Lorna D. Keach (she/her) lives and writes in Omaha, Nebraska, US. Her work has appeared in various small print and online publications over the years, but she recently took off time from publishing to have a baby, hone her craft, read some books, summon a few friendly demons, etc. etc. She would love it if you popped in and said hi at www.lornakeach.com.
In A Strange Finch, an entitled gourmand with questionable ethics gets more than he bargained for with his latest culinary acquisition…
GI: I have to ask: are you a foodie? Do you have an adventurous palette (hopefully
not to the degree of your character, Zachary Vautour, but…)?
LK: Hah! No, I’m not much of a foodie, but I have a somewhat adventurous palette,
as long as it involves interesting spices (but certainly not in an Andrew Zimmern
Bizarre Foods sort of way. I don’t eat meat at all if I can help it.)
GI: What’s the most exotic culinary experience you recall?
LK: I was really lucky to have a lot of seriously gourmet moments while living in
Vegas for over six years. Vegas has astounding restaurants; not just the fancy,
starred ones in the casinos, but down nearly every side street, you can bump into
a place that has amazing food. I lived in the center of Vegas, off the strip, a
block away from the best Thai food I’ve ever had in my life, the best Indian I’ve
ever had, the best biscuits and gravy, the best French, the best pizza, everything.
I’ve had access to the most stellar and interesting foods from around the world,
but honestly, the most exotic thing I ever put in my mouth was probably fried
“Rocky Mountain Oysters” when I was a kid in Kansas. My grandmother did not
tell me what they were before I took a bite, and they were still the most awful
thing I’ve ever eaten.
GI: How have you been coping with the 2020 shitstorm?
LK: 2020 has had me hiding inside the whole year and doomscrolling my anxieties in
a frenzy. Coping mechanisms have been books, hugging my kid and video
games, for the most part. (My jam is Diablo 3, and in the seasonal rankings, I’m
currently at 63,482nd place out of 100,000 some-odd players. Seriously, I’m
stupid proud of this.)
As far as books, I’ve been re-reading a lot of my favorites (Shirley Jackson, Laird
Barron, Clive Barker, Caitlin R. Keirnan, Joyce Carol Oates) and getting snuggly
with new writers through zines, anthologies, and poetry collections. I frickin’ love
books of many diverse short things; they allow what I call my “brain crab” to
scuttle around when it gets bored and find new ideas to nibble.
Brain crab does not care for novels; long narratives take a ton of focus for
me that doesn’t come easy. Currently I’m scuttling back and forth between a
few anthologies—Nox Pareidolia, We are Wolves, If I Die Before I Wake vol. 2,
Sara Tantlinger’s collection A Cradleland of Parasites, a stellar collection of Flash
Fiction Online and issue 67 of The Dark magazine. It’s a veritable brain crab
buffet. I’ll finish them all sometime in 2024.
GI: GREEN INFERNO is sub-titled, The World Celebrates Your Demise. How do you
feel your piece relates to this sentiment?
LK: I wrote this story as a traditional “comeuppance” story—a tale where flawed
people see the error of their ways at the last minute, but it’s already too late.
(In terms of GREEN INFERNO, I think this thematic structure is relevant because
comeuppance will be the theme for a lot of people in real life, as the realities of
climate change have a palpable impact on everyone, not just the deniers and
corporate machines barreling us towards environmental cataclysm.)
But if a comeuppance story is too straightforward it can be boring (the brain
crab won’t like it!), so I try to veer from stories that are too black-and-white
morally. Vautour’s one redeeming trait is that he really loves endangered birds.
His entitlement and wealth means that he doesn’t know how to translate that love
by any other means than consumption and possession. The strange finch of the title
isn’t quite a Vampire Finch (which are actually perfectly reasonable birds; they only drink
blood when water is scarce) but it’s a force of nature, a non-human agency, that basically
treats Vautour like he treats other living things.
Vautour, like all of us, will be consumed by this non-human agency with a cold relish.
A Strange Finch will appear in GREEN INFERNO: THE WORLD CELEBRATES YOUR DEMISE. Follow the Kickstarter here!