Dan Brotzel

Dan Brotzel’s first collection of short stories, Hotel du Jack, is published by Sandstone. He is also co-author of a comic novel, Kitten on a Fatberg, now available to pre-order at Unbound. He has Pushcart and BIFFY50 nominations. He won the 2019 Riptide Journal short story competition, was runner-up in the 2019 Leicester Writes contest, and was highly commended in the Manchester Writing School competition 2018. He has words in places like Pithead Chapel, Ellipsis, Tiny Molecules, Storgy, Reflex Fiction, Cabinet of HeedBending Genres and Spelk.

WHEN THE FIRST HUSBAND DIES YOUNG by Dan Brotzel

When your first husband dies young, you feel shock, you feel sick. You hurt, you bruise, you ache, you sting. You feel nothing at all but also everything, way too much. Reality has been swept from under you. There’s a big hole, a gap, where your life should be. Nothing makes sense. You’re trapped in a nightmare that can’t possibly be yours. Everything is panic, anxiety.  You keep running up against the hope that this is all an illusion, that soon you’ll be able to get your head round it, feel differently about it, send it away. You keep thinking…

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