Bosca Dubh

Certainly, no one can fault storySouth for limiting the pool of eligible stories to 1,000 words or more. As a challege to the collections like “Best American Short Stories” and “The O. Henry Prize”, which implicitly limit themselves not only to print publications (and, apparently, “The New Yorker”) but to longer stories, the Million Writers Award certainly looks more credible the more like the “old guard” it appears. Still, there’s a wealth of wonderful little stories being overlooked; and because shorter is harder to write, these inelgibles may be the best of the lot.

The story came to me before the “dirty” aspects, but the “dirty” aspects were so integral to the story that it really didn’t belong in a general literary journal. But Clean Sheets is different from the “dirty story” sites that are all over the internet; it’s a thoughtfully-edited, well-written journal that happens to be about sex.

This is a somewhat experimental story, about points of view and parallel universes and disconnections. I hope you like it.

It’s a strange little story–it owes much to the Kafka and Link and Borges I’ve been reading lately–about gills and ponds and cleaning fish.

The storySouth 2006 Million Writers Award, for short stories published on-line in 2005, will begin taking nominations on February 15. Watch this space for updates; I’ll be listing stories that I’ve read that I think should get a nod in the voting, and also a few stories of mine that meet the requirements.

Lately I’ve been interested in the way myth and dream can be used in stories, without having the story sit squarely in the fantasy genre.

Our last house, I think, was haunted. There was a night when both Kelly and I heard the heavy front door swing open, and voices on the porch, and we both chose to pretend it didn’t happen. And occasionally lights would turn themselves on or off for no apparent reason. Perhaps, when it comes time to haunt a place, I’ll go back there, where I may have some company.

The subject of “I might not miss you” is friendship, and that perennial, shopworn, aching question: Can men and women be friends? I’m not sure what answer it comes to; I think it’s a tentative, wistful, cautious “yes”, but with caveats.

This little nightmare started with the dream the narrator describes in the middle of the piece. It’s one in a series of dark little stories that started as nightmares; I’ve never been much for the surrealist project, though I do like Nathaniel West and Barbara Gowdy quite a lot. It was a useful exercise to try building a story around a dream; it helped me loosen out of the straitjacket I put on when I write, cinched up by too much Carver and Cheever and Updike.

Where exactly it turned dark, I’m not sure. The story was rejected on one of its first outings because “[u]sually … there is a motive for violence, and there did not seem to be a motive here.” Which is probably an accurate statement, except, of course, to anyone who spends time with little kids.