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Excerpts
The Travelers
Regina Porter
Bessie Coleman was the first woman Eloise Delaney loved—before she knew love meant anything. There is a rectangular photograph cropped from the Buckner County Register, a local Negro paper, of Coleman standing atop the left tire of her Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” biplane. Her gloved right hand hugs the cockpit. She is decked out in tailored aviation gear and stares directly into the camera. The photograph is at least thirty years old and dates back to 1926, the year of the brown aviatrix’s untimely death, but for Eloise’s parents the crash might have happened yesterday. They were the town drunks and time played on them murky.
Happiness, as Such
Natalia Ginzburg (trans. Minna Zalman Proctor)
A woman awoke in her new house. Her name was Adriana. It was snowing out, and her birthday, she was forty-three years old. The house was in the country. The village was visible from the house, on a hilltop, two kilometers away. Fifteen kilometers to the city. Adriana had moved in ten days earlier. She pulled on a light, tobacco-brown robe. Slid her long narrow feet into a pair of slippers that were also tobacco-brown and trimmed with dirty white fur. She headed to the kitchen and made a cup of instant coffee to dunk biscuits in. There were apple peels on the table and she swept them into a newspaper to keep for the rabbits they didn’t have yet but would soon because the milkman had promised to bring them. Then she went into the living room and pulled open the shutters. She saw herself in the mirror hanging over the sofa. She was tall, she wore her wavy copper hair cropped short, she had a small head and a long strong neck, her green eyes were wide set and sad. She sat down at the desk to write a letter to her only son.
“Here Is What You Do”
Chris Dennis
You wet your hair in the sink, then comb it back, slick as a new trash bag. You look nice. Okay, so your name is Ricky. You are twenty-three years old. People say you’re sweet. You say to them, “No, I’m not.” But you are. You know you are. You can’t help it. It’s like there’s a piece of candy hidden deep inside you and everyone is trying to find the easiest way to get it out.
Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?
Johan Harstad, Translated by Deborah Dawkin
"Not everybody wants to be head of a corporation. Not everybody wants to be among the top sports personalities of their country, to sit on various committees, not everybody wants the best lawyers on their team, not everybody wants to wake up in the morning to jubilation or catastrophe in the headlines."
Turbulence
David Szalay
“My gardener,” Ursula said. “You remember my gardener—Shamgar?” “Yes,” Miri said. “Sort of.” “I think he might be gay.” “Yeah? Why?” Ursula laughed. “I think he might be having some sort of affair with the man who works next door.” “Good for him,” Miri said. She didn’t seem very interested—her mind seemed elsewhere.
Stubborn Archivist
Yara Rodrigues Fowler
"The first time that she had gone on her own, she was fifteen. She would leave on the Thursday night. For two days she made herself meals and woke herself up in the morning and Jade and Elena came over and they pretended to be grown ups and went to bed later than they should have."
“If Something Is Free the Product Is You”
Chuck Klosterman
"I think about that screwdriver every day. I think about it more than I think about my parents. Most of my dreams involve screwdrivers, or at least the dreams I can remember. Sometimes I walk into a hardware store and just stare at all the screwdrivers displayed on the wall. It’s like looking at pornography, minus that moment of release when whatever you’ve been looking at explosively becomes absurd. There are lots of reasons screwdrivers are different from vaginas, but that’s one nobody ever talks about."
Costalegre
Courtney Maum
"I find myself thinking a lot about my dear Elisabeth. What else am I to do? Of course, I think a lot about my brother, also, but I know what he is doing, so it isn’t as much fun. As for Elisabeth, I don’t even know what country she’s in; maybe she’s still in Hertfordshire, where it was so nice. Our house there was lovely, even in the damp, and there was almost always a sturdy fire going. Papa walked me to school, you know, and all the buildings were made of the roundest funny stones, and at the end of the day, Lisabeth would walk back with me, and Doris would give us steak and kidney pies, and then we’d go outside and throw sticks for the doggies, and Stephan would flirt with both of us a little, and we’d run up the rocks."
Let’s Hope for the Best
Carolina Setterwall
"Night again. I’m still counting the minutes and hours since the moment you died. The doctor said “around dawn,” and I’ve decided that means five o’clock. In three hours it will have been four days. In three hours and three days it will have been a week. I want it to have been a week. I want it to have been six months. I want it to have been one year. I long so desperately for a time, a day, when it isn’t so fresh anymore. A day when I’ve figured out how to keep living, how to keep taking care of Ivan, when life feels normal rather than like a sad, sick joke."
Inhabitation
Teru Miyamoto (trans. Roger K. Thomas)
"The glare of the fluorescent light made the lizard’s body appear dark, and yet Tetsuyuki was able to tell that it was unmistakably a lizard, not a gecko or a newt. The small striped reptilian pattern was the same as he had seen in the crevices of stone walls, clumps of grass, and on ridges between rice fields when he was a child."
The Ghost Clause
Howard Norman
"Every waking moment, I’m astonished that I have any consciousness. I feel like a stenographer of the afterlife—what am I to call myself now, a revenant? An apparition? An entity? I need to find a word in any language that might work. I have no useful spiritual predisposition or references. Here’s how I often feel I would appear, if I appeared: like that famous hollowed-out-looking man on the bridge in Edvard Munch’s The Scream. This image keeps recurring to me."
Vincent and Alice and Alice
Shane Jones
"We’re heading to the castle, the Hudson river passing by smooth as glass. The guy in front of us is playing a machine-gun video game with the sound loud because he thinks his headphones are plugged in. Doesn’t matter, all I can concentrate on is my leg touching Alice’s leg. It could be seconds or minutes, who knows, where I’m moving my thigh back-and-forth, not connecting with her, then connecting with her."
“On Trains”
James Alan McPherson
"The waiters say she got on the train in Chicago, after transferring from Dearborn Station. She was plump and matronly and her glasses were tinted so that she might have been a tourist seeking protection from the sun; but there was neither sun nor fresh air on the train and she was very pale and a little wrinkled, the way clerks or indoor people grow after many years of their protected, colorless kind of life. She was, indeed, that nondescript type of person one might be aware of but never really see in a supermarket or at a bargain basement sale, carefully and methodically fingering each item; or on a busy street corner waiting for the light to change while others, with less conscious respect for the letter of the law, flowed around her. She rode for a whole day before coming into the dining car for a meal: then she had the $1.95 Special. She asked for buttermilk and wanted “lightbread” instead of rolls. The black waiters all grinned at each other in their secret way."
Beirut Hellfire Society
Rawi Hage
"One sunny day at the start of a ceasefire, a father drove with his son down towards where the fighting had been. A cadaver had been lying on the ground for days, mutilated. The son, who was named Pavlov, and his father, an undertaker, loaded the remains into plastic bags and carried them to the hearse. The cadaver’s belly had been opened by a bullet wound and vermin had claimed it and multiplied inside the soft organs, gorging on the entrails. Father and son gathered the scattered items that belonged to the dead: a loose shoe, a bag filled with mouldy food, broken glasses."
More News Tomorrow
Susan Richards Shreve
"The letter from Roosevelt McCrary that upended Georgie’s life came the morning of her seventieth birthday—written on Camp Minnie HaHa stationery and dated June 18, 2007. The handwriting sloped, the way Georgie’s father’s had been, the way children were taught to write script in the thirties—the paper smudged from handling. He must have written Georgie and then reread the letter again and again for months before he decided to mail it."
“Jackpot”
Mona Simpson
"There was still my father. After Daniel proposed, we stayed on the bed and made a flurry of calls, starting with our closest friends. In a few hours, everyone knew. Everyone, that is, except my father. My father was different. Most of my life we hadn’t had a working telephone number for him. My mother would dial and a recording would click on saying that the line had been disconnected and that there was no new number. Eventually we’d hear from him again, often from overseas. He and his wife Lucille traveled to Macau, to Rio, to Singapore."
“In Dreams”
Brian Evenson
"He heard a buzzing in his head that he took at first to be a dream, but of course he no longer could dream. What was it then? Was it in his head after all? He called up his familiar. Almost immediately, the noise stopped."
The Red Daughter
John Burnham Schwartz
"Her face was staring up at me from the front page of The New York Times. On the right edge of the grainy black-and-white photograph taken at Kennedy Airport that day forty-four years earlier, I could just make out the crescent-shaped smudge that had been the tip of my elbow, before I’d been digitally amputated from the frame. For years a copy of the original picture, with me still included, had hung on the wall of my law office, signed “To Peter with love.” Clients would frequently remark on it, such was her fame in those days."
Provisionally Yours
Antanas Sileika
"The border guard studied the identity papers Adamonis had kept hidden through his escape out of shattered Russia, looking from his photo to his face, from his photo to his face. He told Adamonis to stay where he was on the train platform. Adamonis set down his suitcase and briefcase and pulled the collar of his woollen coat around his neck. The guard’s superior came back without the passport and asked Adamonis to follow him."
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