book cover of Wave of Mutilation
 

Wave of Mutilation

(2011)
A Story by

 
 
A dream-pop exploration of modern architecture and the American identity, Wave of Mutilation is a Zen finger trap for the 21st century.

It is the eve of the 2001 presidential election. Christian and his wife have traveled back to Tennessee to attend his father's funeral. When Christian picks up the phone attached to an atom bomb exhibit at the American Museum of Science and Energy, he finds the ghost of his father on the other end of the line. His father's ghost warns him that a rift in the world has opened and that unreality is leaking out.

Cast into a world with no more illusions, Christian descends into an Escher-like grid of paranoia and comical absurdity.

As polls close and votes are counted then re-counted, his wife begins coughing up eggs. Then, back home in Portland, they are forced at gunpoint to join a neighborhood block party.

Convinced that she no longer exists, Christian's wife splits herself open like a clockwork dummy and reveals that she is hollow inside, but she isn't dead. In fact, she is still pregnant with their child.

In order to survive, they must transform the scenes of their past into a new reality, before the rest of humanity buries them in a wave of mutilation.


Genre: Literary Fiction

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