A piece published, and habituating to the absence of the panther

Dec 05, 2023

I am thrilled to share that one of my flash fiction pieces was included in the inaugural issue of Dog Throat Journal, the “home of compelling short fiction and prose poetry by a variety of authors.” The purpose of Dog Throat is to “provide readers with enjoyable, unusual fiction and to help authors promote their work, web sites, and books.” The editor is Victor D. Sandiego, whose writing you can also find at

Dynamic Creed

My piece is titled My Strange Rocker, and I’m over the moon that it was included in this first issue of Dog Throat. Please give My Strange Rocker a read; it’s scintillating. And check out all the other gems in the issue as well!

My writer friend, Oleg, recently published this lovely piece, “Flying is for fools”, on the

Soaring Twenties

website. Just before reading his story, I’d started a tiny story of my own. Just after reading his story, I emailed Oleg to say how much I adored the piece. He shared that his original ending skewed darker, and so I basically yoinked his specific alternate ending and made it my own. It’s less stolen and more shared. Being inspired by others is one of my favorite things about being a part of the Soaring Twenties. See my piece below, a springboard from Oleg’s above - read both, read them all!

We’ve habituated to the absence of the panther. All it takes is time. A predator long gone from existence. Like a former lover, now emaciated by your forgetfulness, who used to be fat from feasting on you. They say scarcity can lead to being loved, as absence makes the heart grow fonder. But he realized that when you are not seen in the first place, then you are not missed once gone. While he’d dreamed of being a panther, he’d always felt more bat. Less sinew and more flap.

Years ago, he ran away from the wife he half loved and the life he wholly abhorred. Ran away from nights he spent making love to his keyboard while she made love to the TV, neither seeing the irony of their mutually destructive pleasuring. That spring, he adopted a dog, not for companionship but to conceal the real reason for his evening walks - being away from her and home. A house he didn’t choose in a country that felt foreign to him. So he and the middle-aged canine ambled in the power easement, a stretch of vegetation that toupeed the buried power lines while the rest of the world went bald. The bats flew overhead, adding a click and buzz to the invisible electricity, adding archaic audio to a modern silent film. He nearly walked the dog to death, so chose the path of generosity and left.

He quit his life and abandoned his wife to live in the caves of bats, researching their deaths and disappearance. He spent weekends reading the lore attributed to their insectual crawl and rapid cyclone flight. He spent weeks measuring their rawbone length with the anxious tenacity he used to measure his own in puberty. How could people fear the animal that was the inspiration for DaVinci’s ornithopter, with its webbed and ossified wings? With its mechanical articulation. A wonder he pondered daily. Biomimicry at its finest, he said to fellow amateur chiropterologists. They nodded because respirators can muffle vocals and the audible crinkle of their puffed protective equipment made every conversation sound like static. The others wore the respirators to protect themselves, but he wore the respirator to protect the bats. Not only from the exhale of his potentially viral pathogens but from the virality of his escapist ennui. What would he do if the bats flew away from the cave the way he fled from his domesticity?

“Go back,” they’d bellow with the silence of their wings.

“No,” he’d suffer, from the safety of his cowardice.