Is it me? Anderbo.com and the hot-sick

So sometime back on this blog I went ga-ga over Jody Madala’s story at anderbo.com . But only recently did I find Julie Britt’s “Ricky’s Condition” at the same site, and it’s also terrific. Britt’s narrator has let the wind blow her into predictable hook-ups that culminate into a sturdy, working marriage now about to end due to her husband’s terminal illness. I especially warm to the way the necessity/ubiquity of prayer in the characters’ lives doesn’t connect to worship. You pray, just like you brush your teeth, and transcendence/transformation, if only momentary, is the job of sex not Jesus. Each paragraph is uniformly smallish, and anderbo’s format gives the story the look of an epic poem. The links between the Britt and Madala stories are ones that I can’t ignore—both cure the grief of cancer with erotic restoration. Is this a sub-sub-genre I’ve been avoiding all my life?