My short story titled "Why The Dead Dream" has recently been published in issue #2 of Velvet Tarantula magazine, and as usual I'm blogging a few words about how the piece came to be written. There may be spoilers within.
"Why The Dead Dream" is one of ten stories I've written on the subject of grief. These will appear in a short collection titled "Tokens Of Grief" which has been accepted by a publisher that I am not yet at liberty to name (more information on this once contracts are signed). The inspiration for the collection as a whole unfortunately came about due to the death of my father in February 2025. Whilst I appeared to accept this eventuality at the time, it really hit me in October that year and subsequently the devastation relentlessly ploughed through me. What else is a writer to do but assimilate that grief through fiction, to find a creative cathartic path to the other side? However I didn't want to limit myself with stories about grief of the loss of a loved one. There are other forms of grief that we eventually inhabit, after all.
"Why The Dead Dream" came about from my consideration - as an atheist - as to what we might expect from an afterlife. Whenever we imagine our deaths, we view them from another's perspective, which is really our perspective on that another. Yet we wouldn't have that perspective at all. We wouldn't even have that "Nothingness, non-existence, black emptiness..." consideration as in Woody Allen's "Love And Death". My understanding isn't simply that death is an absence of everything, but that also it is an absence of nothing. "Why The Dead Dream" is therefore a stream of consciousness piece, an unspooling of ideas, which attempts to mimic what I imagine might be the final impulsive thoughts of a dying brain, trying to assimilate it all before it eventually stops.
Here's an extract:
How can that bread be so expensive. It’s not even baked. You’d rather lie on your back on the grass. Yet then you’d miss those ladybirds. Even one of those would be too large for most pockets. You remember you left the key on the rollercoaster. Everyone is wearing a different pair of trousers. How do you make a noise silently? Sometimes all you desire is to insert a pencil into the reel of a cassette tape and slowly turn it anti-clockwise. You know that smell. It encourages you.
They bleed out of the air. Mannikins etched onto paper using lemon juice and a scratchy nib. They’re coming for you. Right now. Those eggshells have come in handy. You scrunch them, fingers gripped against palms. Such a thin strip of membrane to collate them in patterns of scorched earth. Those cracks will widen. They’ll never get past them now.
Regular readers of this blog will know I usually listen to music through headphones whilst writing. In this case, it was the album "23" by Blonde Redhead, on repeat (a record I return to often).
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