The Ninth Chime

My short story, “The Ninth Chime,” has just been published by Red Canary Magazine, an award-winning journal dedicated to human rights, protection of the environment, and long-form storytelling, both fiction and nonfiction. Many thanks to the journal’s incomparable editor, Joe Donnelly, and outstanding managing editor, Victoria O’Campo. This story, part of a book-in-progress called Turn Up the Radio When You Speak, is very close to my heart, as it brings together impressions of the Soviet Sixties, contemporary Putinist Russia, and, sadly, the strange authoritarian leviathan looming just over the American horizon. But it also, purposefully, occupies a world all its own—one that any of us could wind up living in…

Tertz lay on the cold brick looking at the white sky. Did he know what he was looking at? Maybe he saw it only as a flash before darkness, or blank paper before the typewriter ribbon, or the emptiness of pain he could no longer feel. Maybe he thought he was alone on the square, unaccompanied despite his best efforts. Because who can bring themselves to come to the square for such purposes on such days?Continue reading “The Ninth Chime” in Red Canary Magazine.

– GBM