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Demurral: Lintels, Towels, and Fears, Oh My!
Azioni libro
Inizia a leggereLunghezza: 246 pagine3 ore
- Editore:
- Bards and Sages Publishing
- Pubblicato:
- Nov 10, 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781393914280
- Formato:
- Libro
Descrizione
KJ Hannah Greenberg once again explores the weirdness of everyday life with her latest collection: Demurral. If you like your literary fiction sprinkled with friendly insanity, or if you prefer your contemporary fantasy to resonate with profound realism, or if you simply enjoy reading about anthropomorphic critters and everyday people in unusual situations both mundane and bizarre, this collection of flash and short fiction is for you.
Informazioni sul libro
Demurral: Lintels, Towels, and Fears, Oh My!
Lunghezza: 246 pagine3 ore
Descrizione
KJ Hannah Greenberg once again explores the weirdness of everyday life with her latest collection: Demurral. If you like your literary fiction sprinkled with friendly insanity, or if you prefer your contemporary fantasy to resonate with profound realism, or if you simply enjoy reading about anthropomorphic critters and everyday people in unusual situations both mundane and bizarre, this collection of flash and short fiction is for you.
- Editore:
- Bards and Sages Publishing
- Pubblicato:
- Nov 10, 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781393914280
- Formato:
- Libro
Informazioni sull'autore
Faithfully constructive in her epistemology, KJ Hannah Greenberg channels gelatinous monsters and two-headed wildebeests. Other of her Bards and Sages Publishing collections of fiction include: The Immediacy of Emotional Kerfuffles, and Don’t Pet the Sweaty Things.
Currently, Hannah serves as an Associate Editor at Bewildering Stories. Despite the fact that she eats oatmeal, runs with a hibernaculum of imaginary hedgehogs, watches dust bunnies breed beneath her sofa, and attempts to matchmake words like “balderdash” and “xylophone,” she refuses to learn to text or to use a digital watch.
Correlati a Demurral
Anteprima del libro
Demurral - KJ Hannah Greenberg
Publisher
Acknowledgements
Every inhalation is a gift. Every step is a treasure.
Sagacity is the knowledge that The Boss favors us with the most rudimentary elements of life. For such largesse, we ought to be grateful.
Preface
These days, established rules for writing, for disseminating books to publishers, and for delivering goods to audiences, have limited applications. Therefore, not only ought authors to regard the process of composition as focused on cognitive chowing, but they ought, as well, to view the proposing and promotion processes, likewise, as necessitating consuming any number of mental victuals. If writers don tinfoil hats while they ingest, that’s good, too.
Currently, every interaction with book vendors, and every interaction with audiences is as unique as is every fashioning of a fresh document. Hence, at present, sometimes it’s more apropos for an author to shake her booty at words. Contrariwise, sometimes, it’s more apropos for her to engage in staid discourse. Three-headed lions aside, most critters involved in the publishing industry heed one or the other sort of rhetoric.
See, when it comes to crafting flash and short fictions, it’s a good idea to be funky. Despite everything, zucchini dogs, offered in whole wheat buns and slathered with spicy mayonnaise, still have questionable worth, even though captivating cryptids remain notorious money makers. What’s more, songbirds make for soft targets, but dragons continue to be capable of leading readers to emotional quandaries.
Accordingly, this book’s three sections, Lintels: Challenges,
Towels: Bitter Sweetness,
and Fears: Uncertainties,
are as much about archaea, namely, about nucleus free single-celled organisms, as they are about the economics of book sales. It’s not for naught that horse whisperers have given up contesting pythons or that gelatinous wildebeests tour Earth with decreased frequency. Today’s economy dictates strange choices.
To wit, Demurral: Lintels, Towels, and Fears, Oh My!, in striving to function as both perspicacious and marketable, intentionally serves up an odd mix of useful insights and compelling tidbits. It bites while it purrs. It leaves tracks while it safeguards. It’s loud because its essence is discreet.
Join me on the various rocketships, in the many haunted glens, and under the numerous city bridges proffered in this book. In the least, you’ll meet space captains, grifters, murices, and hedgehogs. At best, you’ll come away from your read with an appreciation for wordsmiths’ need to balance fantastic and realistic concerns.
KJ Hannah Greenberg
Jerusalem, 2020
Lintels: Challenges
Kaorog’s Companion
Kaorog regarded his tentacles. They were turning purple. Whereas that hue was lovely, it was, simultaneously, an indicator of illness. Physical maladies, as all of the denizens of his world know, derive from unbalanced emotions.
He scanned the lobe, which was located above his beak, and which was responsible for his feelings, to discover the cause of his condition. He was sad. In fact, the mollusk was miserable. The pet with which Tarog had gifted him had died.
The creature hadn’t seemed broken when it had arrived. More accurately, when Kaorog had received it in a sealed carton, along with an instruction booklet (which Kaorog suspected that Tarog had scripted), it had seemed unspoiled.
At the time, Kaorog had merely skimmed the booklet’s pages given that he had been so excited about owning a wee one. He had, thereafter, flashed red and yellow for a long time. Ordinarily, only the most popular members of his consortium possessed such companions. That is, only youths high among the social echelons could coerce others of their kind to obtain those small, encased mammals for them.
Fortunately for Kaorog, Tarog, who was neither an outcast nor the most popular fish, had a crush on him. Consequently, although Kaorog knew that he was taking advantage of her by accepting her unsolicited gift, he also believed that he was not manipulating her. Meaning, the little monster that Tarog had presented to him was his to keep without any expected interchange. Irrespective, Kaorog’s buddy, Brog, had had to remind Kaorog to take the pet to the consortium’s exotic animal doctor.
When Kaorog had done as much, he had been scolded by that specialist. Apparently, removing little brutes from their shiny, glass-fronted vessels, even for a moment or two, can kill them—the atmosphere which Kaorog and his kin took for granted remains lethal to outworlders.
Even had he been aware of that problem beforehand, it’s likely that Kaorog wouldn’t have been able to prevent himself from exposing his two-legged friend — he had quite desperately wanted to touch the miniature beast. After all, fluffies were alleged to be therapeutic and Kaorog needed much healing since Tarog had tried, multiple times, to cuddle him.
Yet, when he had hoisted his manikin beyond the lid of its home, that little critter had turned blue and had nearly stopped breathing. Hastily, Kaorog had stuffed it back into its box. For almost a sun space, Kaorog had refused to even look at it. Besides, that pet was nothing more than a leftover from some lowly octopi’s harvests.
More exactly, every so often, tinned lunches were sent to their quadrant. Most of his peers had never weighed why such nibbles were sent to them or who was sending them. What’s more, most of those adolescents cared little that the metal-wrapped tasties were supposed to be harvested only by the impoverished; individuals who felt entitled also culled them. Tarog, for example, had styled herself as a being that deserved those delicacies.
Kaorog sighed. His purple tinge remained. He next reflected on Brog’s warning.
Never saw one before. But remember, food can’t be your chum.
Brog had cautioned Kaorog before directing him to the vet.
Tarog, though, had furnished Kaorog with no suitable counsel. Rather, upon presenting the critter to Kaorog, she had simply twitted something about food serving as a route to a potential mate’s heart. Kaorog had been bewildered by her remark because he knew that both his heart and his crop sat within the security of his mantel. He could not imagine how they might be associated.
Regardless of Tarog or Brog’s sentiments, Kaorog’s animal shriveled. Hours after being restored to its sealable container, it had shed its skin. It had sloughed both its lower and its upper layers of blue, leaving only a funny, bubble-like casing, which covered its mantel.
Most worrisome was that no new blue layers grew over the tiny fiend’s appendages. Worse, the pet had picked off the row of shiny bits that had been part of its upper body’s covering and had tried to eat them. It had retched horribly.
At the same time as Kaorog had considered that, perhaps, his pet was hungry, he had done nothing to address that presumption since one does not feed food. Even so, he fretted. On the one tentacle, it could be that the metal casings in which such treats arrived were a source of nutrition to them, enabling them to remain fully succulent when collected. On the other tentacle, maybe he ought to call the vet to double check if it was possible to feed food. On a third tentacle, such a call would use up more of his limited funds and would do so on a thing with a life expectancy of just a few days.
Amazingly, Kaorog’s would-be snack lasted half of a week. In fact, it was only after it had eaten the stuff lining its case and had clutched its body that it had died. It was after that incident that Kaorog’s tentacles had tinted purple and that he had pushed all thoughts about his short-lived buddy out of his mind. He hadn’t even bothered to eat it.
Sometime later, Kaorog mounted the back of Tarog’s mantel. She conveyed I told you so,
regarding their pairing, with sixteen different gestures. Subsequently, she devoured Kaorog. Even though Kaorog had successfully broken off his hectocotylus, which had remained lodged in Tarog, she had been unsated.
No matter. As per norm, Tarog died shortly after laying her eggs. Both she and Kaorog had actualized their lives’ purposes.
In any case, during the time when they yet breathed, neither of them had discovered the nature of the consortium’s imported munchies. Namely, neither they nor any of their kind had come to realize that they had been chowing down on mariners in submersibles who had had the misfortune to be captured while exploring the oceans’ greatest depths.
Assigned Myself the Job
The scream that I let loose at Öskjuhlíð might have been an echo of wrongdoings suffered by my ancestors, or a reminder of my sister’s enduring loss. Certainly, that rendered cry is the stuff of magnetic fields, whose pull is particularly strong in Reykjavík.
Weigh that my bloodline is half constituted by genotypes from the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, specifically by elements of my mother, a Bosnian speaker, who escaped with my aunt, with whom she was granted asylum under the Fahamu Refugee Programme, ostensibly as women at risk.
Those girls, who reported being victims of serial rapes, received sanctuary in exchange for getting showcased by The Progressive Party as representative of its compassionate politics,
notwithstanding their government’s Framsóknarflokkurinn positions on pricing tog and pel for the international textile market, and on subsidy farming.
Contemplate, additionally, that the other half of my essence derives from my father, a New Yorker, whom, decades earlier, served as a Fulbright Scholar at The University of Iceland, and who courted Mom on the shores of The Faxaflói Bay, a setting where mustard-colored rocks jut out like pieces of a colossus’ broken necklace. It took him years to work up to regularly placing ungentle hands on her. His latter-day rectification served up in American rehab centers and Canadian spiritual
retreats, no more warms me than does Bláfjöll’s eruptions; death by lava can’t be transmuted.
Like my grandfather, to whom my stricken grandmother allegedly glommed for over forty-five years, before dying from cancer, my father held fast to an attitude of academic entitlement, i.e. to a cowardice actualized in thrown furniture, cigarette flesh burns, and knife threats. In brief, Suri and I grew up in shadows, experiencing none of the regular sort of joy attendant to hosting friends or other dear ones, or attendant to happy
occasions.
What’s more, Mordechai, Suri’s paramour, perished trying to save Suri from the subpolar oceanic drift of the Elliðaá River into which my sister had walked, Sylvia Plath-style. After his funeral, Sis, who had survived the dangerous sea, dispassionately immigrated to Chicago, where an endowed chair in rhetoric awaited her. Whereas she insisted on a permanent break from fjords, she was unwilling to entirely forgo ice and water. Lake Michigan suited her.
So, I sublet her flat. These days, I count snowflakes and raindrops. The hills of Öskjuhlíð and Skólavörðuholt witness my attempt to make art, both prints and paintings, from coldness.
I assigned myself the job of salvaging the irrecoverable. All precipitation melts, eventually. Thus, in the beautiful woodland area surrounding the Pearl, I vocalize loudly, gleaning color not from the greenness of Mosfellsbær or from the verdure of Elliðaárdalur, but from using my strengths to move away from a lineage of forced, compelling acts.
If Ever
After Jalilah had miscarried , Fen had refused to receive her gifts. A year later, when he had again wanted to hook up, it was too late; Jalilah’s brothers had removed her from Fen’s apartment.
The doctor on the hill had told Jalilah that she and Fen were cosmically connected — while Fen was a good source of love, he was a horrible companion. It was good that Jalilah was marrying Sawyer.
A decade more, Jalilah still dreamed of Fen. Initially, when Fen appeared in Jalilah’s dreams, she’d wake up, abruptly, in tears.
With time, though, when Fen appeared in her dreams, some of Jalilah’s parts tingled. Covertly, Jalilah located him and then took to calling him during Sawyer’s hunting trips.
Fen vowed that he still loved Jalilah.
The phone charges Jalilah accrued were awkward to explain. The roused state in which she sometimes woke was more difficult to justify. After two years, Jalilah put an end to her and Fen’s phone calls.
Fen said he understood. Jalilah wished he didn’t.
Her dreams intensified. In one, she was transported to Fen’s mansion. Surrounded by his magnolias and field hands, she approached the exquisite, external staircase to his home. Fen opened his front door.
Jalilah fainted. Fen scooped her up and carried her past his pet leopard. Jalilah was brought into Fen’s sunny dining room. He poured her an iced drink.
Jalilah woke. She remembered Fen’s promise not to call and his assurance that he’d answer if she ever again summoned him. Fortunately, she had whited out his number in her phone book.
Even so, Brad would know how to connect Fen. Brad, like Sawyer, had roomed with Fen. Brad, unlike Sawyer, had often leered at Jalilah. Calling Brad would be expensive and would hurt Sawyer. It would be stupid to take that risk; Sawyer was worth her loyalty.
So, Jalilah drove to Sawyer’s office, pulled him into a supply closet, and berated him for forgetting her birthday. Sawyer kissed away every one of Jalilah’s remonstrations. The two of them stayed in that closet for a while.
Ten years later, Brad called Jalilah. Jalilah did not ask him for Fen’s phone number. Brad did not offer it. Instead, Brad insisted that Jalilah record a certain URL. After finishing the call, Jalilah typed in that connection, saying nothing of that call to Sawyer.
The gasp that Jalilah uttered upon opening that web page was sufficient for Sawyer to come running. He hugged his shaking wife.
Fen had been beheaded for trafficking child brides in Vang Vieng.
Snack Attack
Mara had to have grain . Now. Immediately. It didn’t matter that it was night, the time when Oogpister Beetles, Paussinae Beetles, and Granite Night Lizards reigned. She has just laid over two thousand eggs. She was profoundly hungry.
Her daughters begrudged her nothing. She, their mother, had consumed her own wings to feed the first of them. On balance, they balked at harvesting in darkness. Had Berta, a soldier, not led the way, those girls would have stayed put until morning.
Berta had picked up the trace of something sweet. She led her nearest and dearest to a picnic blanket mere yards from their colony. All manner of refuge covered that cloth.
Nearby, beer cans clasped in their limp hands, humans slept. Their Land Rover’s radio spilled music into the night air.
Otka collected a crumb of wurst. Gerda sniffed at and then lifted a potato chip morsel. Karlina and Armina circled a red cabbage bit, while Harimanna and Erna nudged, rolled, and then heaved tiny springerle fragments.
Romilda, alone, remembered that Mother had specifically requested grain. She walked back and forth across the linen looking for that foodstuff. She found specks of zimt sterne, flakes of boiled potatoes, and puddles of yeast-fermented malt. Nowhere, however, was the Grünkern Mother adored.
So, the little worker moved off of the fabric, away from her sisters’ column. She wanted Mother’s praise.
No seed stalks grew among the grasses closest to the harvest site. There was only a house spider’s trap. Had an alcohol-impaired human not taken that moment to relieve himself, crushing the arachnid’s web as he fumbled, the ant would have been eaten headfirst.
Romilda returned to the woven surface. Many of her kin had been trampled by the same feet that had freed her. She followed a scent trail back to the formicary.
There, Mara had fallen asleep, temporarily oblivious to the death of her young and to the nature of the treats, which the survivors had gathered. Tomorrow would be time enough to send her girls on further missions.
Boxing Day
Oison dripped snow . He looked back and forth from the puddle under one of his hands to the puddle forming under the other.
Maebh grimaced. His hands ought to be full of cash, not melting snow.
I was stiffed,
Oison justified.
Maebh threw their only table lamp at
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