chomping at the bit: love & black holes

Khristian Mecom's short story “We Once Lived in Caves” (IHLR Volume 13.6) positions Amelia as a modern day Goldilocks as she enters her neighbors' homes, though with a specific set of rules to follow. Mecom's story transforms the familiarity of one's home into

something unique through Amelia’s interaction with those spaces and objects. In the story, Mecom has created a tension between knowing someone intimately through living in their space versus knowing someone personally via interactions beyond a wave: speech, touch, art. Mecom writes, “Soon she feels like she knows him better than anyone could, because she knows not what he puts forth to the world, but what he is behind all that, what he hides in the secret corners of his home.” We look forward to her new book: Love & Black Holes.

From Black Hill Press: The formation of a black hole in Penelope’s living room leads her to the end of her relationship with her boyfriend, Oliver—an end which she may or may not have caused by pushing him into said black hole. But the black hole persists, even after she is long gone, and affects the lives of a lone astrophysicist who has lost his wife, a young woman who comes to the realization that she isn’t in love with her boyfriend, and a girl who has lost her entire family to an epidemic. Love & Black Holes explores the complicated nature of love and the lasting effects of love that ripple through the universe.

“Khristian Mecom’s powerful novella explores the ways in which love in its various forms has the potential to both destroy us and sustain us. From the moment Penelope pushes her boyfriend into the mysterious black hole, the novella takes the reader through the causes and effects of this instinctual action, and shows us moments of love (or lack thereof) that are both small and intimate as well as moments that exist on a grand scale—and how those small moments can become grand. Throughout the story of Penelope and Oliver and the vignettes of others who have been affected by this cosmic anomaly, Love & Black Holes is always raw and poignant, and will echo in the reader’s mind long after the book has been set down.”

-Sarah Becker, Editor

Khristian Mecom was born in Oklahoma but grew up and still lives in South Florida. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University. Her fiction has appeared in Slice Magazine, Passages North, Zone 3, Iron Horse Literary Review, Yemassee, and elsewhere. Find her online at http://weoncelivedincaves.tumblr.com/ and on twitter @krmecom.

Buy Khristian's book here.