Short Stories: 1. Someone Had Been Telling Lies

As mentioned in a previous post about releasing my short stories as individual mini-ebooks, I had intended to do a post on each of them. This is the first of that series of posts. The short stories I have published individually so far are those contained in the collection Fluctuation in Disorder, and I will be talking about the stories in the order in which they appear in that book. The individual stories are priced at €/£/$0.99, so if you are tempted by five or more of what you see in the previews, it is better value to buy the whole book! You can find the details of all of the individual stories here.

Someone Had Been Telling Lies

Jae receives a summons to the office—does this mean a place on the inside track in an organization where position is everything? Slipstream fiction set in the 'bureaucratic gothic' universe of the novel Hollowmen.

'Someone Had Been Telling Lies' (the name comes from the first line of Kafka’s The Trial) is associated with a fictional world, that of the novel Hollowmen. It, too, is a sort of testing-out of ideas, of aesthetic, and of ambiance. The action takes place in the Institute, unnamed in the story, and concerns the initiatory moves in the Processs that starts against Kaye in Hollowmen. 

The world the characters understand to be the ‘real’ world has no anchor in, or even ability to see, the ‘real’ worlds around them: the dead dog, the users of wheelchairs, even their colleague Kaye. The characters are protected from consensus reality by their participation in the world of the Institute. The material wealth the Institute provides makes a world of difference to its workers, for whom all other workers are ‘other’, barely human when seen skating on the river. With life in the Institute comes an insulating sense of entitlement, and they register neither that everyday world nor the co-existing world of the "dark and speckled flicker," the sucker-marks on the window, or the blood on the snow. 

At the same time, Jae, Kaye, and Elle’s own world is floating and transient in its operations. Jae struggles to comprehend the material world into which they wake, surrounded by signs that temporarily make no sense, until "the darkness tilts" and comprehension returns. Jae is constantly on the uneasy edge of comprehension, aware of the ceaseless competitive horse-trading of information within the Institute, but timid about participation. It is unclear who has any real understanding of what is going on. By the end, Jae still has no idea what has ‘really’ happened, but can revel in it having been a good day because of the success of the last exchange with Elle: Jae has found the knack of presentation, of disruption with meaninglessness, of wielding "inspired nullity."

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