Back on my bullshit
After missing last week like a loser, I’m back with eight stories, and a few of them are LONG.
Three nonfiction stories. A heartstopper by Elizabeth Jannuzzi, a strange confessional by Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo and something you may have already read by Taffy Brodesser-Akner.
Five fiction stories from blog faves Andrea Bishop and Samanta Schweblin, plus new names Monte Lin, Bob Johnson, Fionnuala Meehan, and Éva Székely
Want to submit a story? Please do!
Nonfiction
Purgatory in Two Parts by Elizabeth Jannuzzi
This is about suicide, so if that’s something you avoid, skip this. Jannuzzi’s sister took her own life, and Jannuzzi writes about it. It has haunted me for days.
I started going to church again after my sister Julia attempted suicide and failed. If my parents were surprised by my sudden reappearance in the back of their station wagon on Sunday mornings, they didn’t show it.
It was 1996, and I was 24 years old, a recent college graduate, living with my parents with no real future plan. Julia was 29 and lay comatose in a hospital, a result of her intentional overdose.
Contra by Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo
This is kind of a story about deer contraception, but there’s a whole lot more to it than that. Gelfman-Randazzo uses a weird bit of local lore to tell a much more personal story.
A deer stares into the camera. An ear-sized tag dangles from her lobe, like the world’s biggest cartilage piercing. It’s dusk. A researcher crashes through the woods after a different doe he’s just darted. He waits for the anesthesia to kick in. For her to fall unconscious. Nearby, a deer is hit by a car on a backroad. Under the darkening foliage, the researcher injects a shot of contraceptive vaccine. He strains to see what he is doing. On the other side of town, a deer chews a tuft of daylilies. The light slips out of the scene, like someone with something to hide. I’m a senior in high school, and this is my town.
This Is the Holocaust Story I Said I Wouldn’t Write by Taffy Brodesser-Akner
This is a long read, but I could not put it down once I started. It’s funny, tearjerking, and lovely.
In my most bitter moments, in times when I realize how much of my foundational education was given over to the war and how little was given over to, say, gym or art or the other humanities that would have helped me in life or at the very least in work meetings, I say I went to a Holocaust high school, a magnet school for Jewish death studies. I say my school taught us masters-level World War II history and also just enough math and science to pass the New York State Regents exams. I’m joking, but am I? I left high school having read “Macbeth” not once but Elie Wiesel’s “Night” three times over the course of my education. I can probably autocomplete any sentence from Anne Frank’s diary if you start me off with three words. I have forgotten more about the Holocaust than I ever knew about the American Revolution.
Fiction
My Parents and My Children by Samanta Schweblin
From the collection Seven Empty Houses, Schweblin is at her weird best in this story about a man’s parents who seem to be suffering from dementia, and the drama it causes with his ex-wife and kids:
Where are your parents’ clothes?” asks Marga. She crosses her arms and waits for my answer. She knows I don’t know. On the other side of the picture window, my parents are running naked in the backyard.
“It’s almost six, Javier,” Marga tells me. “What’s going to happen when Charly comes back from the store with the kids and they see their grandparents chasing each other around?”
I promise you have no idea where this story is going.
Mommy's Business by Bob Johnson
A woman clips a cyclist with her car on a country road. Johnson captures the mother’s mounting anxiety so well I was holding my breath at one point.
Kat groaned and slapped the mirror back into place, and—as if by doing so, she’d activated a mechanical sequence—there came a soft splintering, a flash of yellow outside the passenger window, the steering wheel writhing in her hands.
She gasped and skidded to a stop. She looked in the mirror again but saw nothing behind her. Rangeline Road had once been a logging trail and was barely two lanes across, guarded on both sides by steep banks and ancient oaks.
Causality Syndrome by Monte Lin
This is my favourite kind of science fiction – big ideas used to explore big themes on a very personal scale. This is a first-contact story that explores all kinds of unforeseen consequences of faster-than-light travel. It’s reminiscent of both Cixin Liu and Ted Chiang.
If you had asked Miriam about tachyons before the First Transmission, she would have told you they were a mathematical quick of General Relativity, like seeing the blank space on a map and deciding “Here be dragons.” Of course the possibility of a mythical beast could be there, just unlikely.
But she couldn’t, wouldn’t, argue with hard proof, and like a lot of discoveries, such as finding the first exoplanet, she knew that once someone shows the world a thing that exists, it becomes easier to know where to look, and even more easy for someone to make money off of the discovery.
Miriam knew all this already. At this point, this knowledge was manageable, the Causality Syndrome contained. But still, she needed to start at the beginning to understand the real problem behind this new technology: humans.
The Red Bag by Fionnuala Meehan
The narrator of Meehan’s story is visiting a friend whose home is not exactly warm and loving. There’s a slow ratcheting up of the stress level in this story that I love:
I don’t like your house; too many traps. Gleaming brass handles I might smudge, clear plastic runner I might trip over, perfect cushions I might ruffle, Ainsley vases I might topple, glossy tiles my filthy shoes might spoil, velvet wallpaper my damp jacket might blemish. Your mother has said it all to me, not about the cushions though, but I’ve seen her watching.
Sicko by Éva Székely
Székely’s narrator is the titular Sicko, and being inside of his head is pretty disturbing stuff:
One day in late October, I couldn’t take it anymore and suggested we break it off. Then she went completely wild, screaming like a wild beast. We were sitting in bed, and I don’t know what came over me. Her voice—shrill, relentless—filled my head, and I just wanted it to stop. I grabbed a pillow and pressed it over her face. Just to quiet her down. Just for a minute.
Nothing Mechanically Wrong by Andrea Bishop
This isn’t the first story by Andrea Bishop I’ve featured here, and it surely won’t be the last. I didn’t get the double entendre of the title until just now, but the story has haunted me for days. It’s a stressful story, told from the perspective of a traumatized and anxious young boy on the way to visit grandparents in a downpour:
Cars are safer than motorcycles. Henry’s YouTube searches have taken him down increasingly gruesome paths, but the videos help him understand the difference between actual crises and the ones he dreams up, help him sift through the comforting lies adults tell to arrive at what might be true.
