New Fiction at Rumble Magazine

One groovy thing about Rumble Magazine is that you can read the site in your choice of five color-schemes: blue dream, beige boy, hot pink, sea turtle, and my personal favorite, yellow bastard (or is that five groovy things?).

Another groovy thing about Rumble Magazine is that the offerings don't necessarily have anything to do with the "theme" of the month. This month, for example, it's the "We Are All Doomed" Terrorism Issue, in solemn acknowledgement of the existential threat we're all under from deadly underwear bombers and so forth. And yet the stories and poems this month -- by Michael Doherty, Kyle Hemmings, Meghan Lamb, Lisa Carroll-Lee, and Jonathon Ullyat (plus a J.A. Tyler review of Joseph Young's Easter Rabbit and an interview with its author) -- seem flippantly, even brazenly, off topic!

I smell irony. Is there any chance the Rumble editors don't take seriously the ceaseless vigilance of the US government and US media, so ceaseless and vigilant that it is sometimes hard to tell them apart? Is it even possible that the site's groovy five-color template selection represents some kind of subtle or unconscious "dissing" -- or whatever you kids these days call it -- of our sacred Homeland Security Terror Status Alert system?

In that case it shocks me to report that a story by me, "The Halsted Arms," has also somehow found its way into this issue. I can only say, in my defense, that I originally thought I was submitting it to this Rumble Magazine, the one with motorcycles and pictures of chicks on motorcycles.