So last week I put out Black Dog: A Biography, which is not a new story in the Brain Jar Press Short Fiction Lab, but a reprint of a somewhat experimental older story that I’m using as a free sample of the kind of short fiction I write. It contains fiction. It contains biography. It contains large, girlfriend-eating dogs that may or may not be an imaginary friend.
And your sample:
The first time the Black Dog showed up I was five. We were living in Miriwinni and it lurked behind the low, chain link fence that marked out our backyard, hunkered down in the long grass filling the space between the fence line and the train tracks. No-one else could see it, not even my parents. It was good at hiding when other people looked.
I don’t remember much about our house back then. My parents were teachers, so we moved a lot. I was five, and that means I’m working with hazy images here: I remember the house was on stilts, thick hardwood pylons that would keep the snakes out and keep us dry if the river flooded. I remember off-white weatherboards and a corrugated iron roof. We lived across the road from an endless expanse of north Queensland cane fields. They burned blood red and spat ash into the air during the harvest months. The town was just a school, a pub and a corner store that sold fizzy drinks and cordial; maybe a couple of dozen people living around the train station, the rest spread out in the houses that nestled in the heart of the cane fields. My friends were mostly farm kids, seen only on weekends.
Miriwinni was the kind of place where adults were filled with conventional worries: a bad harvest, the bills coming due, snake bites while cutting the cane, a cyclone sweeping in over the coast. No-one worried about the Black Dog except me. At first my parents would check the long grass when I spoke of him, just to make sure nothing was hiding there, but it didn’t take long for their concern to falter. I was a child prone to imaginary friends and childish fictions. There was no reason to believe my stories. “It doesn’t exist,” they told each other. “He’ll grow out of it.”
When I first wrote this, back during the pressure cooker of Clarion south, Jason Fischer‘s critique of involved air guitar and a rendition of the Led Zepplin song. It went on to appear in Interfictions II, a 2009 anthology that celebrated work that didn’t fit into a single genre category.
It’s also the story that convinced my mother that she probably shouldn’t read any more of my fiction, which I always look on as a point of pride given that it came out after Horn.
In short, it’s not a particularly nice story, but it’s always been one of my favourites out of all the things I’ve written.
The ebook is currently free on every story except Amazon, where it’s as cheap as they’ll let me price things (if you point out that you can get it cheaper elsewhere, they’ll likely choose to bring that price down). You can get it at your favourite store using this Books2Read link.
And yes, as the title implies, I’ll be sneaking one last release out before the end of the year. Or, at least, I’ll be trying too–I’m not yet sure how easy uploading a new book will be on some of the stores with small teams.
