FICTION: ISSUE FIVE
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Una en la RecámaraThe two women are named Ababa and Inés, and upon crossing my threshold they instruct me to lock the front and back doors and shut out the lights. They are certain that the man called Trasero has followed us from Manolo’s, and will arrive here at any moment |
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The Girl Who Was
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RefrigeratorThey say a Chinese boy was stuffed into a small refrigerator in the kitchen of Shen Li’s Fortune Moon Restaurant because he saw something the owners didn’t want him to see. They stuffed him in it and played cards. |
FICTION ARCHIVES
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The Bread’s Song
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CodaAugust began in its usual way, with the dry, stiff heat that eked out of July turning into something slick and vaguely musty-smelling. That continued until September, which, for our town’s small grid of land bordering the western shores of Lake Michigan, was entirely normal |
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Sacred GroundIn the kitchen, above his basement bedroom, Alex hears voices. His mother’s, mainly—going on about the plot of graves behind the barn. ¶ “Died of Typhoid Fever all in the same week,” she is saying now. “The mother and her three little ones.” |
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Lake MichiganWe were a family, perhaps like many families, that appeared close when together. We kissed one another warmly on the cheek, a real kiss, lips to face. We hugged tightly, pushing the air out of the other’s chest, a hugging umph escaping from our mouths. And we talked about the intimate details of |
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Mirabeau, the TruantMirabeau couldn’t sleep, so he stole his father’s binoculars and went out into the early dawn where, perched in the bed of his father’s truck, the boy could see Mrs. Walthrop inside her bedroom, naked. In the daytime he knew Walthrop as the kind old lady who smelled of rotting flowers |
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A Charmed LifeHis father was a disgraced steamboat pilot with a knack for grounding boats and destroying docks, his mother the thin-lipped illegitimate daughter of a beefy prostitute. When the midwife handed him over, she waited six hours in the parlor room to be paid, her queries up the decrepit stairs |
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The MillwrightBy the time Tom Mantela’s three girls turned thirteen, they had been crocheting afghans for years, passing hundreds of snowy winter afternoons rainbowed round the radiator, knotting long strands of yarn into pretty four-inch squares while their father worked in the garage. |
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SpringEveryone says they cannot harm you, that they look worse than they really are. They say, “Well, the big ones come from the trees. They come from outside. That’s just how things are here.” You try to listen but all you can think about is their bodies, their arms and their arms and their legs. |
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Marble DustIn 1970 forty-three thousand slabs of marble were shipped from the Italian province of Carrara to Chicago, USA, for the purpose of sheathing the new Standard Oil building downtown. At the time the building was Chicago’s tallest, with eighty-eight floors, fifty elevators, and tracks of |
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The Poor, Dead SoldiersThe war was over, but we didn’t know what to do with all the poor, dead soldiers. They lay everywhere: on the lawns, in the streets, draped across the steps of the museums. Sometimes in trees, where they had been doing a smart bit of reconnaissance work when they met their ends. |
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The Lighthouse Keeper’s WifeThe quilt was a who’s who of the coast, each of us embroidering our name in red, our married names, and something else, it could be of our choosing, though still the parameters were implied. The object needed to be something simple, domestic—a basket, a flower, an egg. |
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The SwimmerEvery day Nora went to the pool where the young pretty mothers dipped their little girls into the water. Because Nora liked to feel her skin bristling with heat before she got wet, she always spent a few minutes walking up and down the concrete, surveying the scene. |
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Translated from the FrenchI should not have allowed the scooter to run out of fuel. The problem is mileage. I am required to fill the tank so infrequently that I forget it even exists. I forget about combustion, about the small explosions taking place in the engine just centimeters from my feet. |
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TorrentThe rain wouldn’t stop raining nor the creeks rising, too strong now for walking home, so I waited, daydreamy, thinking of a she-bear I hankered to see feeding on berries, though not so close as her to sniff me, just to watch her eyes gleaming and hear her snort like a rutty shoat. |
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The BunkerThe bunker comes equipped with tinned nutritionals, home repair manuals, and a selection of musical works deemed by a committee to be those most intriguing upon repeated listening sessions. There are canned peaches and scratchy industrial paper products. Anything that can be dehydrated is. |
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Au Pair with SimbaYou catch the Bryons like crazy people, listening into some corner of thin air. You do not know the time they put in with the Big Cats. How they come home, and roars are still booming in their ears. Soon, they get the license. And they buy a cub. It is dopey like the babies of all species. |
