I’ve added a FAQ to the sidebar, as well as links to the other places I hang out online: Facebook, Good Reads, etc.

I’ve got a new story out in the Halloween issue of Canada’s Taddle Creek magazine: “Deja Yu Makes the Pain Go Away.” It’s kind of a Mad Men meets zombies, although I wrote it before I’d seen an episode of Mad Men. Here’s a teaser:

The worst thing about being dead is the pain. I felt like I was being crushed inside for months after the heart attack.

The kids tried to help ease it before Sarah, my wife — my ex-wife now, I guess — took them away with her. Samantha, my daughter, told me the pain meant my heart was broken. She said it would feel better if I came home again. Jesse, my son, said maybe being dead is like when you scrape your knee or elbow. You get a scab for a while but then the pain goes away.

Sarah wouldn’t talk to me after I died. She wouldn’t even see me. She changed the locks on the doors after she kicked me out. I tried to come back to visit the kids, but she wouldn’t let me in. I had to talk to them through the door, or on the phone. Samantha said Sarah worried I’d give them whatever it was I had. But I didn’t have anything.

My doctor said all the dead feel the pain. He said there are different theories about it. The people who think our condition is caused by all the preservatives in our food say it’s a chemical byproduct. The religious people think it’s purgatory, that we’ll be able to die for good once we’ve suffered enough. The medical experts think it’s the body’s memory hanging on to the last seconds of life. My doctor said if I think feeling my heart attack all the time is bad, I should try to imagine what burn victims feel.