Categories » Fiction

 
 
 

Three Marriages | By Emily Mitchell

October 31, 2013 by
Categories: Fiction

From the current issue (34.2):

Eamon_Everall._The_Love_LetterShortly after they moved from their own house in Darien, Connecticut, into a retirement home near Fort Myers, Florida, Lucinda announced that she didn’t want to be married anymore to Fred, her husband of fifty-nine years. When she told her children this they were first horrified and then dismissive. She could not mean it, they said to her and to each other. She could not possibly be serious. They interpreted it as a sign that she was becoming senile, that her mind and judgment, which had until then remained very sharp, were becoming impaired. They took her to get tested for other signs of reduced cognitive function, but the doctors they spoke with found Lucinda to be lucid and competent, her memory of recent and distant events remarkably intact for someone of her age, which was eighty-three years old.

“But what about this idea that she’s going to leave my father?” her son, Harry, asked the gerontologist who administered the battery of tests. “If that doesn’t count as crazy, I don’t know what does.”

The doctor looked at him and shrugged.

“I can’t comment on whether your mother is making a sensible choice in this matter,” he said. “But she is able to talk about her decision with perfect clarity. Being sane is in no way related to being wise.”

[read more]

Tags: ,
Comments Off

from Sea of Hooks | By Lindsay Hill

October 21, 2013 by
Categories: Fiction

From Lindsay Hill’s novel Sea of Hooks, in the current issue (34.2):

sea of hooks

GLASS

Of the great Victorian conservatory in Golden Gate Park, known formally as the Hall of Flowers, Christopher Westall’s mother had once said, “This is a place where glass is safe.” For some reason he thought of this first on finding her body, the plastic bag fitted so snuggly over her face. He held her hand awhile there in the cold. It felt reef-stiff. Her eyes were closed. She had somehow managed to tuck herself in quite tightly. Her face was soft, expressionless and tired. No hint of how it had been for her to die, there on the bed in his room, the bed under which he once thought knife-people slept.

[read more]

Tags: ,
Comments Off

Lost Things

July 8, 2013 by
Categories: Fiction

From Lisa Van Orman Hadley’s story, “Lost Things,” in the current issue:

800px-Rippl_Sour_Cherry_Tree_in_Blossom_1909We’ve lost teeth, for one thing. One hundred and sixty baby teeth among us, not counting wisdom teeth. Some of them fell out easily. When they didn’t, my father gave us two options: the pliers or the door. Each choice inflicted its own particular kind of pain. The pliers bore a pain of certainty—the pain of knowing that once they were clamped down tight, the tooth would come out carefully, slowly, achingly. The door held a pain of surprise. My father would tie one end of a piece of string to the tooth and then tie the other end to a door handle. Then he would pretend to slam the door several times until he finally did it for real and the tooth would go with it. If we were lucky, the suddenness of it all would override any actual pain. I, thankfully, lost my first tooth at six while eating an apple in my parents’ bedroom.

[read more] [Image: "Sour Cherry in Tree Blossom" by József Rippl-Rónai / Wikimedia Commons.]

Tags: ,
Comments Off

The Texas Project

April 17, 2013 by
Categories: Fiction
File:Pencil 357.jpg

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

From Kelly Kathleen Ferguson’s story, “The Texas Project,” in the current issue:

Lora meets Derek at Measurement, Inc., a grading service for standardized tests. In a basement below the mall, tables of college graduates judge preteen thoughts on gun control and personal liberty. This job is considered better than temping. Should Smithtown build a park or a library? Support your argument with evidence. The Texas Project is a crucial assignment. The first batch of scores was contaminated; this is a retest. For five weeks 373 readers will assess 200,900 essays written by Texas ninth graders. The scores determine who moves up and who gets held back, the first sorting of the college bound from the cashiers. The topic: drunk driving.


[read more]

Tags: ,
Comments Off

The Finder

December 19, 2012 by
Categories: Fiction

From David Guterson’s story “Tenant,” in the current issue:

Lydia Williams—as the finder put it in his final report before siphoning off his outlandish fee—moved in “without a hitch.” Invisible, an abstraction, RENTER—all caps—but indeed her rent got paid, expediently and electronically, on the fifteenth of month two—and with no trouble, no communication. It was as if Lydia Williams remained in the finder’s hands—she existed contractually but not in person; he could not have said what she looked like or how she sounded; now and again he stopped to wonder who Lydia Williams was, but his questions about her had to do with her reliability as a rent payer and with whether she could change a light bulb in figurative terms, i.e., whether she could save him time and money, by virtue of solid do-it-yourself skills, on repairs and maintenance. He wondered but made no move to find out about her, fearing that by asserting himself he might pave the way for a burdensome relationship, invite nuisance, regret his forwardness, ultimately end up with more trouble, work, and concern than if he’d stayed in the background.

Finally, he sent her a benign and innocent-enough e-mail.

[read more]

Tags: ,
Comments Off

We Want So Much to Be Ourselves

December 18, 2012 by
Categories: Fiction

From Stephen O’Connor’s “We Want So Much to Be Ourselves,” in the current issue:

Roland’s longing trailed after him as he walked, a sort of dirigible, attached by a silver filament that tugged and tugged without ever lightening his step.

“Why’s that thing always following you around?” his brother asked. “Haven’t you already got everything you could possibly want?”

Roland didn’t bother to argue, not because his brother was right (wasn’t it simple fact that human desire was endlessly replenishable?), but because his brother was a very small man with the jaw of someone twice his size. He walked with his jaw foremost, his shoulders hunched and his elbows back, as if he were being bent nearly to the ground by the burden of all the things he couldn’t have. If anyone were to be followed around by a dirigible of longing, it ought to have been Roland’s brother, but the air above his hunched shoulders was a void. And this seemed sad to Roland, although many things struck him as sad.

[read more]

Tags: ,
Comments Off

Vicissitudes, CA

September 12, 2012 by
Categories: Fiction

Bryan Hurt was a Co-Editor of The Loudest Voice

Bryan Hurt’s short story, “Vicissitudes, CA,” appears in the current issue:

Brandon and Kara went hiking but were unprepared for the physical challenge. “Hiking is hard work,” said Kara. She cupped her hands and drank from a limpid mountain stream.

“But it’s awesome,” she said.

“Nature rocks,” said Brandon.

They were in the San Gabriel Mountains and from their elevation could see Los Angeles and the smog in the distance. In Los Angeles city people lived in tiny apartments. The tiny apartments had tiny windows and the tiny windows had tiny curtains which blocked the prying eyes of neighbors. The curtains, sometimes, needed to be ironed.

Brandon didn’t own an iron.

He thought about this.

Nature, he thought, is good because it’s simple and expansive.

Brandon came to the mountains to find enlightenment. Enlightenment, he learned from his yoga teacher, could be found in nature.

[read more]

Tags: ,
Comments Off

When I grow up

June 26, 2012 by
Categories: Fiction

From Brock Clarke’s short story “Of the Revolution,” in the current issue:

The last time I saw my father was on Monument Square. It was a Friday. I was thirteen years old. My school and my father’s office were within walking distance of the square, and so every Friday afternoon at four we met there in front of the monument and then walked to one of the nearby restaurants, where he had a martini and I had a soda and we talked and drank until my mother joined us there for dinner. I was a few minutes early that day, and since I was standing in front of the monument with nothing better to do, I decided to read the plaque on its base. I’d stood there next to the monument dozens of times, but had never bothered to find out who it was supposed to memorialize: it could have memorialized a guy named Monument for all I knew. But it didn’t: the plaque said it memorialized George Washington, whom the plaque called “the Father of the Revolution.”

[read more]

 

Tags: ,
Comments Off

Sixty and beyond

March 27, 2012 by
Categories: Fiction

Втёрся-парень-в-хоровод

From Megan Staffel’s short story “Tertium Quid,” in the current issue:

Meredith was a good person. She had been young once, but now she had entered the age of entropy, and the great media machine of American culture gunned past her, its probes searching out juveniles. Movies, music, TV shows, like bathing suits and bras, were not created for a person like her. Sixty and beyond, it was the age no one wanted to be reminded of, except of course the other women who had reached it also. They were an army that is no longer needed yet still wanders the countryside, doing all of the things they were taught to do despite the fact that no one was watching.

[read more]

Tags: ,
Comments Off

Real chilling things

February 28, 2012 by
Categories: Fiction

Joseph Mallord William Turner 064

From Zana Previti’s story “The Letters of Odysseus to Kalypso,” in the current issue:

They started out very calmly, hello, Kalypso, how have you been, do you still have that necklace I made for you out of shells and dolphin tendons. Pretty quickly he began adding in short vignettes about his kid and some hunting trips they had been on, or how they’d gotten together on a Saturday afternoon and fixed a broken yoke. Then the kid stories stopped and he started telling her all about his fears—someone was in the house last night but he couldn’t catch him, someone was killing his beeves, there was a knife under his pillow he hadn’t put there, real chilling things.

[read more]

Tags: ,
Comments Off