Fiction from Donatella Di Pietrantonio, Margriet de Moor, Josip Novakovich, and Laura van den Berg

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The woman who had conceived me didn't get up from the chair.  The child she held in her arms was sucking his thumb on one side of his mouth--maybe a tooth was coming in.  Both of them looked at me, and he stopped his monotonous crying.  I didn't know I had such a little brother.

        "You're here," she said.  "Put down your things."

        I lowered my eyes to the smell of shoes that wafted from the bag if I moved it even slightly.  From behind the closed door of the room at the back came a tense, sonorous snoring.  The baby started whining again and turned to the breast, dripping saliva on the sweaty, faded cotton flowers.  

        "Why don't you close the door?" the mother curtly asked the girl, who hadn't moved.
--From A Girl Returned, a novel by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions, 2019).  Originally published in Italian as L'Arminuta (Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a.: Torino, Italy, 2017).   

I am grateful to my husband for this soft wooden floor, laid with his own two hands.  I know that he salvaged these planks of oak from a scrapyard.  I even know that the wood originally came from the Heide Hotel, an old hunting lodge.  I walk a floor for which a tidy sum was once paid.  As he worked away in the living room--I can still hear the short, intense blasts of hammering--I was running an angled paintbrush along the frame of the door that leads down to the cellar.  I remember how pleased I was with the color, a grayish green that even now, almost fifteen years later, still seems just right.  I recall the stiffness in my fingers when the paint that had dripped down the side of the brush began to dry.  I didn't have much space to work in.  I see very clearly that the sweep of my clumsy efforts was hemmed in by a pile of secondhand chairs and boxes crammed with wedding gifts.  While the Chinese bowls, the tablecloth embroidered with irises, the cocktail shaker, and goodness knows what else are items I still possess and see almost every day, Ton, my young husband, has vanished without a trace.

--From Sleepless Night, a novel by Margriet de Moor, translated from the Dutch by David Doherty (New Vessel Press, 2019).  First published in Dutch as Slapeloze nacht (De Bezige Bij: Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2016).

Ivan Medvedich was washing his silvery mustache after eating a slice of dark bread with honey when a whistle cut through the air, deepened in frequency, and sank into an explosion that shook the house so that a bar of soap slid from the mirror ledge into the sink.

        "Lord have mercy!" his wife Estera said.  "What was that?"

        "The Chetniks, what else."

        Soon, another whistle and another explosion.

        "Run for cover!" Estera shouted.

        "What cover?  This is the safest place in the house."

        Ivan had built the house alone--actually, with a little help from his oldest, flat-footed son, Daniel, who had groaned more than he worked.  It took Ivan twenty years of careful labor to finish the house, but one thing he had skipped: a cellar, perhaps because snakes had nested and floods crept into the cellar of his childhood home.  God is my fortress and my strength was his motto.  But now, in addition to God, a cellar would help.

--From Honey in the Carcase, a collection of short stories by Josip Novakovich (Dzanc Books, 2019).  This section is the beginning of the title story, "Honey in the Carcase," which was first published in The Threepenny Review (Autumn 1993).  This story was later included in The Pushcart Prize XIX (1994-1995) and reprinted in The Literary Review in 2019 as a TLR Share.   

Eventually I come upon a twenty-four-hour diner called Helen's Kitchen.  The door chimes as I enter.  The diner is empty except for two waitresses, standing behind the counter like strange twins, one on the left-hand side, the other on the right.  They are both wearing forest-green aprons and holding white coffee carafes.  They are wearing the same glasses, with pink cat-eye frames; their hair is pulled back into matching French braids.  For a moment, I think Beth Butler's husband has murdered me after all and Helen's Kitchen is the afterlife.  The woman on the left puts down her carafe.  She walks over and rips the the tape from my mouth.

        "How can we help you?" she says. 

--From I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, a collection of short stories by Laura van den Berg (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020).  This section is from "Your Second Wife" (pages 159-173 in the hardcover).  A slightly different version of this story was published in Lenny Letter (August 28, 2018).