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The Odd Purgatory of My Personal Perception: Little Portraits by Keith Hamilton CobbThese short pieces were a long time in coming.  Many of them were around three laptops ago…  But now they’re here, and that’s about all I’ve got to say about them…  Except perhaps that, over the many years that I’ve picked them apart, put them back together, slapped them around, and let them sit, they were fun to write.  Perhaps they’ll be fun to read as well.  Perhaps you’ll have a look, or a listen… and let me know.

Bless’d be.

 

Audio Excerpt from the story, God’s Children

 

 



A Collection of Short Fiction in Progress

Leer and Keith SoundsmithWebRandom clips taken at Soundsmith Studios with the soundsmith himself, Leer Leary.

“The Odd Purgatory of My Personal Perception” is a collection of stories that have been kicked around on one laptop of mine or another for the past 15 years.  Some have said that they are not stories at all.  Maybe they’re right.  Some call them erotic short fiction.  Others have said that there is nothing erotic about them.  We’ll see…

Fourteen selections… or so… Small noises…  Big silences… Awkward, unbalanced, verbose, meandering prose in bite-sized pieces…

And it’s coming soon.

 Above:  Recording work on the short story, “God’s Children,” also excerpted below.

…She was God’s child, so he had thought; one of the ones that the Universe looks after because, for whatever reason, they didn’t end up here upon this seething orb of self-serving fuck-ups with the tools to fend for themselves, so he thought…  Dumber than a box of rocks, he’d thought, but as delicate and as lovely as an orchid.  And she smelled like vanilla ice cream.  She was the sort of vacuous that could be beyond sexy when the sexy wore it.  And he had not been looking for a lover that would be anything more than that: sexy, immediate, and unencumbering ever after.  He had few other reasons to subject himself to a barroom’s sensory barrage of boisterous humanity.  Everywhere else, feeling the oppressive weight of its incurious tumbling on, he navigated around the dumb motion of the masses as best his own too human condition could manage.  The only thing to be gotten by braving the concentration of festering crowd psychology that a Friday night tavern contained was the prize of some pretty diversion intent on receiving him without superfluous ceremony; something sweet and soft to distract his embattled heart and sate his hunger for an hour or two without making of itself a nuisance in the a.m., and she came dancing up to him from out of the aggregate of noise and dark and compressed bodies in a joint in Seattle, and stood at the bar staring at him, blankly, as her hips swayed to the bass beat of The Isley Brothers singing “Caravan of Love…”  

© Keith Hamilton Cobb


Beth and Roman

MorningShoesweb

           “Roman lay sprawled on his face about the bed, half dreaming, less than half awake, reached for her, his fingers finding, feeling the contour of an uncovered hip, his touch her stirring, turning from him, a long, irregular breath, exhaling, pressing her back against him, and he wishing he could be outside of himself on mornings like these; outside of himself, invisible, and watching the two of them together, waking, and behaving like two do when their only acquaintance has been made by the trial and error of an unplanned, first time tryst; when the light of the morning reveals that they are beautiful.”

Excerpted from the short story, “Beth and Roman” from the collection, “The Odd Purgatory of My Personal Perception”
©Keith Hamilton Cobb
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