He can feel the sheets gathered around his head. He can hear his wife’s body torn asunder and carried out of the world. He can smell the reek and decay of everything he has ever loved. He tries to cover his ears against the screams of this world but he cannot move. He cannot move.
Make yourself a meal, her voice says with finality.
He gazes down at his ponderous belly and fumbles at all the utensils suddenly spilling off the edge of the table: all the sharp edges, all the knives of the world.
The telephone rings. The answering machine picks it up. “Are you there?” the male voice asks. “Pick up. Pick up.”
“I’m not here!” he says. “I’m not here!”
Make yourself a meal, she says, and, grabbing the sharpest knife, he does.
Publishing History
1. “Onion Song” appears here for the first time.
2. “The Sadness,” Star*Line, Nov/Dec 2009
3. “The Messenger,” Weird Tales, Fall 1981, Vol. 48, No. 3
4. “The Hijacker,” Eldritch Tales 8, 1982
5. “Out Late In the Park,” GATHERING THE BONES, Jack Dann, Ramsey Campbell, and Dennis Etchison editors, 2003
6. “Picnic” appears here for the first time.
7. “Doodles,” Noctulpa 7:Sinistre, 1993 (reprinted in Ellen Datlow's Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror)
8. “Strands,” Noctulpa 4, 1990
9. “Night: the Endless Snowfall,” Eldritch Tales #12, 1986
10. “Archetype,” NonStop Magazine 2, Winter 1995
11. “The Hunter Home from the Hill,” 2001 (India), July 1991
12. “Shoplifter,” Kayak 60, 1982
13. “Brain of Shadows,” Psychos '92
14. “Attached,” Kayak 60, 1982
15. “The Rifleman, the Cancerous Cow, and the Swedish Memorial Hospital,” Pig Iron 11, The New Surrealists issue, 1983
16. “Jungle J.D.,” It Came From the Drive-in, ed. Norman Partridge
17. “Cats, Dogs, & Other Creatures,” Talebones 21, Spring 2001
18. “How to Survive a Fire at the Greenmark,” The Spook, July 2002
19. “Minimalist Biography” appears here for the first time.
20. “Sometimes I Get Lost,” Electric Velocipede 11, 2006
21. “The Changing Room” appears here for the first time.
22. “Charles,” Black Static 12, 2009
23. “The Figure in Motion,” Postscripts, 22/23 - The Company He Keeps
24. “The Glare and the Glow,” Interzone 227, 2010
25. “Slapstick,” Bare Bone 11, 2009
26. “Strangeness,” Sybil's Garage 4, 2007
27. “Off the Map,” Albedo One #35, 2008
28. “Unknown,” Black Static 2, 2007
29. “Saturday Afternoon,” Brutarian 33, 2001
30. “A Visit Home,” The Tiger Garden, ed. Nicholas Royle
31. “The Multiples of Sorrow,” Cinnabar's Gnosis Ex Occidente Press
32. “Fish,” Horror D’oeuvres (online), 2006
33. “Merry-Go-Round,” New Pathways 14, 1989
34. “The Green Dog,” Null Immortalis: Nemonymous 10
35. “A Dream of the Dead,” Album Zutique #1, ed. Jeff Vandermeer
36. “Saturday” appears here for the first time.
37. “Aphasic World Syndrome,” Pindeldyboz (online), November 15, 2007
38. “December,” HORRORS! 365 SCARY STORIES, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg, Robert E. Weinberg eds, 1998
39. “The Mask Child” (a play for puppets) originally appeared on the multimedia CD Imagination Box, Melanie & Steve Tem, Lone Wolf Publications, 2001
40. “Shuffle” originally appeared as a virtual card deck on the multimedia CD Imagination Box, Melanie & Steve Tem, Lone Wolf Publications, 2001
41. “12 Minutes of Darkness,” a chapbook, Chris Drumm Books, 1991
42. “An Ending,” A Walk on the Darkside, John Pelan editor, 2004
Praise for Steve Rasnic Tem
“Steve Rasnic Tem is a school of writing unto himself.”
“Tem’s stories are written with an enviable precision of language and the hallucinatory candour of the true visionary, but with all the signature notes of a keen and compassionate intelligence at work. Consistent in quality and diverse in content, as impressive as it is impressionistic, and spanning thirty years of the author's career, Onion Songs is the strongest collection of short stories that I've read in the last year.”
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For more information about these books and others, please visit: http://chomupress.com/
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Copyright
Onion Songs copyright © Steve Rasnic Tem 2013
The right of Steve Rasnic Tem to be identified as Author of this
Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published in March 2013 by Chômu Press.
by arrangement with the author.
All rights reserved by the author.
First Kindle Edition
This book is a work of fiction. If your life resembles these stories we would be quite puzzled but interested to meet you.
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Cover image by Jessica Fortner
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