Short stories by Susan Perabo and poems by Jeanne-Marie Osterman and Catherine Barnett

~
Katy's mother was a real piece of work.  She lived like a hermit in a crappy little apartment in Newark, listening to talk radio and working crossword puzzles and--from what I could tell--just waiting to keel over dead. . . .  She only spoke when asked a direct question, and her answers were always polite and indifferent and short, like she was being interviewed for a job she didn't really want; she looked right through Katy like a pane of glass. 
--From "Counting the Ways," a short story by Susan Perabo.  It was published in her collection Who I Was Supposed to Be (Simon & Schuster, 1999), pp. 35-51.

He awoke Christmas morning to find a tall, frowning doctor standing over him.  Three of his ribs were cracked, and his nose was broken.  His cheeks ached and his ears tingled.  He lifted his arm and read the plastic band that circled his wrist.  John Doe, it read. 
--From "Reconstruction," a short story by Susan Perabo.  It was published in her collection Who I Was Supposed to Be (Simon & Schuster, 1999), pp. 83-102.

I was twelve the summer I watched four men beat up my father on a softball field at his company picnic.  
--From "Who I Was Supposed to Be," a short story by Susan Perabo.  It was first published in Black Warrior Review, 21.1 (Fall/Winter 1994), and later included in her collection Who I Was Supposed to Be (Simon & Schuster, 1999), pp. 103-117.


I walk to the cafeteria carrying my
      clipboard with Medicaid application and notes

for Washington State Human Services
     I'm mistaken for a social worker 

by a man in a wheelchair whose wife
     is dying down the hall.
--From "Any Fool Can," a poem by Jeanne-Marie Osterman, 45th Parallel, Issue 4.


A doctor suggested I spend four minutes a day asking questions about whatever matters most to me.

Four minutes, that's how long it takes to boil an egg, get from 96th to 42nd on the express train, initiate an irreversible apocalypse. 

     ---

How do I get out of here? is the question my father asks most frequently.  It takes him three of four seconds to say the seven syllables, there are frequent glitches in his speech but it's a perfect mantra.

What next? and Jackie? are his other inquiries.

Jackie what next Jackie what next Jackie--

If you count repetitions, they add up to at least four minutes.

--From Human Hours, a collection of poems by Catherine Barnett (Graywolf Press, 2018).  This segment is from "Accursed Questions, i" (pp. 23-26).  The poem that led me to this book, "Essay on 'An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,'" appeared in The New Yorker on March 19, 2018 (pp. 52-53).  "Essay" is on pages 32-33 of Human Hours.

Fiction by Dorthe Nors, Etgar Keret, and Lydia Davis

~
Sonja is sitting in a car, and she's brought her dictionary along.  It's heavy, and sits in the bag on the backseat.  She's halfway through her translation of Gösta Svensson's latest crime novel, and the quality was already dipping with the previous one.  Now's the time I can afford it, she thought, and so she looked for driving schools online and signed up with Folke in Frederiksburg.  The theory classroom was small and blue and reeked of stale smoke and locker rooms, but the theory itself went well.  Besides Folke, there was only one other person Sonja's age in the class, and he was there because of drunk driving, so he kept to himself.  Sonja usually sat there and stuck out among all the kids, and for the first aid unit the instructor used her as a model.  He pointed to the spot on her throat where they were supposed to imagine her breathing had gotten blocked.  He did the Heimlich on her, his fingers up in her face, inside her collar, up and down her arms.  At one point he put her into a stranglehold, but that wasn't the worst of it.  The worst was when they had to do the exercises themselves.  It was humiliating to be placed in the recovery position by a boy of eighteen.  
--From Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, a novel by Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra (Graywolf Press, 2018).  Originally published as Spejl, skulder, blink (Gyldendal: Copenhagen, Denmark, 2016).  First published in English by Pushkin Press, London.

"What did you buy it for?"
"Because I need it," she said.  "A lot of things around here need gluing."
"Nothing around here needs gluing," I said. "I wish I understood why you buy all this stuff."
"For the same reason I married you," she murmured. "To help pass the time."
I didn't want to fight, so I kept quiet, and so did she.
--From "Crazy Glue," a very short story by Etgar Keret, LA Weekly (September 26, 2001).  It was published in his collection The Girl on the Fridge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), pp. 5-7.  "Crazy Glue" was translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger.

In the summer of '76, they remodeled our house and added another bathroom.  That was my mother's private bathroom, with green tiles, white curtains, and a kind of small drawing board she could put on her knees to do crossword puzzles on.  The door of this new bathroom had no lock because it was my mother's and no one else was allowed to go in anyway.  We were very happy that summer. 
--From "The Summer of '76," a very short story by Etgar Keret, from his collection The Girl on the Fridge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), pp. 169-171.  "The Summer of '76" was translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston.

Nearly every morning, a certain woman in our community comes running out of her house with her face white and her overcoat flapping wildly.  She cries out, “Emergency, emergency,” and one of us runs to her and holds her until her fears are calmed.  We know she is making it up; nothing has really happened to her. 

--From "Fear," one of five very short stories by Lydia Davis, Conjunctions, Issue 24 (Spring 1995).

Minna spends her days in the Royal Library. 
Minna has to work without noise.
Minna's working on a paper sonata.
The paper sonata consists of tonal rows.
Minna writes soundless music.
Minna is a tad avant-garde.
...
It's morning.
Lars has left again.
Lars is always in a hurry to get out of bed.
The bed is a snug nest.
Minna's lying in it, but
Lars is on his bike and gone.
Lars bikes as hard as he can in the direction of City Hall Square.
Lars makes the pigeons rise.
Lars has deadlines.
--From Minna Needs Rehearsal Space, a novella by Dorthe Nors, from her book So Much for That Winter, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra (Graywolf Press, 2016).  Part of Minna Needs Rehearsal Space (Minna mangler et øvelokale) was published in English and Danish by Asymptote.

Fiction and poetry by Domenico Starnone, Sayaka Murata, Mary White, and more

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One evening Betta called, crankier than usual, wanting to know if I felt up to minding her son while she and her husband took part in a mathematics conference in Cagliari.  I'd been living in Milan for a couple of decades, and the thought of decamping to Naples, to the old house I'd inherited from my parents, and where my daughter had been living since prior to getting married, didn't thrill me.  I was over seventy and, having been a widower for some time, had lost the habit of living with others.  I only felt comfortable in my own bed and in my own bathroom.  Furthermore, I'd undergone, a few weeks earlier, a small surgical procedure which, even in the clinic, seemed to have done more harm than good.  Though the doctors poked their faces day and night into my room, to tell me that everything had gone fine, my hemoglobin was low, my ferritin was poor, and one afternoon, I saw small heads, plaster-white, stretching toward me from the opposite wall.
--From Trick, a novel by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri (Europa Editions, 2018). Originally published in Italian as Scherzetto (Einaudi: Torino, Italy, 2016).

The morning period is passing normally in the brightly lit box of the convenience store, I feel.  Visible outside the windows, polished free of fingerprints, are the figures of people rushing by.  It is the start of another day, the time when the world wakes up and the cogs of society begin to move.  I am one of those cogs, going round and round.  I have become a functioning part of the world, rotating in the time of day called morning.
--From Convenience Store Woman, a novel by Sayaka Murata, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Grove Press, 2018).  Originally published in Japanese as Konbini ningen (Tokyo, Japan: Bungeishunjū Ltd., 2016). 

When my fiancé left for the war 
Which is still going on 
I prepared increasingly elaborate foods
--From "Expectation Management," a poem by Mary White, Communion Arts Journal (June 2019).

Like, he's definitely cheating.  He's not even trying to hide it anymore.  He's such a piece of shit.  Take a left here.  And the worst part is she's not going to say anything either.  I mean, she's basically just waiting for him to leave her.  It's honestly stressful just being in the same room as them.
--From Bottled, a graphic novel by Chris Gooch (Top Shelf Productions, 2017). 

I didn't belong there.  I wandered through the succession of rooms, with a glass of overly acidic champagne in my hand.  I looked at the other guests.  Their self-confidence, the way they held their heads.  Their facial expressions.  They formed familiar little clusters, burst out laughing, glanced over at rival groups, occasionally glanced at the canvases, gushed noisily, turned away, murmured a spicy anecdote or scathing commentary into the ear of an acolyte, demolishing the opus they had just praised in the blink of an eye.  
--From Exposed, a novel by Jean-Philippe Blondel, translated from the French by Alison Anderson (New Vessel Press, 2019).  Originally published in French as La mise à nu (Libella: Paris, France, 2018).

Living alone in his dead uncle's cottage, and with the burden lately of wandering thoughts in the night, Seamus Ferris had fallen hard for a Polish girl who worked at a café down in Carrick.  He had himself almost convinced that the situation had the dimensions of a love affair, though in fact he'd exchanged no more than a few dozen words with her, whenever she named the price for his flat white and scone, and he shyly paid it, offering a line or two himself on the busyness of the town or the fineness of the weather.
--From "The Coast of Leitrim," a short story by Kevin Barry, The New Yorker (October 15, 2018), pp. 70-75.

Flash fiction by Ron Nyren and Francine Witte, and several poems about stories

~
The summer of no breeze, six men carried an enormous fan up the stairs of my grandmother's four-story townhouse and installed it in the roof.
--From "Vertical Travel," a story by Ron Nyren, 100 Word Story (April 24, 2019).

Six months gone, but it's still my sister's birthday, and so we buy a cake.
--From "Candle," a story by Francine Witte, Fourth & Sycamore (August 15, 2018).

Halfway through the sentence
she fell asleep.  She had been telling 
some sort of fable concerning
a young girl who wakens one morning
as a bird.
--From "An Endless Story," a poem by Louise Glück, The Threepenny Review (Summer 2018).

You chase me through a cornfield
and we arrive in a clearing.  All
that we know and do not know
shimmers between us, an invisible
door with no way to open or close.
--From "Bringing in the Sheaves," a poem by Donna Vorreyer, from her poetry collection Every Love Story Is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016), p. 15.  A different version of this poem was first published in the Apple Valley Review (Fall 2012) and later reprinted in the 2014 edition of New Poetry from the Midwest (New American Press).

dark, the better for sleeping, brown like my eyes, 
you said, (may we all find that one person who will
compare our eyes to Ralph Lauren paint colors
instead of noticing the chipped polish on our left
foot) but my eyes aren't brown at all, . . .  
--From "We are painting the bedroom," a poem by Donna Vorreyer, from her poetry collection Every Love Story Is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016), p. 64.

He's a happy baby.  How old is he?
I ask the woman who is reading a magazine 
and seems to have forgotten 
the baby at my feet.  She looks up and I watch 
her mind chew through my question.  
Seven months maybe.  Or eight, she says
then adds, He isn't my baby.
--From "Baby Facing the Wrong Way in the County Jail," a poem by Nancy Miller Gomez, from her chapbook of poetry and short essays, Punishment (Rattle, 2018), p. 22.

Fiction by Joseph O'Neill, Ottessa Moshfegh, Lily King, and Martin Suter

~
The cat looked nothing like Buster.  It didn't even look like a cat.  The vet offered some clearly dishonest and meaningless statistics about the thing's chance of recovery.  She also referred to the expense of keeping it alive.  Martha held Robert's hand as he listened to all of this.  When she understood that Robert could not speak, she took it upon herself to ask the vet the necessary questions.  When the vet again said, The operation was a complete success, Martha said, you know what?  We'd appreciate it if you stopped saying that. 
        The next morning, nothing had changed.  The plug was pulled on Buster.  There were various options with regard to the remains.  Robert decided on the gratis option, namely the garbage.  Buster was garbage at this point.  Over the next few days, handwritten condolence cards arrived from vets.  Bills, too.
--From Good Trouble, a collection of short stories by Joseph O'Neill (Pantheon Books, 2018).  This segment is from "Goose" (pp. 118-131 in hardcover).  The collection also includes stories which first appeared in The New Yorker (e.g., "The Poltroon Husband" and "The Sinking of the Houston") and Harper's Magazine (e.g., "The Trusted Traveler"). 

Whenever I woke up, night or day, I'd shuffle through the bright marble foyer of my building and go up the block and around the corner where there was a bodega that never closed.  I'd get two large coffees with cream and six sugars each, chug the first one in the elevator on the way back up to my apartment, then sip the second one slowly while I watched movies and ate animal crackers and took trazodone and Ambien and Nembutal until I fell asleep again.  I lost track of time in this way.  Days passed.  Weeks.  A few months went by. 
--From My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a novel by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Press, 2018).

The summer of 1986, the summer I was fourteen, my parents went to the Dordogne for eight weeks.  My father had been unwell, and it was thought that France, where he had studied as a young man, would enable his recovery.  Through the university’s employment office, my mother hired two sophomores to house-sit for the time they would be out of the country.  As I came with the house, these two college boys were obliged to take care of me, too.
--From "When in the Dordogne," a short story by Lily King, One Story, Issue 212 (October 26, 2015).

No sooner had the barman served him his martini than a woman entered the bar, put her coat and handbag on the bar stool beside Weynfeldt, sat on the next one over and ordered a gin fizz.  She was wearing a green silk Chinese blouse, white arms extending from its short, close sleeves, a tight black skirt and high heels a similar shade of green to the blouse.  Her long red hair was tied up, secured with an imitation tortoiseshell clasp to free her neck, which the blouse's high collar circled loosely.  
--From The Last Weynfeldt, a novel by Martin Suter, translated from the German by Steph Morris (New Vessel Press, 2016).  Originally published in German as Der letzte Weynfeldt (Diogenes Verlag: Zürich, Switzerland, 2008).

In an odd coincidence, the cover design and one of the major plot lines of the book feature Femme nue devant une salamandre (Nude Facing a Stove), a painting by Félix Vallotton.

I published the Spring 2019 issue of the Apple Valley Review in April 2019, and I picked up and started reading The Last Weynfeldt earlier this month (May 2019).  The cover art for AVR's spring issue, which I selected well before reading the book, was Intimité (Intimacy), a painting by Félix Vallotton.  There are times when everything seems interconnected. . . .

Fiction and poetry by Ottessa Moshfegh, Jennifer Kronovet, Domenico Starnone, and more

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My classroom was on the first floor, next to the nuns' lounge.  I used their bathroom to puke in the mornings.  
--From Homesick for Another World, a collection of short stories by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin, 2017).  These lines are from the story "Bettering Myself," which first appeared in The Paris Review. 
 
My husband had warned me about the cameras before we moved to Guangzhou, saying that there would or wouldn’t be video cameras hidden all over our apartment and that someone in the Chinese government would or wouldn’t be watching us at all times.  He told me that there was no point in having a password on my computer because the cameras would see what was on my computer screen.  That’s how good the cameras that did or did not exist were.
--From "The Cameras," a short story by Jennifer Kronovet, Bennington Review, Issue 6.

Today they are talking on the radio about 

how to remember your infant, . . . 

--From "Lost Body," a poem by Jordan Rice, The New York Times Magazine (February 10, 2017).  "Lost Body" is from Constellarium, Jordan Rice's debut collection of poems (Orison Books, 2016).

In case it's slipped your mind, Dear Sir, let me remind you: I am your wife.  I know that this once pleased you and that now, suddenly, it chafes.  I know you pretend that I don't exist, and that I never existed, because you don't want to look bad in front of the highbrow people you frequent.  I know that leading an orderly life, having to come home in time for dinner, sleeping with me instead of with whomever you want, makes you feel like an idiot.

--From Ties, a novel by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri (Europa Editions, 2016).  Originally published in Italian as Lacci (Laces) (Einaudi: Torino, Italy, 2014).

That was the summer it rained and rained.  I remember the sad doggish smell of my sweater and my shoes sloshing crazily.  And in every city, the same scene.  A boy stepping into the street and opening an umbrella for a girl keeping dry in the doorway.  
--From Dept. of Speculation, a novel by Jenny Offill (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).

Hélène could not remember having ever experienced a perfect moment.  When she was little, she often surprised her parents with her behavior--constantly tidying her room, changing her clothes the moment there was the slightest spot on them, braiding her hair over and over until she obtained an impeccable symmetry; she shuddered with horror when they took her to see Swan Lake because she alone noticed that there was a lack of rigor in the alignment of the dancers, that their tutus did not all drop down together, and that every time there was a ballerina--never the same one--who disrupted the harmony of the movement.

--From The Most Beautiful Book in the World, a collection of short stories by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, translated from the French by Alison Anderson (Europa Editions, 2009).  Originally published in French as Odette Toulemonde et autres histoires (Odette Toulemonde and other stories) (Éditions Albin Michel: Paris, France, 2006).  These lines are from the story "A Fine Rainy Day." 

A little poetry for Spring 2019 and Poetry Month

~
garden party

Not what you might think: not tea & cakes & ices.
Just the neighbors, come to clean the yard,
taking rakes & clippers to dead leaves & bracken,
piling debris on tarps to drag out to the brush heap.
My sister falls asleep reading on the daybed.
Three hours later, the yard’s raked clear.
A shower comes, an almost double rainbow.
We watch it fade, admiring the neatness
of the flower beds, the rain-rinsed brightness
of the lawn.  Just then the woodchuck slithers up
from his burrow, starts chewing iris blades.
My sister raps on the window.  He looks up,
stares, chews more.  She raps again, harder,
& as he scoots off, we call out, laughing,
Your days are numbered, pal!  Ours, too.
But first, this green, this flowering.

—From “After My Sister's Mastectomy,” a four-part poem by Lynne Knight. Read the full poem in the Spring 2019 issue of the Apple Valley Review (Volume 14, Number 1). https://www.applevalleyreview.com

https://www.leahbrowning.net/Apple/Spring_2019/Lynne_Knight.html