flash fiction – Cajun Mutt Press

!!Now Available from Cajun Mutt Press!!

April 11, 2023 James D. Casey IV

Tales From The Rotten Land is a mind-bending mixture of artwork and flash fiction by the talented Efe Tuşder. Stories about demons, sex, gore, interdimensional beings, existential crises, and other normal daily nuances; all laced with a touch of gallows humor and Efe’s beautifully macabre images. Also featuring cover art by JDCIV.

“Efe Tusder’s TALES FROM THE ROTTEN LAND is a more concentrated look at Narc Planet…the world we already live on…what if everything was reversed? Instead of artificial beauty hiding truth, horrid yet genuine truth spilled over the glitzy veil…from spitting on your breakfast plate to being the man who tried to split his skull. You’ll be splatter house appalled into enlightenment.”
—Mike Zone, EIC of Dumpster Fire Press

**Tales From The Rotten Land** by Efe Tusder
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C1J1XDGM

!! COVER REVEAL !!

March 29, 2023 James D. Casey IV

Tales From The Rotten Land drops on April 11th!! This is a mind-bending mixture of artwork and flash fiction by the talented Efe Tuşder. Stories about demons, sex, gore, interdimensional beings, existential crises, and other normal daily nuances; all laced with a touch of gallows humor and Efe’s beautifully macabre images. Also featuring cover art by JDCIV.

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 03/12/21

March 13, 2021 James D. Casey IV

Esmerelda and the Curse of Kindness

Esmerelda’s tears flowed down her cheeks making clean lines down her ashen dirty face as she rocked her head from side to side with a silent but real moan. Her nasty feet, black from soot, folded under her skirts on a torn mottled blanket. She had three more layered over her shoulders and covering her legs, all brownish or sullen green. The veil she wore halfway, clasped on one side, so her face, in all its hideousness, was profitably exposed for all to see.

Esmerelda hardly noticed the five-hundred Euros placed in her cup by the banker. She knew him by sight as he passed her daily. Her spot was in the shade of the huge concrete, marble-pillared structure he worked in, in the center of Rome. Her spot was decided by her Papa, who controlled that whole block and all its beggars.

It took a great deal of effort for him to give her that much money, especially since he had seen her there literally hundreds of times and simply chose to ignore her as he was not normally a charitable soul. But that day, seeing her with her nose sliced completely off, hog-like snout, bloody and dried with no salve, his heart was touched. She had been one of God’s prettiest creatures on this earth with a natural beauty: olive complexion, green eyes to match her name, long flowing black hair, full red lips, a curvy figure who walked with a natural grace.

But Esmerelda had been sold as a child to an Italian gypsy, some call Romani, travelers, who lived off the trade of begging, stealing, and conning. She ended up in the hands of a grizzled old Romani task master she called Papa. She felt like his daughter as she had been handed over to him and Mama as a baby. She thought of them as her own and she as theirs.

Sadly, Esmerelda’s sole purpose was to beg for money from tourists, workers, the citizens of Rome and anybody who might toss a coin her way for her to bring home to Papa. She had been doing this as a child with Mama. There was no schooling for Esmerelda other than the street. When she turned sixteen, a few days before the banker filled her cup, Papa, fearing her great beauty and the fact that she thought well too, being blessed by God with a superior intelligence in addition to her physical attributes, decided to fix Esmerelda.

The family all knew what was coming. The two boys, crippled as children and jealous of Esmerelda, tied her up. Mama drugged her with a face full of Novocain and a good shot of Demerol. Papa then took a sharpened razor knife and sliced her nose the fuck off – even with her cheeks. They held rags on it until it stopped bleeding. And poured alcohol on it to sterilize the wound as the drugged Esmerelda screamed through the gauze they had packed her mouth with.

Two days later she was taken to her corner as usual and that is when the banker, who had always and ever, ignored her, saw her weeping in streams and saw the revolting nose wound. Putting that amount of cash in her cup was the most humane, kind, and generous thing he had ever done in his entire life. It sure made Papa happy.

So happy that the next night the heartless bastard sliced her thirteen-year-old sister’s nose off too. You know, to bring in more money. He wasn’t greedy; that’s just how they lived.

This was written by el gallo sabio, a mochillero who spends his days in an underground marijuana club in Barcelona where he consumes copious amounts of Pilar, a Venezuelan cerveza, to charge the creative ions in his bones.

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 02/22/21

February 22, 2021 James D. Casey IV

Suitcase

My heart raced as I waited for you on the corner. The breeze picked up the edges of my new dress as it danced with glee. But it, as I, soon wilted under the unforgiving sun. As dark swallowed the day, I fell asleep on top of the suitcase your assistant sent.

I counted the minutes until our next meeting and again, I looked for your car to emerge from the horizon. Another night fell on your broken promise. Flowers and a familiar apology arrived a week later. The card read, “Let’s try again next year.”

Twenty-three expired birthdays have evaporated the small amount of trust I had in you. The suitcase, like my faith, was thrown into the dank corners of the attic.

You said you’d come for me. You never did.

Your new wife contacted me last week and informed me you have cancer. She said you wouldn’t make it to your next birthday. She wanted me to know how much you wanted to see me again.

I stood on the corner, waiting for the cab to take me to the airport. I looked down at the pink suitcase that will finally take its long-awaited trip.

Yong Takahashi won the Chattahoochee Valley Writers National Short Story Contest and the Writer’s Digest’s Write It Your Way Contest. She was a finalist in The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Southern Fried Karma Novel Contest, Gemini Magazine Short Story Contest, and Georgia Writers Association Flash Fiction Contest. She was awarded Best Pitch at the Atlanta Writers Club Conference.

The Escape to Candyland, a short story collection, was published in 2020.
To learn more about Yong, visit: yctwriter.com
All social media @yctwriter

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 06/21/19

June 21, 2019June 21, 2019 James D. Casey IV

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The hole

Ivan’s mother loved to talk about her family. How they were decedents from Polish royalty and that they had a coat of arms. Her family name meant something in this town and in the world at large. Her husband’s life, she said was not so much. Many people thought she had married beneath her and she was not afraid to say it out loud. Stanly hardly ever spoke about his life or where he came from. So, Ivan was surprised on the day they drove to Lattimer, Pa to see where his father had grown up. Ivan had no idea his father had ever lived anywhere else, or ever had another job outside of the paper factory he worked in. It was Ivan, his sister Judith and both his parents. His mother was oddly silent during the drive, but Ivan did not mind it left him free to doze off. He had a habit of being lulled to sleep in cars and his mother often chided him for not paying attention to the lectures she was fond of giving about manners, the importance of family and the need for hard work. A Saturday drive was for Ivan usually a lot like school.

The coal company camp looked unchanged from about 100 years ago Ivan thought as they walked up to a small one-room house that his father said was where he began and ended every work day. Wooden floors and no pictures on the wall and only one window would have been bad enough, but inside there was a filthy porcelain bathtub with claw feet and no water hook up. It was black inside and the water in it looked like mud. There were no towels around it but there was a clothes tree to hang your stuff on. A few feet away there was a hole in the floor that was a black and scary as anything Ivan had ever seen, all around the outside of the whole there were black dusty fingerprints making it look like someone, or something had dragged many people out of, or into that hole.

“What is that hole daddy?” Judith asked her father holding tightly to his hand. “Here is where we climb down into the mine,” her father said. We go in before sunup and at the end of your shift you come out, you bathe yourself there before you go home. He said this with no real emotion at all. Ivan was staring into the hole intently hoping he might see someone come out when his mother started to cry. It was quiet at first, but it built like a thunderstorm into sobs and hysterical tears. His mother took Judith’s hand from her father and left the room. You could hear her sobs outside and Ivan was not sure if his sister was supposed to console his mother or not because soon she was crying too. Ivan’s father said nothing for a while; he just looked down the hole for a long time, and for a second Ivan thought he saw his father smile.

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Matthew Borczon is a writer and Navy Sailor from Erie, Pa. He has written 8 books of poetry and publishes widely in the small press. He is married with 4 children.