I’m pleased to announce that my short “Death and the Girl from Pi Delta Zeta” has just gone live in the inaugural issue of Lackington’s.
This great magazine was founded by Ranylt Richildis in order to profile strange, beautiful and stylized prose in genre stories. I’m delighted that she thought my work fits the bill. In this issue you’ll also find some fantastic pieces by Kate Heartfield, Amal El-Mohtar, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Christine Miscione, Erik Amundsen and Rose Lemberg. The story also features some great artwork by Alfred Klosterman.
I wrote this particular piece during the fifth week of Clarion West, and I confess it was heavily inspired by our surroundings: a secret sorority house in Seattle where you could see posted on bulletins the faces of all the girls who had come before us (some mysteriously exed off). It was a strange, and delightful, experience. Particularly the basement. We don’t talk about the basement.
Here’s a taste of the story…
Carissa first sees Death at the Panhellenic Graffiti mixer where he is circled by the guys from Sigma Rho. They can’t seem to help crowding him even though they clearly don’t want to be near him. She has gone with several of the Sig-Rho boys. All of them have. But she has never gone with anyone like Death before.
Death is wearing a black track jacket, with a black t-shirt on beneath and faded black jeans. Carissa, like all the other girls, is wearing a pink cashmere sweater with the letters Pi Delta Zeta embroidered in darker pink and a white cotton tank top. She is also carrying a marker. The boys from Sig-Rho have already begun to make use of the marker to write things around her breasts and stomach and neck, things like Sig-Rho 4Evr and Love your body and Kevin likes it with mittens on.
Read the full story here.
