Synkroniciti is excited to welcome writer Mary Salome from San Francisco, with “Juniper is in the Basement,” our runner-up in the “Haunting” short story contest. Sarah is hoping her interview with Francis Woods, former dancer and choreographer and the wife of a noted muralist, will result in a captivating story and lead to a permanent position at the radio station. When she arrives at the old Victorian house in Bayview, she meets the delightful Mrs. Woods, who, incidentally, is looking for her missing cat, Juniper. The interview goes off very well and she’s checking to make sure she has what she needs when the unexpected and inexplicable happens.
“Sarah navigated through the recordings to the file that contained the room tone and hit play. There was the now-familiar hum of the refrigerator, the tick of the clock, the whisper of traffic. And then there was something else. It was a man’s voice, and he clearly said, “Juniper is in the basement.””
Mary does a brilliant job of investing the story with wonderful and surprising details that paint a believable and engrossing picture of artists’ lives in San Francisco in the 20th century. It is a ghost story, but more than that, it is a human story with dimension and color that extend beyond the everyday world. We want memories of the dancer and the muralist, who once knew Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, to live on, and Mary creates a world in which they lead Sarah (and us) to unforeseen discoveries.
Read “Juniper Is in the Basement” in Synkroniciti’s “Haunting” issue, Vol. 6, No. 4, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Mary Salome (she/her) is a queer Arab- and Irish-American writer and media activist who lives in San Francisco. She has produced radio, video, and web publications. Her prose and poetry have been published in Food for our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists, Solstice: A Winter Anthology Vol 2, Archive of the Odd, The Argyle Literary Magazine, Moss Piglet Zine, and SPROUT: An Eco-Urban Poetry Journal, among others. Her short story “Okami in the Bayview” was nominated for a WSFA Small Press Award.