Sara McKinney’s new and very short story led me to a jackpot of fantastic, disturbing writing.
Fractured Lit recently published a short story by Sara McKinney, called The Children. I read it blind, and it blew me away. Like Stephen King’s take on The Chrysalids, in ~750 words. It’s short and shocking. Read it now, it’ll only take a couple minutes.
There’s more where that twisted bit of brilliance comes from. Here’s a longer story called Shedim in Uncharted magazine that starts on the first day of a women’s retreat. The whole story feels a little precarious, as though it could go off in one of a few directions: failed relationship, family nightmares, or something much more sinister:
That night in my dream, I sit on the back deck of the Fairfield house, tall and white and imperious under a hazy summer sky. My ex-husband and our son stand in the grass, tossing a baseball back and forth, its yellowing skin beating a dull but steady womp-womp-womp as it passes from mitt to mitt. Their mouths move, their expressions cycling between laughter and joy and playful rage, but the sound of their voices does not reach me, and maybe that’s for the best.
Not done yet. Another fantastic story called A Yizkor for Charlottesville was published back in 2019 in Scribble (new to me). It’s about being Jewish in the midst of *that event* in Charlottesville, and the first sentence is “So, here I am walking around with a skull in my purse.” How can you not click that link?
I’ve saved the best for last: the first chapter from a novel called Mordent (no details on the novel’s release). It’s shocking and unpredictable, about a successful musician whose life starts to spiral in frighting ways. Be warned, there’s suicide in here:
The week that everything went wrong started with a fight. This is what you expect me to say, what I wish I could say because saying it would give what followed a neat logic, the sort usually reserved for movies and books, but if there is a logic here, it is obscured, elusive, self-effacing.
I’ll update this if and when I find out more about the book, because having read that first chapter, it could go in one of several directions.