Jim Kelley is a full-time carpenter in the great state of Ohio, where he co-owns a small exterior deck & siding company. He’s a former semi-pro football player for the Columbus Sharks, Swarm, and Phantoms, and is happily married. Jim shares his house with his wife, six cats, and a hyper rot/beagle mix dog.

His short story, titled Sex and Rot in the Afterlife, will appear in the first issue of The Ashen Eye. The following is a short excerpt taken from it:

On a stack of elbow macaroni boxes, I saw Tina laying on her back. Her blouse was open and her milky white breasts almost glowed in the dimness. Her skirt—the denim number she teased me with earlier—was hiked up around her thighs. Worst of all, her knees draped across someone’s shoulders, and her hands pulled feverishly at the somebody’s hair.

“Tina,” I cried.

She snapped her head up; a look of horror crossed her face when she met my stare.

“Tom,” she tried to pull her blouse closed with one hand and push the guy’s head away with the other. She wasn’t successful with either, one tit still showed and the guy wasn’t giving up the head job.

“What’s going on?”

She only stared at me with her shocked and horrified look.

A million emotions raged through my mind, but chief among them were jealousy and betrayal. Tina and I weren’t an item, but we had dated on occasion. Nothing ever serious because she claimed she wasn’t emotionally available or ready for physical relationships again. Yet, here she was, sprawled out on a box of macaroni with a guy eating her out.

I added fury to my new found emotions.

My first thought was Brian Huffman hadn’t been in an accident after all. Maybe Tina decided to rob the cradle. But when the guy turned his face toward me and met my eyes with his one dull eye, my heart sank.

“Evan!”

Evan only scowled at me with blood on his lips and chin.

“My god, did he hurt you?” I started toward Evan, unsure exactly what I intended to do.

“No, he didn’t hurt me.” Tina’s sheepish voice stopped me.

Evan grinned as he spit what I thought was gum out on the floor.

My eyes followed the wad down and when it landed with a small splat, the white string told me what it was, a tampon.

“Puuussssyyyy,” Evan grinned.

I wanted to rip his rotting head off his shoulders, but I only stood there. Some semblance of reason crept back into my head as I realized what it was that stood in front of me. Zombies were twice as strong as living men and I’d seen them when they were enraged.

Evan would rip me limb from limb if I attacked him.

Some of Jim Kelley’s short stories have appeared in “+The Horror Library+” and “The World of Myth” ezines under the pen name Kelly James. Also, he’s the book review columnist for The World of Myth.

To visit Jim Kelley’s MySpace page, please click here.



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