Fiction

Another Death: ellipsis

translation by Owen Good     It’s there. It’s gone. Both. Almost always.   I didn’t go out for four days; I was inside the entire time. I stocked up on wine. At the time, I never considered that I shouldn’t, that I should do something to combat this; I forget resolutions I’d previously made…

An Optimistic Engineer

They depart in the early morning hours in a rainstorm, and as they drive north the sheets of falling water turn to windblown snow. The client leads in an SUV with a couple of his employees; Jake follows in his own SUV, Reggie beside him. Despite the weather, the client presses the speed limit, 75…

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So Much Straw

The end of my labors has come. Such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as so much straw. Now I await the end of my life. —Thomas Aquinas   1. How did I come to God? As you see me. In these dark Kentucky woods. The hermitage—really no more…

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Balsa and Tissue Paper

In memory of my father, Donald French Williford and his father, Carl Lex Williford November 1998 1. The first time I decided to drive to Dallas after I’d stayed away for too many years, my mother told me on the phone, “I’m so glad you’re coming home, honey, and so’s your father. Would you like…

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Notes on the Pekingese

Translation by Christopher Peacock In some places, hapa is a generic term for dogs. But where I come from, the word hapa refers not to the wild, ferocious Tibetan mastiffs kept by nomads, but to a Pekingese: one of those squat, fluffy, snub-nosed, flat-faced, stout-legged little Chinese dogs that shuffles about the house and the…

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George Washington’s Teeth

On the night before the first day of school, a video was released, and it began to circulate among the parents, teachers, and students of Baldwin Clap Elementary. The video featured Miss Korto, a fourth- and fifth-grade Social Studies teacher, and presented her as a finalist in the National Teacher of the Year Program. Claire…

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The Pfeffermans

Of course, they choose the Fourth of July to reenact their childhood, a holiday known for explosions, maimed limbs, trumped-up loyalty. The kids—Abby will never stop calling them that—have grown unduly nostalgic in the past year, mythologizing her mediocre dinners, romanticizing their sporadic vacations, basically whitewashing decades of benign neglect into a family life that…

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The Caller

All week Max thinks about it. At night he falls asleep constructing the narrative and at work he spends the lunch hour in his car manufacturing details. When Sunday night rolls around and Nora has been put to bed and Julia is asleep or reading, he brings the radio station’s stream up on his computer….

Image of a solo cover showing black and white photos of American Civil War-era soldiers, each with a black line covering their eyes.

The Regimental History

I. Hello to You One of her jobs at the Deverells’ was to gather up the letters, after they’d been read by the family and the neighbors whose sons had been mentioned, and file them in the special box. Each envelope smoothed and flattened. Each sheet unfolded, the creases pressed out under a stack of…