Atrous Orb

Gabe Gomez is in a kickball game from hell.The dreadful Mr. Banabieger brings in a new cool black kickball... but something's wrong with it. Gabe is not a good player but he's an emerging voice in third-grade kickball analytics.. will his intellect and capacity for paranoia be enough to figure out the black kickball?Gabe wants to win, but he also wants to live. Childhood is full of inexplicable events that are merely survived rather than explained- that will have to be enough in the hatefully dark world of the Atrous Orb.Matthew Atkinson brings you a quirky, freaky SHORT STORY from his collection Final First that like so many things kids go through, looks like it's for kids but really isn't. Step up to the plate- it's rolling right toward you whether you're ready or not. 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.