My fiction piece, “Metamorphosis Variations” (inspired by the first sentence of Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”) now appearing in 3:AM magazine. Excerpt below:

As I awoke one morning, from a night of discarded syringes and cough syrup, I found myself transformed into a woman dreaming she had been transformed into a scream. She, meaning I, awoke, the taste of mercury teasing my tongue, nerve-endings tuned to the residue of the scream I had been: the dead with polyphonous voices.

When the trembling in my legs quieted down, I swung them over the side of the bed, planted my bare feet onto the carpet, and stared at toenails painted faded calico. In staring, with my head bowed down, my hair, a sleep-warmed autumn, fell to either side of my jawline. I knew that in order to return to my pre-dream-state—I was a man of some sort, I think—I would have to pass through another scream, to release something primordial, a catch of hard existential candy lodged in my larynx. I would have to feel myself woman.

God, a plastic surgeon wearing a false mustache and dark glasses, raised her scalpel, and told me: Not all screams are created equal. Then she laughed, the blade moving swiftly.

Read the full story here.