Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

by Neil Gaiman

I first spent time with the woman who would become my wife because she wanted to make a book of photographs of herself dead, to accompany her album Who Killed Amanda Palmer? She had been taking photographs of herself dead since she was eighteen. She wrote to me and pointed out that nobody was going to buy a book of photos of a dead woman who wasn’t even actually dead, but perhaps if I wrote some captions they might. Photographer Kyle Cassidy and Amanda and I gathered in Boston for a few days of making art. The photographs Kyle took were like stills from lost films, and I would write stories to accompany them. Unfortunately, most of the stories don’t work when separated from their photographs. (My favorite was a murder mystery, involving a woman killed by a typewriter.) I like this one, though, and you do not need the photograph (of young Amanda with her mouth open and a floor covered with costume jewelry) to understand it.