Melancholic Parables

Bellatrix Sakakino has lived many lives. She dampens electricity. She longs for a fruit that went extinct before she was born. She’s radioactive. She’s not above committing a massacre for the sake of a perfect omelet.

She crashes through timelines and circumstances, recurring in these flash stories as a tricksterish film director, a pink hedgehog, a simulation of herself, or a child who can only speak in dial-up modem shrieks.

Are we the same person we were last year? Or last week? Or last story? Whimsical and dolorous, ironic and absurd, this slippery assortment of stories dances around these questions with ambiguous aplomb.

“Wistful nihilism holds hands with absurd humor and lighthearted whimsy—some of the stories are almost horror, some are almost jokes.”
— Briar Ripley Page, author of Corrupted Vessels

“Encounters with to be and not to be: vulnerable yet ungovernable, tragicomic and ignormal. Shimmering reinvention.”
— Tucker Lieberman, author of Most Famous Short Film of All Time

“Every story in this collection is a kind of gift: a chance to discover new perspectives.”
— Hengtee Lim, author of Something Like Hope

“This is a witty, clever book, but it’s also a dark work: a work of uneasy ghosts and climate change, of loving your abuser and hating yourself.”
— Zilla Novikov, author of Query