“Living in Pittsburgh, and truth be told at loose ends since the blue jays, how could we expect to hold off wave after wave of crazed, violent buccaneers questing for booty?”
From the Publisher: “Not unlike his literary forebearers Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover, Damian Dressick brings us a crackling series of dispatches fresh from the postmodernist front.
This daring gathering of brief, innovative stories tantalizes the intellect nearly as much as it illuminates the human heart.
Drawing from his quiver of flash fictions, prose poems, lists, pie charts and micros, Dressick’s narratives are fully engaged with the wild disorder that everyday feels more and more like the sine qua non of our fractured now.
Meet meth-addicted grizzly bears, a coal mining Jesus, grieving alcoholic parents, and murderous villagers whose only speech is culinary in this fleeting edge tour de force… Fables of the Deconstruction.”
About the author: “Born and raised in Pennsylvania’s coal country, Damian Dressick is also the author of the novel 40 Patchtown (Bottom Dog Press). A Blue Mountain Residency Fellow, Dressick teaches writing at Clarion University of Pennsylvania, and co-hosts WANA: LIVE!, a (mostly) virtual reading series that brings some of the best Appalachian writers to the world. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, W.W. Norton’s New Micro, Post Road, New Orleans Review, Cutbank, failbetter.com, Hippocampus, Smokelong Quarterly, Hobart, New World Writing, and many more.”
“This collection of sixty-three stories is as rich and varied as a patisserie, as nasty and brutish as a Japanese architect in the mid-sixties, as delicate as the swift-moving scents in the coastal air at midnight. To call these stories short-shorts or “flash fiction” is to do them a disservice. While some are indeed short, and many are pleasantly flashy, every one hits home with the weight of boxer’s punch, every one is more beautiful, and more fun, than the last. This is a first rate performance by an artist to be reckoned with.” —Frederick Barthelme, author of There Must Be Some Mistake
“Like Donald Barthelme, Damian Dressick finds himself on the leading edge of the junk phenomena. The thingness of things falls apart delightfully right before our dilated eyes. Fun for the whole goddamn nuclear family.” —Michael Martone, author of Michael Martone
“Fables of the Deconstruction is funny, sad, dreamy, and brutal. The stories here veer off in strange directions, happily disobedient to the conventions that plague so much of our current grindingly cautious literature. This is a credit to Damian Dressick, an excitable and exciting new writer who will probably be a big deal someday and, in fact, if you check your heart, already is.” —Steve Almond, author of Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life
“Damian Dressick writes with gusto and sly humor, and Fables of the Deconstruction introduces a bold and robust new voice of impressive range. A heady debut.” —Gary Lutz, author of The Complete Gary Lutz
“Damian Dressick’s Fables of the Deconstruction expertly explores the question: why not? Wandering through Dressick’s terrain, you can leave your own (real) life behind for a while. Sit back and enjoy. This little book will make you both happy and sad—with footnotes.” —Sherrie Flick author of I Call This Flirting and Reconsidering Happiness
ACCRUAL
The cardinals came first. Their bright plumage a welcome splash of color in the late winter sunlight, my wife and I would gather at the kitchen window clutching our steaming mugs and watch them greedily at the feeder. We’d eye their conical beaks dipping into the bed of sunflower and canary seeds and bask in the pleasantness of their arrival. Like a visit from favored, distant relatives or the commencement of a long- awaited sporting event, their morning perching signaled a magic time, a joyful respite from the rigors and knocks of our overscheduled lives.
Then the orioles came. Their hunting-vest orange chests were less dazzling than the cardinals’ spectacular plumage, but together the colors made for a nice contrast and at any rate we took great pleasure in listening to their high twitter and watching them dance and flutter between the branches of our dwarf cedars.
When the blue jays appeared, however, we were somewhat less thrilled. They were avaricious and bossy and perhaps it was this reflection of our own less palatable qualities that caused us to bear them so much ill-will. But they were colorful and spunky and eventually we came to appreciate the harsh music of their down-slurred trill.
It was the rattlesnake incursion that started us suspecting something uncanny and not entirely avian might be afoot. Not that the birds had stopped coming, even though the feeder was long depleted. In fact, dozens of them roosted cozily out of reach above the brood of newly arrived vipers lazing on the Rorschachs of pea gravel separating the hydrangea from the tiger lilies and bleeding hearts.
Our mornings, formerly cherished oases in task-choked days, were now consumed with dodging bird droppings or even errant diamondback strikes in acts simple and quotidian as retrieving the mail from its shiny silver box or sipping diluted pomegranate juice on the brick patio. Repeated calls to the city’s various extermination outfits were met only by a motley assemblage of drunks trundling unsteadily up our sidewalk and onto the porch, where they tried loudly to interest us in quaffing schooners of their homebrewed beer.
Nearly overwhelmed—a carpet of diamondback rattlers stretching across our yard, over which perched an increasingly menacing flock of blue jays, cardinals and orioles that over the last week had swelled to Hitchcockian proportions, and the home brewing contingent having torn out the flowerbeds to make room for their crop of Bavarian hops and frittering away the remains of our cord wood firing the barley malting kiln they erected on the front porch—we imagined things couldn’t get much worse.
Only when Luis, our postman, was chased up the block by a trio of bear cubs did we realize how wrong we were. Snarling almost joyfully, they treed the poor bastard in Wilson’s white birch, taking turns batting at his Vibram-soled walking shoes each time he refreshed his iffy grip. Of course their growling was nothing compared to the terrifying roar that thundered from the gaping maws of the mated pair of tigers that days later ate the pizza delivery boy. Pausing in our fortification of the picture window with organic potting soil-stuffed sandbags, we looked on in horror as the big cats polished off him and his insulated delivery satchel without so much as a belch.
But it wasn’t the marauding bands of apex predators that finally demanded we seek some insight into what was happening to our neighborhood, rather the sudden influx of Franciscan friars. Almost overnight, the business casual attired teachers at Woodbine Avenue Elementary were replaced by severe and befrocked Jesuits, terrifying our tiny, agnostic children and sending my wife and me out to risk life and limb to procure intel. Stealthily we crept from house to house, peering through windows, hiding behind Camrys and Accords, scouring the manicured lawns and neatly trimmed hedgerows for clues to the strange and increasingly infelicitous goings-on.
When, peeking through their draperied windows, we saw that many of our formerly flag-waving, almost disturbingly patriotic neighbors had begun to demonstrate pronounced communist leanings, centering polished marble mini-busts of Stalin on their mantles between the Hummels and ceramic urns and replacing Old Glory with the Hammer and Sickle, we began to formulate a theory.
The mass incursion of twins two days later confirmed what we’d formerly regarded as left-field suspicions. Taken together with the influx of cardinals, orioles, blue jays, diamondbacks, cubs, tigers, padres, brewers and reds, the sets of identical, tow-headed teens roaming our streets could mean only one thing: our neighborhood was being invaded by baseball mascots.
“It’s not so much the Mariners’ incipient shore leave that concerns me,” Kelly offered as we cowered in the living room, occasionally peering over the window sash to reassure ourselves that the closest tiger was still engaged in devouring the entrails of a wayward twin. “But when the Pirates come, Damian, I think we’re well and truly fucked.”
She had an excellent point. Living in Pittsburgh, and truth be told at loose ends since the blue jays, how could we expect to hold off wave after wave of crazed, violent buccaneers questing for booty?
We scrambled those next fast-moving days. Doing our best not to end up as amuse bouche for the prowling tigers and marauding bears as they pitilessly stalked Woodbine Avenue, or be gunned down by an errant crossbow bolt as the padres set out to rid the neighborhood once and for all of the godless Reds, we strung our newly purchased razor-wire, buried our army-surplus anti-personnel mines and commenced with the digging of a small moat. Taking every conceivable measure to Pirate-proof our home, we even went so far as to load up the bird feeder with poison-parrot pellets.
Days later, however, when we discovered the Kandinsky’s corner lot raised ranch mashed into splinters and in its place nothing but colossal footprints, we began to suspect that we had somehow miscalculated the rampaging mascots’ order of arrival.
“Kelly,” I asked. “Doesn’t San Francisco have a baseball team?”
Later that night, as we practiced our parries and thrusts in preparation for the impending Pirate assault, the clatter of hooves and a fusillade of gunfire drew us to the window. Peering over the sandbags, we watched as one of the unfortunate becowled padres was ridden down by a quartet of self-righteous Texas lawmen. As the horsemen dismounted to string up their quarry, my wife informed me she’d had an inspiration.
“We’ve got to pit Ranger against Padre,” my wife intoned conspiratorially. “Padre against Red.”
At first I thought the stress of the situation had gotten the better of her and I’d have to watch my back as well as my front, but when I saw her laser printing dozens of copies of The Communist Manifesto, photocopying Rent-a-Rack catalogues from MailOrderInquisition.com and speed reading the middle chapters of Gulliver’s Travels, I started to get the picture.
We started small, offering the Rangers flagons of beer as bounties on the snake skins and cub and tiger pelts. Then, with the ranks of cubs, diamondbacks and tigers thinned (and after we’d stored up enough beer to last the rest of the winter), we turned in the Brewers to the Liquor Control Board for commercial brewing without a license. Next, we schooled the Rangers in Lilliputian combat tactics and battle strategies, enabling a quick dispatch of one house-stomping Giant. From there, it was no great leap to incite a bloody and decimating anarchist riot, fatally setting the Reds against the Rangers.
The following week—employing a few choice 14th century quotes citing the evils of religious tolerance—we encouraged the Padres to convert the Reds by trials which must be described as unspeakably brutal. Suffice it to say, few survived.
It was only then we discovered that Pirates weren’t coming—rumor had it they disbanded to join up with the Mariners. We later learned this was the only way they could envision being involved in a winning season in the foreseeable future.
“What about all these damn priests?” I asked my wife. “We can’t live in a neighborhood ruled by Torquemada.”
“Just you wait,” she said.
And she was right. It took a few weeks of suffering enforced fish on Fridays and compulsory morning church attendance, but one bright Saturday in early April, the Angels came, from California or heaven, neither of us felt compelled to ask. But when they did, they drove the Padres from Woodbine Avenue like St. Patrick chasing the snakes from Ireland.
This excerpt from Fables of the Deconstruction is published here courtesy of the author and should not be reproduced without permission.
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