Read now: "The Impossible Place" on Theme of Absence

I have a new short short story called "The Impossible Place", about two boys who get trapped behind a red door. Read it here and read the Author Interview here. My thanks to editor Jason Bougger.

It begins:

Anton held Eric’s hand as he lay bleeding after he was wounded by Belshazzar. It was not the creature’s name, but Anton had to give it a name, and it was the name that came to him, bubbling up from his deep fount of Bible verses and shame. He who was weighed and was found wanting. 

Belshazzar was eight feet tall, smelling like pus and clad in black, claws as sharp as knives, and it lived in that impossible, sprawling space behind the red door, in the house Anton’s family had just moved into. As Anton applied more pressure on Eric’s wound, he imagined an alternate timeline where he did not open the red door, where he just took the dusty turbo broiler his mother wanted him to keep in that room, and just left it in a corner and went back to his comic book. But the red door opened on a feast—gleaming oak table covered with flowers, wine bottles, fruits, thick cuts of meat—and, entranced, he walked in. Anton did not see the writing on the wall: the dried blood filling the cracks on the marble floor like grout, the dark doorway on the other side of the table that led to many rooms. Eight hundred and thirteen rooms, as Eric had noted.

“A hundred more than the Palace of Versailles,” Anton had said.

“It’s amazing that you know that,” Eric said, which Anton treasured as he would a flicker of light in a dark room.

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