Table of Contents

ANTISOCIETIES

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Milking

Stillville

My Hand of Glory

The Starving of Saqqara

The Purlieus

Saccade

Antisocieties

Oneiropaths

Water Machine

About the Author

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ANTISOCIETIES

ANTISOCIETIES

Michael Cisco

New Orleans, Louisiana

© 2021 Grimscribe Press

Cover art by Jesse Peper

Cover design by Michael Cisco and Jon Padgett

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Published by

Grimscribe Press

New Orleans, LA

USA

grimscribepress.com

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Intentionally Left Blank

WE LIVED IN a little house on the hilltop, just below the peak. Nobody lived up on the actual ridge line. There was a narrow, snaky side street that went up and around one curve, and we all were hidden up at the end of it, a cluster of maybe a dozen small houses. Everybody knew each other, because we formed a kind of pocket community up there. With no through traffic, people would be out in the street all the time. We were a sociable bunch up there. If I put my mind to it, I imagine I could probably remember the family name of each home.

That year, my mother tried to kill herself and had to go into the hospital for a while. My father had to go back to base at the same time and couldn’t get an exemption, so Aunt Gabrielle offered to take me in for the time being. She lived in a white stucco house on the hilltop, nestled in a heavy spiderweb of cables. I remember there were cables strung up all over, so that it looked as though the houses were all leashed to each other. People were in and out of that house all the time, because she was in a wheelchair and never left the hill. This guy named Claudio she called her “boyfriend” did all the shopping; he was a musician who lived somewhere in the valley, but he came by pretty often and took good care of her. She had two refrigerators, a big lie-down deep freezer, and a garage full of food in cans and boxes, enough to feed an army, so I wasn’t any burden. It meant stale cereal and microwaved stew, dusty two-liter bottles of soda and angel food cake you had to thaw out in the microwave at two in the morning with a pillow over the oven so the beeping wouldn’t wake her up, that’s all. She wouldn’t have complained if I had woken her up.