Dog Versus Sandwich, April 2008

The first offering in April’s Dog Versus Sandwich is “Eat My Stardust” by Sarah Totton. For those unfamiliar with Totton’s fiction, you’re in for a real treat. Her work has an odd quirkiness unlike any I’ve seen. While her style often possesses a childlike innocence, a certain disturbing decadence offsets the naiveté. In this particular tale, Zif the magic beaver must escape the wrath of his mother with her hydrochloric acid trap and her flame thrower so he can go be a groupie for The Reprehensible Ticktown Trio. To secure favor, he arrives with a jar of sperm to find himself the only one in attendance. For some reason, the conversation between Zif and the trio wasn’t as engaging as it could’ve been, and the ending didn’t surprise me in the slightest, but there is still much to like about “Eat My Stardust.” My only big complaint is that Totton doesn’t write more. I really wish she would.

Melissa Yuan-Innes’s “Piranhas, Pickle Joe, and Me” tells of a young boy’s struggle to be normal in real life while dealing with absurd adventures in his nightly dreams. The boy’s best friend is a pickle named Joe, and in the first scene, Joe saves him from piranhas as they rush underwater down the Amazon River. The next evening, his dad reads the boy to sleep, a practical book on how the telephone works, and soon sleep overtakes the boy and the nightly adventure is on.

I’m not really sure what to make of this flash piece. It’s supposed to be surrealistic, I imagine, but I found the author’s use of language too mundane to transport me to a world of “soft watches” or “melting clocks,” if I may use a Dalí metaphor. The pieces are there, but since it’s just a boy’s dream, the drama failed to sweep me into its maw. A dollop of lavender prose would have helped rush me down this dreamscape Amazon and recapture the nightmares of my youth. Or perhaps I just don’t care for the anthropomorphization of pickles.

“When I was Thirteen I Ate My City” by Trent Jamieson is pretty much synopsized in the title; still, this is an amusing little story. Filled with teenage angst and sexual frustration, this narration-driven tale is a comic delight. I don’t want to give away any more as it’s a mere 800 words, but check it out. It might make even the old at heart decide to go on a rampage and devour a city themselves. Unfortunately, the city of Brisbane has already been consumed by the boy in the tale.

“A Scene from Café Retro” by Peter M. Ball is just that. Told in second person, you sit across from Pandora as she sips her coffee spiked with ephedrine. She tells of Mitsuko, a “queercore purist” in a world of edgers after the first gene-push. This flash piece has a Gibsonesque feel about it, with its sex, drugs and rock & roll mystique. Basically a plotless tale, it succeeds by its sheer use of language to place the reader in the futuristic café. Absorbing.