T.J. McIntyre’s Southern Fried Weirdness: Reconstruction — all proceeds from which go to the Red Cross to help with tornado relief in the South — is out now on Smashwords and Amazon Kindle, with stories and poems from a cutting edge and up-and-coming roster including Nicole Kornher-Stace, Rae Bryant, Mari Ness, Berrien C. Henderson, Jaime Lee Moyer, Marshall Payne, Gustavo Bondini, Marsheila Rockwell, F. Brett Cox, Fabio Fernandes, Danny Adams and many others. (Click here to see the complete table of contents.)

The anthology also contains a folk tale-tinted horror story of mine that absolutely fits the “Southern Fried Weirdness” motif: “The Music of Bremen Farm.” Here’s a sample of the opening.

But for a flat tire, no one would have ever known that Old Hag Bremen was dead.

Her forebears, like other settlers from Germany, staked out plots in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains even before the white colonies declared themselves a nation. Throughout the rolling hills, where houses regard each other across wide vales, and narrow roads still ford streams with wooden bridges held together by iron spikes, the Anglicized names speak from rusting mailboxes: Anselm. Flohr. Krone. Newman. Schrader.

Yet even in this place of isolation, with corn blanketing the hills for miles before giving way to ancient mountain slopes and defiant oak, the Bremens stayed a world apart. They sent no sons to fight in the War of Northern Aggression. They did not come to the whitewashed A-frame churches. They did not grow crops, or ask for work in others’ cattle farms or dairies or tobacco fields. Those few who knew the business of the Bremen family left them to it, and spoke of it at most in late night whispers that by morning seemed like troubled and half-forgotten dreams.

By the time the single-lane dirt ruts finally gave way to asphalt, only one Bremen remained, a sad, solitary heir rattling alone inside a rambling home more than three hundred years old: still with an outhouse, still with a kitchen standing separate from the building where she made her bed. Only the squirrels and wasps that took shelter in the walls kept her company.

In all its formats the anthology is only $2.99. I hope you’ll check it out.

Posted in Fiction, Short stories, Signal boosts