One of Hayden’s short-short stories of the fabula type. This one is so rich and glorious and terrible it’s like cracking open a cursed treasure chest and being blinded by the dazzling hoard within. The narrator is already dead, killed by his children in revenge for violences he’s done to them, though it takes a little while – and it takes the children beginning to “live outside my hate” – for his narrating consciousness to cease. Deep, dark psychodrama with ground-breaking special effects: always a winning combination.
First published in The Stinging Fly, Summer 2016 and available to subscribers online here. Collected in Darker With The Lights On, Little Island Press, 2017
