Suddenly I’m a big Katherine Plumhoff fan. Earlier this week I read “Go To Hell” in new favourite and blog regular X-R-A-Y Magazine (I’ve been styling it wrong, it seems). It’s a stylish piece of writing — off-kilter from the first sentence:

I thought I knew what hot was. Humidity I could swallow. The wings of dead fish flies going translucent in the sun. Sprinkles melting off my ice cream cone the second I walk out of the shop. 

There is no ice cream here. There are plenty of dead things, but they are not stiff and quiet. They buzz. Shake. Scream. If I think about them for too long they’re all I can see. All I can hear. 

It gets increasingly urgent and sinister as the story progresses. It’s the kind of story that you want to read faster and faster as you go. The reveal is heart-stopping. Great stuff.

Her website has links to a bunch of work. I read a lot of it and so should you. There are two more stories I want to share. Teasing them is tricky because these stories are very short (sub-1000 words), and they rely in part on a sense of disorientation in the reader. Half the fun is guessing where it’s going (spoiler alert: your guesses are wrong).

“The Bread of Life“, published last year in Heavy Feather Review, received some acclaim – it’s provocative and outrageous, and once I got to the end I started again to see what I missed the first time around. It starts as an expression of gratitude, told in the second person, and things get weird in a hurry. To say more would be to spoil it. It only takes a couple minutes to read, but will probably cost a few hours of sleep, trying to forget.

“In a voice too low to wake anybody” was published in January of this year, in Flash Frog. It’s somewhat different than the first two – involving a family member spiraling into depression and despondence, neglecting himself and his dogs. She again uses the second person as the point of view, and again things don’t unfold the way you expect. This one has a grim undertone of mental illness and loss, and the last paragraph, and the way the narrator’s voice evolves throughout the story, has stuck with me for days.

You can find other ways to follow her on her website. She’s pretty active on X.

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