All Due Respect #4
The fourth issue of All Due Respect is out, and I’m honored to be its featured author. You’ll find my new story “A Hopeless Case” in the magazine, as well as an interview conducted by Benoît Lelièvre, who asks me smart, provocative questions. There’s also original fiction by Joe Clifford, Travis Richardson, William Wallace, Stephen D. Rogers, Michael Cebula, CT McNeely, Christopher Irvin, and Michael Pool, as well as reviews and interviews. I’m so grateful to editor Chris Rhatigan for asking me to be part of it.
Want to read “A Hopeless Case”? Here’s how it begins:
Jump, Sarah ordered herself.
The number four express train was roaring towards the station. It was all of nine, maybe ten heartbeats away.
Jump. Jump. Jump. No more excuses. Time to jump.
She’d been mentally preparing for this moment for days, but now that the time to act was upon her, she hesitated, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath. When she fantasized about her death, it seemed so simple. She would fall forward in a gentle arc, like a scuba diver pushing one flippered foot off a pier, just as she and Colin had done countless times into the warm embrace of the Caribbean. She’d dive for the subway tracks, but be intercepted by the train. It would be a clean, swift meeting of flesh and metal with only one possible outcome.
No one else would be harmed. That was essential.
What Sarah hadn’t envisioned, until she was standing on the platform, was the driver of the train. In her daydream, it was just a faceless, eyeless train. She saw herself being killed before anyone knew what had happened. She hadn’t thought about the driver seeing her. A week earlier, when she’d been walking on the George Washington Bridge, looking for the right spot to leap from, she’d realized how impossible it would be to end her life there. Certainly, she would die, but before her body was cold, rescue workers would be dragged in. Sarah didn’t want anyone else to be affected by her death. What if the subway driver saw her throw herself in front of the train? Would that person have nightmares for weeks or months or years to come, visions of a forty-five-year-old woman in a headscarf splattering before their eyes?
Buy All Due Respect on Amazon.