Dreams With Sharp Teeth: Week of 12/19/13

**Usually a reader imagines the places being described in the story. Draw a picture of the image you have from this story. What do you usually see when reading a story?
Pages read: 649-693   (Short Stories: "How's The Night Life On Cissalda?" & "Flop Sweat")


Usually when I read a story, I picture the characters in my head, the setting, or both like a movie. "Flop Sweat" featured more setting and character description than the other story I read, so this post will be on FS. Just like usual, I saw the characters and setting once they had been described and the words began to form a sort of movie in my head. FS happens to be about a talk show host for a radio show in LA. The host's name is Terri and she's interviewing a devil worshipper the particular night the story takes place during. The interview also takes place during a time when there was a string of murders in LA, all believed to be connected. So, at this point, the hostess had been described, so I had a pretty clear picture of her in my head. The devil worshipper, Michael, on the other hand, was wearing a domino mask, so the only things the reader knows about him is that he has green eyes, a soft voice, and wears all black with the mask. Also, pretty much the whole story takes place in the radio show's booth, so it wasn't hard to get an idea of what that looked like.

When the murders are first mentioned, they don't seem very important, but that soon changes when Terri begins taking calls for the show. The first call and every call after that come from a person who claims to be the killer of all the victims. At first, the people on the show don't believe him/her (the gender is not specified, as the story says the voice sounded like a male and a female at the same time), but the caller provides them with information about the murders that only the murderer would know. This information was that the victims all had the same pentagram-symbol cut into the soles of their left feet. Since it was such a simple thing to visualize, I regrettably pictured a foot with the bloody symbol cut into the sole. Along with the visualization of the foot, I also pictured a sort of map of the US. When the call by the killer was cut off by the radio show, they get even more calls from him/her, but they were strange. All the calls were coming from different parts of LA, meaning the killer was somehow in multiple places, pretty much everywhere. Because of this, a dark map of the US appeared in my head. I visualized little yellow dots appearing on the map, since I thought it was kind of like the country lighting up with the calls.