After Gabriel García Márquez died, I picked up my copy of Love in the Time of Cholera – or rather your copy, since your name is still written on the first page. For years, the book’s been a permanent fixture on my shelf; until yesterday, I forgot how it ever appeared.
You may not remember, but you gave me the book for my birthday, a day I hated and which I still hate, even though I have, in my old age, resigned myself to the fact that birthdays are like funerals – events which the guests require but which the person of honour would be just as happy to avoid. I never liked to talk about my birthday but somehow you got it out of me, which was a talent you had.…
Newly Edited for 21stCentury Technological Phenomena
Room Décor, Chronology of
The daughter’s bedroom will undergo a series of very definite changes indicating the passage of time and the gradual estrangement of the daughter’s identity from your own. She collects horse figurines—expensive, painted things with spindly legs that always snap—and the interest makes Christmases and birthdays easy. You spend a week in the garage building the shelves where the creatures can live, and years later, after the horses have all gathered dust, you find her wrapping their super-glued, taped-up limbs in old t-shirts and storing them away for good.
Her room is painted over too many times to remember, favorite color under favorite color until she can find a permanent answer to the question, and you’re sure she never will.…
By Jordan Blum, Holly Rae Garcia, and Ryan Prentice Garcia
Posted on
Ryan Prentice Garcia & Holly Rae Garcia
Holly Rae Garcia and Ryan Prentice Garcia are a sort of power couple in the creative writing world. They live on the Texas Coast and their new novella, The Easton Falls Massacre: Bigfoot’s Revenge, just came out on October 30th. Holly is a corporate photographer by day and the Editor-at-Large and Art Director at Versification Magazine. Some of her favorite authors include Edgar Allan Poe, Daniel Keyes, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King. Her debut novel, Come Join the Murder, was released this past March by Close To The Bone Publishing. Ryan works in construction and his most prized possession is a Kane Hodder autographed Jason Voorhees mask. He calls himself a “military brat” and he’s lived in Germany, Turkey, and Belgium.…
What I wouldn’t give for another morning like that one:
I brought you Kona coffee and sunny-side-up eggs, pausing momentarily at the bedroom door, teak tray perched on my fingertips, to watch you float on the rippling blue comforter, a still life, swimming a statuesque side-stroke. The birds in the branches outside our bedroom window capered about in the yellow-breasted sunlight. The maple tree, wrapped in wet brown bark, sprouted buds bejeweled by last night’s fog— the same little beads which slid down your naked skin in the shower, dawn after presumptive dawn.
I sip my coffee alone now, in the first anodyne rays of the mourning hours, measuring my life in birdsong–plaintive and palliative.
Despite being written and published decades apart, Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and Shena McAuliffe’s The Good Echo bear similarities in how each novel breaks the fourth wall in order to engross the reader. While the novels also have differences in this approach (Vonnegut’s work utilizes drawings while McAuliffe’s novel utilizes a father’s dentistry notes where his story is told in his journal’s footnotes), the most notable similarity is that each novel utilizes a first-person narrator who at first seems disassociated from the story but slowly becomes more and more involved. In the case of Breakfast of Champions, the first-person narrator can be interpreted as the author; in The Good Echo, the first-person narrator is 12-year old Ben, the deceased son of Cliff and Frances Bell, who died from a botched root canal performed by his father.…
Seth Eisen died on Friday, January 18, 2018. Or he did not. There were several possibilities of what occurred that evening. Here is the first.
It was Julie’s fault and his own as well. He hadn’t cleared the evening with her first, so when she, a bestselling novelist with an almost unhealthy love of animals (she had provided hospice services to not one, but two pets in the last year and hired a pet psychic to find her lost cat), was busy, Seth was alone. His high hopes for a relationship to Julie had been dashed earlier anyhow; the long string of solipsistic text messages about her new agent; her belief that her religious sister-in-law’s prayers had caused her Netflix TV deal and a contract writing for Archie; the realization that the chaos surrounding her was not a bug but a feature.…
