New Work in New Dead Families

June 24, 2010

I have a new piece up in the second issue of New Dead Families, which you really ought to read right now. The whole issue, I mean. This is one of my favorite new online journals, and the second issue is just as good as the first, with stuff from great writers like I. Fontana, Robert Kloss, and David Backer. My piece is called “To Make Us Whole,” and it’s about a bathtub. Well, among other things. I fear baths, and bathtubs, and always have, so you can imagine this story might be…anti-bathtub:

Mother’s head whipped around. No, no, I yelled, kicking and flailing and trying to get away from the thing that was already streaming up out of the wet. It was hard to tell just what it was at first, but as the blood droplets joined up and the veins grew around the dark red river, joints formed, bits of cartilage clicked together like rocks, and then tissue draped over muscle draped over bone, it became clear that the thing was an arm. An arm still waiting to be made whole. It wiggled its fingers at me, and I screamed and scrambled, naked and wet, up and over the side of the tub, landing hard on my tailbone on the cold tile.

Read the rest here…IF YOU DARE. Mwah ha ha ha ha. (Thanks for publishing this, Zack!)