More Beautiful Lies

Chloe Hooper, Anna Kay, Jay Krantz and Mark Panozzo pool their remarkable talents in More Beautiful Lies, a collection of the best of their writing and a taste of wonderful things to come.

Less and less sure of more and more, but my name is Ruby… Friends, relatives, the man who fixed my ceiling, all saw me at the books and all asked me what story I was spinning. They asked me what I was researching. I told them, ‘Phantasmagoria’. They’d sit me down, hold my hand in theirs and ask me, ‘Ruby, do you believe in phantoms?’ JAY KRANZ, ‘Phantasmagoria by Ruby’.

So there’s nothing left for me to do. I face Alison and I tilt my head back.
Just slightly. I close my eyes and let Alison take my face in her hands. I let her smooth her hands over my eyes and across my forehead. I’m so close I can feel her breathing. She’s breathing on me…
ANNA KAY, ‘Other Parts’

‘And I’ll only believe you,’ replied Lou which, if she were to be honest, wasn’t completely true. But as she dug her thumbs into Bella’s shoulders, she decided things: 1. She didn’t want to end up as the resident bondage queen at her local Old People’s Home. 2. She didn’t want to live on a hobby farm making pottery in breast- or vulva-shapes.
3. She didn’t want a recipe for Ambrosia…
CHLOE HOOPER, ‘The Anything Can Happen Room’

I’ve read about a habit of obesity that sometimes gets pedophilia victims later in life, this fat-bellied, coping schizophrenia. History is blackened out and eating habits blow until fat rolls down the underside of the belly and cover that dark spot between the thighs…
It’s happened before. It’ll happen again…The world has already ended a count of seventeen times. Yes, it all begins with a flash…
Everything is flattened. I’m as flat and crisp as bacon and it’s such a dumb way to die…
MARK PANOZZO, ‘Carl Warnecke’s Brain Jokes’