Billy Sledge

Dangling Propositions Billy Sledge

Do we believe what we know? Do we know what we believe? Dangling Propositions is as much an act as it is a title. Human perceptions are suspended, within the imaginative realms of its three speculative stories, for reader scrutiny. These are exploits through individual and collective dimensions of our awareness, challenges to expected experience. Solitary library worker Zharko Solovich not only keeps to himself, he, one might say, "keeps himself in." When attempts to "bring him out" are fantastically taken up in a variant reality, where it is a crime to withhold oneself - punished by forced chemical correction. In "The Superstoic", it may be asked, how much right does one have to their inner self? "Instrument" presents the "plasmamorph," a lifeform that supposedly resides in Earth's upper atmosphere. Image promoter Nebo Rhombus, despite what he wants or believes, finds himself "taking on" this ethereal being as a client. The Biblical and the phenomenal combine in a cryptic narrative concerning the questionable fate of our world. For compulsive mimic Bogustin Guisermann, who hides himself mirroring others, being unintentionally "gifted" with the ability to blind people to his presence, as a result of thought-projection experiments, may be the refuge from the "judging sight" of the world he's always sought. He becomes an "imperceivable man." In "Not to Behold", to be perceived, or not to be perceived, seems the question.