Hi, I’m Susan Frith
a storyteller, strategic snacker, and relentless creative type. I live with my family in Orlando, FL, where I write about kidnapped swans, radium girls, balloonists, and phone scammers. Also, English teachers, bicycling dogs, Poe impersonators, lion tamers, angry waterfalls, and more. I'm revising a novel about a lactation consultant who gets swept up in a cult.
It’s your turn. Dip the brush in the paint pot on your desk. After you slip the bristles into your mouth, slowly pull them out through puckered lips. Feel the cool grit dissolve on your tongue.
Francine’s doctor rocks on his stool. “What day of the week is it?” he asks her.
She looks around the examining room for clues, but there’s only a black-and-white photo on the wall, a picture of somebody’s feet on the beach. As if that’s going to relax her, staring at strangers’ feet. Francine’s binder would tell her the day, but her daughter holds it tight to her chest to keep her from cheating.
—Today is Wednesday
Zone 3
Clearly, I, Celine, have made a miscalculation. Misled by a stranger, an outsider, that large-knobbed Trumpeter Swan whom I most certainly was not flirting with.
When the man snatched me up, I was all for it. I didn’t even fight. I said Show me the world! But the Trumpeter Swan must have been lying. He promised minarets, marionettes, and puffed pastry. Calliopes and foosball tables. The Chunnel. The Matterhorn. Mount Kilimanjaro. Blah. Blah. Blah. Instead the world appeared to be nothing but a blue tub with a rust stain down the middle and a giant bottle of follicle-stimulating shampoo on the rim.
There are eight of you left now. Three have backed out, and Lenny, of course, isn't returning. For your next challenge, you are stuck for one afternoon in a two-hundred-year-old prison after signing a waiver not to sue the National Park Service if struck by falling plaster.
—Tours for Claustrophobics
New Madrid
(Link forthcoming.)
Selected Stories
They Kept Riding, Nashville Review
Mycophile, Necessary Fiction
Three Hearts, Phoebe
Bullfighter’s Daughter, The Quotable
Hollow Cut
The Cossack Review
The Visitor
The Potomac Review
Flight Over Paris, Raleigh Review
The Singing Waterfall, forthcoming in Emrys online
Welcome Center (Some Notes for Our Visitors), forthcoming in Cleaver