What’s the opposite of a short story, anyway? I’ve been thinking about this a lot in compiling this anthology. There’s this little American press, run on love and old processors and convenience store parking lot fumes, in the middle of what they’d proudly and not-a-little-unironically call ‘flyover country’– Inside The Castle. Once a year they have a residency, called the ‘Castle Freak’, where one writer has five days to produce 100,000 words but must be assisted in some way by algorithmic or other machine technology. This may be that antonym to the short fiction work. The latest Castle Freak was friend, and editor of Sublunary Editions, Joshua Rothes, who wrote We Later Cities without going insane. This is the last thing I’d put on a list of short stories. So here it is, on my list of short stories, naturally. I am nothing if not perverse in this manner.

Published by Inside The Castle, 2020