New England Review

Carrying the Torch | Brock Clarke

 

Brock Clarke’s story “Carrying the Torch” appeared in NER 21.1 (2000):

450px-Gersdorff_p21vI decided last night that someday soon I am going to rip my husband’s penis off with my bare hands. I plan to do it while he’s sleeping. I will make sure that I am wearing my running shorts and sneakers, and after I have done the deed, I will jog at a good clip around my neighborhood, holding the bloody thing above my head and a little in front of me like a torch. The summer Olympics started yesterday, and I was in the crowd as Rafer Johnson ran through Atlanta with the real torch, which is how I got my idea.

“Who exactly is Rafer Johnson?” I asked my husband, Till, yesterday. Till is an executive with Microsoft’s Atlanta division, and he’s also on the Olympic organizing committee, which is how we managed to stand right up front while this large, fit black man ran down Peachtree with Nike written all over his mesh tank top and nylon jogging shorts.

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Brock Clarke

Of the Revolution

Fiction from NER 33.1.

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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.”

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Brock Clarke is the author of five works of fiction, most recently the novels Exley (Algonquin, 2011) and An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (Algonquin, 2008). His fiction and nonfiction have been included in a number of magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies, and have earned him an NEA Literature fellowship, the Mary McCarthy Prize, and the Prairie Schooner Book Series Prize, among other awards. He teaches at Bowdoin College and lives in Portland, Maine. 

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