Welcome to Litsy!

This is book #03 in our APEX VOICES series! In her first collection of short fiction, Damien Angelica Walters weaves her lyrical voice through suffering and sorrow, teasing out the truth and discovering hope. Sometimes a thread pulled through the flesh is all that holds you together. Sometimes the blade of a knife or the point of a nail is the only way you know you're real. When pain becomes art and a quarter is buried deep within you, all you want is to be seen, to have value, to be loved. But love can be fragile, folded into an origami elephant while you disappear, carried on the musical notes that build a bridge, or woven into an illusion so real, so perfect that you can fool yourself for a little while. Paper crumples, bridges fall, and illusions come to an end. Then you must pick up the pieces, stitch yourself back together, and shed your fear, because that is when you find out what you are truly made of and lift your voice, that is when you Sing Me Your Scars. Blurbs: "Sing Me Your Scars revolves in the mind's eye in a kaleidoscope of darkness and wonder." --Laird Barron, author of The Croning and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All "Damien Angelica Walters writes prose as sharp as a scalpel. With surgical precision, she slices through her characters' veneers to lay bare the secret scars underneath, the knots of fear and desire twisting them. The women and men in these stories struggle against their own, oddly-beautiful damage, and even when they succumb to it, the narrative is never less than compelling. Anatomist of dreams and nightmares, Walters is a writer to watch." --John Langan, author of The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies Reviews: "From a pure enjoyment perspective, there are few that rival Damien’s style. I will not be the first to talk of how lyrical her prose can be, but I haven’t heard many mention how unobtrusively so it is. It flows easy, like a song, but dammit if she doesn’t manage to pull of the trick of not allowing the wording to distract us from the tale. The images are strong and memorable and the stories are tight and there is even a second person perspective tale in here that doesn’t come across as snobbish and self-conscious." --Eviscerating Pen, Anton Cancre Table of Contents Part I: Here Sing Me Your Scars All the Pieces We Leave Behind Girl, With Coin Paskutinis Iliuzija (The Last Illusion) Glass Boxes and Clockwork Gods Sugar, Sin, and Nonsuch Henry Part II: And The Now Running Empty in a Land of Decay Scarred The Taste of Tears in a Raindrop Always, They Whisper Dysphonia in D Minor Shall I Whisper to You of Moonlight, of Sorrow, of Pieces of Us? Immolation: A Love Story Part III: And Away Melancholia in Bloom Iron and Wood, Nail and Bone And All the World Says Hush They Make of You a Monster Paper Thin Roses of Maybe Grey in the Gauge of His Storm (Apex Magazine issue 53) Like Origami in Water