Lucy Porter, “Ilk”
The first-person narrator of this story is Lucy Porter—or L. Porter as it says on the name tag. She wastes no time in letting the reader know that she is referenced by that initialized version of her name in the spring issue of Ficto-Factions by a certain G.T.A. in his/her paper presented as the recent NWUS Conference on Narrativity and Notation. It is not by accident the writer the published paper sports a gender-neutral pen name nor that the reference that person makes to L. Porter is accompanied by a personal pronoun indicating that L. is a man. Which she’s not, but a feminist she is. And therein lies the point of her story.
“Edith-Esther”
The title character of this story is a writer once very famous, but now ready to cross the last final thatch of ground separating her from senility. A biographer comes snooping for scoop on how the years has given the writer wisdom wrought from experience and a spiritual center that comes with passing fame. Instead, the biographer finds a subject hardly capable of providing anything useful for spiritual uplifting, especially with the confession that she turned her back on god after priest molested her. Rejecting the truth as too harshly cliched, he instead writes a best-selling spiritually uplifting biography that takes great liberties in distorting the actual facts.
The Artist, “Death of an Artist”
That he’s not given a name is, of course, significant. Just as much as the fact that the tale of his biography opens with the line “The old man is dead.” The narrator provides a slim sketch outlining the entire life of the artist and what makes is especially interesting is the story begins there at the end and progresses backward in time ending on a quote attributed to the artist: “No serious person ever pays attention to his childhood.”
Thomas Tallis, “New Music”
This short little puff of oddball narrative at its best commences with the story’s young female protagonist “reading” pages of musical composition. A chance encounter with a stranger reveals that the composition she is studying so earnestly are that of Thomas Tallis, second behind only William Byrd as the most gift composer of his era. Upon learning this fact, the strange can’t help but express wonder why, then, is she not using her time to pore over the compositions of Byrd with such intense scrutiny. The story ends upon the image of the woman’s husband getting used to learning about the new music that is playing as his wife is busy studying every last detail of the intricacies of the compositions of William Byrd.
