Aleksandr Usiaih Wandkoflacs, Sr. was born — as the story goes — in AD 1965, under a rainbow, beside a waterfall, in Bruges, to a young single mother and a plural father. Emerging from a long line of Cold War spies, dirt farmers, and pygmy goatherders (pygmy goats, not pygmy Wandkoflacses), he didn't begin speaking the English until his mid-twenties, during a protracted disaffection with his ancestral digdirt-and-tiny-goat cheese (and occasional briefcase-and-trench coat) heritage.
   Wandkoflacs was there when the Berlin Wall came down, when it seemed the world could change in the blink of an eye. (And if anything, that was his fulcrum, his axle, his sign of the times.) He still describes it as ‘Unbelievable,’ to this very day, and remains a devoted fan of Imperialist comedians Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay and Dane ‘Chief’ Cook.
   Many years later, just before Wandkoflacs wed his alien wife illegally and began repeatedly impregnating her, he bequeathed to his bride a lovely engagement ring, the center ‘stone’ of which  was a 1.22 carat pebble of Official Berlin Wall Concrete, spray-painted Swastika red — the color of remorse — to match her beautiful red dress, her beautiful red shoes, her beautiful red lips, and her beautiful cinnamon-colored beard. Mrs. Wandkoflacs bore him a litter of red-colored bear cubs, enough to have brought a tear to both of Mother Russia's eyes had she still been alive to cry them. (Even though the Cold War is over, Aleksandr takes comfort in the ongoing Tepid War, a war on the culture, the spirit, the economy, and the social media of the global middle class, which, from all appearances, may never end.)
   Wandkoflacs was successfully neutered in 2007 by a nice doctor with small hands and Valium, spending quite a number of his postoperative hours in a physician-prescribed swirl of frozen pea-sitting, fermented hops-swallowing, and pipe cleaning — tasks for which the lovely and talented Mrs. Wandkoflacs (and her beard) were happy to lend a hand.
   Something In The Middle, An Anthology — Small Fictions From The Far Side Of Consciousness is Wandkoflacs's first English-language book, which he's penned partially under the pseudonym Augie Christie (an amalgamation of August Wandkoflacs, his favorite former father, and Steve Christie, his favorite former NFL placekicker) and partially next to it.