New Story in Permanent Flux

I have a new short story out today!

"At the Edge of the Neighborhood" is the lead story in Issue 7 of Permanent Flux.

I started this story in 2021, finished it the following year and put it on the market in December 2022, so it went through a long process to find its home. Thanks is owed to two groups who gave me feedback: WIND (Writers In Need of Direction) and the staff of The Echo Teen Art & Lit Mag which I advise. The latter gave me feedback during our weekly Writing Wednesday feedback round tables.

I was inspired to write the story during a kind of waking nightmare. I was lying in bed and started to write the story in my head and then it developed as I fell into and out of sleep, which is evident in the content of the story as well. My wife and I's bed used to be positioned next to our bedroom window. I could roll over just slightly, pull the curtain aside and look out at our unfenced backyard which is all the more wide-open because we are the last house of the neighborhood. To one side of us is just trees. Behind us is just pond. Mostly we love the quiet seclusion, but lying in bed that night, I dreaded the exposure and imagined a beast stalking out in the open. This is the story's opening and from there I followed it to what I felt might happen next.

We live in a world of devices that help us see, record, and report. We've seen the value of this even more since I wrote the story with the current events in Minneapolis. Not only do we bear witness to horrendous events, but we see them played from multiple angles. We also live in a world of lies, commentary, and skepticism. Even seeing the killing of Renee Good or Alex Pretti from multiple perspectives, we still had to parse fact from fiction, everyone had different opinions, and still there were lies about the truth right before our eyes.

When I went to write down this dream story, a narrative that's part monster story, part home invasion, I found it taking on a unique form. As the character's devices came out, they surrendered their ownership of the narrative. Their experience was pushed into the margins of videos, photos, news reports, social media posts, and on and on. So, rightfully, "At the Edge of the Neighborhood" is told on the edge of the page. A series of found documents are the primary text, supplemented by footnotes where the main character's voice comes through.

I knew the story had found a good home when the editor wrote to me, in his acceptance, saying, "The dual-narrative structure—juxtaposing the clinical, detached descriptions of the video footage against the raw, spiraling internalization of the protagonist in the footnotes—is a brilliant mechanism. It captures the modern horror of viral fame and "doxing" in a way that feels both grounded and deeply unsettling."

You can purchase a copy of Permanent Flux Issue 7 here.