Friends and Rabid Hedgehogs

Friends and Rabid Hedgehogs
Bards & Sages Publishing. USA.
June 2016. Order here.

Our problems are often no more than small, furry critters that are capable of casting grand shadows. If we spin so that we face our challenges, instead of allowing ourselves to be thwarted by them, we, not they, become the conquerors. Perspectives that empower such actions do not necessarily transform our inner dwellers into cuties, but do take away much of their fiendishness.

Accordingly, although Friends and Rabid Hedgehogs looks like a mild-mannered collection of brief fictions, it is at once also a savage series of realizations about human nature. This book's roughly seventy flash and short stories are as much about means to confront our occupational hazards and relationship foibles, as they are "simple tales" about dogs, cats, lobsters, and weird, space-faring eukaryotic organisms.

All that has ever been murmured about the coterie of creatures contained herein is true and then some; these furry and scaly players are often sweet only when sleeping. Thereafter, these monsters, who are disguised as lanolin exporters, as incumbent politicians, or as alien spore, these strange or familiar fiends, growl, yap, roar, or look askance at readers that mistake them for simple beings. People, these characters posit, are the worst of beasties.

Fiction, more than co-play, therapy, or odd intimacies, continues to reveal humanity's brutish tendencies. Accordingly, the creatures that populate Friends and Rabid Hedgehogs know that the narratives that contain them are as much curative tools as entertainments. Goblins and guinea pigs, even when dressed as dragons and dormice, help us identify our terrors and help us cope with other folks' manifested creepy crawlies.

Whereas there remains much work to be done to compensate for the damage caused by imaginary hedgehogs, there likewise remains much praise to be given to those rodents for their illuminating frenetic behavior. Those bugs, like their fellow fauna, especially as found in Friends and Rabid Hedgehogs, teach us important truths about ourselves.

Preface
1. At Home
1.1 Tag
1.2 Immurement's Usually Relative
1.3 Relatively Sexy
1.4 Lemon-Sauced Duckling
1.5 Back to the Gym
1.6 Taha and Albuquerque
1.7 If I Don't Sleep
1.8 Nothing Wanted
1.9 Power per Unit
1.10 The Care and Feeding of Agatha
1.11 Dor l'Dor
1.12 Ruminations
1.13 The Ballad of Jeremy One Sock
1.14 More about those Codfish
1.15 Mud Pies and Snowballs for Thursday Junebee
1.16 Red Rings of Rash
1.17 My Wee Zombie Kitten
1.18 Grit
1.19 A 1970's Middle Schooler's Day
1.20 Dandelion Fields

2. At Work
2.1 Lovesick
2.2 Dr. Laura Whitfield: Unexploited Relations among Space Lobsters on Jupiter
2.3 Dr. Laura Whitfield: Mentioning the Aliens
2.4 Dr. Laura Whitfield: Remaining Opaque
2.5 Dr. Laura Whitfield: A Certain Visitor
2.6 Remarkable Robustness
2.7 Nice Car
2.8 Silent Findings
2.9 Validating the Cohort Life
2.10 The Hidden Righteous
2.11 Dr. Owen Brownstone: Crustaceans and an Emerging Creative Writer
2.12 Dr. Owen Brownstone: Deep Sea Mothers
2.13 Dr. Owen Brownstone: Owmapow Gets Fired
2.14 The Relative Utility of Betting on Zombie Yard Flamingos
2.15 Mulvey Slays
2.16 Two Fables
2.17 Statutory Theft
2.18 Rules Governing Hair Elastics and Other Prohibited Utensils
2.19 The Unmade Professor
2.20 Hedgehogs Démodés

3. At Love
3.1 To Likewise Deconstruct Himself for Nadia
3.2 Yitzok's Teachers
3.3 Vinca
3.4 Jagger
3.5 Sylvia from the Amusement Park
3.6 Hypnosis
3.7 Trade Relations in the Horseshoe Galaxy Cluster
3.8 Today's Weather: Pleasant, No Change in Temperature
3.9 Beholden Beauty
3.10 Married, but Lonely
3.11 Chandeliers of the Best Quality
3.12 Sweet Pea
3.13 Illicitly Involved in Commercial Matters
3.14 A Line Producer's Beneficent Notes
3.15 Woodland Cacophony
3.16 Maceo
3.17 Seduction by Means of an Acoustic-to-Electric Transducer
3.18 Competitive and Foolish
3.19 Her Bulbous Eyes
3.20 Once More with Love
Credits
About the Author
Other KJ Hannah Greenberg Books