Happy news!
I've sold my story "Eating Our Young" to Chase Enterprises Publishing for publication in their new horror anthology, The Speed of Dark. There is still time to submit if you are interested--the deadline is 30 December 2012, at midnight.
"Eating Our Young" is a sad and grim allegory about the way families can unthinkingly consume their members, not out of hatred so much as out of an angry reflexiveness that, once settled into, seldom allows for compassion or heartfelt connection with those around us. It's told from the perspective of the youngest members of one particular family, Kenda and her brother Kenny.
I'll keep you posted as details arrive--publication date and all that jazz. Meanwhile, here is an excerpt from the story:
"Eating Our Young" is a sad and grim allegory about the way families can unthinkingly consume their members, not out of hatred so much as out of an angry reflexiveness that, once settled into, seldom allows for compassion or heartfelt connection with those around us. It's told from the perspective of the youngest members of one particular family, Kenda and her brother Kenny.
I'll keep you posted as details arrive--publication date and all that jazz. Meanwhile, here is an excerpt from the story:
Kenda tripped on tangling sheets as she leapt to the door. All seven kids would stampede to the washroom but she was closest and with luck might not have to wait.
Too late. Enid was mean again and wakened James before the rest. He was the biggest boy and Enid’s favourite and slower in the bathroom than anyone. Kenda faltered at the closing door. “Can I come in, Jamie?”
“Wait your turn, Turd-Drop.”
She sighed and looked at the bristling line of bigger kids squeezing toward her, and remembered Kenny last night. It was not going to happen to her today. She ran back to her room and began to change clothes, then climbed out the window, down the rose trellis, to the dirt. No one guessed her use of the garden. Here behind the rose she yanked her shorts down, piddled, and covered the pee before climbing the trellis again. At the window she listened, peeking cautiously over the sill.
The door had drifted open. Children cried and shouted, doors slammed, water ran. Enid yelled orders. Kenda wanted to climb back in and burrow in the blank oasis of the laundry-room where she and Kenny slept. (Her idea. They’d been sneaking in to sleep together on piles of laundry for so long nobody thought about it anymore.)
No one was in the room.
The Speed of Dark is being put out by the same folk who published Writers on the Wrong Side of the Road, in which I placed three stories (one co-authored with Paivi Kuosmanen -- the "a" should look like this: ä).
P.S.! The gentleman in the photo above actually has nothing to do with the story. His was just the scariest face in my photo library when I stumbled there at 7 AM in search of an appropriate pic. Wouldn't want an actual pic of the content of this story. Although... I could make something...
