Today, we have a story for you that can only be described in one word: "relentless."



I don't know who Shane Castle is. I don't WANT to know who Shane Castle is. Maybe he is some hard-up dude living in a trailer somewhere, praying to a revolver, in and out of prison, spiral tattoos up both arms to hide the needle tracks.



Maybe he is a cynical, seventy-year-old language poet who hangs out in a small-town Starbucks, watching the lives of the children around him and trying to understand.



Whatever the truth is, his fiction is top notch, the kind of fiction that you can't really write, you have to "bleed." His story is rude, undefendable, and too excellent to ignore. Maybe it will make you mad. We are publishing it because we have no choice, though if there were some kind of "story penitentiary," that's where we would send it instead.



But when a story like this shows up in your "submissions queue," you ask no questions. You treat it like contraband.



You don't want to know where it came from. You nod, staring at the floor so no one can see the fear in your eyes. You do a grammar edit, and then put it out there for the world to deal with, urging people not to worry about how Adam lost his eye, but to focus instead on that star, that goddamn star...

Posted by miracle on Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:48:08 -0500 -- permanent link