© Sirens Call Publications
March 2022 is proving to be a purple patch for Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write horror fiction. Already this month he’s had a short story, Never Tell Lies Out of School, featured in Volume 16, Issue 26 of the online publication Schlock! Webzine, and another short story, Mermaid Fair, included in the new anthology Fearful Fun. Now a third Mountfield short story, Liver, is served up in the pages of the spring 2022 edition of the fiction and poetry ezine The Sirens Call.
Like much of my fiction, Liver takes as its starting point an incident that happened to me in real life, but then develops things in a different direction – a wildly different direction – from how they actually developed.
The incident that inspired Liver happened about 15 years ago while I was living with my dad, on his farm in Scotland, and I was earning a little money by working in a supermarket in a nearby town – in the story it’s Tesco, back then it was Sainsbury. One evening I arrived home from work and, in the farmhouse’s kitchen, discovered a huge, red, glistening thing heaped on a platter in the middle of the table. This, it transpired, was the liver of a cow that’d just died in an accident. The local butcher had promptly chopped up the carcass as a favour to my dad… Well, why let all that meat go to waste? Obviously, as Liver is a horror story, I’m glad the events that subsequently befall its main character didn’t happen to me in reality.
The spring 2022 edition of The Sirens Call is proof that the best things in life are free. It consists of 198 pages and contains 143 pieces of short fiction, flash fiction, micro-fiction and poetry, and yet costs nothing to download. You can get a copy of it, as well as copies of its back issues, here.