"Mud Season" / Split Lip Magazine

Check out “Mud Season” by Amelia Valasek in Split Lip (3,000 words). It’s a police blotter gone awry.

We’re introduced to “it” (whatever the hell “it” is) in the opener, an entity associated with the boot-sucking mud that plagues an any-town one chilly April.

Then we float through a series of tableaus, a series of lives, each of them poisoned by the appearance of free-wheeling doppelgängers who act on their worst impulses, leaving their doubles to deal with the consequences.

Valasek’s prose is precise and spare, but it’s also visceral and meaty. It has the mud-suck of her fictional town, and it pulls you in and down. It’s a great place to be.

At the close we’re left with a character who recognizes that her dark desires have driven the “it” behind the story’s mayhem, and she’s fearful and ashamed of what her uncorralled impulses have wrought. Could there be a better time than now for a well-told story like “Mud Season”?

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Split Lip is a literary journal “that’s totally bonkers-in-love with voice-driven writing, pop culture, and the kind of honesty that gets you right in the kidneys.” They “love stories and poetry and art because they’re our insides turned out for everyone to see: the darkness and the confetti in equal measure.”

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