She is the author of What Endures, from FPQ Fall 2011.

BJI: Give us some background on What Endures.

PH: The story’s based on an actual event that appeared in Canadian newspapers as one of those two line news agency items. The two line format gives the story a brutal  rendering: Six year-old spends night with dead mother after teacher refuses to believe her. I wanted to dissolve that brutality, go inside the story and find whatever might belong to the six-year old’s world in the way of love, maybe tenderness. I used this process once before when confronted with: 280lb woman accused of murder after suffocating husband. I wanted then to see if it was possible to dissolve the brutal raw comedy of that and evoke compassion – for the woman! The story is called ‘Sitting Pretty’.  I think the one-dimensionality of such headlines is dehumanizing. I’m trying, I suppose, to restore some humanity to the barebones awfulness of the things that happen to us.

BJI: What sorts of stories are you drawn to when searching for inspiration?

PH: Never the ordinary, never the everyday.  I’m uncomfortable writing stories based on material that’s too close to home. I’m a fiction writer who can’t lie— a terrible anomaly and one that causes no end of difficulties for me. So I leave the everyday alone and go where my true inclination takes me —to high drama, Technicolor! I’m always looking for the extreme situation, the crisis point. My earliest diet in fiction was myth, fable, fairytale, later the ghost tale.  I’m still drawn to those forms for the way they wear such outlandish clothes and yet bring us in the end right up against the most basic and the most universal of our impulses as humans. I’ve written several tales and allegories and hope to publish them one day in a single collection.  It’s not a fashionable form but with digital publishing now there’s a real possibility of finding a niche.

BJI: What was your process for writing What Endures?

PH: It was really the same process as something that has acquired the name ‘wit-walking’ and is often employed as a technique or an exercise to limber up the creative side of the brain. You start at a defined point – in this case the child and the dead mother—and you start writing without a plan. You have no idea where your wit will take you. The important thing is to just keep walking it. Extraordinary things happen when you write blind like this. All kinds of material can break in to the story, unforeseen connections happen and images blossom. In the case of What Endures, an early memory of a traumatic event surfaced from my own childhood. Of course it went into the story and lends, I hope, an extra dimension to the figure of the woman.

This kind of writing, based on very sparse information and executed without a plan, has always been for me the most successful. That’s to say, I’ve always been most pleased by stories that I set down in a single sitting. They come closest to approaching some kind of truth. It’s as if you’ll only hit the target if you’re blindfold.

 BJI: What are the advantages of writing short stories? What are the challenges?

PH: Without a doubt the main advantage is that the reward — finishing — is never too far away from the outset of the work. They are a manageable form, and even if you don’t know where the story will take you, it seems more likely than not that you will arrive at a destination. That’s not always the case with a novel. It seems to me, though this is a great subject for a debate, that there really is only one outcome for a short story that will be the right one for the particular combination of material and voice that you choose to work with.

The challenge of the form has to do with poetry. For me a good short story works very much like poetry. Its constraints demand a strict economy of language and image and a very precise manipulation of the story elements to arrive at an ending that is both pointed and powerful, an ending that is in every way right for the material.

BJI: Last question. What excites you most about online/digital storytelling?

PH: Instantaneity, if that’s a word. Everything about it is instant, most of all the gratification. Order a story or an issue and read it in the next instant, literally.

And the possibility of reaching a wider audience, reaching new audience. It seems to me less…’dusty’ than mouldering in a dark corner of the book store. Though I should not use the word ‘mouldering’ for bound books don’t have time to do that. They have a shelf life, I believe, of less than six months, while digital work can remain bright and shiny in a cyberarchive for who knows? Eternity. The thought!

She is the author of Mike Mike Mike Mike, from FPQ Fall 2011.

BJI: Give us some background on Mike Mike Mike Mike.

GO: Mike Mike Mike Mike is actually an older story, but I like to think it looks good for its age. I wrote it in 2007 (I think?) and it was originally called The Plaza. It wasn’t perfect but I couldn’t leave it alone, because I knew a great story was in there somewhere.

I periodically came back to it and tinkered, but without the click. Then, in some strange alchemy, I started working on it again in 2011, tweaked a few things, cut out some soft spots and bam! – It became Mike Mike Mike Mike and I was totally on board. It’s got a fable-like quality that is different from my other work and that I kinda dig. Fairy tales played a big role in my early reading; the Andrew Lang-edited ones with the red hot iron shoes and the Little Mermaid dying at the end.

BJI: Who/what/where/when inspires your writing? Also why.

GO: Why: I want to create that feeling where I read something I wrote and actually enjoy it – with the hope that someone else will feel the same. Steve Heighton, in his Workbook, says “Writers, working well, cast a sort of spell on themselves. Years later they reread passage and say, How could I have known that then? I don’t even know it now.”

The possibility of that kind of magic is enough to keep me at the keyboard on those days where I feel like chucking my laptop out a window.

As for inspiration, it’s everything I read, but especially what I read when I was young, a lot of which was either sad or sarcastic or both.

More than anything though, it’s the people I talk to. When someone is really interesting to me, I kind of want to eat them alive (in a, uh, writerly way).

BJI: You have a novel coming out soon. Tell us how excited you are.

GO: I’m “stay up all night without caffeine” excited. I’m “run around in circles doing airplane wings” excited. “High five an intimidating stranger” excited. I feel like you could peer down my throat with a flashlight and see my heart just absolutely glowing. It might explode on my pub date when I finally hold the little beast in my hands. But what a way to go.

BJI: What’s so great about short literature?

GO: An excellent short story, to me, doesn’t feel like real life, but like something happening just beside real life, a little bit strange, a little bit tilted. It should leave an impression that you can’t quite describe, bigger than the sum of its parts. In a novel, you can point to what you like specifically, but in a great short story, there’s a sort of amorphous pleasure that is hard to pin down. And that stays with you, because it’s this atmospheric thing created by the reader and the writer together. Which is why I can tell people that Alice Munro and I often “work together”.

BJI: Last question. What excites you most about online/digital storytelling?

GO: I love how easy it is to distribute, how it can reach people instantly and easily. A single tweet can carry your work to thousands of people. I can bug everyone at once to read my work!

She is the author of This Is a Love Crime, from FPQ Fall 2011.

BJI: Give us some background on This Is a Love Crime.

LK: This Is a Love Crime came after reading an article in the Calgary newspaper about a female hijab-wearing student that was running for student council. Someone had scrawled “This is a hate crime” across the front of the poster, and the articles and enraged letters to the editors that poured forth, both pro and con, got me thinking about similar, but different oppression in our Canadian society. It’s always easy to point out where another culture/country has seriously missed the boat on equal rights and oppression, but not so easy to pick out in the culture in which you eat, sleep and breath. So, in This Is a Love Crime, I wanted to look at oppression, and in this case specifically, women, although oppression has its tentacles in many other areas: i.e. religion, gender (both male and female), sexuality, government, cultural, military, workplace, you name it, if us humans are involved, there is likely some form, overt or not, of oppression/repression going on. Such is our glorious humanity.

BJI: In your opinion, what role does fiction play in society?

LK: I think the role that fiction plays in society is like that of the court jester, or the heyoka (contrary) in native culture that sneaks up on you, and shows you something you didn’t see prior. Any really excellent fiction I’ve read over the years works on this premise of going beyond the taboos and conventions within a given society. What I love is that fiction allows the writer to express what may be a controversial/contrary opinion that could not be expressed in any other form without serious repercussions. I’m not saying that fiction’s goal is to provoke and/or offend cultural sensibilities, more, I mean that fiction, good fiction, might just be that small, seemingly innocent tool, which causes the reader to look at an age-old situation with fresh eyes. Bare minimum, good fiction provokes thought, and with thought comes consideration, understanding, possibly even change. It drives me perfectly wild to see women in hijabs (or worse, in full niqabs at the local swimming pool), while their male counterparts cavort about in the 30 degree Celsius heat, bare-chested and in western board shorts. Likewise, western women, or anyone else who is willing to hand over their free will to another individual and/or organization, which dictates the codes and behaviours beyond what would be considered good, kind, common, human sense, which I think most people are capable of entirely on their own: i.e. don’t kill each other, robbing isn’t good either, war is worse, no adultery, please, it’s hurtful. My mother’s old adage of what’s good for the goose is good for the gander is often the starting point for me in fiction.

BJI: What was your process for writing this story?

LK: Story process: as above, the start of a story is usually is the goose and gander thing (oh, the unfairness of it all), or anything that gets my dander up, and sticks with me until I feel compelled to put it down on paper. More than the writing itself, it’s the thinking process prior that dictates how the story gets written. I always know the beginning of the story, and the end, but never the path that gets one to the other, and for me, that’s the best part, the not knowing. It’s what allows me to stay fully open as to what might happen along the path, and I love that freshness, the unexpected things that crop up as you write. It’s what keeps me coming back to fiction over and over again. As for process, I’m a seat-of-the-pants kind of writer (minimal notes, no structure, plot lines – what are those???), but it works well for me.

BJI: What are the advantages of writing short stories? What are the challenges?

LK: Short stories are my first love, although I’ve written two novels, a short story collection, am working on novel four. The advantages for me with short stories are that they are short, which may sound simplistic but after spending anywhere from 2-4 years nose-to-the-grindstone on a novel, short stories give me the much-needed break from the novel grind. The challenges of the short story are it’s length. Can I convey and say what i want within a short piece? Can I make something work in a limited form? I relish that challenge, and also think it makes me a better novel writer, in that I don’t tend to get lost in superfluous details that you wouldn’t have room for in short stories, so why waste your reader’s time in a novel? A friend of mine’s wife, we’ll call her Jillian, used to go on and on about any and everything, so that after ten minutes of a lot of talk about nothing, my friend would say, Get to the point, Jillian. Short stories aren’t much different in that respect that no matter what the story is about, the whole idea is to get your reader to the point.

BJI: Last question. What excites you most about online/digital storytelling?

LK: I like the potential of the vast public access to online/digital storytelling. Although the free internet content copyright stuff has me worried that writers will be further pressed in terms of fair compensation for fair work, but that’s a whole other story. Please, if you read online, readers, consider donating so that, at the very least, a writer can purchase another grindstone on which to set their noses … I love love the idea that I can download a short story like a single on iTunes,  and read it while en route to work or travelling or at home in my relaxing pants … I love the easy access, the exposure for short story writers, who are increasingly rare, in these days of hard economic times for publishers, who are also hard-pressed, and can’t or won’t take the risk to publish short story collections. Bravo Found Press, you are a most welcome addition to the short story form. Thank you for that!

He is the author of The Expansiveness of My Sound, from FPQ Fall 2011.

BJI: What was the inspiration for  The Expansiveness of My Sound?

AF: At the time I wrote the story I was listening to a lot of Ethiopian jazz, specifically the Ethiopiques series of CDs, both as research for a radio show, and for sheer pleasure. At the same time I had this opening line (which I’d stolen from a Bloc Party song) that I was eager to use. It seemed to contain the voice I needed to create a fictional account of that very specific time and place, so I was off to the races.

BJI: Your story captures a very specific place and time. Could you tell us about the research that went into it?

AF: When I wrote the story I was still doing a jazz/improvised music radio show with some friends on CKCU in Ottawa, and I immersed myself in that music in order to come up with a 90-minute program that did some justice to this amazing, exotic mix of jazz, R&B, Arabic and East African music. I found a few sources online, dug up a textbook from an African history course I’d done in university, and downloaded a ton of music.

BJI: What’s on your playlist when you write?

AF: Oh, man, I’m a music fiend, so the playlist is ever-changing. But this winter I was dedicated to an album called Jazz pa svenska (“Jazz in Swedish”) by the late Swedish pianist Jan Johansson. A friend mentioned it to me, and it proved to be the perfect early-morning-in-winter soundtrack. At the moment I seem to be in a Sun Ra state of mind, for whatever reason, specifically stuff from the late 1950s, like “Jazz in Silhouette.” Not sure if any stories will come of that.

BJI: What are the advantages of working with short stories? What are the challenges?

AF: As a writer, short stories are opportunities for me to parachute into a different world, immerse myself in it, and then move onto another world. The challenges are the same as the advantages: condensed, intense, hyper-focused, delicate, difficult. As a reader, I’ve had my heart broken by more stories than I have by novels, and I love having my heart broken by a piece of writing.

BJI: Last question. What excites you most about online/digital storytelling?

AF: Reach. Within a week of my story coming out in FPQ, I had dozens of emails from friends, acquaintances, etc., some from people I hadn’t spoken to in ages, telling me they’d read and liked the story. Would even half of those people have taken it upon themselves to track down a literary magazine in a bookstore to read it? I also like that FPQ treats stories like they’re pop songs: buy the song, or buy the whole album, your choice.

Have We Become Extraordinary Yet? (FPQ Spring 2012)

Not much to tell about this one. The covers I design are generally conceived one of two ways: (1) Jackie or I or the both of us have an idea of what we want to see, and the art  flows from that, or (2) I mess around with images, give up and go away to watch some Community, then come back and mess around with images some more, until lightning strikes.

This cover definitely falls under (1). For a reason that escapes me now, I wanted to try making a very physical-looking  cover entirely in Photoshop. It has been pointed out to me a number of times that our visual style is incongruously throwback and “physical”, considering we work exclusively online and through ebooks. We’re not purposely trying to be ironic, but I won’t blame anyone for thinking we are.

Psalm 77 (Jack Bootle)

The setting of the story is particularly evocative, so it was pretty much a no-brainer that the landscape would figure in the cover somehow. Jack did a fantastic job of helping me visualize it, as evidenced by this snippet of email from him:

The beach in the story isn’t based on a specific beach, so unfortunately I don’t have any photos. But I guess I had in mind the kind of long sandy beaches you get on the northeast coast of England, where I used to go on holiday as a kid. They’re quite wild and empty, with these dunes that are held together with rough brown grass … I guess images that speak to the essence of the story would be … hmmm, this is a cool exercise … the sea, deep water, sand dunes, rough grass, a big empty sky …

That would’ve been more than enough for a really enterprising designer to go on, but this is me we’re talking about, so of course I couldn’t get past “unfortunately I don’t have any photos”. Google image search turned up some frustratingly lovely images – frustrating because none were public domain, and therefore useless for anything but inspiration and desktop wallpapers.

Since I couldn’t bloody well fly out to England, and it was too late to ask Jack to run up there and take photos, I was forced to do something I’d never done before: digitally paint a landscape. So there you have it. In this instance you could say copyright law encouraged creativity rather than stifled it. Go figure.

Eleven Miles There, Twelve Miles Back (Meghan Rose Allen)

Eleven Miles There, Twelve Miles Back splits timelines between Toronto and the Kawarthas. I wanted to capture those two places melting into one, as they would when viewed through the lens of memory.

The forest part of the image is a ho-hum photo I took three years ago while driving through British Columbia. The photo which became the city part of the image, on the other hand, came about in fabulously serendipitous fashion. I was walking around downtown with my girlfriend at the time, and just as we were crossing the street at Queen and John, the dying light glinted off the pavement and a streetcar just so, and I had to take a picture of it. The picture sucked, obviously, so I re-crossed the street a couple of times – much to my companion’s consternation - and snapped some more shots from the middle of the intersection. That’s the life of an artist for you.

Angels Passing (Don McLellan)

This cover wouldn’t have been possible without a fantastic photo taken by my friend, Julio Palacios, who spent a few years teaching (and travelling) through Asia. I’ll let him take over from here:

I was almost finished crossing the island of Java on my way to Bali when I took this photograph. Seeing as though I was already heading east and in its direction, I decided it would be wrong to skip on seeing the tourist-friendly Mount Bromo. After a long and bumpy jeep ride left me as close as it could to the pristine yet still active volcano top, I discovered – scattered across the flatlands surrounding the ancient volcano – these Tenggerese people on horseback. Drawn by the gaggles of tourists, these nomadic hoarders gather every morning before daybreak in order to pick up or deliver much needed supplies and goods, and to offer the exhausted tourist a lift to one of the volcano’s fuming volcanic craters.

There really isn’t that much more for me to add to this, except maybe a couple of words on the Korean script we used above the title. Julio was teaching in Korea when I designed the cover, and he was kind enough to ask one of his co-workers to translate the phrase Angels Passing to script. Our crack team (and by team I mean Geoff Olynyk, Jackie’s partner and one of the unsung heroes of Found Press) double-checked with one of his co-workers on the quality of the translation, and reported back thusly:

The current translation does not strictly mean “angels passing”, it means “the trace of an angel”, with “trace” in the sense of “a presence left behind”, like a footprint left by a person that walked through the snow. But he suggests leaving it as it is now, for these reasons:

• If you add the plural character (둘, dul, pronounced dool), it becomes “the trace of angels”, but he says it sounds much more awkward in Korean that way. The Korean language has certain phrases that sound very elegant, and the way you have it now sounds very elegant and poetic. Adding the dul takes that away.
• Changing the current second word (“the trace of”) to the one that more literally means “passing by” also makes it sound “childish” according to JP.
• He says it’s very clear what it means now, and the current translation is the best for keeping the meaning while also making it sound good in Korean.

Something about the lot of us firing emails at each other from three different countries to get this done strikes me as extremely cool.

By the way, if you want to see more of Julio’s awesome pictures from Indonesia, pop on over to his website. Seriously, go look. Now.

Memories of a Carnivore: Adventures in Eating Ethically (Julie Dupuis)

Memories of a Carnivore is the autobiographical account of a meat-eater trying to become vegetarian. So naturally, my twisted mind immediately pictures a vegetable that eats meat. The fly trap doesn’t actually have anything to do with the story, except on a conceptual level, but it’s just so striking and weird that I had to use it. The illustration is from an ancient (ergo: public domain) guide to American plants.

So there you go. If you’re interested, go on and check out the first part of our series. And do keep an eye out for our next post, previewing our upcoming collection and authors!

We’re about to embark on our second year of short lit revelry – but, as my Pa always says, you can’t look forward without first looking back. So we asked our friends on Twitter which stories from the past year really stood out to them. And boy did they step up.

Thanks to everyone who responded, for giving us a reading list to kick off 2012!

@angie_abdou:
So many great short stories to choose from this year but I think my fave was “What Are We Doing Here?” by Zsuzsi Gartner.

@shawnsyms:
“Bright Outside,” by @afsulli http://ssy.ms/v1uy7t
“Scoodly! Doo! Wop! Wow!” by Greg Kearney http://ssy.ms/sB34Rs
Unique & Life-Changing Items” by @jessicawesthead http://ssy.ms/vfxr33
“In Her Prime,” by@clarkblaise http://ssy.ms/tsxmp5
“The Weather I’m Under,” by @rebeccarosenblu http://ssy.ms/unWofr
“One One-Thousand, Two One-Thousand, Three,” by @meganstielstrahttp://ssy.ms/uLakBd
“Something More,” by @ericalorraine http://ssy.ms/sI9tDn
“Corpse,” by@kkuitenbrouwer http://bit.ly/rKFXrb

@JessicaWesthead:
“Gargoyles” by David Whitton in The Reverse Cowgirl http://bit.ly/vPZCDJ
“What to Wear” by Greg Kearney, in Pretty http://bit.ly/udyH4k

@LexJusti:
Jacob Appel’s “Prisoners of the Multiverse” (New Orleans Review)
@karltaro‘s “The Gymnast” (@southern_review.)

@AshleyJStokes:
‘Slow Dance With A Skeleton’ by William Thirsk-Gaskill.

@Becs - Kafka’s short story where character wakes up & he’s turned into a cockroach. Made me realise how powerful short stories can be

@eshonkwiler - In the Dry by Breece D’J Pancake. Marvelous, touching as a reader. Humbling as a writer. Deftest, lightest touch I know.

@FallenRedNinja - Bisson showed me that short stories can be amusing, unpredictable & throw the plebs for 6 w/ this onehttp://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html

@cormeegs - A Perfect Day for Bananafish. At 12, I was shocked at the ending and in awe of how powerful a short story could be … It was, to me then and maybe still today, the perfect short story

@kirstylogan - A story in Best Lesbian Erotica 2009 got me writing erotica. Up till then I thought it was all trash, but those stories are art.

@jjponeill - ’Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ by Bierce – i think i was 11 or 12 – the first story i fell in love with

@shawnsyms - Adam Haslett’s “The Good Man” because something extremely startling happens, but it’s completely organic and not for shock value … I’ve a near-uncontrollable impulse to do the same in my own work. Barbara Gowdy’s We So Seldom Look on Love for the same reason.

@cjudson86 - Franny and Zooey killed me as a teen, questioning religion and dealing with the loss of a close family member.

@Little_Fiction - Down Through The Valley by Wells Tower. Crazy good. Parts of it I can’t shake.

Follow us on Twitter @foundpress

This is the first story in the collection, Mike Mike Mike Mike:

The author of Mike Mike Mike Mike is Grace O’Connell. This is Grace:

Grace O’Connell lives in Toronto. Her work has appeared in various publications including Walrus, Taddle Creek, Quill & Quire, and EYE Weekly, and she holds an MFA in creative writing. She has taught creative writing at George Brown College and now works as a freelance writer and editor. Her first novel is forthcoming in May 2012 with Random House Canada.

This is Grace’s blog: http://graceoconnell.blogspot.com/

You can follow her on Twitter at @yesgrace.

This is the second story in the collection, The Expansiveness of My Sound:

Meet author Andrew Forbes:

Andrew Forbes has published music and film criticism both online and in print, and his fiction has appeared in The Charlatan, Carleton Now, and The Feathertale Review. He is currently at work on his first collection of stories. When not labouring before daybreak in his basement office, he enjoys spending time with his wife and three children. He lives in Peterborough, Ontario. His periodic thoughts on music can be read at www.thisisourmusic.ca.

The third story in our collection is This Is A Love Crime:

And this is author Lee Kvern:

Lee Kvern is the award-winning author of short stories and novels. Her novel The Matter of Sylvie was nominated for the 2011 Alberta Book Awards. Her novella Afterall was nominated for the 2006 Alberta Book Awards. Her short stories are also well celebrated: “White” was the winner of the 2007 CBC Literary Awards, and “I May Have Known You” was nominated for the 2010 Alberta Literary Awards. “Detachment” was a finalist in the Malahat Open Season Award 2010. Her work has been produced for CBC Radio, published in Event, Descant, enRoute, Joyland.ca, and New York. Her website is www.leekvern.com.

You can follow Lee on Twitter at @LeeKvern.

The last, but definitely not least, story in our collection is What Endures:

This is the author, Pauline Holdstock:

Pauline Holdstock is an internationally published fiction writer and essayist. She is the author of Beyond Measure, shortlisted for several prizes including the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Giller Prize, and winner of the Ethel Wilson Prize for fiction. Her latest novel, Into the Heart of the Country, was longlisted for the 2011 Scotia Bank Giller Prize. She lives on Vancouver Island.

Pauline’s website is here: http://paulineholdstock.com/

FPQ Fall 2011 is coming soon! Sign up for our newsletter for all the latest, or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

All told, perhaps a dozen people have contributed to this story. Nothing has been censored, and only spelling has been changed. We’ve added MS Paint illustrations to enhance the text.

Oh, and it should be no surprise that this work of our collective creative consciousness is NSFW. You were warned.

The Box

He found it on the sidewalk, half hidden between a trash bin and the cracked wall of an old cinema, long abandoned.

It was in a box made of an indeterminate material; waxy to the touch, durable, yet showing the scars of every single day of every single month of every single year. The box was the size of a gorilla’s heart.

The Box

Beside the box was a man.

The man was not extraordinary looking, nor was he remarkable, yet there was an element of intrigue to this non-descript gent. The man had stopped to inspect the box. Hesitant to touch it for fear of a Pandora-like occurrence. So he stood paralyzed by fear, but engrossed in his thoughts. There he stood waiting for something to happen.

Fearful of the box, but socially bold, and cunning, he turned to face passersby.

“Madam,” he said to the approaching woman, “for only two dollars, you may discover for yourself the contents of this mysterious box.”

The woman, tall and bony, hesitated.

“My father learned to speak English through a call-in telephone service. There was no time to get to the library before it closed on Thursdays; he needed to go for his weekly milkshake. After his milkshake he turned on his (???) to have a wank. He jerked his cock for a good hour and wiped up his seed with his sock. The sock was reminded of its pitiful vessel of an existence. Its howls were smothered by the liquid penetrating its threads. It felt soaked to its fibres. Not only with the liquid but with his despair for the future.”

The sock despairs

“Inside this mysterious box are those very socks. Christened by my immigrant father, lo, those many years ago. And for only an additional two dollars, those socks could be yours.”

The man completed his pitch. The tall, skeletal woman hesitated. Two dollars was a pretty good price for socks, but these were used. Well used. She had to think about this purchase.

“Did I mention that my father was a mutant? He could set his body aflame. In his home country, he was called El Toro. And these socks are full of his genetic material.”

The immigrant father aflame

She stared on in disbelief, confused and nervously seeking an exit. And then, unbeknownst to the rest of the crowd, she slyly sneaked into the anteroom, removed her cloak, and stared into the void, wondering aloud: “What does it all mean?”

… and then suddenly died of a heart attack.

A man discreetly snatched her purse as he passed. He fled, down the street, tree-lined, cagey trees, full of emaciated squirrels and pigeons curious as to each others’ purpose in the (???) of vermin. He passed a man, a man with a box, and feeling powerful and pumped with epinephrine from his recent crime, grasped the box in his clammy hands. Away away.

Away away

He came to a stop in a nearby alley, gasping for breath and checking to make sure no one had seen him. He opened the box, and inside was the aged black and white photo of a young man, full of promise, dressed in First World War soldier’s uniform. The young soldier stood in a distant European field, his arm around a woman – a girl, really – grinning as if the War had all been worth it.

The man holding the photo stared, trying to find something familiar and meaningful in these strangers. His focus was such that, when it began to snow, he didn’t notice at all.

Down, down it fell around him, collecting on his shoulders, hunched in contemplation, until he was covered completely, as if by a blanket flung over the head by one yearning for just five more minutes of sleep. Cocooned in the cool softness, he allowed himself to drift. And all that could be seen by the passers-by — if in fact there were any witnesses to the scene — was a pristine landscape of white. Unmarred.

This was literature.