Issue 25 Feature Author: A.M. Dellamonica

The feature author for our winter issue is A.M. Dellamonica.  Their first novel, Indigo Springs, won the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Their fourth won the 2016 Prix Aurora for Best Novel. They have published over forty short stories on Tor.com and elsewhere. Alyx teaches writing at two universities and is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at a third. Their sixth novel, Gamechanger, was released last September under the name L.X. Beckett and is a hopetopia: a story that imagines humanity successfully navigating the twenty-first-century bottleneck.

Please enjoy this excerpt of  A.M. Dellamonica’s ‘Wrap Party’ from Issue 25

Wrap Party

by A.M. Dellamonica

“There’s blood in my puddle!” A reasonable facsimile of Lauren Bacall, circa 1946, bursts through the Kit Kant Club door, stage left. Out of habit, she strikes a pose in the fizzing lemon light of the club’s neon sign before confronting the survivors of the evening’s bacchanal. “Who tainted it?”

Conversations stop. Heads lift off tables. Phyll, at the piano, croons the terminal note of a Nina Simone song into the sudden silence. Then a wave of drunken hyena yips drowns out all that jazz.

We found out about Lauren’s puddle before we opened, when the props mistress mixed up a fresh tub of stage blood and dumped the old batch at the edge of the parking lot. It’s a bowl- shaped pothole lined with quartz-flecked granite pebbles in an array of unremarkable browns. We’re not talking the pearls of the Orient here. If they were paint chips, they’d have names like Beige Beach, Autumn Rust, Horse Chestnut.

But our Lauren—whose real name is Dani, not that anyone’s checking the playbill—flipped out. Turns out she meditates there before every rehearsal or performance. When it rains, the pool formed is pretty enough. The water shines clear when it’s not full of stage blood. The surface mirrors the clouds, and the pebbles glint back flecks of sunshine. Lauren appreciates a good visual.

Anyway, she tends the thing: keeps the cigarette butts, drowned wasps, and twigs from accumulating. When the rain dries up, she fills the puddle herself.

“Jeezis, Lauren, OCD much?” says a musician.

“All hail the sacred pothole.” Phyll has been sitting at the piano, away from the others, drinking and playing, playing and drinking. She takes up her glass and toasts me. I return the gesture then pour another shot of tap water from a too-pricey-to-share bottle of boutique gin. I even dress it up with fizz and a twist of lime. The only thing worse than being the sober one among a crowd of the blind is the blowback when they realize you’re a bonafide, full-bore stick in the mud…

Read the entire story in Pulp Literature Issue 25