I’m back from Texas now, but while I was there, I did indeed take more photos of locations related to my fiction. (And thanks to Jennifer and my family for putting up with me as I pulled over on the side of the road every few hundred yards!)
Yesterday, I announced that Ampersand Books is sponsoring a reading here in Portland, at which I’ll be one of the readers. So I thought today I’d share some photos from my story “Horror Vacui,” which appeared in the online supplement to Ampersand Review‘s issue 6. (The story slipped into the cracks of Ampersand’s awesome reboot of their website, but they’ve been reposting old stories a few at a time and mine’s in the cue. In the meantime, you can read it in the Issuu edition of the online supplement, which still lives here.)
These photos are of the house (or, one like it) where main character and professional sword-swallower Samson lives:
It had been a Friday, those five years back. He had been sitting on the toilet in his home, a clean house with white limestone siding and aged-honey trim in a sprawling country suburb with many identical houses.He collected his two dozen swords in their oiled scabbards and their velvet crimson wraps and he took them into the ruined kitchen, kicking aside cups and plates, and he oiled the blades in the sink, prepared them for his act. Then he walked out the back door to the old wooden deck that creaked and chafed against its rusted nails, and he hurled the swords one by one like javelins into the dirt of the cedar hill that rose behind his house.
I write fiction and teach college writing and literature. I'm the author of the story collection There Is No Other Way to Worship Them, the novel Hagridden, and the flash fiction chapbooks Box Cutters and Where There Is Ruin.
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Samuel Snoek-Brown 