NORMA

Widowhood and weirdos, online and off, NORMA is so dark it smarts.

It’s a terrible freedom to linger unaccounted for.

Norma is waking up and cracking up. Decades of marriage, housekeeping, and family responsibility: buried with her husband Hank. Now, she’s free, gorging on an online riot of canceled soap operas, message boards, and grocery store focus groups. Transcribing chatter for fifty cents a minute. It’s all of humanity—grim, funny, and desperate—wafting into her world, a world reeking with the funk of old fast food wrappers, cold stale recycled air, and desiccated car upholstery. And one where appropriate boundaries are suddenly slipping too, when a voice from one of her transcripts goes from virtual to IRL and just down the block.

NORMA is a tart, unhinged flail into widowhood, the parasocial, and some of the more careworn corners of the internet.

Sarah Mintz is a graduate of the English MA program at the University of Regina. Her work has been published with Book*Hug Press, JackPine Press, Radiant Press, Apocalypse Confidential, The Sea & Cedar Literary Magazine, and Agnes and True.