Celebrant (64 page)

Authors: Michael Cisco

BOOK: Celebrant

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The girl, when he looks back in her direction again, is standing once more.
She has pulled the lid off a rain barrel and lifts water to her mouth in a cupped hand.
Slurp.
Slurp.
A glance up, toward the sky.
The light makes streaks on her wet profile.

There’s something admirable about that girl (deKlend thinks)
Intrepid.
Unusually coordinated and deliberate for a child.
If her parents had possessed the imagination to conjure her, this really wonderful little girl, would they have discarded her, as a baby?

If I were a father (he thinks) I’d want my daughter to be just that way.
I’d cherish a little girl like that one.

The girl glances in his direction as she takes off, following the others, gone all but silently, like a flash.

Heroic girl!
I won’t forget her (he thinks)

[end]

A
bout the Author

Michael Cisco is the author of novels
The Divinity Student
(Buzzcity Press, 1999, winner of the International Horror Writers Guild award for best first novel of 1999),
The Tyrant
(Prime, 2004),
The San Veneficio Canon
(Prime, 2005),
The Traitor
(Prime, 2007),
The Narrator
(Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2010), and
The Great Lover
(Chômu Press, 2011). His short story collection,
Secret Hours
, was published by Mythos Press in 2007.

His fiction has appeared in
Leviathan III
(Wildside, 2004) and
Leviathan IV
(Night Shade, 2005),
The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases
(Bantam, 2005),
Cinnabar's Gnosis: A Tribute to Gustav Meyrink
(Ex Occidente, 2009),
Last Drink Bird Head
(Ministry of Whimsy, 2009),
Lovecraft Unbound
(Dark Horse, 2009),
Phantom
(Prime, 2009),
Black Wings I
(PS Press, 2011),
Blood and Other Cravings
(Tor, 2011),
The Master in the Cafe Morphine: A Homage to Mikhail Bulgakov
(Ex Occidente Press, 2011),
The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities
(Harper Voyager, 2011), and elsewhere. His scholarly work has appeared in
Lovecraft Studies
,
The Weird Fiction Review
, and
Iranian Studies
.

An omnibus edition of his work is to be released from Centipede Press, and new short fiction is scheduled to appear in
Dadaoism
(Chômu Press),
The Weird
(Tor), and
This Hermetic Legislature: A Homage to Bruno Schulz
(Ex Occidente).

Michael Cisco lives and teaches in New York City.

Praise for The Great Lover, also from Chômu Press:

“
It seemed as if
The Tyrant
was the biggest monster Cisco could make, but
The Great Lover
is now his new masterpiece. Brilliant, light-years beyond … Cisco has an identity as much as any writer I’ve read.”

Thomas Ligotti

“
...Cisco is simply operating in a sphere that most weird fiction writers never reach, or attain only rarely, and is doing it effortlessly.”

Weird Fiction Review

“The surreal narrative [of
The Great Lover
] is something like a 400-page T.S. Eliot poem: otherworldly, lyrical, deeply philosophical, and supersaturated with extraordinary imagery and ideas.... Fans of stylish and thematically sophisticated weird fiction should seek out this mad testament to Cisco’s visionary genius.”

Publishers Weekly

“Cisco’s imagination is the most monumentally Tartarean of any dark fantasy writer currently writing.”

Rhys Hughes

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