Don’t Smell the Floss: Part 1 Story Titles and Descriptions Installment 2
Part One: Kittied to Death: Love Stories for a Contemporary Audience (Stories 4-7)

Read about Stories 1-3 from Part 1 in this earlier post…

The new collection of short stories has been divided into 2 main parts, with 7 stories in each. Kittied to Death, Part 1, features seven stories that all attempt to answer questions about love. In this post, a brief synopsis of stories 4 through 7 in part one of the book.

4 A Brief History of the Tupperware Party
We all have things about ourselves that provide the necessary insecurity to keep us honest. Written entirely in second person, the main character in this story has a serious problem with his own body hair. To put it mildly, he’s a gorilla man. To make matters worse, his girlfriend is a tiny hairless female specimen of what is supposed to be the same species. When she invites her father over to the house one Sunday evening for dinner, Gorilla Man loses his cool and puts the entirety of his relationship with her in jeopardy.

5 And Then Somehow, We Find Each Other (In Germany, the Cats)
A young, scruffy looking man rides the bus around San Francisco one fall afternoon, on his way to get a haircut. To pass the time and beat down his boredom, he creates super heroes out of the bus denizens, tucking the characters safely into his imagination, describing them in such a way where the line between what is real and what is dream becomes hazy. That is, until one of the heroines in this landscape entreats him to a magical conversation in which he discovers that they have known each other in another life. Or have they? She knows perhaps too much of “their” story, but what is actually in their past may not really be anything more than a fiction they have created, either in conversation or only in his head.

6 My Friend the Pornographer
Amateur pornography cameraman Will, aka “Toots,” has invited a friend along for a ride, down to Long Beach where he has scheduled an official shoot for his boss who runs the website, “Darkmeat.com,” a fantasy interracial porn kingdom. Narrated closely and more in the manner of curious journalism, our narrator struggles throughout the evening to pin down exactly what is “real” in this world that seems highly arch, clumsy at best and entirely fictional. Herb and Luther, the actors in the scene, engage with Toots seemingly like anyone locked into the roles of employer and contract employee, only of course with special exceptions given their line of work. When Candy Pink finally arrives for her scene, the energy shifts, making the narrator’s pursuit of “the real” even more hazy and frustrating. Is Herb’s desire to take his own Polaroids of the night real? Is Luther’s phone conversation with his girlfriend real? Is the massive python named Baby, locked in the bathroom, real? Find out when you read….

7 Ohne Titel (der Punkt)
Obsessed with the spot on his foot, which in the end may only be metaphorical (or allegorical for that matter), the narrator in Ohne Titel (Translated from the German simply as Untitled (the Spot)) battles his ever-growing paranoia over co-workers in the Corporate Bureaucracy, whose every action he sees as an unflinching, dastardly attempt to expose his secret, thereby rendering him a powerless fool. Through history, shopping, psychology and world travel, the machinations of his mind are laid bare — and we understand just how corruptible the brain can become when its owner latches onto an obsession that takes over. One evening, he agrees to join his coworkers at the local bowling alley for some work-related sport, when he accidentally hits a young man riding a bicycle (with his car). Was this merely another scheme on the part of the Corporate Bureacracy?

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