~
I decided to throw the chicken sandwich away but couldn't bring myself to touch it, the first step in the throwing-away process proved impossible, so I sat there while it sat there too, me in my chair, the sandwich on my plate, both of us in the kitchen listening to my wife talk or cry softly in the bedroom, where I pretended to sleep every night but couldn’t for no reason, no reason at all.
—From "Chicken Marriage Sandwich," a story by Parker Young, Always Crashing Magazine (May 22, 2022).
In Bora Bora, crabs do the work of rodents at night, patrolling the gutters with a percussive, mechanical menace. Dogs sleep inches from the road; it looks like they've been struck down by careless drivers. I almost hit some of them myself in our rented Fiat Panda because I was attempting to learn, under [my brother-in-law] Harrison's tutelage, how to operate a manual transmission. I made the Panda lurch erratically around the road that circumvolves the island, like a model train powered by a sketchy generator, which was pretty close to the real situation mechanically, as Harrison kept trying to explain to me by repeating the story of the clutch and the drivetrain, the clutch and the drivetrain, a meaningless story, impossible to visualize, which I never even began to understand. While everyone else on the island only appeared to be driving recklessly (it was ultimately a sign of their mastery), I was actually doing it, because I had too much to think about all at once—the clutch, the gas, my error in taking this one-week job as Harrison's assistant—and it was embarrassing.
—From "Disappearances," a story by Parker Young, from his debut collection of short fiction, Cheap Therapist Says You're Insane (Future Tense Books, 2023). I originally discovered this book via a list of new fiction, which led me to read "Chicken Marriage Sandwich," which was published in Always Crashing (see above). I liked the story so much that I ordered a copy of Cheap Therapist Says You're Insane. (Interestingly, the version of "Chicken Marriage Sandwich" that appears in the book is quite different. I definitely recommend reading the version in Always Crashing, even if you do read, or have already read, the collection.) This story, "Disappearances," is on pages 93-101 of the book. This particular segment appears on pages 94-95. I was making a list of my other favorite stories from the collection, but it ended up being too long. (I will single out "Repentance Rebate" and "Two Bathtubs in Memphis.")
First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they've always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let's just say out of it.
On any other day they'd have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home, good neighbors taking notice, pestering the tit of trouble as they will. All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the mountain and there she'd be, little bleach-blonde smoking her Pall Malls, hanging on that railing like she's captain of her ship up there and now might be the hour it's going down. This is an eighteen-year-old girl we're discussing, all on her own and as pregnant as it gets. The day she failed to show, it fell to Nance Peggot to go bang on the door, barge inside, and find her passed out on the bathroom floor with her junk all over the place and me already coming out. A slick fish-colored hostage picking up grit from the vinyl tile, worming and shoving around because I'm still inside the sack that babies float in, pre-real-life.
Mr. Peggot was outside idling his truck, headed for evening service, probably thinking about how much of his life he'd spent waiting on women. His wife would have told him the Jesusing could hold on a minute, first she needed to go see if the little pregnant gal had got herself liquored up again. Mrs. Peggot being a lady that doesn't beat around the bushes and if need be, will tell Christ Jesus to sit tight and keep his pretty hair on. She came back out yelling for him to call 911 because a poor child is in the bathroom trying to punch himself out of a bag.
—From Demon Copperhead, a novel by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper, 2022), winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.
He found the corpse covered with a blanket on the campaign cot where he had always slept, and beside it was a stool with the developing tray he had used to vaporize the poison. On the floor, tied to a leg of the cot, lay the body of a black Great Dane with a snow-white chest, and next to him were the crutches.
—From Love in the Time of Cholera, a novel by Gabriel García Márquez, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (Alfred A. Knopf, 1988). The book was originally published in Colombia as El amor en los tiempos del cólera in 1985.
Bonus book to read again:
That was the spring that Ian's brother fell in love. Up till then Danny had had his share of girlfriends—various decorative Peggies or Debbies to hang upon his arm—but somehow nothing had come of them. He was always getting dumped, it seemed, or sadly disillusioned. His mother had started fretting that he'd passed the point of no return and would wind up a seedy bachelor type. Now here was Lucy, slender and pretty and dressed in red, standing in the Bedloes' front hall with her back so straight, her purse held so firmly in both hands, that she seemed even smaller than she was. She seemed childlike, in fact, although Danny described her as a "woman" when he introduced her. "Mom, Dad, Ian, I'd like you to meet the woman who's changed my life."
—From Saint Maybe, a novel by Anne Tyler (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991/Vintage reprint, 1996).