About This Story

This is a story about hidden things. Skulls. Nails. Trees. Water.

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About This Story

In this story, I’m inching a little closer to one of those human things that’s hard to write about, or understand. ‘True Love’. ‘Soul Mates’. When you’re young, you can argue about whether these things are real or not; and I’m not as young as I was. I’ll give you a Chesterton passage about it:

“You sing of the young gods easily
In the days when you are young;
But I go smelling yew and sods,
And I know there are gods behind the gods,
Gods that are best unsung.

G.K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse

Oh, and the mother is quoting Euripides. And lying about it. I shouldn’t explain. It ruins the magic when the author explains what something means.

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About This Story

All of the bookstores in this story did, at one time, exist. I worked for two of them. Both are gone now.

This story can be considered a kind of tribute to The Book Exchange in Durham, North Carolina. Someday, some writer who’s better than me will tell the true story of The Book Exchange. Read that, if you can find it. Mister Pergerson was an amazing person.

That’s me, at The Book Exchange in 2008.

The Peter Pumpkin Press in the story is based on the real-life Peter Pauper Press, who at one time printed some strange and beautiful little books. I don’t think they ever did human skin, though.

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About This Story

The senses are strange. Human life produces these various impressions that impinge on the consciousness. They present themselves as accurate representations of the world.

But they are not.

In fact, those impressions aren’t even accurate representations of the senses.

One example of this is that the human eye doesn’t see color in the periphery. But objects you see from the corner of your eye still seem to have the right color.

We ‘see’ color in the periphery, but not because our eyes are receiving that color light. The mind is making its best guess.

The experiment in the story is one I had a roommate help me with, because I found these facts so incredible. Over the years, I’ve been thinking about it off and on.

This story is the fruit of treating those ‘colors’ at the periphery as a metaphor for people at the periphery.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about Tiffany lamps.

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About This Story

I have maybe a strange relationship with the horror genre. I enjoy the stories, but I myself don’t experience the fright reaction that so many people seem to have and enjoy. Because of that, I feel like I have a hard time judging quality. I love the cerebral, experimental horror of Brian Evenson, and the otherworldly horror of somebody like Ligotti or Lovecraft. I really enjoy Stephen King’s world-building.

But none of them scare me. So I’m not sure I can give horror readers what they want.

Anyway.

This is a horror story.

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About This Story

A missing child. A mental breakdown. A woman searches the watery labyrinths of Providence for clues to a tragic mystery that may never unravel.

That’s what you’d put on the dust jacket. It’s meant to be a tragic short story, that has mysteries but maintains realism.

I’m a long distance runner, so I spend a lot of time pounding the pavement around Providence. Ear buds in, audiobook on, Pokemon Go active—but eyes and ears radar-sweeping for details.

You see where this one homeless guy who hates pennies leaves them in glittering piles by his post on the bridge. You see “END THE FED” spray-painted on the Washington Bridge next to a picture of a phallus twenty feet long. You pass What Cheer? doing their thing just as hard as ever they can. Statues, arches, gables, rusty gates, bricks and stones and deep water. The distant echo of chains.

Yes, you see drug deals. No, drug dealers, you are not being as sneaky as you think you are.

But you also see the cops flashing their headlights goodnight to sick kids. That affectionate bedtime blink from a tight chevron of sleek, aggressive police cruisers. Parked in the median, signaling love across the water to Hasbro Children’s Hospital.

It often feels like running through a beautiful, tragic short story collection. A wistful, melancholy tale around every corner. As though you could open any door and peer into a Yoel Hoffman paragraph. Everything is too small or far, far too big. Too symbolic to understand and too real to touch.

Providence is heartbroken and beautiful, and it’s all these things that went into the mix. Plus inspiration from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which are personal favorites.

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About the Story

Many of my short stories have a clear conceptual framework. Others come from a mysterious alchemy of unrelated ideas. This is one of the latter. And I think that’s part of what makes it a funny short story, rather than an exciting or tragic one. The ideas interact in ways you don’t expect.

Natalia Poklonskaya & Manga

In 2014, Russia carried out some sort of invasion/annexation of the Crimean peninsula. American commentators tended to consider it fairly treacherous. Apparently, it featured the involvement of masked soldiers without insignia.

There came a time when it wasn’t at all clear what the Autonomous Republic of Crimea was. A local independence movement? Or a Russian invasion? One major player in all the confusion was Natalia Poklonskaya. She gave a famous press conference. Many see her as a perfidious Russian puppet.

The Internet reacted to all this. Incredibly strangely. By creating an absolute metric ton of amateur manga.

So that’s in this story.

Equatorial Guinea & Oil

Another ingredient was the real ethical difficulty of international trade with dictator-led nations. I was thinking particularly of Equatorial Guinea at the time, and oil. This isn’t a paper on ethical philosophy. But it’s a thorny problem, and something of that tension worked its way into this story. However, in a funny short story, I wanted to be respectful to the dead. So I used a light referential touch. Thinking of the way Ghost Dance deals with injustice in the beginning, coming at it from the side.

Machine Elves

Users of the hallucinatory drug DMT sometimes report meeting extra-dimensional beings. The reports are eerily similar, and have given rise to the idea of machine elves. Machine elves live behind the fabric of reality. They are immensely powerful and beautiful. They may be what holds reality together. (And probably not really real.) People talk about them in weird places. It’s a thought-world that reminds me of VALIS.

They’re in this story.

The Inner Secret

Imagine a cathedral. One work of statuary is more beautiful than all the rest. The artist labored on it for a decade. It rests on the very highest peak of the roof, where no human can ever see it. Ever. Who is it for?

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