December | 2017 | Write Yourself Sane

My new short story is called “How We Cured Racism.” But first, some back story.

A couple days ago, I found a woman’s wallet lying on the pavement in the parking lot where I was food shopping. I spotted a woman getting into her car and rushed over to return the wallet to her, for which she was very grateful. As I walked back to my car, a man standing by his truck spoke to me. He had observed the scene and told me that I had done a very good thing. He seemed very impressed, almost amazed by this simple act. (It made me wonder — would he have done the same?) Then he told me the universe would do something good for me.

“I hope so,” I said in return.

Maybe he was right, because in the last two days I’ve had two works of fiction accepted for publication. One won’t appear until well into 2018. (More on that when it appears.)

The other was a story I had developed by participating in NYC Midnight’s 11th Annual Short Story Contest, which I wrote about in this blog earlier in the year. I didn’t win the contest, but have been sending the story out for publication for the last few months.

Today, which happens to be my birthday, I woke up to an email informing me that the story had been accepted at a journal called Rosette Maleficarum, which identifies itself as “a literary journal of dreams, nightmares and madness.” Not only that, but it had been published today and was already online.

Here’s Rosette Maleficarum’s creedo:

“This literary journal shows the beautiful, yet depraved nature that lies within reality, both in humanity and the environment surrounding us. From dark, Gothic fairy tales, to dream-laced poems, the Maleficarum dances between the boundaries of life and death itself.”

So whether it was because of good supermarket karma, or because it was my birthday, or for whatever reason, I’m grateful for the publication.

It’s an edgy, speculative story that leans toward the dark and disturbing. In some ways I think it reflects the tumultuous, divisive, unhappy world we currently find ourselves in. It is perhaps all the more disturbing in that the voice that narrates the tale is that of a child.