The inspirations and origins for our stories.
Jess Koch’s story “Fur and Feathers” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 22 November 2019. “Fur and Feathers” began its life as a flash fiction piece about a man slowly transforming into a tree. Both the original short piece and the final short story are from the perspective of his young daughter, known as Little Bird, who soon learns that all humans will eventually face the change into a plant or an animal. Though I …
Lisa Fox’s story “A Time for Understanding” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 15 November 2019. This story is a deeply personal one. I originally wrote this as a 1,000 word flash fiction piece four days before my mother died. She’d been in the hospital for weeks, declining steadily, though we had no idea why. Her last days were spent on a bi-pap breathing machine – the mask was basically keeping her alive – and …
Christine Lucas’s story “Via Dolorosa” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 8 November 2019. “Via Dolorosa” is a story in a series of stories dealing with the Unseen. In my worldview, the Unseen includes elements from the speculatively obvious, that most people cannot see (ghosts, undead, mythic creatures) along with everything a lot of people choose not to see, like abuse. It also draws a lot from personal experience, from growing up in a household …
Jack Neel Waddell’s story “Rooks on Sundays” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 1 November 2019. The impetus of this story was Heinlein’s “ ’—All You Zombies—’ ”, although they have little obvious in common. While Heinlein’s masterpiece is a gutwrenching puzzle, it laid bare one element I wanted to meditate upon — how manipulating people isn’t always about the control you have over them, but can be about struggling against the ever-diminishing influence in your environment …
Yume Kitasei’s story “Super” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 25 October 2019. Confession: once, when I was a teenager babysitting a toddler, I decided to try to tire him out by making him climb twelve flights of stairs. We’d been playing all morning, and I was hoping by the time we got to the top, he’d be all ready to nap until his parents came home. Mind you, this was a big baby. Big …
Lisa Short’s story “The Season of Withering” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 18 October 2019. I have the (probably peculiar) lifelong habit of making up bedtime stories and telling them to myself when I’m having trouble getting to sleep at night. A lot of the stories I end up writing have this exercise as their inspirational mechanism, and this particular one definitely originated as a “bedtime story.” I didn’t get much past the opening …
