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    Black Dog: A Biography
    Black Dog: A Biography
    Black Dog: A Biography
    Ebook38 pages27 minutes

    Black Dog: A Biography

    By Peter M. Ball

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The Black Dog's been eating his girlfriends for years. Now Pete's met someone the dog won't devour.

    There are three things Pete believes to be true about his life: he loves reading; nothing interesting is ever going to happen to him, and the Black Dog who lives behind the fence will eat everyone he loves. It's been happening since his childhood, and he's mostly gotten used to it…right up until he meets Victoria.

    The dog seems reluctant to eat her, no matter how much Pete seems to like her. Then Victoria points out she can see the Black Dog too, and everything Pete took as a given about his life starts to change…including his relationship with the Black Dog itself.

    First published in the Interfictions II anthology of interstitial writing, Black Dog: A Biography is a genre-bending tale that blends emotional truth with outrageous fantasy. How much is fiction? How much is fact? There's only one way to find out for sure…

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrain Jar Press
    Release dateDec 10, 2018
    ISBN9781386302995
    Black Dog: A Biography
    Author

    Peter M. Ball

    Peter M Ball is the author of more than fifty short stories and six novellas, along with essays, RPG material, articles, and poetry. His short stories and non-fiction have appeared in venues such as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Shimmer, Dragon Magazine, Writing Queensland, and Apex Magazine, and has been included in several Year’s Best anthologies. He’s previously taught creative writing at Griffith University and the Queensland Writers Centre, spent five years as the manager of the Australian Writers Marketplace, and convenes the biennial GenreCon writing conference in Brisbane, Australia.

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      Book preview

      Black Dog - Peter M. Ball

      Black Dog: A Biography

      GET THE BRAIN JAR PRESS STARTER LIBRARY FOR FREE

      Sign up Notes from the Brain Jar, my no-spam newsletter, and get four short stories and a collection of non-fiction essays about writing and the writing life, all for free.

      Details can be found at the end of Black Dog: A Biography.

      Black Dog: A Biography

      A Brain Jar Press Short Story

      Peter M. Ball

      Brain Jar Press

      Black Dog: A Biography

      The first time the Black Dog showed up I was five. We were living in Miriwinni and it lurked behind the low, chain link fence that marked out our backyard, hunkered down in the long grass filling the space between the fence line and the train tracks. No-one else could see it, not even my parents. It was good at hiding when other people looked.

      I don’t remember much about our house back then. My parents were teachers, so we moved a lot. I was five, and that means I’m working with hazy images here: I remember the house was on stilts, thick hardwood pylons that would keep the snakes out and keep us dry if the river flooded. I remember off-white weatherboards and a corrugated iron roof. We lived across the road from an endless expanse of north Queensland cane fields. They burned blood red and spat ash into the air during the harvest months. The town was just a school, a pub and a corner store that sold fizzy drinks and cordial; maybe a couple of dozen people living around the train station, the rest spread out in the houses that nestled in the heart of the cane fields. My friends were mostly farm kids, seen only on weekends.

      Miriwinni was the kind of place where adults were filled with conventional worries: a bad harvest, the bills coming due, snake bites while cutting the cane, a cyclone sweeping in over the coast. No-one worried about the Black Dog except me. At first my parents would check the long grass when I spoke of him, just to make sure nothing was hiding there, but it didn’t take long for their concern to falter.

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