“There is a version of Purgatory where the only music you will ever hear is that of scrape
and pluck. Groaning woodgrain; the stuff of sinking ships and drowning sailors. Strings
manipulated beyond a heart’s connection; stressed just up to the point of failure.”
from Gabe Bogart’s “The Cacophony”
Gabe Bogart, who once landed a pontoon plane in a busy harbor illegally without any experience, will be joining the TERSE. family with a series of pieces on Purgatory — its dusty corners, its quiet reverberation, and its multifaceted liminality. These pieces, flowing and shadowy, are a welcome edition to the TERSE. family, and will be featured on a monthly basis.
Gabe, while working as a bar tender, had a regular patron suggested he read Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman. After devouring the text, he says, “Always prone to pondering the afterlife and the beyond, I was inspired, but was self-conscious of being creatively lazy by writing a mirror series of afterlives. So, I chose the slightly less lazy option of writing a series of purgatories and it coincidentally matched my deep sense of dark and comical justice; the pursuit for a ballast against the suffering and trauma everywhere in our reality in imagined limbo worlds.”
Follow along as Gabe masterfully explores the space between space and the current that runs through our untold realities. Each piece will be available on the 25th of every month.
Gabe Bogart lives in Seattle, Washington, where he patiently awaits the return of the Seattle Supersonics. He learned to love words in his senior year high school creative writing class and from his sister and mother. It’s been a long time since he took a major road trip and he’d like to do it next in a 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle Super Sport. His work has appeared in Pareidolia Lit, Hencroft Hub, Collective Realms, TERSE. Journal, Fahmidan Journal, acloserlisten.com, and thesianetwork.com.