Dog Versus Sandwich, January 2008

Dog Versus Sandwich is an Australian, blog-based e-zine “dedicated to the fantastic, absurd, surreal, obtuse, bizarre, fandangled, hyperbolic, ‘slipped streams,’ the parable, the duck with the broken leg, the experimental, the mental, and also stories in which a dog eats a sandwich (or vice versa).”

The January, 2008, instalment is the inaugural issue and features one poem and three stories. Poetry isn’t my oeuvre, but I’ll mention in passing that Kristine Ong Muslim’s poem, “What the magician’s assistant says about her master,” is entertaining and thoughtful, but not something that particularly resonated with this reader.

The first story is “Chronicle of a Doomed Librarian” by Toiya Kristen Finlay. Ostensibly about a library on the verge of closing due to lack of interest—with virtual reality cafes to be erected in its stead—the writing feels a bit distant, and the surreal element that comes via the ancient librarian doesn’t really gel. The story feels more like a taste of what might be, rather than a fully fledged tale in its own right. Which is a pity, as much more could be had from this—the nature of reality, the dichotomy between reading fiction and creating your own fiction, the potential characterisation—yet, as it stands, it lacks depth which in turn leaves it lacking meaning.

Patricia Russo contributes “Why Do They Dance?”, a weird little tale which is partly about tiny men who dance to unheard music and partly about the transient nature of relationships. Difficult to categorize, nevertheless there’s a pull within this story which draws you through and leaves you satisfied, despite a lack of familiar buttons being pushed to tell you how to like it. Really good fiction perplexes as well as entertains—there are no real answers in real life, after all. The writing is very good too:

The old people swear the little men are real. They’ve seen them before; used to see them all the time when they were kids. Hard-faced, butterfly-quick, dancing on the corners, dancing on the paths, dancing in the empty lots that are all built up now. This is nothing new to the old folks. The woman as withered as an ancient rose who sits at the window above the liquor store, she smiles now, when before all she did was scowl at the passersby. The kids, the dogs, on leashes and off leashes, the slinky cats. She’d scowl and spit down at them, at us all. Now she smiles, and her cheeks have a faint bloom to them.

The final story of January, “Fennywompus: A Modern Fable” by Faith Gardner, is a brief and humorous tale with an unexpected ending. An unemployed man is granted three impromptu wishes by Fennywompus, a magical stork that appears to have randomly knocked on his door. As with all of these tales, being careful what you wish for is crucial, and an almost arbitrary turn of fate robs the man of all that he desires. While the piece is too brief to be much more than what it is, it’s an entertaining read which muses on temptation and desire and…actually, let’s not chuck hyperbole over the story; it’s daft, but I liked it. Sometimes, that’s all that matters.

All of these stories are very short, with the longest at only 1500 words; however, Dog versus Sandwich seems to be ploughing an absurdist field which, while yielding a few stones, will also produce some very tempting potatoes. These stories hit its guidelines on the head. Well worth a look.