Toast

By the time dreadlocked and pierced Tania comes home to New Orleans to get her snake tattoo completed, the seemingly simple task has gotten more difficult than she could have ever imagined. If she can't find a way to pay for the "tat" quickly, she must stay forever unfinished. Enter Big Marcus, a British hipster, who falls for Tania and tries to extract her from her maze of bad judgement. Yet he, too, loses his way as their lives enmesh. The unlikely pair then labor to bring a subcutaneous work of art into a world that couldn't possibly understand their obsessions. In their milieu of loonies, lovers, tattooists, transvestites and French Quarter freaks, the impossible becomes the merely improbable, and common sense gets as rare as an honest cop.

Novelist, journalist and poet Rex Rose brags of being a 3rd grade dropout. He came of age in New Orleans, where he played electric guitar in indy rock groups, worked in a Bourbon Street sex toy shop and shucked oysters for seven years at a bar. He never returned to school in earnest until entering Tulane University, where he earned a BA in English on the John Kennedy Toole Writing Scholarship. During his Tulane years, Rose wrote a monthly techno-culture column for Tribe magazine and was also one of the magazine’s journeymen music critics. After a stint in law school, he earned his MFA in fiction at LSU under Andrei Codrescu, Vance Bourjaily, and Mark Jude Poirier. His work has appeared in the Exquisite Corpse and Milk magazine, and he now lives and writes in Abita Springs, Louisiana.