New Work: And In Her Eyes The City Drowned

I can now confirm that Weirdbook #39, edited by Douglas Draa and containing my short story, "And In Her Eyes The City Drowned", is available to purchase here. I am delighted to share this issue with the likes of Lucy Snyder, Jessica Amanda Salmonson and Frederick J, Mayer.

The story itself contains some of my  most enduring obsessions - masks, artists and life beyond death. Also gelato. I started writing it back in September 2014 as the coach pulled away from the Ferrovia vaporetto station, concluding a hallucinatory forty-eight hours in Venice. What did I see there? What did I hear? That, my friends, would be telling. But this piece is a perfect exemplar of just how long and winding can be the route from first draft to publication. I hope you read and enjoy.

"...after the medley, the sounds of the audience, the coughing, the scrape of chair legs, the painful shifting of old bodies. The hiss of glass globes heating and a stray breeze dragging its fingernails along the colonades. I hear wood creaking, stone grinding and the lapping of dark, dark water, and these are the things that conjure her from the shadows beside the clock tower, with her mask-like face, her long and flowing hair. I could not say when was the first time I noticed her there, part and parcel with the darkness, the sea and the stone. But I do know that having done so, I cannot stop..."