The inspirations and origins for our stories.
Evan James Sheldon’s story “There is a City, He Told Me” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 30 August 2019. I wrote, “There is a City, He told me,” after reading Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In that short novel, Marco Polo describes the Kahn’s empire to him through a series of flash-length sections. Reading, you come to realize that Marco Polo is actually talking about something else, and in the end (Spoilers!) a descent into hell. …
Simone Kern’s story “The Propagator” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 23 August 2019. I live near the Houston ship channel, the chemical refinery capital of America, so both the causes and effects of climate change are right at our doorstep. Summers are brutally hot, and the city (and our house) floods regularly. In March of 2019 we had a major industrial accident, the ITC plant fire, which put a black cloud of poisonous smoke …
Dawn Lloyd’s story “The Last Duty” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 16 August 2019. I wrote this story when I was teaching at the American University of Afghanistan. When I first moved to Kabul, I was fortunate that a guard at the bombed out Darul Aman Palace accepted a “tip” to let a group of us inside. I remember one particular guard who followed us around whistling and watching to make sure we didn’t …
Edward Ashton’s story “A Bear, or a Spider, or an Elephant” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 9 August 2019. Most of my shorter pieces start with an image that gets stuck in my head, and won’t go away until I figure out something to say about it. In the case of “A Bear, or a Spider, or an Elephant,” that image was a night sky, clear and cold, deep black and packed tight with …
Claire Simpson’s story “Never Fade Away” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 2 August 2019. The whole of this story grew from the opening scene, which is unusual for me. Usually when I write I have some concept of the plot, or at least the ending, but here I had nothing more than the image of the old woman working in her garden and the kid showing up to drag her out of retirement. The …
Josh Taylor’s story “The Offshore” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 26 July 2019. I recently read the book The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens by Gabriel Zucman, which I recommend to anyone interested in the topic. People evade taxes by putting their money in other countries with lower tax rates. Anonymous bank accounts and shell companies make it possible to do it in a way that looks legal. So what …
