Fiction from NER 41.1
What was she thinking?
That depends. When she stepped onto the tarmac in Irkutsk, the sky crisp and glittering, she was wondering why it had taken her so long to come to Siberia. But earlier, when she boarded the stale plane in Beijing, she was trying not to think about the world’s first marathoner. (You know: the one who died.) And when her husband dropped her at the airport curb in Minneapolis, she was wondering if he’d miss her.
Fiction from NER 40.4 (2019)
So when Hannah’s mother appears to be present and listening Hannah says, “So I wanted to tell you that I’m non-binary.”
Hannah has read it’s a myth that sharks will die if they stop moving forward but chooses to believe in it anyway. If it was allowed, Hannah’s driver’s license would say: Clark, Hannah—Height: 5′5″, Hair: Blond, Eyes: Blue—A Shark.
This morning, every morning, Hannah wakes up at 5:50 to run. Through four municipalities, from the unsightly traffic of Medford, Massachusetts, along the Mystic River into north Cambridge, onto the bike path through Arlington to Lexington. Not up to usual pace today. No clear reason, except maybe an odd pain in the sole of the right foot. Hannah starts to feel something like resentment or anxiety, which brings up anxiety about talking to Mom later today, which settles into a general high, weird pall over the day’s
Around mile seven a man passes from behind, and the feeling hardens into hatred and points right at him. Hardly anyone passes Hannah anymore, but those who do are always men. Hannah hates his basketball shorts and his crew socks pulled all the way up, hates his earbuds and the phone he holds in his hand. Hannah wants to stop him and say, I just wanted you to know that you’ve done nothing to deserve your body and I’m actually faster than you. Hannah watches his shoes bobbing slowly away on the pavement ahead and wants to say, You piece of shit asshole motherfucker. Still running, Hannah wants to push him to the ground and spew abuse too vile for words onto his face, to vomit black acid from deep in the gut at him, acid to burn the skin.
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Fiction from NER 40.3
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Shalini is about to leave the office when her editor, Reza, who is nine years younger than she is, slaps a slim book with a black cover down on her desk and grins at her.
“I need this reviewed by the end of the week. It’s short and shitty but I’m curious what you think,” he says.
Shalini is a fiction writer working as a columnist for the literary supplement of a young newspaper called the Dhaka Chronicle in Dhaka, Bangladesh. After a divorce, installing her son in college, and three decades abroad, she moved here from New York to watch her alcoholic father die slowly, whittling away her mother’s spirit in the process.
New fiction from NER 40.2
he city, like so many others at that time, was reviving. The neighborhood of modest bungalows, a mile from downtown but seeming farther, was in transition. There were working class couples whose children had long since left home; grown sons who’d moved back after a divorce or lay-off, taking over the work of mowing the lawn, visited on weekends by children wearing Disney T-shirts and sneakers that lit up. There were young professionals with Japanese cars, replanting their stretch of boulevard with native grasses, taking down the ugly asbestos siding that was so effective at keeping out drafts; Public Defenders and stay-at-home parents, programmers, academics. For four years Jerome had felt he belonged in this latter category. Then his wife left him and everything went to seed. The front garden she had made, cultivated out of the stubborn monotony of turf, steadily became feral. Un-pruned branches of ninebark and hydrangea half-covered the front windows—a detail the realtor remarked upon when the bungalow next door came on the market.
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