Actuarial Life Table

Shricky has a fun idea for a game, so he thinks. When you're out of college every time you get to hang out with your friends and play video games is special. But Shricky's come up with a different one: use the government's data on American lifespans and make a drinking game out of when he and his friends might die. They are going to die. In real life. Just like the rest of us. For now it's really good fun. But it's also kind of... dark. You know? Matthew Atkinson brings you this raucously adolescent and surprisingly deep banger of a SHORT STORY from the collection Final First, a thought experiment gone terribly wrong- but maybe that just means it served its purpose. FINAL FIRST, the debut short story collection from Matthew Atkinson, will take you across several different genres where you'll laugh, shudder, get shot, play some super high-stakes children's games, and get beaten senseless! FINAL FIRST offers slow-burning dramas either horror-adjacent (where cosmic mystery meets family drama in "Shard") or not (lighthearted adulting non-epic "Eggs in Stainless Steel") or WTF (the spiritual whiplash of "Glue for the Goose"). FINAL FIRST will stab you over and over with the emotional pain of growing up (the bitter epistolary grief of "Spread"; the game in "Actuarial Life Table" that gets too real) or the physical pain (the senseless and patently adolescent mayhem of "Fifteen Minutes Later"). FINAL FIRST will unnerve you with realism (the sleazy hotel hostage situation of "Occupied / Vacant"), definite un-realism (the bad dream and beyond of "Hypnopomp"), an uncertain amount of realism (the world-changing kickball game of "Atrous Orb", the aftermath of a horrible event that might come up in a later collection (the Bechdel test-acing "The Q-Word") Although a number of these stories prominently feature children... warning: not for kids! Arguably not for adults! Just like life itself. There's no kiss or kill like the first... let this collection be your FINAL FIRST.