The Sky Over Chaos: Short Stories by Markus McDowell

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Chaos rattles our arrogance, shakes loose the dust, breaks rigor mortis. In chaos, you find out who you are—what matters, what you fear, what you love…

Here is a collection of nine short stories about chaos in multiple genres: historical, speculative, stream-of-consciousness, poetic, literary, and more.

• Morty loves his job. Really loves it. Perhaps not so strange, except that he is an embalmer at a funeral home. What happens when someone loves their job so much they don’t want to do anything else?
• Becky’s husband is away on business, in the cold of a snowy winter, when her youngest of four girls develops diphtheria. In the late 1800s, what can a young mother do?
• What if everyone had a hat but you? And it really mattered?
• Poor Charlie. He really needs order in his life. He prides himself on schedule, structure, and sameness. So did his grandmother…and they found her dead in a house crawling with thousands of insects she had collected.

Included stories: “Three Days,” “Turn and Face the Change,” ‘Three Hours and Thirteen Minutes,” “Ringing,” “Hats,” “Preparation,” “Ten More Days,” “Behind the Bar,” “What Does the River Say?”

Endorsements

“McDowell’s short stories are deep and penetrating, taking you through the uncharted waters of his characters lives, which can be conflicting, self-serving, desperate or hopelessly futile. We can find chaos almost anywhere here on earth, life is challenging for all of us. It is part of being human and we live in a world of free choice, we all make choices that affect us and each other.”

—Linda Zupancic, Reviewer

Markus McDowell is an author & editor of fiction and nonfiction in multiple genres. He is the author of To and Fro Upon the Earth: A Novel, Mortals As They Walk, Onesimus: A Novel of Christianity in the Roman Empire, and his first short story collection, The Sky Over Chaos, as well as a number of nonfiction books in law, theology, and literature in the ancient world..