Issue 36 September 2016 Flash Fiction Online September 2016

I recently read The Usual Path to Publication, a collection of essays edited by Shannon Page, where genre writers share the story of how and why their first novel was published. It has its merits, and if you’re a beginner I recommend buying it. I was interested in each of these stories, too, since my debut novel from a publisher is out this August. But I’m far from a beginner, so I noticed something . . . interesting.

Given the focus, it’s a good, short read. A tad repetitive (so many jokes about Self-Addressed Stamped Envelopes, or when email was dangerous, or how people used to talk on phones!), and the usual oscillations of bad agent stories and fawning over those who made their debuts a success (for a counterpoint, see this horror story), but the enduring lessons, while not stated as such (since these are stand alone essays and not an analysis) can be summed up thusly: “Persevere, newbie, because the night is dark and full of rejection and I’m just telling you the highlights since it takes YEARS, except when it doesn’t, and, yes, networking helps a TON to shave off those years, especially if you’re not a shit to editors and agents at cons, but there are no guarantees, luck happens (but in both directions), and you increase your odds of success by working harder, longer, and making good work and connections, but never forget, life ain’t fair.”  And yet for me, one unfortunate and unintended consequence of these kinds of collections is the lasting impression of the writer’s life as a highlight reel . . . despite all the caveats to the contrary.

Structure, rather than intent, plays a hand. The essays must crunch time and tell you to “fast forward” a year, or two, or five, or ten, while publishing did whatever it does outside of their direct influence. That time “in between” statuses (newbie and first published author) is compressed into a handful of details. Thus, by dint of this compression, the impression (even with the caveats) is of something happening quickly. Long stretches of actual time passed quickly on the page. And while I’m a historian, where such compression is critical and subject to intense scrutiny, this reflection made me think of an art form that uses empty space to fill in information far more than prose.

In comic books, we have the panels, where a moment is frozen in time (guy holds cigarette, another hand in his pocket). But we also have the space between them, known as The Gutters. It is in The Gutters where time and space have elapsed before the next static image. It’s in The Gutters, as comic guru Scott McCloud and others have noted, where the magic happens, where the reader’s imagination fills in the blanks between the first (dude holding a cigarette) and the next (he’s taking a drag, and there’s a closed lighter in his other hand). Because of The Gutters, we turn all the frozen images into a narrative that moves in space and times. So, The Gutters are not empty. They are essential.

To push this analogy to the breaking point, The Gutters are where we actually spend most of our time: between moments of significant action that most people want to read about. That year waiting for a response from a short story mag that actually died the day after they sent you a contract? Gutter. The long pause after you harassed a junior editor of a major house in an elevator at GenreCon about your novel (“It’s like the  The Aeneid, but with CHICKS in SPACE!”) and they said “uh, sure, send it by snail mail” and did everything in their power not to give you their email address? Gutter. The five years your agent said “I’m just waiting to hear back and can’t call them because that would be rude and ruin the deal they might be working on”? Gutter.

The Gutters are the “flash forwarded” material of existence before the money shots of life (Go ahead, click, it’s for a novel. Get your minds out of the .  . . well, you know).

The Gutters are also where we create our work, stuffed with the material we leave out of essays on writing because writing about writing is often boring as shit. And yet, it’s the purest place. It’s the land of Borges infinite libraries and of Howard’s “damndest bastard” Conan, of the microcosm of ambition and power in the creepy world of competitive gymnastics. It’s the land of our imagination unformed. Once it is Out of The Gutter, it assumes its last form before being internalized by the external world.

The Gutters are also filled with day job horrors, relationships, hobbies, boredom, sexy sex, wasting time, making schedules, loved ones and hated enemies, porn and prayer and breakfast bars and long distance phone calls, rent and bills, garbage and new recipes, heartbreak and first kisses, violence and accidents and Christmas, births, deaths and shit you can’t explain. The world in which our hearts and minds operate. The world we internalize with our engines of imagination. That be The Gutters.

You know, BORING STUFF! Nothing to see here! FF the long walk to Mordor and just throw your jewelry in the volcano already!

I like The Gutters, and think we obfuscate their value. After all, getting published is the exception. Not the rule (remember: life ain’t fair). The Gutters are the rule. And this rule ain’t boring.

And I’ll prove it.

Below are ten things that happened in the Gutters, way back in 1999, when I published my first short story “Treasure Chest” to The Lamp Post: Literary Journal of the CS Lewis Society of Southern California for contributor copies that were handmade and side stapled. I had just started my MA in War Studies at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, home of some great writers, including the venerable George Stanley. Yeah, I said it, GEORGE FUCKING STANLEY! I won’t FF to when I signed the contract for THE BRIMSTONE FILES, a short sixteen years in the future. I’m going dive back into The Gutters.

1. I came home from Cavalry House (where War Studies students had class without mighty steeds), and found I’d forgotten to lock my door. And forgotten to turn off the light. Two things I never do. I started making dinner, spaghetti from a can as I recall, and then went to go put on music: only to find all of my CDs were gone. And one of my windows was open. My apartment had been broken into. And my brain tried to tell me everything was normal: a pure PKD moment. When the police finally arrived, the officer had zero patience. When I asked if he was okay, he told me he was coming back from a domestic dispute, and that losing my shit was meaningless. He was right.
2. I wrote a paper on civil/military relations in the Franco/Prussian War, and focused on the personal letters of Helmut von Moltke (the Elder!). It was the first A I received in Grad School. This is funny because in grade eight, I failed history!
3. After a formal Christmas dinner, one of the few times I wore a tie that year, I walked home and got completely lost. I had to take a cab to my place . . . which was one block away.
4. One day in winter I walked in subzero temperatures to the college, about a 40 minute stretch. When I entered Cavalry House rogue historian and mentor Sean Maloney looked at me like I was insane. “Ridler, you walked? It’s -40 Celsius without wind chill. Someone is giving him a ride home.”
5. That year, I got my first email address, from the Care2 company, because my sister (far more tech savvy) said they were good people. All their links had animal icons. My favorite was an angry tiger with a roar in his mouth who held, between two clawed paws, a present! This was the donate button!
6. I made Ray Bradbury’s infamous Pizza Soup (crushed crackers, cheese, and spaghetti sauce, not this modern high-stakes monstrosity). Vile. It explains why Bradbury was a tubby bastard.
7. My book collection grew by leaps and bounds because of killer used book stores in Kingston, a college town with tons of bibliophiles. Among my early finds was a signed copy of Harlan Ellison’s PAINGOD at BOOKPEOPLE, signed by the man himself . . . all unbeknownst to the cashier who charged me four bucks.
8. Kingston, ON, is the prison capital of the Great White North. My apartment was only four blocks away from the women’s prison and Kingston Penitentiary, the two facilities that once held notorious serial killers Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka.  Between them was a prison museum I used to visit, where they had collections of material made by the inmates, including a crossbow made of toothbrushes.
9. My diet consisted mainly of spaghetti, eggs, and instant mashed potatoes, plus whatever my family would cook me on Sundays. Being poor was awful, but sometimes flavorful.
10. I wrote my first completed short story that year, about a dude who worked at an abattoir, suffered from insomnia, and was being communicated to by a comatose alien in a hospital. She could talk to him because he was burning out from the real world and thus could “hear” her (as should be noted, I am a MASTER OF PLOT). It was based on a job interview I’d had at a slaughter house the previous summer when I lived in Toronto. In the offices above the warehouse, the air was sticky. The lady interviewing me was a haggard beauty who, in the din of summer heat, wore pounds of make-up and chain smoked Player’s Unfiltered in her office. She looked at my resume, freshly inked with my BA (Honours) in History, and said “You’re clearly smart, so I’d say you . . . really shouldn’t work here.” In the dead of winter that following year in Kingston, suffering burnout from grad school, I turned that experience into “Slaughter House Sam.” It was awful at Mach 9 in all directions. Two people read it before I said “what a pile of shit,” and then I started again. 

Later, I would read Joe Lansdale’s essay “A Hand on the Shoulder” in the Horror Writers Association Handbook on how setting and place can help you refine your voice as an author. Until then, I’d viewed Kingston with the normal big city smugness one gets living in Toronto. But Kingston turned out to be a fascinating, dark, weird city. You just had to look at it the right way. Once I did, my writing voice started to shift.

My “debut”* as a novelist is a roughly a year away. By the mandate of Page’s book and my rather strained analogy, I’m still in The Gutters. So I can’t fast forward into the future to give you relief. Instead, I’m going to drag you through the stuff you usually fast forward, cut out, or ignore until the book is released.

Because you know what’s in The Gutters?

Everything that matters.

The seawall of New-Galveston glistened shell-white in the years before you were born. I paddled over to pick your daddy up from work, pressed my palm to the warm concrete, and waved at the top-men. They worked the blinkie-lighted antennas and got to look down inside the fifteen square miles of the Richie-rich and tourists in the bowl. The rest of the island was below the waves.

  We were just married, and my heart did a flounder-flip when I saw him come out the pumpers’ gate, with his lopsided grin and greasy coveralls. He eased into our canoe and slapped the hull’s side.

“Let’s bolt,” he said.

We had to hurry that day; it was the first of the month. He helped me paddle flash-quick to our rickety tug, the Merry-May. We had three floodgates to get through before our tuition deadline.

See, we were married, but in two different colleges. Two different service areas. I was interning, checking mosquito traps and getting a bio-degree with Lone-Star. He was working pumps and finishing up his hydro-degree with Galvez-college. A student ID chip on our wrists linked to the registration tags on the Merry-May, our legal homestead. Schools tracked these with GPS — we called it pinging — and baby, both boat and body had to be in the right place to be considered in-district.

Your daddy’s school pinged on the third week of the month; mine on the first. We both needed in-district tuition discounts, which meant us moving the boat up and down the bay. Lots of people did it. It was practically a parade of family barges, bio-diesel sailboats, pontoon shanties, all puttering up the bays on first-Mondays and third-Thursdays.

“How’s work?” I asked as we chugged along. Miles ahead of us were the great sea-gates of Houston.

“Same ol’.”

I thought of the Richies back in the Galveston bowl, with their fake beach and old cobblestones and horse-drawn carriage rides.

“Get paid this time?”

He shrugged.

Wet-footers like us can’t get a good job without a degree, so until then it’s interning. We got enough for beans and rice, while the rest auto-paid down on the principal.

I’m still carrying my mother’s student loans, even though she died years ago. In-district is the difference between being in debt only until your 60s or passing it along to your descendants.

I kissed the back of your daddy’s dirty neck, and we floated over Pine Line. Below us were the old dunes from when folks took their Christmas trees to the beach, trying to shore up the sand. That was back before the sea-walls. No lie, sometimes storms roll those old bark-bones and strings of tinsel float up. That was what he proposed with, wrapping a silver strand around my finger like spun moonlight.

I leaned over the rail and saw, bobbing right along with us, a star tree-topper. I scooped it up and took it into the wheelhouse.

“Look!” I hung it from the roof.

“Hope and goodwill,” your daddy grinned.

After gate three we were in Ship-Channel Lake. Party time. Students coming up from the Bay, Seabrook, East Lake — coming from the off-shore rigs and rice fields. All scrambling to get into Lone-Star’s district for the location ping. Someone yelled that College of the Mainland, a campus perched high on the stilts of Texas City, was pinging too.

That made folks nervous; it was even more raucous. We knew a quiet anchorage through a cut, just off Lost-Forest Lake. It always spooked me, all narrow and shallow. I looked off port, and a crazy guy was standing naked in a half-submerged tree, dreadlocks blowing. Looking right at me.

  “Joshua shall be his name!” he shouted.

“Psych major,” your daddy said, forcing a laugh.

But I knew it was something else. See, I knew I was pregnant with you. And I got to thinking about Moses’ son and Old Testament stuff, how there were cities with walls then too . . . I got chills.

Suddenly there were air-horns and yelling from the boats.

“No!” your Daddy said, checking his e-tab. “No-no-no!”

“They pinged early?” I asked.

His face was pale. “And Galvez-college just pinged. They all pinged at the same time!”

My stomach sank.

He read, “Out-of-district rates applied.”

“You can appeal . . . we can . . . “

The flood gate now looked like a giant guillotine. We heard shouts from the boats; everyone else was checking their e-tabs too. Folks went crazy, uselessly gunning engines, screaming curses. They popped flares, revved into nowhere.

The wakes hit us hard and pushed us into the dead tree-tops of the cut. Drowned limbs scraped at the hull. The tow-rope broke, and the canoe rolled, sinking like a lost leaf.

The boat bucked, and everything fell from the walls. Dishes cracked. The black limbs of the dead forest were like hands.

  Your daddy tried to steer us free, but I saw the star topper swinging, felt you in my belly, and grabbed the wheel myself. I followed that swinging star like a crazy person myself until we were in the clear.

See baby, I thought I’d save the world with bio-research, and your daddy with engineering. But we were both wrong. Sickness is getting worse, waters getting higher. And when he drowned in the pumping station of New-Galveston, saving all the Richie-rich from another summer storm’s surge, his college didn’t forgive one cent of his loan. He was just an intern.

Maybe all the walls in the world need to tumble down, so folks will learn to swim together.

That’s how you inherited our debts. The burden’s on you. There were fines and fees, and I’m sorry. But baby-boy, you’re going to be smart and savvy and know how to fix this world.

I know, because you led us out of the wilderness. And when I first saw your baby eyes and felt your little fingers grip my own, I heard the trumpets of angels.

“What you burnt, broke, and tore is still in my hands. I am the keeper of fragile things and I have kept of you what is indissoluble.” — Anaïs Nin

This month marks my third anniversary as Publisher of Flash Fiction Online. Three years ago, if you’d told me that in September 2016, I’d be publishing my 36th issue of FFO with two anthologies under my belt and a collection of stories headed to Audible.com, I would’ve laughed.

But here we are.

Flash Fiction Online is bigger, better, more popular and better funded than ever, and it’s all thanks to you.

I need to thank the real heroes — the staff of FFO. These women and men spend countless hours reading, editing and selecting the very best for each issue. They do it all because they love this magazine. Every single one is a volunteer. Perhaps someday our Patreon will make enough to pay my editors a salary. Until then Suzanne, Damon, Sabrina and Chris take on the enormous responsibility of curating FFO because they believe in what we do here. And we haven’t even gotten to all the slush readers. Let’s just say bravery is a pre-requisite for the job.

On to the stories for this month. No one grasps the intricacies of passionate quite like Anaïs Nin. She wrote, “What you burnt, broke, and tore is still in my hands. I am the keeper of fragile things, and I have kept of you what is indissoluble.” This month we explore that tenuous connection between people who love each other — though sometimes love hurts more than we care to admit.

Joy Kennedy-O’Neill brings us “Jericho,” a dystopian science fiction story. Student loans are passed from generation to generation until the burden becomes almost more than a brave couple can bear.

Nicola Belte’s “Muse” is as delicate and beautifully crafted as the Victorian paintings of young women it describes. To what lengths will we go to capture the most exquisite moment of life? A horror story for the ages.

There is no better exploration of the weak mother-daughter bond than Maria Haskins’ “Scent.” Pain and suffering combine with magic in this dark fantasy.

For our final story, we bring you one of our favorite FFO alumni, Pulitzer nominee John Guzlowski. Originally published in The James Franco Review, “My Mother’s Death — A Sonnet” is a powerful piece that will leave you wondering what love looks like. We did.

But that’s not all!

A fellow FFO alumnus, Tom Crosshill, is back with an interview about his new book, THE CAT KING OF HAVANNA!

And don’t miss Jason S. Ridler’s latest column, “FXXK WRITING: THE GUTTERS.”

Now, off to it. Reading awaits!

All my best,

Anna

White as china, she is, a new polished plate, ready to be broken. She ain’t more than ten-and-fifteen, made very tiny by the master’s heavy, black overcoat what’s thrown about her shoulders. I stand back as the door swings wide, the carriage crunching away over the gravel, her boots tipping and tapping on the step, not wanting in but not keen on staying out, neither. I’d tell her to bolt, to run screaming, but there ain’t no-one what can see me. Her skirts swoosh into the parlour, and there’s that rattle and clank of buckets, as the maids make ready her bath.

* * *

Maud’s her name. The morning sun has her propped up in her nest of feather quilts, her eyes bold and bright. There’s food on a tray aside the bed — poached eggs and bacon and sweet, milky tea. At first. As soon as the master starts his work, they quick lose the stomach for it.

“Will it hurt?” she mutters to herself, shaping the burnt rind into the curl of a question. I think of her mother, weighting her empty heart and home to the velvet sack of shillings in her pocket. Think of a sweetheart, perhaps, seeing her face, for a while, in every passing flower-girl; her shape forming in each swirl of steam from the trains what growl across the arches. But they’ll forget.

“I daresay it will,” I whisper. I stare out over the spindly trees and the tall metal gates, run my fingers over the frost what’s gathered on the inside of the glass. I don’t feel nothing, and I’m glad for it.

* * *

“Consumption. To be consumed, to be eaten up, to have all that is superfluous burned away, in one glorious moment.” The master and his men talk in the parlour as I stand outside. I put my face to their long coats on the hat-stand, choke back the smell of January rain and the suffocating smog of the city. “A woman is most beautiful on the brink of death. It is capturing the apple at its ripest before it starts to decay. There is beauty in death, and in death there is art.”

There’s a creak on the stairs behind, and there’s the young miss, crept out of her room in her white nightgown, her head tilted to the side as she tries to make sense of their fancy talk; the way they tried to make right what they did. There was those, rich and poor, that got the consumption the same, but to be given it? The master starts fires just so he can watch it grow; to see it all cinder at his making. He calls it art. It ain’t. It’s a crying shame.

* * *

“Who shall bring me roses,” Maud sings to herself, that old music hall song what sends me back to dizzying dances in smoky taverns where the wallpaper hung in peels and the piano never stopped thumping. She sits at her table, staring at the skull what’s peering back at her from the looking glass.

There’re handkerchiefs spotted with blood about her. Her cheeks are flushed. She’s a candle teetering over the short wick and burning wax. She runs a brush through her thick, damp hair, then stops, lets it clatter to the floor. She coughs, stares down at her blood-splattered palms, and laughs, near weeps, wipes her face and leaves her chapped lips smeared with brown. She sings, “Will it be you, my love, my love, will it be you?”

* * *

From his studio, that rotten smell of turpentine seeps. The master’s brushes scrabble against the canvas like rats across the attic. There’s a clink as his paintbrush meets the water, a cough-cough-cough as he talks sweet to her, his voice mumbled through his mask, as the young miss gasps and sobs. He’ll wear her tear-trails on his waistcoat like diamonds, keep her heart what he stopped in a small, silver box.

* * *

She went on a Wednesday six-month later – took very quick– and was dropped into a pauper’s grave on the edge of St Giles. Her portrait hangs in the master’s gallery. Her heart’s locked in his dresser, next to mine. The master did me when I was ten-and-four, his voice soft as he held the poisoned rag over my mouth, making me breathe in, and out, until my lungs were full with it. He’s got friends in the sanatoriums and the hospitals and the morgues. Friends in the museums and the galleries. Friends in places so high it crooks your neck just to think of ’em, especially when you’re born so low.

“Where you were plain, Esther, now you are pretty,” he told me, his eyes shining terrible over his mask, “men will look at you, for centuries, and they will marvel.”

I never much cared what men thought, but the master thought that was everything, men thought that was everything, and what I had to say didn’t count for nothing.

* * *

Maud stands aside me by the empty fire, and through the window we watch the carriage come clattering in.

“Queer how people should have a taste for it,” she says, dusting down her frock what’s still damp from the ground. “For paintings, of dying girls. Well, at least we shall be remembered, I suppose.”

I don’t say nothing.

Feet shuffle across the gravel, and in the lamp-light I see an auburn lock shivering loose from a dirty bonnet, a girl half-drowned by the master’s heavy, black overcoat. I fancy I hear her skirts swooshing into the parlour, the rattle and clank of buckets as the maids below stairs make ready for her bath, the door slamming shut, and one final gasp.

Her cabinet is full of perfumes, and the scents try to escape as soon as I open the door – twined tendrils reaching out – each scent a murmur, a ripple of memory beneath my skin. There are liquid amber and fluid gold, swirling ruby and molten jade, lustrous indigo and glossy lilac – gleaming prisms of crystal and glass, stoppers carved into birds and beasts and blossoms – all aglow in her gloomy boudoir, lit only by the flames beneath the copper cauldron in the other room.

“Don’t touch, Alynna.”

Mother’s voice. Not loud or sharp, because Mother never raises her voice. But firm. Like the hand on my shoulder, turning me around, away.

She asks me to brush her hair, as she has done every night for as long as I dare remember. I unravel her waist-long braid, brushing black tresses into silk and shadow, her skin already warm and flushed in the heat and steam rising from the deep basin cut into the stone floor.

The golden mirror holds Mother’s reflection. She is so beautiful that it hurts even me to look at her: beauty like a blade – a sleek, perfect edge – sliding through skin and ribs so easily you barely notice when it stops your heart. I don’t want to look, but I inhale her scent with each sweep of the brush: the smell of spring mornings in the garden, days when she’d hold my hand, bedtimes when she kissed me. Each brushstroke tangling into memory.

Don’t touch.

In the other room, the fire keeps the water boiling, heating the large transparent sphere suspended on its chain above the cauldron. Inside the glass, the heated fluids rise, trickling slowly through twisting tubes of copper, dripping into vials. Something twitches within the steam and mist and glass. I do not wish to see. Not tonight.

She rises from the chair, and the weakest part of me wishes that she would stay this way: that she would not undress, not step into the steaming water, not wash and rinse her skin. I breathe in her scent, trying to hold on to it, keep it safe, forever. Mother, safe, forever.

The gown drops, embroidered silk blazing blue and black like butterfly wings, smooth brown skin beneath.

Through the window beyond her naked form, I glimpse the forest: trees, the moon, narrow trails made by paws and hooves beneath shriveled leaves and twisted boughs. There is a way through the shadows and the mires. Maybe a bird could fly above. Maybe a wolf could find the trail. But I have no wings, no fur, no beak, no snout. I have only a child’s hands, scarred and calloused. Strong enough to carry water and light the fire, to brush Mother’s hair, and lay out the gowns upon the bed. Not strong enough to break open locks, or crack the wood that bars the door.

Don’t touch.

Once, I touched. Once, I balanced on a stool, reaching into the cabinet, my hand trembling so it almost knocked the bottles over. I took the vial on the highest shelf, in the farthest corner, the one with the carved onyx stopper, wings spread in flight, black feathers carved into the stone. I removed the stopper, didn’t let the liquid touch my skin, only breathed: felt the shiver of beak and flight.

That bottle isn’t there anymore. Perhaps it’s locked in the chest next to her bed, buried beneath pearl-embroidered lace and silver-stitched brocades.

I watch her descend into the scalding water, watch her wash Mother off her flesh and bones with oil and soap and sponge, shedding scent and memories, skin and spirit, until she is twisted spines and cracked hide, gut-rip claws, and needle fangs, red tongue flickering between. The water fills the crooks and crevices of her body, rinsing warped limbs stitched together by sinew, spell, and shadow. She rises, stripped of all illusion. Clean. Strong as roots and vines, as tooth and bone.

In the other room, the glass sphere glistens, tarnished with dark residue above the roiling water. I smell wolf tonight. By now I can tell the smells apart: the animals and birds, the children, the women and the men, the tiny faeries with wings of spun gold, the beasts of horn and wing and tusk. Each trapped inside the sphere, above the heat; giving up its scent and spirit, releasing the essence hid within as the bonds of life are loosened. Only the dregs are left behind, slick and foul, to scrub and clean, leaving my palms and fingers raw.

Don’t touch.

A crooked talon strokes my hair, slides down my cheek, cutting into skin and flesh.

“Alynna, give her to me.”

She takes the bottle filled only yesterday from my hand, contents shimmering like liquid strawberries and honey: the girl with red hair, barely older than I am, eyes like moss and water. Mouth open, but bereft of sound as she lay inside the glass, as the heat drew out every last bit of her. Her essence held in crystal now, a crimson stopper to keep her in her place.

One splash, two, of strawberry and honey. Firm flesh and creamy skin blushed with fire flows over stripped bones and creaking joints, eyes like moss and water open, red-brass curls tumble down her back.

“You will be gorgeous one day, won’t you?” There is a gleam of hidden teeth and darkness as she speaks. “Make your Mother proud.”

I think of black feathers stirring, claws and beak, and I nod.

Tom Crosshill is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in Flash Fiction Online, Clarkesworld, and other fine establishments. His novel, THE CAT KING OF HAVANA, is a YA story set in Cuba published by HarperCollins.

How does an award-winning Latvian author of science fiction and fantasy end up writing a novel that deals with internet media moguls, lolcats, and SALSA in Cuba . . . for the YA market? Or, WHY HAVE YOU ABANDONED GENRE FICTION for a novel that sounds like way more fun?

One of the things that I really love about genre fiction is the sense of surprise and discovery — reading about places I’d love to go, people I’d like to meet, awesome skills I wish I could attain. When you look at it like that, THE CAT KING OF HAVANA isn’t really that big of a departure. I wrote the book at a time when I wished I could go back to Cuba but couldn’t afford to — and I was burning to share my excitement about salsa dancing with the world.

Also, I had a lot to say about the experience of growing up as a nerdy teen — about getting a handle on physical and social skills which many of us SF geeks take far too long to develop. I’m hoping I might encourage some teens to get going on this stuff earlier than I did.

As I put in the book, if you expect CAT KING to tell you that Geeks Are Good and Everyone’s a Special Flower and You Shouldn’t Let Other People Tell You How to Live Your Life, you’ve been watching too many indie films with quirky teenage protagonists.

(Also, I do have a track record in animal-themed fiction — take my FFO piece TO FLY A PIG IN THE DORSENY SKY!)

That still sounds like far more realism than science fiction . . . until we have a geeky guy learning salsa and living in Cuba! Why would someone raised on the shores of the Baltic Sea be captivated by Cuba’s sexiest export? Why did you become their first Baltic import?

A lot of assumptions there! Among others, I certainly wasn’t Cuba’s first Baltic import — in fact, there are a number of Latvians who have lived on the island far longer than I did (and some who have had children which have, in turn, emigrated to Latvia). But it’s probably true that I’m the first salsa-obsessed Latvian to spend such a long time in Cuba. . .

My first trip to Cuba was actually for a yachting trip — I couldn’t dance a single step of anything. A chance meeting with a woman married to a Latvian led to my first salsa classes — and from that there was no turning back! There are some passions in life which develop over time, and others that you simply discover intact and full-blown, like they’ve been under the surface all along.

And perhaps dance was indeed under the surface. . . critique group friends have pointed out to me that a lot of my stories had a dance theme even before I consciously became interested in the topic. If only I’d known!

Actually, that’s one thing I’d like to accomplish with CAT KING — encourage people who might have this subsurface love of dance to go ahead and try it out.

We start with assumptions (and hyperbole) then get to the nitty grity! Let’s talk about the subsurface. Why would salsa be lurking under your skin? I ask because, as a fellow Balt, our people are often represented in history and culture as dour, hard working, and reserved, in part from being victims of the Soviet occupation and its powerful aftermath. But! Is this another cultural assumption that needs challenging, or was the subsurface desire for a beautiful, vibrant, and sensual art form all your own? If so, why salsa and not Tango, like the Finns seem to love?

Perhaps it’s that old attraction-of-opposites thing. Many of my life decisions have seemed unlikely at the time. I decided to major in physics in college even though that was my weakest subject in high school. I decided to look for a job on Wall Street when I grew tired of life as a hirsute physics senior. And I decided to learn salsa even though I was a barely-coordinated, stiff as a log Baltic geek. . . I guess I enjoy a good challenge! Although of course by now it is much more than that.

Re. tango vs. salsa — the answer is probably that salsa is what I happened across first. I have yet to try tango so I don’t know how I would like to dance it — certainly I enjoy watching it. But I’ll have you know salsa too is big in Finland!

Ha! The benefit of questions is getting answers you didn’t expect! As a writer, you’ve carved a successful track record in SF&F short stories. How did writing a non-fantastical-genre novel challenge you, and were you tempted to make the cats psychic or aliens or Cuba is really a spaceship? Also, will there be a sequel?

CAT KING was actually my second non-SF novel in a row, so I was used to it! When I was writing THE CATTLE EXPRESS — an adult literary novel of a Latvian on Wall Street, and his grandmother’s struggles in Siberian exile, now coming out from a major publisher in Latvia — I was a bit tempted to make Stalin a secret vampire or something of the sort. By the time I got to CAT KING the temptation had faded.

CAT KING still allowed my geek side to express itself, though — the protagonist is a cat video entrepreneur, after all, and there is a lot of cat video meta-analysis in the book. . .

Making Stalin a vampire is the call of all Baltic writers, so good on you for resisting the urge! Is the CATTLE EXPRESS due for North American release as well, as it sounds terrific?

Also, you’ve clearly betrayed all genre fiction by writing material inspired by geek culture but with no elements of fantasy. Why are you such a Judas? More seriously, your books sound way more fun than most of what’s coming out by the major genre outlets. Did you “level” up out of the genre ghetto, or is that material just under the surface still percolating in non-genre yet inspired by genre (geeky stuff) culture?

I’m definitely shopping THE CATTLE EXPRESS around, and actually, there’s a Latvian government grant that could help the right well-positioned small press publish it pretty much risk-free. I don’t know much about the adult literary space, though, so I haven’t actually been able to show the manuscript to as many people as I’d like. I’m working on it.

Personally I’m not big on the genre/non-genre divide. I love all kinds of books, and I enjoy writing about all sorts of topics. I’m still writing occasional SF short stories, and my next novel may well be genre again. But I’m definitely not a purist. For me the story comes first — if a great concept comes to me, I don’t care what genre it is in.

I know this genre-hopping might hurt me commercially, but then, I’m not really in this for the money (although I certainly won’t turn money away!)

Hey, grab all the scratch you can, and do it your own way (the systems rigged, anyway!). Second last question: what’s next for Tom Crosshill the cross-genre writer and is there another wild left-turn bubbling under the surface for us to watch?

Very last question: when are you writing more flash fiction???

I’m working on a couple of short stories and a fantasy novel concept. . . I prefer not to discuss my works-in-progress too much, though, as it saps my creativity. I find these days that my number one priority is doing work I enjoy and not worrying too much about publishing pressures or practical concerns.

With flash, the difficulty for me is that a flash story can take as long to conceive and design as a novelette! Generally I’ll write a flash when a story comes to me fully formed in a. . . what do you call it. . . ah, yes, in a flash of inspiration. And those flashes are kind of hard to anticipate. . .

Line 1

14 lines to talk about my mother and her death? Too many, too few. And I’ve never been a poet. Not really. There was that one poem I wrote in 4^th grade, the one about the class I was in. It was a rip-off of some poem about trees. My poem started like this: I think that I shall never see, a class as mighty as 203. 

Crap.

Line 2

The dead are dead. 

My mother didn’t believe in heaven. When she was dying, I asked her if she wanted to have a priest come and give her her last rites. She and my dad were both Catholic, and I remembered he wanted to make sure there was a priest with him at the end. So I asked her. It was in a hospice in Sun City, Arizona, just after she had the stroke that finally killed her. She could barely talk, couldn’t move her lips at all because of the stroke. It was like they were frozen shut. But I asked her, and here’s what she said, “I don’t want a priest.” 

Line 3

“No priest has ever come back from heaven to tell us what’s there.” That’s what she said.

Line 4

She had been to hell. She’d seen her mother shot in the face over and over. Seen her sister raped and murdered. Seen her sister’s baby kicked to death. She saw things most of us just see in the movies, and even then we turn away. But that was just the beginning. Her first day in hell. The first hour. They caught her and put her in a boxcar with the other girls from her village in Poland. 

She spent the next three years as a prisoner in a slave labor camp in Nazi Germany. She used to tell the guards that she had typhus and syphilis so they wouldn’t rape her, do to her what they did to her sister.  It didn’t matter. They didn’t believe her. They raped whenever they wanted.

Line 5

She had no use for priests. Or men of any kind. They were worthless, she said. One of her favorite words. My dad was the prime example. They met in the concentration camp after the liberation. After four years in the camps, he was blind in one eye and skinny as two shoelaces tied together. He was worthless, she said. Couldn’t fix a leak or mend the holes in his pants. A clown in dead men’s clothes. That’s the way she always saw him.

Line 6

Her other favorite word was bullshit.

Line 7

I remember something about how the sonnet is divided into 4 parts, four lines and another 4 lines and another 4 lines and then 2 to finish it off. Each 4 lines is supposed to introduce and develop some different part of the main issue, and then the last two lines are supposed to finish it off, I mean come to some kind of conclusion, resolution. Or maybe I got it all wrong. I should Google it. Maybe it’s 8 lines to state the problem and 6 to resolve it. In any case, I have to be moving toward resolution. 

And what’s that? That my mom’s dead, but there was some kind of peace at the end for her? That she found some kind of joy through her understanding that life was finally beautiful and that there were people who deserve our love and our blessing? That wherever there was someone trying to raise a family and give them the best that she could she’d be there too? That she’d be all around in the dark, everywhere, wherever people were struggling to crawl out of the holes/hells somebody had stuck them in? 

Line 8

That’s bullshit. She was no Ma Joad, staring at the trinkets from the St. Louis World’s Fair with a tear in her eye. My mom wasn’t built on the soft side.

Line 9

I remember how she used to get letters from her sister who survived the war and went back to Poland after she was released from the refugee camps. My mom would take the letters and slip into the bedroom and close the door. She didn’t want anybody seeing her weep as she read the letters.

Line 10

Years later, when she was dying, I asked my mom where the letters were. I told her I wanted to keep them safe for the family. She looked at me and shrugged, “I burned them. What good were they?” 

Line 11

She was like that. 

Line 12

My sister wouldn’t come see my mom when she was dying. The years of beatings, my mom’s broom handle stabbing for my sister under the bed where she was hiding, my father begging her not to beat my sister again, my mother knocking him down to the floor and kicking him instead. My sister blamed her for the abuse and blamed me for not fighting back against our mother. I was a child then, two years younger than her, but I still feel guilty.

Line 13

In Korea, a country my mother never imagined, the living write poems for the dead, to reconcile those who are left behind with those who have died. My mother died 9 years ago, and I’m 67 now, and I think about death more and more. In those Korean death poems, you can’t use the word “death,” but you can say “setting sun” or “autumn” or “snow.” All of those images embody the sense of continuation, of something ending and going on, some kind of cycle of life. The sun sets and then it rises. The snow falls and then it melts and spring comes. Like that. It’s an image of reconciliation, one that will make us feel good about whatever this death we face is really like. The poem can be in any form, even a sonnet. At least that’s what I read. They also say that after you write the poem you have to take it outside and burn it.

Line 14

I will burn this poem.

Previously published in The James Franco Review, 2015. Reprinted here by permission of the author.