Exigencies: A Neo-Noir Anthology - Softcover

Trent, Letitia; Keaton, David James; Walters, Damien Angelica; Catalano, Kevin; Detzner, Brendan

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9781940430492: Exigencies: A Neo-Noir Anthology

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1940430496 ISBN 13: 9781940430492

Publisher: Dark House Press, 2015

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Edited by Richard Thomas
Foreword by Chuck Wendig

Cover art by Daniele Serra
Interior illustrations by Luke Spooner

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Wilderness by Letitia Trent
Monster Season by Joshua Blair
Cat Calls by Rebecca Jones-Howe
Ceremony of the White Dog by Kevin Catalano
The Armadillo by Heather Foster
The Last Manuscript by Usman T. Malik
Single Lens Reflection by Jason Metz
The Mother by Nathan Beauchamp
Everything in Its Place by Adam Peterson
When We Taste of Death by Damien Angelica Walters
Figure Eight by Brendan Detzner
My Mother's Condition by Faith Gardner
Fragile Magic by Alex Kane
The Eye Liars by Sarah Read
Searching for Gloria by W. P. Johnson
And All Night Long We Have Not Stirred by Barbara Duffey
Dull Boy by David James Keaton
Brujeria for Beginners by Marytza Rubio
Heirloom by Kenneth Cain
The Owl and the Cigarette by Amanda Gowin
Desert Ghosts by Mark Jaskowski
Blood Price by Axel Taiari

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Richard Thomas is the author of six books—Disintegration, The Breaker, Transubstantiate, Herniated Roots, Staring Into the Abyss and The Soul Standard. His over 100 stories in print include Cemetery Dance, PANK, Gargoyle, Weird Fiction Review, Midwestern Gothic, Arcadia, Qualia Nous, Chiral Mad 2, and Shivers VI.

From "Wilderness" by Letitia Trent:

The airport was small, squat like a compound, its walls interrupted in regular intervals by tall, shaded windows. When Krista looked out the windows, the sky seemed slate-grey and heavy, but when the front doors opened, she remembered that it was really blue and cloudless outside.

She was early for her flight back to New Haven. She liked to arrive at the very earliest times that the flight website recommended. She was prepared to wait, liked it even. It was calming to have nothing to do and nowhere she had to be. She had brought a book about the history of wilderness and America, something left over from college that she had never read. She liked the cover, a picture of a Pilgrim family, small and sickly, their clothes black and heavy on their bony bodies, facing an expanse of trees so tall and green you could see nothing beyond them. She underlined phrases in the book out of old college habit: Wilderness remained a place of evil and spiritual catharsis. Any place in which a person feels stripped, lost, or perplexed, might be called a wilderness.

She shared a red, plush armrest with a large woman who had almost incandescent, butter-blonde hair. Her skin was so tan that it reminded Krista of a stain. Coffee on blonde wood.

The blonde had apparently just come from a trip to Maine. She told an older woman next to her an even larger woman with tight pin-curls and wire-rimmed glasses, wearing those boxy, pleated shorts that middle-aged women often wear on holidays about her trip. The blonde had stayed in the cutest hotel. Her entire room had been done up all nautical. The other woman nodded in agreement with everything the blonde said, as if she had had an identical experience.
Krista watched the airport attendants and one airport policeman patrol the area. They sometimes stepped into the waiting room and observed the crowd with what appeared to be either worry or constipation (they pressed their lips together, their hands on their hips, and blew the air from their mouths as if making silent raspberries). They had a vague air of agitation. She watched them carefully for signs of what might be wrong, but they revealed nothing in their pacing. Nobody else seemed to notice.

On Krista’s left, opposite the blonde, was a family, a mother and two children separated from her by one seat. The mother was thin and loud and wore shorts with many utilitarian pockets and a simple tank shirt without a bra. She seemed infinitely capable, as if she ran her own business or perhaps even managed some kind of sports team. Krista admired thin, efficient women like this, women who wore comfortable, rubber-soled sandals and clothing with enough functional pockets. The woman and her children all spoke on their individual cell phones, all telling somebody variations on the news that they would arrive soon, that it was only thirty minutes until boarding.

An announcement crackled over the loudspeakers, the sound delivered in one chunk of indiscernible static.

Krista looked around the room, hoping for the scraps of somebody else’s conversation to explain what had just been said.

Plane’s delayed for an hour, the blonde said to her husband, who had also missed it. Storms down in Boston.

A general grumble rose. People shifted in their seats and took out their recently stowed cell phones. The blonde woman called her husband’s name, which Krista immediately forgot.

Phone me up a pizza, she told him. I won’t eat that shit from the vending machine.

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