an exciting new serial by Miranda F. Mellis, which will bump up your quest for meaning and beauty a notch or two, and as a result or side effect of this, at the very least, highly improve your quality of life. You cannot afford to miss an entry, dearreaderfriend.
The following is a partial excerpt from EVERY DAY SHE MAKES A NEW BLUE DOG:
She made a new blue dog. This dog involuntarily remembered elements of her past life without remembering or recalling somatically or otherwise her identity as such. So: it wasn’t her self she remembered, rather it was certain objects she had used over and over again, objects covered in her fingerprints that floated before her eyes, phantasmagoric static interfering with her dog-flow: shoes, a broom, kites, cameras, radios, telephones, beer. In that life of objects she had been a human filmmaker. She had once strapped her camera to a seagull to film her own shadow at high noon. Then she exposed the film in the room in which her mother lay in state. The film was blurry when she projected it, but she felt she could clearly make out her mother, her face shining forth in the exposed footage of the shadow. The (closed) casket was purple and the undertaker was playing the Ukulele. None of this was clear, and yet it needed no explanation. All this is going through the new blue dog’s mind as she lifts her gray eyes to see her maker. She had been a filmmaker–-an artist. Now, in her present life as a new blue dog on a’,i, she is not the artist, rather she is the creation of this woman, this tall woman with black hair who is trying to coax her into playing with a stick. She doesn’t want to play with a stick; she wants to think about her condition. She walks away and, circling a few times first, she curls up in an unprepossessing ball to wonder at having died and come back as a dog–-which clearly was considered some kind of art form in this other world. She thought she could love this incarnation. She would be fed, she wouldn’t have to work, and she was free to spend all of her time thinking and even…playing. How to play? That would be something she would have to learn, as a dog: how to play, jump around and all that.