherworldly river, but I do like this bit
The boundless expanse of what unfolded beneath Liana curdled her stomach. The trees lashing their branches like tongues of acid flame. The mountains, ever closer, bending toward them like looming monstrosities. Strange lights glinting at their peaks. The undulating black ribbon of river rolling endlessly alongside. She focused, tried to tamp down that disquiet and focus on the task at hand.
October 1, 2025 at 12:24 PM
dennycore.bsky.social
#WIPSnips #WriteSky #weirdfiction

No actual bears in this one sadly, but we do have an action sequence where "bear" shows up twice. Wrote this bit the day I watched Hard Boiled the first time - if that comes through even a little I consider it a victory
In that instant Deckard dips just beneath a spray of machinegunfire and answers in a single crushing burst from his sawed-off, an explosion of buckshot that tears apart the shooter and the entire storefront behind him in a shower of sparks and blood. Considering, a moment, that his shotgun is a double-barrel, Deckard decides not to let that second shell go to waste and, whirling, brings it to bear on an opposing shotgun-toter coming in for an ambush and squeezes off another blast that smashes apart the shooter and most of the alleyway he’s standing in. Still twirling, always keeping that telekinetic and Hoshi in at least his peripherals, Deckard lets a hand bearing two fresh shells drop to his hip, quickly drawing the two spent smoking husks out and slotting their replacements home quick enough to genuinely disturb any observer. A single chunky clunk and it’s done. Settling into that sawed-off kick, he takes aim at a man in businesswear raising a pistol.
September 29, 2025 at 11:40 AM
dennycore.bsky.social
#WIPSnips #WriteSky #weirdfiction

very normal very cool corporate prison facilities
They were swept through the facility then, away from the prison complex and into the other darker half of the place, where harsh fluorescent light gave way to something hazy and filmy. Open prison-rooms and rec areas narrowed into conspiratorial tunnels and crawling labyrinths of offices and testing chambers, the lightning turning shadowy and dimbuzzing, the corners full of inky darkness perfect for concealing clandestine activities. As they passed so many unlabeled sealed doorways Eric could occasionally hear the muffled sound of industry from behind some, twitching mechanisms assembling or disassembling, humming and crashing machine-sounds. The soft babble of thinking men’s voices, snatches of syllables from hitherto unmapped branches of science. The occasional soft sob of a human test subject.
September 28, 2025 at 2:55 PM
dennycore.bsky.social
#WIPSnips #WriteSky #weirdfiction

our empath heroine gets sad drunk
She sat at the bar, elbow on the table, a resolutely downward-faced head cradled in an upturned right palm, the left curled round a very near-empty glass of whiskey. She breathed as the dark music thumped heavy in her chest, stared at the sweat travelling agonizingly slowly through the glass before upending it and sending a swift burn down her gullet. Liana spared a moment’s glance through the glass’ bottom, distorting the bartender into a fleshy smudge, twisting his removed-yet-concerned aura into a diseased yellow cloud that clung to him.
September 27, 2025 at 4:03 PM
dennycore.bsky.social
#WIPSnips #horrorwriting #weirdfiction #WriteSky

One of my favorite character descriptions so far happened to have "flurry" in there
The Minister stood on the rooftop landing pad like a stoic necromancer atop his tower. As the VTOL’s spotlight shone upon him his glasses reflected them, mirrored insect eyes, his teeth flashing briefly in a spectral grin. The VTOL landed amidst a rapid-fire pinging flurry of sideways ice rain; yet the waiting Minister seemed utterly unbothered, clad in his regular business suit, tall and unshaking in the bitter Alaskan freeze, somehow holding a wildly-fluttering umbrella steady in the shrieking gales of icy wind, contorting it perfectly that he remained dry and unbothered. He seemed to dwarf all those armored-and-masked big guys that were always clustered about him, his personal terracottas. As the VTOL opened and the heavily-jacketed squadron piled out shuddering and rushing through the greetings and clearances the Minister seemed to be the least uncomfortable of all, his black-gloved hand like cold metal as it shook Eric’s. He even lingered behind the rest as they crowded into the rooftop entrance, soaking in some last bit of the harsh Alaskan night, crossing the threshold just as the doors snapped shut.
September 22, 2025 at 2:57 PM
dennycore.bsky.social
trapped in the silly dimension

#WIPsnips #WriteSky #HorrorWriting #weirdfiction
Text, out-of-context snippet from a work in progress story: "But it’s not the sky he’s looking at now. The sky he’s looking at is bloodred. The sun shining in it is void-black, a great black hole torn through the red sky. Void-black yet somehow shining, a paradox that makes his head throb like it’s trying to escape from behind his eyes. What he had once thought of as the Andes loom on the horizon, but with the rumbling vibration of grinding stone they shift subtly like impossibly large hooded figures, giants that breathe and stare with unfathomable eyes that Deckard realizes now that he can see fading in and out of existence on their slopes. Eyes full of alien intelligence far beyond his, looking down on him from high above."
September 18, 2025 at 3:04 PM
dennycore.bsky.social
Philly baybee

#gobirds #fuckice #nokings
June 14, 2025 at 10:56 PM
dennycore.bsky.social
I’m getting one of my weirdest little pieces yet published by Gypsophila Zine! Check out Volume 3 Issue 7 coming May 31st!

gypsophilazine.com
May 20, 2025 at 8:23 PM