Zyxt

Joseph Clayton Mills
195mm×135mm; paperback; 40 pages

London, UK: Entr’acte, 2010.
Printed by Ditto Press

An anthology of alienation from A to Z, Zyxt consists of 24 brief and darkly
comic tales of idealism and despair, suicide and self-loathing, madness and murder.

Together, they form a mosaic of parables, fables, and paradoxes for the
bitter, melancholy, and disaffected.

From Zyxt

Nightingale

I have a friend who, as a lifelong devotee of Bizet,
harbors great hopes that his young daughter might
one day make a grand success upon the operatic
stage.

Although she is still a mere toddler and is thus far
incapable of forming with any facility even the
simplest words in English (to say nothing of Italian),
my friend insists that, even from the moment of
her first postnatal cry, he has been able to detect
in her voice the sure traces of a divine instrument.

In order to encourage in his daughter a proper love
for all things sonorous, my friend installed in her
bedroom a beautiful nightingale in a gilded cage.
Its melodic trills, he hoped, would serve as a suit-
able influence upon his daughter’s as yet inchoate
musicality.

When, some days later, my friend discovered that
his young daughter had smothered the nightingale
with a silken pillow, he was, much to my surprise,
neither horrified nor discouraged. On the contrary,
he was transported with delight, and his face
beamed as he related the story.

“After all, is not the foremost ingredient in the
soul of any artist,” he asked rhetorically, and with
an expression of perhaps justifiable pride, “an in-
satiable lust for the blood of one’s rival?”

First edition of 100 copies

$12.00