New short story! "Sailing to Byzantium" now available in Fusion Fragment (issue 4)

 One of the stories nearest and dearest to my heart, "Sailing to Byzantium," is now available in Fusion Fragment magazine's 4th issue!

It is a pay what you want PDF, or you can get a physical issue or $23.99 Canadian. They sent me a contributor's copy, and it is a very high production print work!

If you liked some of my other short stories, "Daddy's Girl" and "For Whatever We Lose" specifically, then this story is an examination of similar themes.

It's a story that was rejected by some as too literary, and by others as too genre, and I'm still not really sure what to call it necessarily. But it's found its home, and I hope that it is read widely! Tell your friends!

Happy Birthday, Dad. I miss you.

Sailing to Byzantium
William Butler Yeats

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
-Those dying generations-at their gong,
The salmon-falls, the mackeral-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For ever tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificense;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing on God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.