Brake

by Gregory Spatz

HE WOULD NOT BE the first traveler to imagine his path through the mountains, rising and falling with the course of the river below, as a tunnel cut through space and time with everything along its course fated for him to encounter: the pattern of light and shadow on his windshield and on the road ahead, the exact smattering of rain at kilometer marker 146, wind gusting at the sides of his car, the sudden splat of a dead bug leaving Cranbrook…

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The Inventor (Excerpt)

by Chris Wiberg

ON THANKSGIVING DAY of 1977, my father took a Greyhound bus from Minneapolis back to Chicago after spending a week in the Twin Cities settling his own father’s affairs. My mother and I had gone along for the funeral, although I was too young to remember, then taken the car back home. At five o’clock that morning he locked up the house where he’d grown up and took a cab downtown to the bus station, where he made breakfast of a Mars bar and a bottle of Coca-Cola.

The station was packed to capacity even in the predawn—holiday travelers who’d booked at the last minute after the more civilized departures had already filled up. My dad had booked the early trip on purpose, hoping to avoid a crowd. Half the terminal was asleep on their bags or each other’s shoulders; most of the rest nibbled on snacks or sat with glazed eyes and magazines open on their laps. A few parents contended noisily with irate kids, and of course there was one bright-eyed, cheery family sharing juice boxes and playing patty-cake. Every bus terminal in America had at least one. A few chairs were occupied by people he assumed were homeless; it was Thanksgiving and the staff couldn’t bring themselves to boot them out in the cold. But when the bus boarded, my dad was surprised to see one of them get up and climb on board.

Dad claimed an aisle seat near the rear. As the bus filled up, the man he’d pegged for a vagrant came and took the seat across the aisle. He was in a green army jacket and my dad realized that was the thing: he’d seen a lot of homeless vets.

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Lulu in Love (Excerpt)

by Jerome Charyn

IT HAPPENED LIKE THIS.

Tom would deliver aria after aria at criminal court, while the most seasoned cops stuttered under his cross-examination. Even witnesses who had been coached by the Manhattan DA couldn’t stand up to the pounding. The DA scoffed at Tom, mimicked him, called him “Tonsils,” and that moniker remained. Tom hadn’t served overseas, but landed in the provost marshal general’s office in ’43 and visited prisoner-of-war camps in the South and Southwest. He’d been the boy wonder at Nichols & Bass, fresh out of Columbia. He’d grown up in a hovel on Eleventh Avenue, studied at Horace Mann on a full scholarship, and entered law school at nineteen. He never learned who his benefactor was. Some obscure Fenian society, he’d been told, a society that was just as real as any illusion. He could quote Aristotle and Captain Marvel in the same breath. He was impossible to resist.

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IQ Test

by Marc Palmieri

I’D KNOWN FOR weeks that my father had gotten transferred to Long Island. We’d be moving in the winter after Christmas, and I’d be leaving my sixth grade class right in the middle of the year, but I kept it top secret at school, even from my friends. I hadn’t even broken the news to my teacher, Ms. Waters. Whenever it felt like the right time came each day, I put it off and tried to not think about it.

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From: When I Wore Floods (Excerpt)

by Marc Palmieri

IT WAS 1983. I was eleven. My father, some kind of salesman, wore ties. The company he worked for transferred him from our town in New Jersey to Long Island. I liked where we lived, but that didn’t matter. We packed up and moved right after Christmas.

I met Andrew the first day we stayed in our new house, the same size and shape as our old house. What was different was that there were no sidewalks, no telephone wires, and that I had no friends.

I was outside tossing a Nerf football in the air. Playing catch with myself was no fun but there wasn’t much else I could think of doing except crying, and I’d already done that all morning.

“Hi there,” came a voice behind me.

I turned around and there he was. He had a long smiley face with green eyes and freckles.

“Hi,” I said quietly.

He looked at the house.

“You’re moving in here?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m Andrew Hoffman,” he said. “I live two houses down. What’s your name?”

“Peter Pellegrini.”

I wished he would leave. I lofted the Nerf up and ran after it as far away as possible. He followed right behind me.

“I’m in sixth grade,” he said. “What grade are you in?”

“Fifth.”

“Want to play catch?” he said. I didn’t know how to make a new friend and I felt sick. He put his arms up so I threw him one. It bounced off his chest and chin before he caught it and threw it back like a girl.

“Are you Jewish?” he said.

“No.”

“Are you half-Jewish?”

“No.”

“I am,” he said. “I’m completely Jewish.”

He tucked the ball under his arm.

“Come here,” he said. “Do you curse?”

“No,” I said.

He looked around, as if to make sure nobody was listening.

“I curse,” he said. “I say shit, dick, and asshole. But not the F word. If the F word is in a movie, it’s automatically rated R.”

“He threw back the ball underhanded. My mother came out of the house and when she saw us she called for my father to come see. They stood watching us, smiling proud, like we were something glorious they’d painted on a nice big canvas.

“Your mother’s waving to me,” Andrew said. He waved back.

Don’t curse,” I whispered.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Do you like your parents?”

“Yes. Sure,” I said. I looked back at them. She finished waving and they walked inside.

“Come here again,” he said, and glanced around. The coast was clear. “Where they’re in bed, your father puts it in your mother. Then you know what?”

“What?”

“Then he pees in her.”

I stared at Andrew Hoffman and he stared back, hard but empathetic into my eyes, like he knew this would change things for me, but that someone had to let me in on it.

“I’m serious,” he said. “They do it to have a baby, or just for fun.”

A woman called his name, loud but lovingly from somewhere down the street.

“Well, I gotta go,” he said. “My fuckin’ mother. See ya.”

He threw me the ball one last time and walked off.

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Lucky's

by Katie Edkins Milligan

IN THAT VERGING summer between high school and college, I worked at a BYOB lobster restaurant on an inland creek in Kittery, half an hour down from Kennebunk by the Post Road, where the water was brown and shallow enough to get hot. I lived in the next county over, which is enemy territory in a football town like this, so I shouldn’t have gotten the job.

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Boone

by Heather E. Goodman

LAUREL RACED FROM the woods, thinking Boone might have doubled back to the house after he bolted. It was hot, too muggy for early June, and she was out of breath after hustling up from the creek that bordered their seven acres. She yelled for Sam, who still called for Boone in the woods behind her. A truck in the driveway: engine wheezing quiet. She saw the shotgun. Stopped. Her voice in her throat, she listened. She could hear Sam’s feet in the leaves, maybe 150 yards off.

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Court of Last Opinion (Excerpt)

by Joseph McElroy

WE LEARNED OVERNIGHT and from an impeachable source that we were a person. We were entitled to the privacy any other person could claim though you must claim it. It was news – ins and outs basically one could say confirmed by two former appellate judges consultant to the Firm not just on the law but on matters as various as blood and ingredient labeling and what is called hunting…

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Kakua

by Lawrence Osborne

CASSIDY SARAH O'BRIAN was past thirty-eight and already divorced when she decided to write her thesis on the language of the Outer Citak. They were a remote people of the Maukele forests closely related to the Inner Citak and, more remotely, with the Korowai. She had studied them for some years, aware that they represented to the linguist a niche of underrepresented possibilities. They were Neolithic horticulturalists and no one knew whether they had a past imperfect tense in their language. They might be useful when it came time to post her mark on posterity.

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Coral Fernández

By Silvina Ocampo

HER NAME WAS Coral Fernández; she always wore her hair over her left ear, leaving the right one uncovered. She was so pretty that at first I thought she was foolish.
We met at a country luncheon to celebrate the opening of the Cyclist's Club in Moreno. The tables were set beneath a grove of blossoming paradise trees; there was a bandstand and a floor for dancing.

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