This month’s offering is a set of thirteen flash fiction stories I have on sale under the title Feral. Jo Seaquist did the artwork, Francesca DiPiazza did the editing. It’s 99 cents.
These stories are taken from the first iteration of The Oort Cloud, back when it was a blog. After the shock-and-awe of early parenthood, I quit writing fiction. Adopting two daughters, aged one and three, allowed us no free time.
My return to writing, once the kids got a bit older, was The Oort Cloud. I’d publish short little flash pieces there, respond to writing prompts and weekly contests. Eventually I rewrote and edited them, and had most of them published, in odd little corners of the internet and the occasional printed literary journal. Then I put out this collection.
My writing style has changed much since then, though the seeds of the genre I like to call Suburban Horror were being planted. In a nutshell, I define Suburban Horror as discovering menace hiding in the guise of normal, everyday objects and situations, usually in a suburban setting. Rarely is the full scale of the menace understood by the characters, or the reader. The monsters in Suburban Horror tend to lurk off-stage.
Anyway. It’s not a term in usage in modern horror, it’s a self-coined term I use to describe the conventions of the personal sub-genre I’m exploring now. Rather than drone on about it any more, I’ll give you an actual example, culled from Feral. This very short story was originally published in Fiction at Work.
If you like this story, consider buying the book.
Baby Teeth
Her name is Betty Bowens, though all the neighborhood kids call her Betty Bones, and she lives in the old house at the end of the street with her three dead children. They are dead; she is not, merely old, very old. Her children died of different causes, at different times: hit-and-run, cancer, suicide. Two were adults when they died, the cancer and the suicide. Her boy Tristan, poor lovely Tristan, he was the hit-and-run, he died at five. But here in her house, in Betty Bones’s house, they are all children again, all toddlers again, their trikes endlessly squeaking down the sidewalk, their food endlessly spilling down their bibs. They need comfort when thunderstorms loom, cold washcloths on their foreheads when they are hot with fever. At Christmas they gather in the living room. On birthdays they blow out candles. They are losing their baby teeth, over and over again, forever smiling at her with loopy gap-toothed grins. She finds the teeth in odd places. Tilting in the drain of the bathroom sink. Rolling in the back of kitchen drawers. Curling in the gray tendrils of her hair as she combs it out at night. She keeps them all in a fragile teacup perched on her windowsill, the cup now filled to overflowing, tiny enamel pearls dropping to the porcelain saucer below like tears, bone white and shining.
Peace.
Other links:
May’s story: Nine Lives
April’s story: Prince Albert in a Can
March’s story: Fuck, Marry, Kill
February’s story: Veronica Scissors
My first novel, Life Under Water
My website:Â jeffmwood.com.
My erotic flash fiction series, Serious Moonlight (as J G Cain)