Sometimes the dead call out to you.
On Death and Dying, Elizabeth Kubler Ross taught us how to grieve. It is a process, it has stages and perhaps it isn’t true for all of us. Perhaps we don’t come neatly packaged in a sequential order for grief-by-numbers. We are humans and humans are messy. In this collection of short stories there are hauntings and people who are haunted. Perhaps it is sorrow, or something else.
THE LAST BRIDE and CADENCE pay homage to the Twilight Zone and the Alfred Hitchcock Hour. The Last Bride takes place in a nebulas future where a groom purchases the final memories of his dead wife and discovers that she may have love another man, his brother. Cadence draws a fine line between the past, present and future. The echo of a memory remains in a fixed location and a woman meets a young man that tries to warn her of danger. She heeds his warning only to discover that he was not really there.
In WHAT REMAINS and SPEAKING OF THE DEAD I explore relationships and how the living can be ostracized in ways that make them almost dead. What Remains of the dead is always the living and sometimes that is the hardest thing to accept.
Paying tribute to the plays of Sam Shepard, ignoring the rules of liner time, ANGELS is a short story in three acts. Act I is the end of the story where a young man waits for his father on his wedding day. In Act II the young man wakes up in a strange bar and overhears a conversation between two women. One of the women is his estranged mother, but he had not even been conceived yet. Act III is just prior to his mother giving birth as she tortures and murders the man who killed her friend.
THE TWELVE PEOPLE YOU MEET ON THE WAY TO BETTER INTENTION and CANCIONES capture snippets of the lives of two women. In Canciones we follow a woman from childhood to death in three separate moments of life. And the Twelve people follow one woman from childhood to a subway ride with shadows of the past.
Each of the stories follows the dead and their impact on the living, because it’s never just as simple as an apparition of the dead or a stage of grief. It’s always as complicated as a ghost and more.
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