Dear all of you,
A couple months ago, an ebook anthology titled “Corpus Pretereo” dropped with my story “The Carnival” between its virtual pages. The editors have written to all the contributors and asked us to plug the collection again and so I am going to bore everybody here with this a second time. For those of you who’ve already seen this, I apologize for this moment in self-promotion, but them’s the breaks.
If you’re a fan of pulp and genre fiction, then the collection will satisfy whatever flavor your teeth are craving that day, from historical magic realism to straight science fiction the likes of which might have once been published in Weird Tales.
Links and a sample of my story below.
Thank you for reading and for your patience.
-Justin
For Kindle Users
For Nook owners
The Carnival
Giorgio’s mother stroked his hair in sleepy passes while New York City’s January poked sharp, insistent fingers through the holes in the wall. They huddled together for warmth, burrowing into the mass of rags his mother had collected with the other shrew-eyed wraiths, their fast hands haunting the rubbish bins behind the textile mills.
Come morning she was gone. He looked around the apartment, groggy and confused. Her sack was gone, as were her shoes and coat and the pile of rags was lighter. A draft blew through the room from a finger-wide gap in the window, the cold air knocking against his naked throat and anxiety rippled within him like a sack of rats.
His breath constricted, the pipe that fed his lungs closing off. Heaving, pushing, he fought against it for several losing moments. By force of will, he calmed, holding his arms over his head the way the doctors had shown him until he could breathe better.
Wheezing, Giorgio unwrapped a quarter-loaf of bread from a cupboard. Chewing and breathing, careful not to choke, he stared out of the greasy windows of the back-tenement on Chrystie Street.
Drowsy after his battle, Giorgio lay down and his eyes closed, offering a brief escape from breathing, from absent mother. Often he fought sleep, afraid he would not wake up, or wake up in a panic when his lungs attacked him. But when it took him anyway, sometimes he dreamt that he was running outside across the landscape of an incredible, mysterious city.
Hours later he opened his eyes onto the still-empty room, the edges of the rags cold to the touch. A few mouthfuls of bread were all that were left, and these went the way of hunger quick enough.
*
“I have to find her.” He told the silent room and darkened windows.
Bundling himself in his jacket, he stuffed rags around his torso, up his sleeves and around his throat. He snuck out of the house past the sleeping families in the other rooms of the apartment, down the dark and filthy stairs and finally onto Chrystie street. January tugged at his clothes with her frigid, curious hands and Giorgio realized that he had no idea where to go. The tops of the buildings held no answers among their hidden rooftops and soot-black chimneys.
At the corner of Delancey and the Bowery he waited for a streetcar and then a cab, the horse’s breath were twin steaming white plumes. Laboring to breath in just a trickle of air with each step, the world passed with the speed of a snail’s dream. Past Delancey, he stopped to straighten his aching back from its hunch against the cold and his disease.
On the Bowery January ambushed him, screaming down her cold gusts like a fist around his throat. Giorgio ducked into the shelter of a stoop, curled up and hugged his knees against his chest. He drew on his little trickle of air and felt some of the heat return to his body, but at the corners of his eyes, the world was dimming. Warmer and very tired, the boy fell into a twilight doze.
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