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David Sklar
Real Estate

When younger, I purchased a house in the Kingdom of Death: a tiny cottage— not even a summer home really, but I like to go there on weekends and sometimes late at night. I bought it when I was six. It cost me a butterfly and three snails. It has fluorescent lights in all the rooms which turn on and off unexpected, and of course it has hot and cold water running in place. There's a freeway across the river. The sound of the cars at night entices me when making love, unnerves me when trying to sleep. The access ramp to the freeway is seven days' journey away on a path of round stones which rattle insultingly if you speak. If you wish to visit you must know to walk in silence: if you need to find me I cannot tell you; you must know the way.

David Sklar writes in the places between the impossible magic of legend, the inscrutable magic of dreams, and the breathtaking everyday magic of the world in which we live. His works include fiction in Strange Horizons and Triangulation: End of the Rainbow, and poetry in Paterson Literary Review and Bull Spec. His first novel, Shadow of the Antlered Bird, is available as an e-book from Drollerie Press, for whom he is currently coediting the two-headed anthology Trafficking in Magic/Magicking in Traffic. A more complete publication history can be found on his Web site at davidwriting.com.

David lives in New Jersey with his wife Rachel and their two kids. He works as a freelance writer and editor. The finest dessert he has tasted is the wedding cake that Sweet Sisters of Totowa, New Jersey, baked for him and Rachel in 2002. The finest he has imagined will appear in the upcoming Magic Beans anthology from Dark Wine and Stars.