Melancholic Parables by Dale Stromberg

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Bellatrix Sakakino has lived many lives. She dampens electricity. She’s radioactive. She longs for a fruit that went extinct before she was born. She’s not above committing a massacre for the sake of a perfect omelet.

She crashes through timelines and circumstances, recurring in these flash stories as a tricksterish film director, a pink hedgehog, a simulation of herself, or a child who can only speak in dial-up modem shrieks.

Are we the same person we were last year? Or last week? Or last story? Whimsical and dolorous, ironic and absurd, this slippery assortment of stories dances around these questions with ambiguous aplomb.

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“Stromberg gifts us a soft-spoken superhero with an all-in-one metaphysical toolbox. Bellatrix, like a Dirk Gently of reincarnation, navigates the ordinary in an extraordinary way. Encounters with to be and not to be: vulnerable yet ungovernable, tragicomic and ignormal. Shimmering reinvention. She already knows, and so will you.”
— Tucker Lieberman, author of Most Famous Short Film of All Time

“Wistful nihilism holds hands with absurd humor and lighthearted whimsy—some of the stories are almost horror, some are almost jokes. The parables challenge the very idea of an individual, consistent being and personality. We find ourselves drawn to ask how we are the same people we were in childhood, or the same people we are in dreams, or the same people we will be thirty years from now, or the same people we are when we’re blackout drunk. Maybe we’re not.”
— Briar Ripley Page, author of Corrupted Vessels

“The stories Dale writes are poignant, funny, tragic, and thought-provoking at each turn of the page. There’s a subtle and skillful dreamlike craft to the way he makes even the utterly absurd feel entirely natural in his short fictional worlds, and every story in this collection is a kind of gift: a chance to discover new perspectives.”
— Hengtee Lim, author of Something Like Hope

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