fwriction

A unique voice in the writing community, Blake Butler’s work continues to entertain, intrigue, and fascinate me. His novel-in-stories, Scorch Atlas, and novella, EVER, are worth your time. Today’s Story of the Day, “New Fruit,” was originally published in Word Riot:

“He took a moment to savor smoke from the just extinguished set of twenty-six birthday candles pressed carefully into the head of a chocolate cupcake, so close together that there might as well have been a single wad of wax. The hammer he held gleamed on its metal end, the over-polished head that he’d rubbed hundreds of times over with a disinfecting towel. He wanted to insure that this, the instrument of its undoing, would be the cleanest thing he’d ever known. He wanted it cleaner than the white linen sheets he’d been laid upon fresh from the womb, laden with afterbirth, weighing no more than a pile of fifty dead goldfish, his heart effortless and in need of artificial maintenance.”