Shedding light on who we are, what we think, and why we care.
I am thrilled to announce that Orchid’s Lantern will be publishing Keter Hardware, the debut novel by A. R. Demory.
This is a stunning blend of cyberpunk and esotericism, and will be a must-read for fans of Snow Crash and Neuromancer. A perfect fit for the press!
I found a new vein. I think it runs deep. I imagine it running from the black jagged wall all the way to the core. The pickaxe sank into something soft and red pulp burst out. I checked over my shoulder three times before I pocketed a wet clump to take home to Mary. Ten years and some buried part of me is still moved by the texture, how it reflects the glimmer of the lantern, the congealed malleable batter that fills the folds in your hand.
Bob barks his orders from where the light gets in until a new discovery is announced and he scurries in. He makes notes for head office and focuses our combined efforts to where the newest batch is unearthed. Each glob I bring home, the worry builds and simmers. Mary says I’ve been talking in my sleep. In that brief window of rest where my thoughts give up I murmur about Gary. Slow Gary who tried to trade it at the company store and hasn’t been seen since. We’ve been careful, the secret nest egg in the faded plastic cooler, nestled in the shed.
Continue reading “Source Material by Jake Williams”
Bridget set the table because she always set the table.
Every evening at six o’ clock, she laid out the dishes, the silverware, and the glasses. She put out a fresh vase of flowers for a centerpiece. Every evening at six o’ clock for the last forty-seven years, Bridget set the table.
Then she would go into the kitchen to bring out supper. A roast, stew, or ham; she had several cooking staples and she rotated through them like clockwork.
One day, she brought out a salad with homemade dressing, chicken parmesan, seasoned green beans, and warm rolls. Bridget made everything from scratch; there was nothing out of a box on her table. She was a wonderful cook: she knew it and took a measure of pride from it. That was why she worked for the most prosperous man in the county. And Mr. Tiller liked his dinner to be punctual.
Continue reading “Flash Showcase: Bridget Set the Table by Elyse Russell”
Kathy Harrison bursts through the Green Lovelies entrance. Cocobolo beads rattle against the glass door. The steely-eyed clerk is dressed head to toe in selvedge denim. She stares Kathy down, inhaling imperceptibly. She knows what’s coming. The woman’s going to start yelling.
“Everyone just stop!” Kathy hollers once fully inside the plant shop’s showroom floor. A few Green Lovelies shoppers freeze in their tracks. The clerk eyes her from beyond the small forest of hanging macramé plants in the middle of the retail space. She’s got everyone’s attention. Part one of her mission successful. Now for part two…
“Citizens of Long Beach, I am warning you as a fellow neighbor, not to buy any of these plants! None of the succulents! None of the pathos! No tropical dwarfs at all! Because you know why?!”
Continue reading “Flash Showcase: Houseplants (Love Spores) by Eric Farrell”
Image Credit: Ava Kelly
When it approached, it was slow. Passive enough to get close, unencumbered by human worry, graceful enough that its scarlet brilliance had exalted awe instead of fear.
I remember Pops, sitting on the back porch in that old squeaky chair, scratching his forehead, saying, “It’s gotta be something else. Aurora my ass, look at it.”
I remember Kiddo blinking at me, a couple of decades later, asking, “Why’s it so pretty, Daddy?” and, “Do you think we can touch it someday?”
I’d answer the same—nothing at all—because any words tasted like ash on my tongue. There had been one action to take, and one action only; even my twelve-year-old self knew. Study the earthbound nebula, comprehend it at all costs.
***
When it hugged the Earth, we didn’t notice, too preoccupied with measurements and suppositions and models. Too close to see. Kiddo used to tell me, when he got tall and broad-shouldered and voice-thick, that it governed my life. It had dragged me through school, through the long hours in the lab, through loss and pain, through stolen tenderness. I sigh, even now, at the memory of his angry frustration.
“We must understand,” I used to say. “Maybe it’s sentient. Maybe it also wants to understand.”
Continue reading “Flash Showcase: Earthbound Nebula by Ava Kelly”
Did I awaken in a dream or dream I was awake?
I’d been drifting into twilit sleep, but did I make it? I saw nothing but blackness everywhere.
Not darkness, even when one wakes in a pitch black room there’s a sense—even if it’s subconscious—of a location, time or an innate feeling that things are there but unseen. When your pupil dilates, it comes to you.
This wasn’t blindness but absolute vacuity, I knew I could see, but there was nothing to see.
Light was derelict. Was it slowed, blocked, had it vanished?
Panic wasn’t within me, but an amalgam of ambiguous emotions: the feeling of awakening when you didn’t realize you fell asleep, the feeling of impending mini-apocalypse as a dreaded appointment neared, the no-man’s-land between déjà vu and jamais vu. As I couldn’t take the world as is nor could I imagine a new ideal, was this a new manifestation of Weltschmerz?
In my mind’s eye, which was unclouded, I saw bubble galaxies imbuing new realities. Was that something I sensed by some latent ESP I’d triggered or was that a dream, a daydream or a nightmare?
I felt weightless which was surreal. It was unearthly yet, as I took a step my movement wasn’t slowed and I touched back down onto solid, indiscernible ground. I was not aloft, nor paralyzed, but benumbed.
Seeing blindly, moving unfeeling; how could this be?
Looking down I saw my legs and hands. Another conundrum: There’s light hitting me and nothing else. What was the source of this light? Is it me?
Impossible. Yet, it seemed to be unless most basic tenets of physics no longer applied.
Continue reading “Flash Showcase: Dissonance by Bernardo Villela”
Kell wiped red paint from her hand onto a boor-tree-fiber towel and studied her creation. The crimson streaks glowed in the diffuse light from her bedroom window. All one color, an entire tube of alizarin used on one small paint board. The paint’s thickness determined the darkness or lightness. No recognizable figure graced the image, but the strokes suggested movement. An arm flung wide. A tapered back arched in dance. Transition from standing to leaping.
She frowned at her work. It wasn’t good enough.
She went to the window, wishing it were safe to go outside. Beyond the glass, rain dripped from curling fronds. Acidic slime, an oocyte that lived everywhere on this planet, dropped in sloppy masses from the branches of the treelike organisms in Kell’s neighborhood. She let her faint reflection fill her field of view and disappear as she pressed her nose to the cold glass. Her breath made a misty circle. Stories of going outside to play filled her head, tales she’d heard since infancy. All the classic stories came from Earth, the broken place that could only support a few thousand souls now, in cities that shielded their residents from the weather extremes wrought by global warming.
Here, on Kell’s home planet, children didn’t play outside. The oocytes would melt your dermis. The warnings echoed like a hiss, first as the voices of the adults around you and then from the mire of your own brain, never to be erased: The oocytes’ll burn your skin. They’ll eat you to the bone.
Continue reading “Flash Showcase: Acid to the Bone by A.J. Van Belle”
“If you can sign here, and here,” he said, pointing, “and here, here and here, you’re good to go.”
He perused the contract slowly, reading the words over and over in his mind. “I don’t know.”
“What are you worried about?”
“What if it doesn’t work?”
“Well ….” He shrugged his lips. “You’ll be dead.”
“That’s what I’m worried about,” he sighed.
“If you’d rather not, then I understand. It’s experimental, but revolutionary technology. I admit, we haven’t figured out how to revive the dead yet, but we will.”
“Are you sure? I mean; how close are you to cracking it?”
“Close,” he nodded frantically, “very close.”
“Within weeks, years, what is it?”
The man smiled and pulled the contract from the table. “I can see that this is not for you,” he said, folding the paperwork.
Continue reading “Flash Showcase: Suckers by Gavin Jefferson”
One of my major interests is inner worlds: the subjective experience of being human. Perhaps, then, it goes without saying that I love to write the self, and I love to read the personal accounts of others. So I’ve been thinking about the different ways we choose to do this, and in particular the various methods available for presenting it. Here I share some distinctions I’ve made along the way.
Autobiography is the most ‘objective’ method for writing the self, with the aim of presenting events as they really happened. It will usually (but not always) be in chronological order and span most of a lifetime.
Memoir is a collection of memories from a specific aspect or time period of the author’s life. It is usually presented in an entertaining way, with some distance between the narrator and the subject, some hindsight, but also some intimacy of emotional context.
An Autobiographical Novel is the semi-fictionalisation of real events. It puts more distance between the narrator and the subject, and allows the use of plot devices, imagined events or characters, and heightened drama. There is an expectation that the author will do this not in an attempt to mislead, but to make the text more attractive to readers. Like memoir, autobiographical novels will usually cover a specific aspect or time period in the author’s life.
Continue reading “Writing the Self”
I knew this book would be for me as soon as I read the description: an experimental, poetic, flow-of-consciousness exploration of reality, fantasy and all the spaces in between. Yes please!
This is the kind of book you bring yourself to, in that you’re never 100% sure whether your experience is what the writer intended or whether you pasted your own meaning over the top of their words. There’s enough continuity, enough thread to hang onto, to make the text flow through an arc, but it also leaves a lot to interpretation.
I read this as the narrator delving into and confronting his own psyche. Perhaps it comes from knowing this was written during the first pandemic wave, when many felt isolated and helpless, but I see someone grasping desperately at straws to find meaning; someone left alone with his thoughts and falling deeper into their clutches. He picks at scabs, seeks out dark corners, obsesses over repeating motifs and patterns, and he digs.
Continue reading “Book Review: Calibration 74 by William F. Aicher”
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