“This time, the fluid did not return to a restful state. Instead, the surface writhed and churned. Some great upheaval was being born out in the impossible space below the floorboards. Reptilian shapes breached the surface. A long slithering spine cut through the liquid only to disappear into the impossible depths.”
Ballroom dancing, Victorian etiquette and self replicating ultra-dimensional reptiles, these are the major components of my new short fiction, The Glimmer and The Gloss, in the current issue of the excellent Medulla Review.
The story took its initial inspiration from the work of visual artist Ray Caesar. I wanted to set a story inside one of Caesar’s surreal scenes, wanted to employ one of his unsettling precocious heroines as its protagonist, and then of course I wanted to fuck shit up. The end result is an irreverent piece that plays fast and loose with the boundaries between past and present, reality and dream-stuff. It inhabits a liminal space at the edges of classic lit, horror, and SF/F. A sense-bender of a story as the editors describe it.
