Light Across the Plain
Mary lived in a garage apartment behind a two story house with a porch swing. She had a mattress on the floor in the corner of the room, and two windows on each wall looked onto the yard — where children’s bikes were thrown — and back to a field that sloped down to a stream where trees grew up along it so, at night, they looked like a wall, stretching as far as could be seen, and high and blocking the sun as it rose in the morning.
There was a pool table in the room at the top of the stairs that had been the family room for the people in the house, but since they rented to Mary, no one, the children or their friends, were allowed up there.
“Charles,” she said. “Get out of here.”
But I leaned against the doorjamb and smiled at her.
Logistics
There’s a hole in the side of the hill birds fly out of. I like to go out there, into the field, and stand where the land rises into the hill, and watch as the birds fly back and forth.
I saw his mother getting out of her car. She kept fretting with her clothes. The baby was strapped to its seat, tightly. He kind of laughed then burped as I slid my hands beneath him. He laughed once, then lay quietly. I held him tightly against me.
I could feel him breathing. He yawned, then closed his eyes, as I set him, stomach down, onto the couch. His back was warm against my hand. I settled into the chair and watched him, and the sun rose and shone through the window.
He slept on the couch and I watched him wake up. I thought of a name for him, though I never called him by it, and I held him on the porch in the evening, before I set him down to sleep, and repeated it.
On afternoons, when he could walk, I took his hand and walked with him into the field toward the hill. We watched the birds. We listened as they flew into the sky or followed as they entered with their wings pressed tightly against them.
I heated water on the stove and watched steam rise as I poured cooler water into it. Then I lifted him and set him, feet first, into the tub. I passed a cloth across his back. I held his head in one hand, and poured water over his hair with the other. The beads caught on his lashes, and he blinked, and they rolled down his cheeks as he laughed.
One morning, he reached up and pulled at my shirt. When I looked down, he folded his hands beneath his arms, then pressed them against his body. They called and sang their songs for us. They dove and fell into the shadow of the hill. He jumped once, then stood quietly.
When I woke, the couch was empty. The door was open, and a wind came through the room, pushing against my hair. I could see the hill in the distance. As I got closer, the birds were singing, and I saw him standing there, arms outstretched, and what I had imagined as the birds calling to each other, was him singing and the birds answering, and coming to him from the hill.
I called out to him, but my voice was lost in it, and he didn’t hear me.
Cake Camouflage
Wild Cakes certainly lives up to its name with this sweet take on spaghetti and meatballs made with buttercream pasta, strawberry jam pasta sauce, Ferrero Rocher meatballs and shaved white chocolate parmesan.
More here from mental_floss. (Via @nypl_menus.)
from the comments
This kind of play always gets me excited. It’s easier for me to remember opening lines I like, though, because the ones I don’t like don’t stay with me. But there’s no denying that dislikes shape us too. Writing an opening sentence in a fiction is like walking up to a stranger on the street and saying excuse me…. In real encounters like this, all of human nature waits in that moment of turning to look at the person. We have secret lists of near-future possibilities waiting: panhandler? thief? long-lost friend? detective….? And we start considering the list before we actually even see the person. I like opening sentences that don’t let me feel comfortable about my list or my impulse to apply it. I like opening lines that say — something interesting is already happening. This power only comes when everything down to punctuation and single word choice is significantly managed.
Here’s a favorite opening sentence:
An Introduction
My car is a Kia.
I drive to IKEA.
I had Chick-fil-A for lunch.
Gordon Lish and dictionary.com
I’m afraid this link will not be what I’m wanting past midnight today. The word of the day for November 19 is “knavery” and they use a quote from Gordon Lish to show usage! (Thanks to my friend Susan for letting me know about this.)
Update:
Yes, I took the brunt of it but not because there was a ballot on it but because I know knavery when I see knavery. Plus underhandedness and mischief.
– Gordon Lish, Collected Fictions
EDIT: The link has been edited to point to the relevant day forever.
List of science-fiction films
Andrew tweeted this, and I thought it was worth passing on. A Wikipedia science-fiction films list of lists.
42 S. Deacon St. #5
There are at least fifty things about her you cannot stand. Maybe a thousand:
She is soft and smells nice. Talks on the phone all day. Makes your favorite meals without being asked. Throws your Maxim magazines on the floor when she’s angry with you. Is sad when an animal gets hurt. Loses your car keys. Asks your opinion and listens to your response as if it matters. There’s more.
All my cloths
are on the floor of my car.
I could use a nice big dresser.
fragment
They always say breathe, and I think what the fuck are you talking about? The inside of a box is as important as the handle of a mop.
Three More, the Third Day…
Tussel kept the pedal to the floor, pushing through resistance. The dusky, snow-blown scenery in his frost-glazed periphery, rushing and slowing as gusting wind pushed against him. Tussel’s car the beleaguered transport toward a what he could not yet name a why for.
Kevin Sampsell in Conversation with Gary Lutz
The Rumpus did a short interview with Gary Lutz about his new collection Divorcer:
Kevin: Do you drive? What kinds of cars do you like?
Gary: I hate all cars, but I drive a black Chevrolet Cavalier filled with trash. The driver’s side of the body has been keyed so intricately, so all-over-ishly (though perhaps keying isn’t quite the word; there might have been ice picks and chisels involved as well), that the vandal (should she ever get caught) might benefit as much from a gallerist as from a social worker.
(thanks, Derek)
(Im)possible Chicagos is a series of hallucinatory joyrides through one hundred and twenty five asynchronous Chicagos.
Alexander Trevi‘s first joyride through (Im)possible Chicago traversed Acer Necropolis.
Trevi recently completed his nineteenth, wherein:
At night when you’re out driving, you can tell which neighborhood you’re in by the light of the streetlamps, because each ward basks in its own different hue. For instance, if the streets are all aglow in azurite, you’re definitely joy riding around Marquette Park.
Zoning codes require that windows are tinted according to the neighborhood’s chromatic identity, so no matter how the interiors are lighted, houses, skyscrapers and 7-Elevens do not give off wayward wavelengths.
Even your car lights beam out the same color. But when you cross over into another ward, they instantaneously switch filter to match that ward’s assigned spectrum.
Extras for Experts
Five fictions from Mike Topp at Hart House Review.
Gloss
Renner has a fiction at Brooklyner.
from the comments
His sister held him close and whispered to his bleeding head, “CH33p VI4GRA!!! SAV3 TONZ OF $$$!!!”
Little Bastard
Then she asked, “Could you play a hymn for me at my visitation? It would make my mama so proud.”
“Suppertime.”
“I’ll play ‘Suppertime’ at your funeral,” I told her. “I promise. But not to make your mama proud. I’ll play it for the same reason we always played it.”
“You’re something, Mister,” she said, fading in and out of grownup words.
She tugged on my collar.
“If you ain’t the Devil then I reckon the Devil best be afraid of you,” she whispered in my face.
“That’s a fine line right there,” I explained. “But I can handle that little bastard.”
Artifice and foam rubber
In fact, so much artifice and foam rubber is often used to create the sexually alluring woman that it’s sometimes difficult to know where the lady ends and the foam rubber begins.
Via dangerous minds by way of Roger Ebert.
the 2011 Bulwer-Lytton winner
Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.
(via Coudal)
‘As a result of several short conversations with him, officers believe he may not be from Utah’
With a little editing, this could be worked into something:
“This is really a strange case,” said Lt. Dennis Harris with the Utah County Sheriff’s Office. “He just doesn’t want to be found.”
Sleepingfish X
I’ve started Sleepingfish back up (online) & posted some work by Vincent Standley (an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, A Mortal Affect, which is coming soon from Calamari Press) & a collage of sorts called Heartscald by Gary Lutz (whose new book, Divorcer, is also forthcoming from Calamari). Stay tuned.
My Favorite Katherine Anne Porter Story
Shrine
More fiction from Renner.
Zombie
Renner posted a lovely short fiction at Fictionaut.
An Uncertain Green
Spring, and the discovery that my coat was ten sizes too large. I knew the different rooms of it. A cavern of wet wool in rain. For months, there under a bridge, I could raise my arm from water and drink at my own breast.
I built nests for birds and waited, on into summer. A wasp examined one made of chopsticks and watermelon rind. A possum peered into the tangle of licorice and bright finishing nails. Then a mockingbird settled in a china cup set in a cat’s ribcage. I fought sleep.
A windy, no-thought day. Calculated my heart rate by barest touch of teeth. The city employed its vehicles in miniature vistas. A man came with the mood of one checking on some report of me. A patch covering one eye; his other gazing as a whale would a moment before slipping below. He must have seen no cause.
How then to populate a day with color, in rain, without bringing a bowl for the fire of it? The sea at this city’s edge marks a kind of hollow, always seeming to say we should be amazed by any dry land. The sharks at the aquarium rasp their gray skins against my sense of water, watching a vision of watchers. So, bird, come to my eye beak first—swim into me, find that avenue that falls through autumn to black bones where perch the reasons.
