A SELECTION OF SHORT FICTION
(L to R) Sally Shore, Alex Boling, Kirsten Imani Kasai and Barbara Keegan.
"Brain in a Jar & Other Stories" New Short Fiction Series, August 2016
LA's longest-running spoken word series presenting West Coast fiction's best new voices.
LA's longest-running spoken word series presenting West Coast fiction's best new voices.
- "Brain in a Jar"
- "The Stone Baby" Lyrical short short about a woman pregnant for 30 years with a talking lithopedion.
- "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son" A contemporary take on the Pied Piper of Hamelin with a horrific twist set in the Depression-era South.
"A Snail Without its Shell is a Slug" Art & Letters, Spring 2017.
Runner-up in the 2016 Unclassifiables contest.
"Before I can fully participate in an egalitarian partnership, I must first heal the narcissistic wound that has fragmented my core sense of self. Therefore, I’m beginning a therapeutic course of self-evaluation and supervised behavioral conditioning in order to communicate my needs and wishes without imposing damning, unrealistic expectations on you. It’s been nice knowing you.” (But having no myth to reference vain Narcissus and his auto-erotic folly, they would use different terminology.)"
Runner-up in the 2016 Unclassifiables contest.
"Before I can fully participate in an egalitarian partnership, I must first heal the narcissistic wound that has fragmented my core sense of self. Therefore, I’m beginning a therapeutic course of self-evaluation and supervised behavioral conditioning in order to communicate my needs and wishes without imposing damning, unrealistic expectations on you. It’s been nice knowing you.” (But having no myth to reference vain Narcissus and his auto-erotic folly, they would use different terminology.)"
"Brain in a Jar" Outposts of Beyond (Jan. 2016)
"...I was among the first to sign up for the “split” when it became available to grades C (compromised) and D (damaged/defective/diseased) bodies. Once the government cleared the procedure for grades A and B, the swapping out of wrinkled, lumpy birth bodies for sleek new vessels became a matter of vanity, not lifesaving medical necessity. The idealistic bioengineers who developed transection surely never envisioned the violations vessels would suffer when parted from their brains. Or perhaps they were so willfully naïve, so optimistically fixated on an egalitarian future that that they blocked out our human history of egregious sexual and physical abuse, and could/would not conceive that their phenomenal achievement would be out to base, nefarious, animal purpose..."
"...I was among the first to sign up for the “split” when it became available to grades C (compromised) and D (damaged/defective/diseased) bodies. Once the government cleared the procedure for grades A and B, the swapping out of wrinkled, lumpy birth bodies for sleek new vessels became a matter of vanity, not lifesaving medical necessity. The idealistic bioengineers who developed transection surely never envisioned the violations vessels would suffer when parted from their brains. Or perhaps they were so willfully naïve, so optimistically fixated on an egalitarian future that that they blocked out our human history of egregious sexual and physical abuse, and could/would not conceive that their phenomenal achievement would be out to base, nefarious, animal purpose..."
"Erela" Disturbed Digest #13 (June 2016)
"He found me naked in a glade, so He says. I wonder at the type of man who’d take a foundling for a wife. Waif-wife, found-wife. It left me feeling like road kill bagged for supper, my meat devoured, my skin tanned and made into a hat. It left me feeling loose and untethered to the world. I had no anchor and without weight, I could drift forever, lost and alone. Where had He found me? He would not say. What was my condition? Broken, He said. Broken like a stick of straw, hayseeds hanging limp. He liked to remind me that he’d rescued me. Saved me from the damnation of the streets, the wider world. His was a saving that did not salve or soothe any pains, but instead made deep, intractable wounds..."
"He found me naked in a glade, so He says. I wonder at the type of man who’d take a foundling for a wife. Waif-wife, found-wife. It left me feeling like road kill bagged for supper, my meat devoured, my skin tanned and made into a hat. It left me feeling loose and untethered to the world. I had no anchor and without weight, I could drift forever, lost and alone. Where had He found me? He would not say. What was my condition? Broken, He said. Broken like a stick of straw, hayseeds hanging limp. He liked to remind me that he’d rescued me. Saved me from the damnation of the streets, the wider world. His was a saving that did not salve or soothe any pains, but instead made deep, intractable wounds..."
"Black Sun" Drunk Monkeys, Oct. 2014
"Penzance, Cornwall, UK, 24 July
@pzpierat Gran says this is much worse than the Blitz. She wants to send me to my cousins in NY, USA, where the air’s better but all flights are down indefinitely.
@pzpierat Tommy Lynn from the pawnshop came round today to buy Gran’s gold. She got £15 for her diamond wedding ring.
@pzpierat Sleep for hours but we’re all totally knackered. Up at weird hours, hard to tell what’s when.
@pzpierat Sea’s frozen. I could walk to St. Michael’s Mount across high tide just like Jesus Christ."
"Penzance, Cornwall, UK, 24 July
@pzpierat Gran says this is much worse than the Blitz. She wants to send me to my cousins in NY, USA, where the air’s better but all flights are down indefinitely.
@pzpierat Tommy Lynn from the pawnshop came round today to buy Gran’s gold. She got £15 for her diamond wedding ring.
@pzpierat Sleep for hours but we’re all totally knackered. Up at weird hours, hard to tell what’s when.
@pzpierat Sea’s frozen. I could walk to St. Michael’s Mount across high tide just like Jesus Christ."
"mice" Existere Journal of Arts & Literature, York University, Canada, 2014
"when you are starving, moldy bread is a blessing. when you are starving, you’ll drink tepid hotdog water like some orphanage outcast and declare it the finest broth. if you have sealed your lips to mother’s milk and clenched your teeth against spoonfuls of love freely made and given, you’ll gladly lick spilled drops off a dirty floor and think it’s the best you deserve, the best you can expect to get. if you thrive on self-denial, if you are a catholic martyr to your cause—fountaining blood to broadcast the extent of your injuries—you’ll hand your abuser the whip and flail. penitential and pathetic, you’ll go slithering after any little rat full of poison."
"when you are starving, moldy bread is a blessing. when you are starving, you’ll drink tepid hotdog water like some orphanage outcast and declare it the finest broth. if you have sealed your lips to mother’s milk and clenched your teeth against spoonfuls of love freely made and given, you’ll gladly lick spilled drops off a dirty floor and think it’s the best you deserve, the best you can expect to get. if you thrive on self-denial, if you are a catholic martyr to your cause—fountaining blood to broadcast the extent of your injuries—you’ll hand your abuser the whip and flail. penitential and pathetic, you’ll go slithering after any little rat full of poison."
“Best Served Cold,” Hunger: A Feast of Sensual Tales about Sex & Gastronomy
(Sizzler Editions, 2013)
"White sheets, white hair, white the pallor of my bloodless skin. The last few grains of sand hovered, circling the neck of my hourglass. Time slid swiftly away. I had only enough energy to mark my consent form with an X, no time or strength enough to sign my own name. Odor of anesthesia, ether-like. The cut zippering my chest, sweat dripping down the surgeon’s brow. His name would make all the morning papers. He did it for his own glory, not mine. My only condition: give me my heart."
(Sizzler Editions, 2013)
"White sheets, white hair, white the pallor of my bloodless skin. The last few grains of sand hovered, circling the neck of my hourglass. Time slid swiftly away. I had only enough energy to mark my consent form with an X, no time or strength enough to sign my own name. Odor of anesthesia, ether-like. The cut zippering my chest, sweat dripping down the surgeon’s brow. His name would make all the morning papers. He did it for his own glory, not mine. My only condition: give me my heart."
"Chen" Tattoo bonus e-book short story , 2011
"My father whistled a jaunty tune as he snapped tendons and broke the fragile bones of a woman to whom he had professed “love and forever.” The disposal was conducted at night, darkness to hide his crime if not his shame, slogging through Neubonne’s waste pits. The Telec river coughed up its vapors and sputum. The air smelled of rotted eggs, burnt hair and flesh, and the eddies of green-black filth that clogged the shore and plastered the hulls of boats. Tankers clanged in the harbor. Somatic scavengers pushed leather skiffs down the river, fishing up bits of stuff to reclaim and sell: clothing, stripped from that woman’s body and tossed into the water; her rings, sacrificed to the river bottom’s silt."
"My father whistled a jaunty tune as he snapped tendons and broke the fragile bones of a woman to whom he had professed “love and forever.” The disposal was conducted at night, darkness to hide his crime if not his shame, slogging through Neubonne’s waste pits. The Telec river coughed up its vapors and sputum. The air smelled of rotted eggs, burnt hair and flesh, and the eddies of green-black filth that clogged the shore and plastered the hulls of boats. Tankers clanged in the harbor. Somatic scavengers pushed leather skiffs down the river, fishing up bits of stuff to reclaim and sell: clothing, stripped from that woman’s body and tossed into the water; her rings, sacrificed to the river bottom’s silt."
