TOUCH ME WITH YOUR COLD, HARD FINGERS a short story by Elizabeth Stott (2013)
Copy 120 of a signed limited edition of 200 copies
Purchased this week from NIGHTJAR PRESS
If I review this story, it will eventually be found in the thought stream below or by clicking on this post’s title above.
The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews 
“The pizza boxes look untidy on the table. They will annoy Tony. She leaves them there anyway.”
A story that starts almost like chicklit with a woman getting her feet under the table for a future with Tony. Friday was his night for stag dos, Saturday THEIR night. Her looking forward to this particular Saturday night, for which she brings to his place takeaway pizzas … she is halted by a tangible ellipsis, a sudden double-take, and is in for a very creepy ride trying to relieve herself of an onset of horror, not a hard cold pizza, but something hard and cold while cloying as if it is still warm. Jealousy made as if into a fabricated self-rehearsal that can’t be clawed off.
I was very interested by my first experience of the quality format of this discretely presented short story, giving a ten page work some bigged-up power over you, without impulse towards a gestalt with other such fictions alongside it. I can’t yet explain this effect, in contradistinction to the more normal effect of a mutually cosy anthology accompaniment in a big realbook or as an effete ebook. Maybe I will have more thoughts after reading six other fictions waiting – within this Nightjar-container format – in my eventual reviewing pipeline on this site.
Other Nightjars:
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