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E Moss

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Apr, 2021

Stories (14)

Comments

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13 Followers

17 Following

14 Stories

245 karma pts

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The Party (part 1/2)

E Moss

(brief allusions to bodily fluids, a prevalent theme of existential anxiety and discomfort, as well as passages pertaining to a distorted perspective of imposter's syndrome; reading discretion is lightly advised) “A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relationships that is more complex and mobile than ever before.”Jean-François Lyotard It was a party I was invited to attend that Friday of the first week of July, and examining how poorly this strange crowd weathered through the trouble soon preci...

1 like

The Grey Man

E Moss

(Forewarning: this account addresses sensitive and frankly disturbing themes pertaining to the murderer Albert Fish, specifically the abuse which helped influence him and his attraction to acts of cruel, often fatal violence. Viewer discretion is strongly advised) Albert Fish, born May 19th 1870 as Hamilton Howard Fish at the capital of the then-young United States of America, had inauspicious beginnings in his childhood to what would years later on coalesce into a lifelong adoration for acts of cruelty, torture & punishment(namely, his ...

1 like

A Premonition of Better Things

E Moss

Submitted to Contest #216

It was not his intention for Jacob to leave his home behind this soon after his father had perished not long after he had shared another pleasantly benign and laconic dinner together, sitting across from the unclean heapings of hotly heated beef chunky in a canopy of canned vegetable aisles whipped downstream cheese-in-aesrolized can starch could not be used for a traditional trade in feigned tenderness shared between a single father figuring out who is even his son's best chances ahead but the dad did not want him back into a fitful game wi...

8 likes

Killers of Light (part 1; revised from a manuscript circa summer 2021)

E Moss

Submitted to Contest #206

Armies of scab-clad blackguards gather in crooked files under dim little exhaust off last skein of light before the one who wrote MOT so was the halcyon thousandfold at a zenith for all varieties of phosphene kiln killers to try and take flight. Behind them, cities and towns and terrain alike all lie razed, ablaze high, outlines of blackened rubble cast low.The mighty Mahmud, the victorious Lord,That all the misbelieving and black HordeOf Fears and Sorrows infest the SoulScatters and slays with his enchanted sword-from The Rubaiyat of O...

8 likes

The Shelf Life of an Insomniac When Faced With Danger

E Moss

It was not what clear at first glance once it emerged into view, but the legs were less artful the closer he looked at this new form, feel that his entire nerve from top to bottom shrank into abject terror as the butchered bottom half of the form was nothing but a bunch of floridly threadbare tendons pulsating largeish only at the kneecap and thighmeat rounded until it terminated in a white, ringed circle of bloodless heel arcs that came inflexible on twofold feet that were without hindrance of skin or tissue and pronged toes jammed crookedl...

1 like

Where Angels Seek & Dare Beyond Fool’s Wise Praise

E Moss

Submitted to Contest #172

(tw: mental health disturbingly depicted, parasocial influence culture grotesquely illustrated, as well as some explicit but brief instances of physical violence, and of course the disturbing suggestiveness of ambiguity that this narrative presents the following tale; author's note) By the time you read this, none of it will be true anymore. It will become increasingly clear that the boundaries have been breached longago. There is no need for ourselves to think lesser, once the publicity has done the release against what my convictions has...

8 likes

The Late and Great Job: What Went Wrong?

E Moss

Submitted to Contest #159

(Tw: suggestive violence, nightmarish imagery, amoral and wanton displays of greed, necromancy) Throughout a brief notoriety during that heightened forest of chiseled moon dust lay on the brickyard stockades: Weimar: burnt-out. 1923. Small children, holes in their faces, are a cherubim so wan and fragile. Seven days did me and Seleck sit squat in the shinola of the straightway into a puddle of hellwater. It was after many hours mired among the cabaret moribund whereupon we were promenading, penniless, peering for some...

7 likes

The Body Is Nothing But Someone Else to Overcome

E Moss

Submitted to Contest #151

Kurtz Loggia didn't know how to initially respond during the odd, finicky lull burnt over so many nights without having markedly a single disturbance to his phelgmatic existence within a smallish fifthteen-by-eighteen foot apartment condominium where he stayed whenever he wasn't outgoing with reprehensible attempts at summoning an artistically meaningful living by nosing his way into the illicit care of homely village spinsters who were once talentless socialites like himself, but nowaday were complacent in soliciting the company of surly do...

8 likes

The Convocation of Baal Betwixt The Final Zenith of Osiris

E Moss

Submitted to Contest #117

(trigger warning: acts of brutal, disturbing and esoteric violence bearing a ritualistic nature; iconoclastic imagery and allusions; cataclysmic terrestrial events potentially anxiety-inducing and evocative of certain environmental uncertainties) Everything was ready for the ritual. The owl would be plucked so the howling recesses of the drawing-room window would be opened to the applause of jade brilliant dappled across a baleful constellation, flaring saffron darkly from outermost the fall of the shadow over forests splintered with imp...

6 likes

Theaterland

E Moss

Submitted to Contest #102

CW: self-harm, strong language “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”–attributed to W.C. Fields Belief, however nebulous, is a truth only cogent enough to serve those who would make the absence of that what is unthinkable to all but themselves. ** Let the viewer understand that this fictitious staging, this gamiture, is only one’s plight who is to be sentenced in that denatured assiduousness for relinquishing themselves to be insubordinate celebrants who think themselves burlesque tragedians, but grew t...

10 likes

Uproars and Benedictions

E Moss

Submitted to Contest #98

I have a limited arsenal of internal movements at hand given to me for explaining my plight, so if focus is frenetic then I shall implore the reader will entertain that I scramble in reciting my last utterances alive like slurred declarations concerning a passage into stillness that is transient, whereas all other which I surface is tenebrous in inhospitable abandon. So I ask that the reader be unflinching about observance so that I may leave understood, notwithstanding my vanishing reserve not only depleting me of alacrity but also seldom t...

9 likes

Wrong Ways Often Make Us Stay

E Moss

Submitted to Contest #97

I. Somewhere along the middle of the woodland road, someone is stepping alone as an honor to serve for his outstanding slow and somnambulatory hypnosis that draws him continuously onward across the purulent scarification of macadam dustpan gravel and suppurating topsoil that only grew sorer, more tremulous with eczematous snowfall clenched between his nethers tucked shut beneath a valley’s downside enshadowed by oaktree curtains drawn, a man discovered someone he loathes more than himself. That person was a woman. He quickly becam...

9 likes

Vae Victis

E Moss

Submitted to Contest #91

I am not the same. This shouldn't be my downfall but it is, and I want to make something crystallize before going any further about how my last chance at attaining insuperable greatness was completely fumbled because you just had to be included within the bigger picture. It was supposed to be my namesake marked as worthy being among those few who were triumphant, me displaying what my entire lifespan could do in one moment that no one else could ever be capable of finishing. No one else could of underwent all I had done in stoic preparation ...

12 likes

The Nephilim In The Furnace Dark(original rough draft; currently nearing novella length)

E Moss

Submitted to Contest #90

Earlier that night: Everything these days could become available now nationwide for public seepage and disposal. So could trains, it seemed. There were many people there that night, important people. It wasn't just the advent for jetsam clouds overhead I'm afraid. At the end of the night all four boys, including me, would end up looking at nothing but moonlit candelabra in the whalelike belly of a sky, searchingly. But as of right now? At the beginning of all this ruckus? I sat mullioned as a vulturelike craning with a sunken larynx, f...

7 likes

Author bio

27 y/o author and poet, currently resides in eastern TN. Am almost done completing my first novella, which originates as a draft published on here as Nephilim in The Furnace Dark. I am also active on medium.com and sometimes on twitter. Have composed several short stories within the span of 2021 following a long period of inactivity and silence. Published one selected works volume in 2015, has mixed feelings about the quality of this publication and had exercised extreme trepidation in approaching published work since. Born 1994 in Raleigh, NC. Favorite authors include William h. Gass, John Hawks, Hart Crane, Thomas Pynchon, Flannery O' Connor, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Kathy Acker, Nabakov, Samuel Beckett, Will Self, among others. Ask about my process and my stories I haven't published on here.