Novels

The Killers in the Crowd - Supernatural peacekeepers from the fringes of human life struggle with the meaning of justice in a world half-born. The secrets they keep will force them between vicious idealists and their own establishment, while every choice - personal and political - threatens to spiral their know-nothing industrial town further out of control. Includes:

• Vibrant characters on a journey from ignorance to uncomfortable reality.

• Life beating beneath the surface: back-alley brawls, faerie gardens, and a dream just out of reach.

• Themes of privilege, authority, and morality. How far will you let the truth change you?

Read an excerpt here!

Plays

Gender is a Possessing Ghost - “Sexuality is the undergrad, babe. Gender’s the frickin’ PH.D.” A one-act on navigating dysphoria and polyamoury.

Short Stories

A Knowing Knot

By E.M.B. Howard

I am puking in an alley. I am playing concert piano in a glittering hall. I am helping my dad round up cows from the back of a tractor. I am punching a man in the balls, though I should have kneed him. I am sloppily kissing a man who I do not love. I am embracing a tiny forest god. 

I am trying to figure out whether my selves are sequential or simultaneous. 

My house cat is not a tiny god, but he does represent a certain mythological ideal of mischief. Consistent enough that you will find ways to thwart his regular efforts, though creative enough that he’ll find another habit within the week. It adds a challenge to my homelife that I think suits the modern age: with groceries delivered to my door, I embrace the responsibility of caring for an indefinitely difficult life.  

His name is Mouse. It started as a simple fancy of naming animals the names of different animals, but as I stare into his slightly-crossed eyes I imagine being the thing you’re made to destroy. It reminds me of morality. 

Living takes up resources. I am lucky enough to have achieved equilibrium, but even given ethical choice in the market I can’t help but take up space, make waste. 

My roommates and I maintain a board on the kitchen wall. Days since we took out the garbage: 8. While we collect it, it’s collecting fruit flies; while I waited for my coffee this morning I made a fly trap out of a jar, some old fruit, honey, plastic wrap. They’re already gathering around the holes. I imagine them celebrating the bounty they’d found, getting drunk on it. Having a little fly-party. 

Being conservative with your waste means allowing it presence, creating more space for it in your mind. Like most things worth doing, it’s unpleasant and necessary. 

What music do flies play at a party? Probably noise. We like what we are. 

Humans prefer the cello because it mimics our voices better than we can produce them. We prefer consonance for the same reason. We seek harmony because it is the human voice doubled back on itself, refined by altered reflection. The euro-centric circle of fifths fools us into thinking there is order in the universe. 

I can’t do anything about the universe (or if I can it’s a very slow process), but I can make order in my own home. I take the time to put some books back on the shelf – my roommate is burning his way through my book collection, tearing at least two pages a book in hungry fervor – and decide not to practice.  

I look at Mouse. He deserves the space. So do I. He bats at a picture we took together last friendsgiving and knocks it off the kitchen board. It’s okay; no frame to break. I pin the picture back up, higher this time. Mouse stretches to reach for it again. In three days someone will stack some books there and he’ll jump on top to knock the picture down again.  

I set out to make my small contribution to the progress of the universe. It’s snowing, so I check the grip on the wheels of my bike against the sidewalk. It’ll be fine. 

My headphones create a liminal space inside my ears, a realm of vibrating air. I remember that the body and mind influence each other enough to be indistinguishable, but nevertheless I fantasize about incorporeality. Eat a lot less food, make a lot less waste. Don’t need a bed or a clock or headphones. Don’t need hugs or cigarettes or the aura of coming rain. 

 Nevermind, having a body is cool. It’s unpleasant and necessary. 

 Rehearsal is fine, the sublime made average by repetition. I correct notes on the piano and wait as the conductor demonstrates how to align your organs to make the best sound for this particular piece, a sudden and startling woman-lead yoik. You have to lift the corners of your mouth, sing from the mask. 

 Google ‘yoik’ and you’ll learn that these Swedish songs aren’t about something; they are that thing. 

 Then our conductor, Jeehye, leans against the stand. Her hair is streaked with gray. 

 “You can tell that I’m not here.” She says. Some of the choristers sit down, sensing that we won’t be singing for a while. I’m mad at them for a split-second – please inhabit this space for a second longer – but then I remember they might have been standing all day or they might have chronic pain or maybe anxiety that makes them shake until their joints hurt.  It’s easy to remember those kinds of things when you’ve sung beside someone. 

Jeehye speaks again. “I haven’t been here all year.”

 A chorister says: “We love you.”

Jeehye responds: “Then we have a problem.”

 There is a stunned silence. A knowing knot twists in my stomach. 

 “There is someone missing tonight. And there is someone in this room that feels apart from us. I will not ask them to come forward – that’s their choice. But we need to talk about it.”

My wrists are sweating. Wrists? Yes. I wring my hands together and wipe them on my pants. I try not to look away from Jeehye. 

 “The love at the centre of our shared endeavour has been used to cover up the uncomfortable parts of working in a group. In any group, there will be conflict. Things will break. And they can either be fixed, paved over, or replaced.”

“In order to make this place safer, I have replaced one of our members – or removed them, as the case may be. But until you all know what happened, until you know to maintain the fix, it will keep breaking and breaking, driving a wedge into one important piece of us.”

 Jeehye breathes. “This ship must have a navigator; but in that duty, I have ignored my obligations to the ship’s maintenance. Sorry – my father was a sailor.”

 An uncomfortable rippling giggle. The choir has become an implicated crowd, an audience that doesn’t know they’re part of the play. 

 I speak. I don’t need permission.

 “You know how they say that love is blind?” I say. “It’s also blinding. And if love covers up pain, I don’t want it. I will prioritize pain and truth over comfortable ignorance.”

 I deserve the space. I deserve to take the reins. It is mine. It is uncomfortable and necessary. 

 I say three more words. One of them twists my mouth around it, like fingers gripping my face, my lips. 

 Eventually, I leave. I get on my bike and ride it through the dark at six p.m. I don’t go home – I veer into the river valley. 

 There are bike paths for nerds, and there are bike paths for assholes. I take the latter, a groove dug into the frozen slope of mud. I go too fast, and decide not to brake until I’m certain I’m going to die. I don’t die, or even fall. I do bash my shoulder into the tree at the bottom, but it feels good to push on the world and have the world push back. 

 The altar is still there at the bottom, crafted out of sticks and abandoned bottles. I supplicate before the forest god with a bag of berries I didn’t use for the fly trap. As is custom, I eat one and smear the rest upon the altar. They’re too soft, squishy in my mouth. 

 I prop my bike against the tree and perch on top of it while I wait. I sit there for seventeen minutes. 

 The forest god laps at its berries. Red stains its mouth as mine has been stained. I hold my breath until it is a struggling bird in my ribs. But I’ve got lung capacity for days. 

 “I told them today.” I say, letting the words out with the breath. “I’m not sure if it’s going to be better. I feel sick.”

 The truth may not itself be a moral good, the forest god replies. 

 “I feel like I’m sharing my pain, rather than healing it.”

 Pain can be diluted by its sharing.

 “Sometimes it just multiplies, though.”

 Perhaps. There is a required dilutive factor. 

 “You don’t talk like you’re ancient.”

 I don’t talk at all. 

 “I know. But I like you anyway.”

 Thanks. 

 The forest god flits away. I trudge back up the hill with my bike and ride back home. 

 I make dinner, store the leftovers. My roommate tells me he likes Steinbeck, but finds him unfocused. What’s with these multiple generations, anyway? I stomp down the husks of a squash and decide that the garbage is too full. I erase the 8and write 0.1. 

Mouse follows me into the alley and rolls in the snow. I try to brush him off, and he goes to roll in the snowy mud. 

It’s not a healing, or a beginning. Not any more than a sunrise is a beginning; the sun had its whole life before you saw it, millions of years before you were alive, and it doesn’t care whether it’s rising or setting. It doesn’t care if you’re here or not, and neither does your body. 

All you can really do is be there, minimizing your waste, making your space.