Noah Bogdonoff

Indoor Animals

January 30, 2019

SCIENCE FICTION.

deer arrives for you in a yellow PT Cruiser. A woman slides out of the atrocious car, her face sun-freckled, her hair sun-bleached. She is no-nonsense about this deer. She says that she found him next to his mother, who was dead by the side of the road, and that the wildlife rescue centers would not take in a baby deer because deer are too common to protect. She says that she has already named the deer; his name is Star Wars. He is no more than five days old.

Will you take him, she asks.

You consider that your dog is named Han Solo and your car is called the Millennium Falcon. It feels momentarily like a collapse of reality: the molecule is smaller and more fragile than the atom. And then Star Wars mews from the blazing-hot cruiser. Eeeeee, he says. Eeee. He is hungry and very cute.

Of course, you tell the woman. Of course we will take the deer.

Thank god, she says, as you approach the PT Cruiser and lift the leggy, terrified creature from the car. Thank god, says the lady again. You are a saint. And then she drives off, and you realize as she peels away that you forgot to ask her who she was and how she knew that you would be the kind of loony to accept an orphaned deer. Eee, says Star Wars.

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Joan Leegant

The Eleventh Happiest Country

January 9, 2019

oi’s old friend from the army, Tal, had been an actor before he got religious and now he wanted to make another film and wanted Roi to do it. An action flick. Tal checked with his rebbe in B’nai Brak and it was all right.

“Whoa, man. Looking like that?” said Roi, waving at Tal’s face—the beard, the peyis spiraling down over his ears, the black kippa. They were at a café on Sheinkin. It wasn’t certified kosher but you couldn’t traife up espresso beans.

Tal had an answer ready right away. He said the movie would be about a former con man who’d found God but was dragged back into crime by his former con man buddies to do one last heist. So he does. It goes wrong and he goes to jail. Or maybe it goes right and he makes off with a pile of stolen cash. Tal hadn’t figured that part out yet.

“How can you make a flick like that?” Roi said. “It would have to have some cheesy ending where the guy sees the light again and gives it all back and comes to his knees in repentance. It’ll be terrible. Shit. I can’t direct shit like that.”

“No, no,” Tal said. His eyebrows were thickly bunched in concentration. Roi hadn’t noticed before how hairy Tal’s eyebrows were. Maybe because now there was so much additional hair in the same neighborhood. “It’ll be a real heist movie with a real heist movie ending. Prison or victory. The fact that the guy’s religious will have nothing to do with it. He’ll just be like all the other scumbags and thieves, only with”—he waved at his face—“this.” He paused. “What?” His dark eyes looked hard into Roi’s. “I’m not asking to film my life questions. No deep meaning here. I promise.”

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Alla Gorbunova

Biomass

June 28, 2018

New fiction/translation from NER 39.2
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from Ings & Oughts
Translated from the Russian by Elina Alter

A teacher of literature, a highly spiritual lady, had a husband who was an alcoholic. One day her friend told her: I know this one woman, a psychic, go see her, maybe she can help. So, the literature teacher takes her sad salary and goes to see the psychic. She tells her: so and so, my husband drinks, can you do something. The psychic looks at a photo of the husband and says: he doesn’t have a soul. How’s that? asks the frightened literature teacher. No soul, that’s how, says the psychic. Biomass. [Read more]

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Alla Gorbunova, born in Leningrad in 1985, is a poet, prose writer, translator, and critic. She has published five books of poetry and one book of short prose, and her work has been translated into English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Serbian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Latvian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Czech.

Elina Alter is a writer and translator in New York. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Paris Review Daily, Modern Poetry in Translation, Guernica, Slice, Brooklyn Magazine, and Southeast Review. She is the editor of Circumference: Poetry in Translation.

Castle Freeman Jr.

Eli Don’t Hunt

June 21, 2018

New fiction from NER 39.2

Ihad no choice, Jane liked to tell her friends. Nobody else would come. Why not?

Deer season, said Jane.

Deer season. Of course.

Nobody would come. Nobody could. Nobody was around, I was told.

Who told you?

The deputy. Deputy . . . Deputy . . . What’s his name, again?

♦

Treat. It was Deputy Treat who set Jane straight. She had walked into the kitchen with her shopping, found the small round hole in the middle of one of the glass panes in the window over the sink. She called the sheriff’s number. They said somebody would be along. Jane waited in the front room. She wouldn’t wait in the kitchen. The hole in the glass was level with her eyes as she stood at the window. She showed it to the deputy. She knew what it was. [Read more]

Castle Freeman Jr. is a longtime contributor of short fiction to NER, most recently with “Enough of Billy” (NER 38.2, 2017). He lives in southeastern Vermont.

from NER 39.2
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