Rasmenia Massoud
Rasmenia Massoud was born just outside of Washington D.C. somewhere during the era of Hunter S. Thompson vs. Nixon, but never lived there. She just happened to be in the area. She grew up in Colorado where she made a living with both blue and white collars at various times in her life before deciding that collars are not good, and that writing stories was very good.
In addition to spending several years in various Colorado towns, she has also lived in Florida, Pennsylvania, Indiana, England, Paris, and the French countryside; traveling to a number of states and countries in between. All the while, thinking deeply about the places and the people she encounters, and writing things down. She looks for the cracks, the scars under the flesh, gathers them up and molds them into stories in an effort to understand what fascinates, confuses and infuriates her the most: human beings.
Rasmenia Massoud is the author of the short story collections HUMAN DETRITUS, BROKEN ABROAD, and YOU DON’T SEE ANY OF THIS. Dozens of her stories have been published online and in print, including The Foundling Review, The Lowestoft Chronicle, Literary Orphans, Sunlight Press, The Molotov Cocktail, Full of Crow, Flash Fiction Offensive, Black Heart Magazine, Every Day Fiction, Big Pulp, and Underground Voices. Her novella, CIRCUITS END, published by Running Wild Press in 2019, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Rasmenia blogs semi-regularly about the awkwardness, frustration and joy of expatriation, food, the craft of writing, and the learning curves that come from being a broken, awkward, and dysfunctional human. She currently lives in southern England with her husband, their loyal chocolate lab and mischievous feline sidekick.
“There are no mirrors of any kind in here. If there were, I’d want to smash them, but I wouldn’t. Instead, I’d probably just stare at them, giving myself negative affirmations.”
“When I walked into the room, I looked down to the floor and saw that each and every garment I owned had been pulled from its rightful place and had been meticulously sliced into countless pieces. One thing was painfully obvious to me: these clothes were symbolic of me; they represented my body.What you really wanted was to slice me into countless pieces.”
“I thought about how I had now let a self-proclaimed lunatic into my house twice and considered the possibility that my life needed sorting out.”
“He mentioned the connection between us. He identified with me. These are the things that many people want to hear, that most “normal” people want to be able to truthfully say, but almost no one can.”
“Who’s happy? Happy is just what people think they are when they can’t find anything to bitch about.”
“The counselor says that with more time and more surgeries, I will begin to feel normal again. She says this with a mouth that can still smile. It’s so easy to be reassuring when you have lips.”
“I know that mirrors give us a false sense of confidence.” I continued. “The reflection that we see everyday has nothing to do with how others see us. The glass lies.”
“Maybe I should find another doctor; one who realizes the importance of scars.”
“I know what death smells like. Death smells like gasoline, singed hair and fingernails.It smells like cooking meat. My meat.”
“Whatever it is that you know, or that you don’t know, tell me about it. We can exchange tirades. The comma is my favorite piece of punctuation and I’ve got all night.”
“The problem with comprehension is, it often comes too late.”
“I wondered why humans were even given the gift of speech at all. We no longer needed it; we’ve forgotten to talk about anything. We only waste it.”
“Lucius didn’t believe in werewolves. He said that people were too horrible for any other monsters to exist, which he thought was a shame.”