Nunyunu-wi, Dressed in Stone

How awesome is this!? My hometown alt.weekly Metropulse invited me to write a short story for their Halloween fiction issue. It was a pretty tight deadline, but I've been reading H.P.Lovecraft lately, and as I was in an elder-gods-making-men-mad kind of mood already I leaped at the chance. They liked what I cooked up so much they put it on the cover, with art based on my story! (Yay, tentacles!)

To give the story a Knoxville angle, I went back to a kernel of an idea I've had for perhaps fifteen or twenty years now that I overheard in high school. While hanging out downtown, some kids I knew had run into a homeless man known as "The Chief." He was leaning on a building, his hands flat against the bricks, because, he told the teenagers, he was holding the building up. (Just like the man in the cover art, above.) If he let go, he told them, the building would fall down. This story was relayed to me as something funny, but I thought it was mysterious and sad, and ever since then I've kept that little scrap of an idea around in case I found a story for it.

And now I have. The story is called "Nunyunu-wi, Dressed in Stone," and you can read it online for free, or you can grab a hard copy (with illustrations!) in Knoxville by picking up Metropulse at any of the dozens (hundreds?) of places it's available for free. The special fiction issue also features scary shorts by Knoxville writers Kali Meister, Jack Rentfro, and Jennifer Alldredge.

Go give "Nunyunu-wi, Dressed in Stone" a read and tell me what you think.

Cthulhu fhtagn!