Jim Zinaman, from Volume 4:2

Jim Zinaman is a recruiter for finance, accounting, and IT professionals. Previously he was a non-profit development director after twenty years at Goldman Sachs as a hedge fund relationship manager, securities lending trader, and computer programmer. After graduating Yale, he hitchhiked around the United States, working as a carpenter and a restaurant cook and waiter, and joined and later helped deprogram members from a cult. Jim is married with three grown children and lives north of New York City. He has published three short stories to date.

Zinaman contributed his short story "Heading to Hot Springs" to the latest volume of Synesthesia. Below is an excerpt:

     Charlie headed out toward Arkansas and gave voice to what he had been humming. Indeed it was early Beatles and Stones in the emulation of their favorite American rockers: “Rock ’n Roll Music”; “It’s All Over Now.”
     Will heard Charlie’s singing as another version, another wave in that Southern tide of talking. The kind of word flow he had shared with those whom too many in New York would deem white trash in Florida, but who had given him food and shelter during his migrations this past year when he had nowhere else to turn. He had hoed crops with these people, slaughtered pigs, and prepared and shared meals with them. With them he had lived amid a thickness of human presence, as thick and filling as the deep-fried food. Everything which had once struck him as so overdone in the South—the heat, the deep-fry, the eyeliner and mascara and teased-up bleach-blond hair, the rising inflection as if every sentence ended embroidered as a question—now impressed him as what they really were. A spicing up, an emphasis, and more than that, a request for reaffirmation. Like the verbena, jessamine, and wisteria blaring their colors and scents throughout the countryside or the kudzu vine blanketing more and more forests in an undulating crescendo of green fronds overwhelming green leaves, these people in the South were saying in voice and cosmetics, “Here I am! Amidst this land of profusion, can you see me? Can you hear me?” And the chorus of a response could be heard in every Southerner’s “Yes, sir” or “Yes, ma’am.”

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Turn to page 47 in Synesthesia Literary Journal Volume 4:2 to read Zinaman's tale in full today!