Today, the lovely, gifted, and intelligent Amber Sparks lights-up the Dark Sky stage. She’s funny, sassy, honest, and doesn’t hold back, and that’s why we love her. Brace yourselves.

– Ethel Rohan

Writing wise, where are you now? Where are you going?

Here’s the part where I bitch and moan about how hard my writing life is. I have two manuscripts, one a collection of short stories and one a collection of writings about myth and legends, and I need to whip them into shape and start getting them out to publishers. The problem is that these are not “fun” things, in the way writing is fun for me. So I cannot make myself do these things.

I’m also trying to work on a novel, but so far all of my attempts have turned into short stories instead, mostly because I can’t be bothered to think of anything else for my characters to do. I don’t think I’m cut out to be a novelist, but I keep trying. It’s probably really tragic, actually, like watching someone drive their car into a wall over and over again. But I persist, despite all the head injuries. Or maybe because of them.

Oh, and I’m going to be Necessary Fiction’s Writer in Residence in September, so watch out for that.

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The Wives Are Turning Into Animals

by Amber Sparks

The husbands are almost sure of it. They have strong memories of an earlier time, of the wives with soft smooth faces and ten fingers and toes.

But lately, things have changed. Some of the wives have grown scaly patches, or sprouted thick pelts. Some wives have shrunk considerably. White, wide wings have unfolded, horns have appeared, tongues have grown longer and rougher and pinker, noses wetter and more sensitive than before.

The men have grown uneasy at night, listening to the wheezing and snorting of the wives as they sleep, as they embrace their husbands with tentacles and talons and long tails. The husbands aren’t sure what to do, whether to say something. They wonder if it would be rude to ask about the wives’ new appetites, their sudden hunger for mice and mealworms and raw, wriggling fish. They worry that they won’t be able to keep these ravenous wives fed. They worry that the neighbors will complain about the carcasses littering their lawns.

The husbands worry, most of all, that their wives will finally fly or crawl or swim away, untethered from the promises that only humans make or keep.

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Amber Sparks is pretty sure she’s human, though she does live with a husband and two beasts. She has work published or forthcoming in places like New York Tyrant, PANK, Wigleaf, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, and the Collagist. She is the fiction editor at Emprise Review, and you can find her online at www.ambernoellesparks.com.