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Short Stories: “Parts Department”

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Nine short fiction pieces – a mix of dark humor with a dash of surrealism. Souls adrift, the blues, and the underlying quest for home and happiness.

NOTES ABOUT THE 9 STORIES … from the author William P. Moore

1– Bayberry is a wayward character long-held in a dusty trunk, a figment on faded typing paper. In this short piece, he’s cut to size and freed to the public page, along with my abstract attempts to describe Key West.

2 – Written in appreciation of Hemingway’s “After the Storm.” I had an idea of layering, and humans living in husks or shells like a Russian doll. I use a squabbled-over domestic treasure as opposed to a sunken ocean liner.

3– “Advanced Level of Play” could have been more about Masked Man but the road led to video games and to Stan Birchard, a reclusive resident from Oceanaire, who crosses over from that novel (as do one or two others in later stories).

4 – “Along the Fall Line” is based on a vision of a pretty young woman on rollerblades, like once were in SoBe. Having the story take place in Columbia, SC was the biggest leap. The theme of “fall from grace” fit the river geography and is resonant to the storyline.

5 – “Orange Bowl Days” is an attempt is to make memorable characters in captured moments…odd moments, like Ulyanna in the bathtub studying a pharmacology book.

6 – The next two stories are tied via Teri and her mother Anna and crazy father John. As gloomy as they are, maybe some will see humor. The niece character Shannon is a reimagined representation of a girl I knew when a teenager in Sandbridge, VA who lived in her aunt’s house that summer.

7 – Is mercifully short. A shot, so to speak, at Southern Grotesque. I liked the name of Soso as a town. Visions of a place like Soso (plus a real-life drive to Aiken on a bleak country highway) started the whole setting. The ruined scenery evoked an atmosphere of mediocrity and nihilism.

8 – “Blue Chile” takes place in an imagined version of that country. It is a morality play of sorts, involving faith, situational ethics, religion, and even a bit of sibling rivalry.

9 – The last piece is a New Orleans vignette, a slice from an abandoned sequel. This story also has character intersections with other stories and novels. Those sort of ties matter to me, but I don’t expect readers to realize the connections; at best they raise curiosity.

wpm