Exacting Clam

Kind of like visiting the old neighborhood

"Our train, a knife infinitely sharp, cuts through the tattered white lace fog careless on a bridge of sticks high above the ravine I strain to catch the unseeable bottom of and I recall that when the world was green I believed every lie they told me, even in the trinkets of their gods and the glory of their dead and I believed in these things hard until the day came when I believed in nothing and came to understand that I have endowed too many inanimate things with life and here I am, riding the home-bound train because of the tethers and the expectations and the fate of all sons, wordless, speaking to no one, interested in no one, seeking time with no one on a church of a train working under the order of a catechism of timetables."

This is the opening paragraph from my short story, "Time Tables," published this week by Exacting Clam #17, Summer 2025.

My thanks to Charles Holdefer and Guillermo Stitch, editors, for including it. You would think an old dog like me would take publication with a degree of nonchalance. As if it is the natural state of things. But I’m still just another writer in the slush pile, taking his chances. So the gratitude I feel when an editor “gets me” is still very real.

And it is always, always, a thrill to see the names of people I know among their past list of contributors. Jack Foley, Ivan Argüelles, Richard Kostelanetz, these are names that I go back with to the altzine, poetry-slam, mailart, birth of modern flash fiction 1980s drunken-alley-crawl-behind-the-jazz-club days with. Fellow veterans of John M Bennett’s “Lost and Found Times” when the only way to find the alternative press was in a thing called FactSheet5.

So here’s the thing, dear friend. You must support the small, alternative, independent press, It’s maybe even more important now than it was way back when. Exacting Clam has been out there swinging away at it for some time now. Go get a copy. I mean it.

Go here and get a copy. Don’t you want to know how “Time Tables” ends?