The Q-Word

Lola doesn't know what the hell just happened. A paramedic struggling because that's a job with struggling with, Lola shows up at an apartment building where the hallway is covered in blood. It's a bad day for her- a lot of the city's resources are going elsewhere, and she's got to bear this burden herself. She wants to quit on this day till an apartment door opens and... it's the woman who loves the man who responsible for most of the bloodbath! Sometimes when crazy stuff happens you just need a smoke, a drink and the chance to talk it out. Especially when you're not exactly sure what the crazy thing was that happened, and you may never be. Matthew Atkinson brings you a mysterious but actually probably heartwarming "aftermath story" from his collection FINAL FIRST- and you know what? If anyone likes this one, he might tell you what happened in the first place. Be first on the scene; the stakes are high! 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.