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Add Sane Magazine to your My Netscape.

The MetroMart down the road was brutally fish-bombed in the middle of the night.

Fob had noticed it first, or so he assumed, as he was the first one on the block out of his house, to watch the mound of fish slumping further and further down the side of the now un-usable MetroMart, slowly spilling out into the street, and he was quite thankful to see the fish juice obeying the laws of gravity and heading away from his own house and down the hill, and not, say, deciding it might like to see what was going on down the slightly nicer end of the street. Not that he was going to make a big fuss about being the first out to see the MetroMart after the gigantic *whump* broke the still of the evening air.
He'd not seen one of these in years. Or ever, now that he thought about it. Which was a pity, as it was a fairly distinctive modus operandi, dumping what he would guess was in the vicinity of twelve tonnes of seafood on a building, the roof, in front of the doors, through the windows, and not likely to be copycatted all that often, 1) because it was unlikely anyone could lay their hands on that much fish at once, and 2) it didn't strike anyone up and down the street as a particularly menacing threat. And this was a street that knew how to threaten properly.
Yes, it didn't smell pleasant, and it was going to be rather inconvenient attempting to actually get into the MetroMart anytime soon, and it might catch your attention if you were blithely not within hearing or smelling distance of the MetroMart and were to sit down to the morning paper and thought, initially, that the mart had been slightly more conventionally 'fire'-bombed when you realised that either someone at the paper had let the interns run the presses again or that you were going to have an interesting story to highlight at lunch that day with your co-workers. Besides that, a good old fire generally received just as much... possibly more, respect than coating someone's business in fish.

Standing there in a pair of tattered shorts and a t-shirt listening to the sirens get closer and closer, soon replaced by sirens and flashing blue and red lights, Fob had to give them the fact that it wasn't likely to piss the policemen off, as it was something different, that was for sure, and they wouldn't even mind the smell so long as they could call in some proper fish clean-up crew, which, owing to the new labour laws, was highly likely (a specialised clean-up like this one was most definitely not covered under their job description, and not many people would argue with that one), and also was quite impressed by the myriad of messages the bombing could potentially be attempting to send.
As he watched on and other people began slowly emptying out of their houses to watch the sloppy mess of fish he saw the first few police to arrive clambering over the piles, trying to see if there was anyone left inside. A rather confused fireman stood by with his axe, listlessly prodding a fish that lay half on the pavement, half in the gutter.

"Who would do something like this?" A voice at his elbow, his neighbour, Mrs. Crattan. A voice carrying, he noticed, a sawed-off shotgun.
"I don't know, Mrs. Crattan, I just don't know."
"Goddamn fish."


disclaimer:
The title of this issue is rather shamelessly poached from Michael Marshall Smith's fine novel One of Us.
It's not normally site policy to review books, or do much of anything except rant and drool for a few thousand bytes, but having just had Smith's three novels (Only Forward, Spares, and One of Us) and his collection of short stories (What You Make It) make the rounds of the office, passing from one staff member to the next on recommendation in some sort of alterna-telephone game (one which doesn't involve secrets and the one person who pretended they were speaking to the person they were handing the book to through a telephone got a very strange look, indeed).
At any rate, cracking stuff. If you like Sane Magazine, there's really a good chance that you're going to enjoy MMS a hell of a lot more, including talking alarm clocks, the sort of relationship you have with your wife if she happens to be a professional killer, and God popping by every once and a while, never ever bloody announcing himself.
While all three of his novels are absolutely stunning displays of imagination and rather stunningly good reads, One of Us is possibly one of the more slyly intelligent things we've read in quite some time.
If Michael Marshall Smith would ever like a blurb for the jacket of a book, he can feel free to give the Sane Magazine offices a ring.

This issue happens to be from the pages of a novel of a somewhat less successful author, William Murphy. This is yet another excerpt from Curious, the novel which isn't Sleep(s) on Chickens, which is supposed to be his forthcoming novel.