Howard Moss’s story, “Afternoons in New England,” appeared in NER 1.2:
Up the hill near the graveyard, a boy is cutting down the tall grass. In the quiet of the afternoon, I can hear the sound his blade makes as it hacks through the stems. A small patch of vertical weeds has just fallen; throughout the day, the patch will become larger until he is boxed in by the surrounding grass, or until there is no grass at all.
Every day but Sunday he dresses in the uniform of his former profession: khaki-colored work clothes, steel-toed brogans, a thin windbreaker zipped to the Adam’s apple if there is a shadowy sweetness in the morning breeze. He rises before dawn, lights the pilot of the kerosene stove, lets the dogs out, careful not to slap the screen door. He sits at the kitchen table drinking instant coffee, black, for an hour until his wife rises and fries breakfast wordlessly in her housecoat. Neither of his sons wanted to take over the farm and his daughter moved up to Raleigh to work in a bank and he doesn’t understand a good three-quarters of the things he hears people say. Commercials on television perplex him. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to them, they begin in the middle and it’s never quite clear to him what it is they’re even advertising. He stands in the backyard looking out over the fields he leases now to an outfit out of, by God, Delaware, working a pick between his teeth, dogs at his feet. Maybe I have outlived time. Soon there will be no such thing as dew, the thing he once had to rouse himself early from bed to beat. Get it done before the sun burns the dew off. They’ll do away with that, too.
Michael Parker is the author of six novels and two collections of stories. A new collection of really short stories, Everything, Then and Since, is forthcoming from Bull City Press in fall 2017. He teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program at UNC Greensboro and lives in North Carolina and Texas.
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When oil drop to 9US$ a barrel, man, you know you getting lay off. The only question is when. Like everybody else in the industry, you wait.
It come like the worst thing that could happen, when they announce people will have to go “in tranches” every month.
At first, every time you don’t get a envelope, you breathe a sigh of relief. After a while, though, you start feeling like a death-row inmate in a cell near the gallows; like these bitches want you to witness everybody else execution. Soon, the fact you still working come like a noose swinging in front your face, grazing your nose. You start to wish they just get it over with.
And when it happen, you rush home to Judith, your common-law wife, mother of your two children, and give her the news. She put her hand on her heart and say, “We could breathe easy now, Junior. We could move on.”
You and Judith cling to one another there in the kitchen. You feel your prick resurrecting like Lazarus. Is months since the last time. You know Judith feeling it too. She pulling away? No, she gripping on tighter.
Celeste Mohammed is a lawyer, emerging writer, and mother of a two-year-old. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and lives on the Caribbean island of Trinidad.
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Jackson’s in stop-and-go traffic on Dorchester Avenue with Darius in the back. They’re on their way to the chicken place, both of them regretting the lost opportunity to buy season tickets when Danny Ainge grabbed the last leg of the Big Three and all the good seats got taken.“Yeah, my buddy had four spots in the second row behind the basket, just waiting for my go-ahead to click Purchase. Right there. Where the players fall into the cameras,” Darius says.
“And over where the cheerleaders sit,” Jackson adds.
“Indeed. Over where the cheerleaders sit.”
They laugh and then they both ride quietly for a while. Jackson turns up the XM station he’s floating through a weak frequency in the car radio, and sees his passenger in the rearview mirror, nodding out the beat pensively to Sir Mix-a-Lot.
“Now that the Celtics be winning, nobody’s lettin’ go of that gravy,” Jackson muses.
“I’d rather watch games at home, you know, Jacks? I can do without all the distraction.”
“Not me.”
“The T-shirt cannon, the dance cam, the whole Jumbotron in general. You know what I’m sayin’?”
“The fanfare,” Jackson sums up his customer’s point.
“Yeah, the fanfare. The flashing lights, the kids everywhere, the leprechaun on the trampoline.”
“Yeah, what’s with the leprechaun? That’s some racist shit.”
“I know, huh? Lucky.”
“Riiiiiight. Lucky the Leprechaun.”
“Crazy-ass white people.”
“Oh yeah!” Jackson says when the next song comes on the radio, and turns it up. Both men jump in from the beginning, phrasing fast and wordy, spreading out the cluttered parts to prove they know them, then trailing off on the rest.
Mary Clark has an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa, and has published poems and stories in Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Fiction, and other journals. She recently completed a novel about race, love, addiction, and urban renewal that takes place in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Many of the Men” borrows from an early chapter of that manuscript.
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