Lou Mathews

Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others

August 25, 2014

Fiction from NER 35.2.

1280px-Path_between_sugar_canes_(5216462193) No man knows his apotheosis. Carl Jung said that. No man knows his apotheosis, but I know mine. That particular deal went down in the scrubby jungle outside of Rivas. This was in Nicaragua, in 1987. I can tell you the day and even the hour. April 22, 1:00 p.m., the high point of my life. At noon that day, the producers fired Alec Litwer-Bowen as director. Alec had recommended a two-million-dollar line of credit, to be spent in-country, which made sense. The US Embargo made the usual studio transactions impossible. When Alec arrived in Nicaragua, he handed a million dollars over to the Sandinista government. It would have been a bargain; government support in the form of reliable cars, trucks, gasoline, construction equipment, soldiers, helicopters, boats, soldiers, extras, and rare goods like plywood and other necessities for sets would be worth well beyond that sum. The bonding company, which should never have known about this transaction, got squeezed by the Reagan administration and demanded that the producers shut the movie or fire Alec. They fired Alec, at least that is what we assumed. Alec had disappeared and the studio publicists began cranking up the creative-differences-agree-to-disagree machine. It was quite a concert back in LA; the rumor machine began a bass murmur of overdoses and breakdowns while contracts and legal whistled moral turpitude. Meantime, the studio tried to recruit an A, B, or even C-list director. No one would touch it; the bad juju taint was out on this one. I was right place, right time. I was the writer, I was second-unit assistant director, I’d made a short, I spoke Spanish. Mostly, I was there. They handed me the swagger stick, the metaphorical pith helmet and megaphone. Traditionally, a transition like this would be noted by a newly stenciled parking space and a folding chair with my name on the back: Dale Davis, Director.

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Lou Mathews’s story “Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others” is from a shiny new manuscript, Hollywoodski, stories by and about Dale Davis, a self-described “faded screenwriter.” Another story from Hollywoodski,“Not Oliver Stone,” will be published in Black Clock #19 this November. Mathews’s work has also appeared in Tin House, Failbetter, Mother Jones, Short Story, and The Pushcart Prize. His first novel, L.A. Breakdown (Malvern, 1999), was a Los Angeles Times Best Book.

Sands Hall

Theim’s Wingéd Chariot

August 18, 2014

Fiction from NER 35.2.

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The_Flower_Book_-_Love_in_a_Mist

Just as Dafne finished her rousing—if she said so herself—lecture about the limited choices for women in nineteenth-century America, much less Britain, and had called on the dependable Serena for a response, the door to her classroom nudged open. And there, peering around the doorjamb, was Edward! Dafne’s heart lurched like an old car. The whole of Friday night tumbled at her, an Atlantic wave full of force and silt guaranteed to knock her over the fence and into the moon. “Professor Hartman!” she said. That horrid betraying flush was, she knew, making her face look as if she’d been in a boiler room shoveling coal. Edward nodded, pushed open the door the rest of the way, and tiptoed, elaborately, to the nearest available chair.

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Sands Hall is the author of the novel Catching Heaven (Ballantine, 2000) and a book of essays and exercises, Tools of the Writer’s Craft (Moving Finger Press, 2005). Her essays and stories have appeared in 2paragraphs.com, Green Mountains Review, and the Iowa Review; the latter, “Hide and Go Seek,” was listed among 100 Other Notable Stories in Best American Short Stories, 2009. She is also a singer/songwriter and playwright; her produced plays include an adaptation of Alcott’s Little Women and the comic drama Fair Use.

Steven Heighton

Shared Room On Union

May 22, 2014

Fiction from NER 35.1.

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They were parked on Union, in front of her place, their knees locked in conference around the stick shift, Janna and Justin talking, necking a little, the windows just beginning to steam. We’d better stop, she said. I should go now. It was 1:00 a.m., a Thursday night turned Friday morning. Squads of drunken students were on the town. So far nobody had passed the car. Hey, take it to a Travelodge, man! Nights like this, that sort of thing could happen—one time a rigid hand had rammed the hood, another time someone had smacked the passenger window a foot from her ear, Justin’s fingers in her hair stopping dead.

I won’t miss this part, he told her.

I really should go, Jus.

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Steven Heighton is a novelist, short story writer, poet, and fiction reviewer for the New York Times Book Review. His novel Afterlands (Knopf Canada, 2005) has appeared in six countries; was a best-of-year choice in ten publications in Canada, the US, and the UK; and has been optioned for film. His poems and stories have appeared in London Review of Books, Poetry, Tin House, Zoetrope: All-Story, Best American Poetry, Agni, the Literary Review, London Magazine, and other publications, and have received four gold National Magazine Awards.

Leslie Bazzett

Studies in Composition

February 27, 2014

Fiction from NER 34.3-4.

The chapel bells had begun, calling the boys to dinner. From the kitchen veranda Davis watched them shambling through late-summer heat, khaki shorts slung low, loafers mashed at the heels, laughing or occasionally tossing overgrown bangs to the side. In a few minutes the day seemed to have swollen. There was a heavy smell of frying. In the distance the rolling pastures greened and damped, grown dark as moss. The farthest was dotted with horses—the boarding school a working farm also, these hundred years since its founding. Unseen was a river; a dappled wood where on weekends the boys were allowed to hunt, its leafy harbor suggesting other things to Davis. He was an imaginative boy. Handsome and mildly disdainful. When headmaster Givens passed, Davis merely nodded, refraining from the “sir” other boys would have offered.

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Leslie Bazzett lives with her husband in Minneapolis. This is her first published story.

New England Review