By Robert John Miller
Somewhere in the tub was a bar of soap, the kind with grit layered in to scrub off oil and dead skin and the previous day, the hefty kind that fit in her hand like a brick, that they market toward men who work desk jobs and teenage boys longing to be bigger, stronger than their friends, stronger than their fathers.
“Remember when you were the future?” she thinks to herself, head tossed back against the porcelain lip. The whole room filled with steam. The water would soon spill over.
Robert John Miller‘s work has appeared in Hobart, Necessary Fiction, MoonPark Review, X-R-A-Y, Peregrine and others. You can find more stories at robertjohnmiller.com. He lives in Chicago and is polishing his first novel.
Robert John Miller’s work investigates the ways in which systems of power contort and the coping mechanisms employed to evade the psychological emptiness that results from disfigurement. His grotesques often exhibit an exuberance for life but also a dread, unable or unwilling to understand the structures that confine them.
The Birdseed 