I'm proud to say that I will have another piece of short fiction published in CHTHONIC, the fifth issue of
Whole Beast Rag. I have to admit it's refreshing to have found a pair of talented editors and publishers (which is a shout-out to Grace Littlefield and Katherine Hargreaves) who feel my work has a place in their magazine.
Have I mentioned that you should take a look at
Whole Beast Rag? Or maybe if you don't believe me, you'll believe
the hype.
In any case, here's a preview of CHTHONIC, as well as a preview of "Bottle Cap Theory", which will be published therein:
CHTHONIC - JUNE 1
[This issue] will serve as the documenting of depths and vices both individual and
collective. Derived from the Greek chthonios, "in, under, or beneath the
earth," the chthonic expresses the desire to expose the underbelly of
our beings and ideas. It is about examining the raw impulse, its presumed repression, and its rebirth.
BOTTLE CAP THEORY
by Steven T. Bramble
Then the hydrogen bomb
exploded! And I don’t have to tell you that the capitalist bastards were caught
with their pants quite down around their pale little ankles, having not really
come to terms with their souls and shit like that on account of all their
monies. And plus there was Irene H. Ronstadt, who was getting fed nearly
science-fiction-like commercial messages about vehicular homicide and Jolly
Khadafy Goat Samwiches while sitting in a well-earned blue nylon recliner, and
she didn’t have a clue what the TV was blathering about because she was two
days away from turning a hundred years old when fusion occurred and the
thermonuclear sprinklerheads went shik-shik-shik-shik-shik-shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiik! Oh God—the 1940s horror—and it was always a
mystery of the universe why Colonel O’Mannon found it necessary to bend over to
look for the bottle cap he’d just dislodged from the top of his beer bottle,
the same bottle cap from a Coke that was recycled from seventy-seven years ago
which caused a horrible smoke to belch from Anne de Witt’s Electrolux Model 30
vacuum cleaner in 1952 when it got jammed in the drive train. The colonel’s
large trapezoidal posterior made accidental contact with the arcane lever which
sent the electron current to the mechanism that lit up and shrieked, “Launch,
launch, launch!” and subsequently sent him through fifteen years of
psychological therapy just to come to terms with it. Oh yeah, great stuff. You
can actually see the mushroom cloud from two states over because most of the
land in Middle America got shaved flat for the Go-Kart track...
Read the rest on June 1st in WHOLE BEAST RAG.
