Friday before Senior Year

The Space between Atoms will continue next week. (The episode is already written.) This week instead I wanted to pass along the timely and happy news that my story, “Friday before Senior Year,” has been published in The Corner Bar. You may read it here: http://cornerbarmagazine.com/pdfs/corner-bar-volume-05-issue-06.pdf.

This particular tale delves back into my own high school days. Those among us timid and shy wondered what other kids did on the weekend while we were curled up at home with books. And the monsters of this story were conjured by an article like that mentioned by the protagonist.

Many of us who write fiction draw from the well of our own experience. I knew bullies in school. Other guys in the locker room bragged of what they’d done with girls we’d only ever seen fully clad. They talked of secret and scary places. Some of them died.

The young might be classified as a different species. Those kids I knew in high school, at least those who found me on Facebook, have mostly sobered up into disenchanted adults. I write fiction to keep the wonder alive. The folks over at The Corner Bar get that.

As I was writing my seventh novel an idea came to me. One of the characters in “Friday before Senior Year” was actually the protagonist of the story I was composing. Writing often works like that. Separate characters thrown into the many episodes that fiction dreams up, come together in interesting ways. Writing is a kind of magic.

The monsters in my stories are sometimes not the evil ones. I have published twenty-two other stories and in many of them the monsters are the innocent ones. That means that those who are guilty are the others, and I suspect we all know who those are.

My high school was weird. I grew up in a small town where everyone knew that strange things happened from time to time. “Friday before Senior Year” is a celebration of one of those unexpected things.

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K. Marvin Bruce

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