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Application for a Story Species Record

Cicada speciesADDRESS: 
San Francisco-ish

ECKELBURG MEMBERSHIP NO.:  
1178345

I, Trevor J. Houser, hereby certify that my story, Malta, is correct and perhaps true to some degree, and that the rules as set out by The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review for claiming a publication have been complied with in full.

ORIGIN OF MALTA: 
World War II documentaries; Mr. Boston’s Official Bartenders Guide; repeated viewings of Thunderball; a hard-won belief in werewolves; and, an appreciation for panic, mass or otherwise, coupled with, and ultimately bookended by a (healthy?) sense of dread.

DATE STORY FINISHED:
Sometime before my son was born.

WEIGHT:
300 to 350 grams

LOCATION:
A closet with a window that never closed right; the smell of burnt salmon and Exodus Kush wafting in with the Santa Ana winds

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF COLOR, MARKINGS (THESE ARE NOT ALWAYS OBVIOUS IN PHOTOS): 
Overall amber-colored that is lighter on the belly, not to mention the very distinctive dark “bandito” stripe running down its right margin, which tends to fade after the third or fourth reading, depending on your geopolitics.

WITNESSES:
David Markson, Donald Barthelme, Sean Connery, J.P. Donleavy, and Flintstones Gummies (now with more vitamin D!).

 

Trevor J. Houser has published stories in Pindeldyboz, Story Quarterly, and Zyzzyva among others. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children.

 

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The World Doesn’t Wait for the Dead

LIES headstoneA Survivor’s Guide was born from trauma. The world broke and what I was able to sweep up dwells in this story: a bunker sheltering the ugly knot of grief and the desperate need for security and knowledge in the presence of horror. When I wrote this story, I had only a memory of trust in the cosmos. One of my husband’s best friends had recently been stabbed multiple times in the chest by strangers. And, in those forgotten hours after midnight, he was left to bleed out on the lawn of a church.

We were not new to tragedy. Our dear friend Blake, a life of light, drowned spelunking in the cold and dark. A young son in our close group of friends was mauled to death by a bear. A brother and sister we knew committed double suicide. And, a family member died from inconclusive results when she bent down to pet her chihuahua. There were others who succumbed to death, naturally or expectantly. But, Mike’s death was different. It was homicide. It was violent. We lived a nightmare for months, and, not yet a year later, it still slithers into our daily life.

I am not sure who the survivor is in A Survivor’s Guide. It is a ceremony of grief. The narrator’s anger and distance is a peculiar blend of my husband’s anger and my go-to dissociative behavior. Elisse’s husband’s denial is a minute blessing, a glint of non-feeling: those brief angels of the surreal. The dark humor makes the story, life, and grief tolerable. Sometimes I think the departed Elisse is the only survivor in this piece.

When a frenzy of young, middle-class, angry men stab a friendly man in the middle of the night – when “it just got out of control so quickly” – there is a part of me like Elisse that seeks the firmer ground, a bunker: an away place. At first, the space is important: dimensions; fortifications. Then it’s no longer just the area I need, but the sustenance to live there. I need the food, the supplies, the guns, and things to make a life there that is warmed by the earth and tucked away from all beasts of nature, not just murderers and rampaging animals, but also the beasts of depression and the too-soon failing body. It is the dream home of solace.

Hellen Keller’s words – “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing” – are often offered as if to spur us into giddiness, strength, and exploration. However, the rest of her quote is always left in shadow: “Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.”

In A Survivor’s Guide, no one is safe. No place is secure. We are all – forever and especially right this very now – simply surviving. 

 

Natanya Ann Pulley is half-Navajo (Kiiyaa’aanii and Tachiinii clans). She has a PhD in Fiction Writing from the University of Utah and is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Dakota. A writer of primarily fiction and non-fiction with outbreaks in poetry, Natanya’s publications include Western Humanities Review, The Florida Review, Drunken Boat, and McSweeney’s Open Letters (among others). Links to publications can be found on her site: gappsbasement.com. Areas of interest include: Disability Studies and Horror Theory, as well as Experimental Literature, Native American Literature, and Graphic Novels.

 

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Punctuated People

Punctuation marks made of puzzle piecesA Case of the Puncs started with the simple idea of attributing personality types to punctuation marks.

Here is my cast of characters:

”(.,.)”…!:;!…?

I sat with a list of punctuation marks and tried to marry their characteristics with those of the people around me. Loud confident people became Exclamation Marks whilst ponderous thinkers turned into Question Marks. I thought of making pregnant women Question Marks at one stage because an upside down Question Mark does look like a pregnant woman:

¿

Hipsters became Quotation Marks with their slogans splashed across their t-shirts. So did war vets and Goths and anyone else who liked to show the world what they stood for by how they dressed. Ellipses were people who never knew when to stop. You met them every morning in the lift on the way up to your shitty desk job. The more you ignored them the more they tried to fill the space with meaningless words. Ellipses were the type of people who walked around at the height of summer saying: what about this heat?

Commas created unwelcome pauses in your clauses. They were the people who would get back to you when you really needed an answer straight away. I’ve probably met more Commas in my life than any other type of Punc. The next most common after Commas is the Full Stop. These were men who had reached the end of the line. You saw Full Stops everywhere: on the bus, on the television, or pushing a trolley along a supermarket aisle. They had slumped shoulders and sad Full Stop eyes. Their wives were cheating; they were losing weight; they were coughing up blood onto blue tissue paper in the bathroom while their kids stood outside with tooth brushes stamping their feet and waiting to get in.

No one really knows what Semi Colons are used for. We stick them in sentences here and there without any real conviction. They hang around because no one has the guts to tell them that they’re not wanted. So I used them to represent those people who weren’t wanted: the one night stand who wouldn’t take the hint next morning; or the old friend you were no longer friendly with. Their first cousin, the Colon, was used to describe people who always tried to better anything you said: folks who would wait until you’d finished talking, before adding a list of achievements that topped yours. You’d say you’d been to Fuerteventura on holiday; they’d say they owned the island.

Brackets were soul mates; couples who started to look the same and who spooned together in bed. They lifted their coffee cups at the same time in cafes and they walked at the same pace. There’s nothing more beautiful in this world than soul mates. I thought of calling them Parentheses but decided against it because there are many kinds of brackets – ( { [ ] } ) – just like there are many types of close couples.

A Case of the Puncs is a story that I hope can be visualised: ideally, readers will see the alpha males’ pogoing down the streets on top of their Exclamation Marks knocking the less fortunate Puncs out of the way or maybe they’ll see the hipsters walking by with their Quotation Marks hovering around their heads like earphones. If I had the money or the skill I would like to animate this story as I think it would work well as a cartoon.

The unnamed protagonist in the tale is a Full Stop. He’s dead inside and he breathes bereavement. His social dislocation is leading him inevitably toward his own specific designation and he can’t do anything to stop it. He’s become isolated in his own life, unable to break out. He almost never responds directly to a question, instead internalising his answers. I tried to make him appear as if he was in a self-contained bubble.

I wrote this story sober and edited it drunk. This is how I usually work. Editing while inebriated somehow makes things clearer to me. Liquor lets me shine a light on language. I catch most of my word redundancies this way. I can also spot places where I’m not telling the truth. I highly recommend this technique. A writer should always put literature before his liver. Perhaps, A Case of the Drunks would have been a more fitting title.

 

Andrew McLinden lives and works in Glasgow. He started life as a lyricist and his work has been used on a variety of film and TV projects from Irvine Welsh’s Acid House Trilogy to a recent episode of American drama One Tree Hill. He’s had short fiction published in a number of online and print journals. He hopes to finish 2013 by completing his first novel. 

Andrew likes referring to himself in the third person. He sometimes walks into a supermarket and says to the checkout girl “Andrew wants to know if these cakes are part of the two for one deal you’re currently promoting?” Andrew likes to read and likes to write and hopes people like to read what he writes.