My short story "The Only Thing Louder than the Talking Is the Silence" is in this issue of Tethered. It's online, and it's right here, but also here are the first few words. If you're paying attention to the typesetting, you'll notice it's laid out weird, and if you know me in real life then you probably know this is a pretty good indication that it's a part of a novel I've written, because I always get super aspirational and super layout-geeky on a novel when I write it, and one symptom of this is that the chapters always begin in some dramatic way. Like, say, 48-point font, and then they transition to a regular old font in midsentence. Geez, Matthue, just get published the old-fashioned way and let the designers do their thing.
This is a horror story, not scary per se but horrific, maybe, the type of thing that gnaws at you where there's something wrong but you can't quite put your finger on it till the last page, and maybe not even when the story finishes. I've been writing a lot of scary stories lately, and I think it's mostly inspired by Virginia Woolf, but that's probably another story entirely.
