Tom Whalen
“A Wonderful Experience”
from Dolls

Happiness, for Kafka, comes in many shades. Somewhere he speaks of breaking his leg as the most wonderful experience of his life.
     Once I found a child’s doll in a black ravine. Her clothes were torn, her limbs ripped apart and scattered in the weeds. When I lifted her head off the ground, I saw that someone had put cigarettes out on her forehead and cheeks, someone had gouged out her eyes, someone had ripped off her ears, and someone (I turned my face away) had pissed on her.
     Poor doll!
     That night, for the first time in days, I slept peacefully.

Caketrain is a literary journal and press based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Our interest is in bringing you, reader, the very best in contemporary creative writing, full stop. Our goals are for each issue of our journal to submerge you in a birthing tank for gelatinous language monsters, young masses of tentacular foci undulating as directed (in all, at once) by our eclectic stable of contributors; for each new book we publish to seduce and ensnare you, sometimes intangibly, always undeniably; and for you, reader, to be able to draw at least one passage from our banks that prods your mind with such precision and power that it feels as if it was written for your eyes alone. To wit and to whet, here is a snippet, a slight nip of our delicious lit mix:

Copyright 2003-2006 Caketrain Journal and Press. Rights to literature revert to their respective authors.
ISSN 1547-6839.

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