Fiction of the Day
Unit One
By Caleb Crain
There is a nothing sound that rooms make that is easier to hear when a room is empty.
There is a nothing sound that rooms make that is easier to hear when a room is empty.
The driver and I got a late start. I usually decide on these excursions the night before, but it was late in the morning when I informed the friend who was coming to visit me for the weekend that I had to cancel, it was absolutely necessary for me to cancel.
The party was a failure. I can’t even tell you what a failure it was. There are no words. Only a great pain in my chest when I wake up. On the veranda. It’s better when I sit in the chair.
I woke to several different noises, something being picked up and put down, a tap being turned on and off. What time is it? I said. It’s four a.m., said Mim. For a moment she was silhouetted in the bathroom door before the light went off and she was reabsorbed into the dark.
The last ones to work for dollars aroused hatred in the town, and some were subjected to regrettable acts of retribution. In our defense, it was an unusual time.
Vivian spends most of the afternoon naked and strapped to the giant ottoman in the interior decorator’s office in Bethesda. When he finally unties her, the sun is low and she’s shaky and exhausted.
They’ll have to hire a girl. The father knows why. The daughter will no longer tolerate any housework that gets her hands dirty. She gives excuses the father doesn’t believe, but he doesn’t argue.
During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees.
It happened like this. A week after the Six-Day War, Sam walked to the eastern bank of the Jordan River. He was working as a counselor that summer near Karameh, at a day camp for boys.
I’d started to visit Olivia more often because it was obvious she was lonely. The ALS lady who’d been moved to Hopkins had been Aunt Olivia’s closest friend, leaving aside Merton Hillstead, who actually went home.
As soon as I said I was thirty, I wondered why I had said it. “Thirty,” said the woman I was talking to, who had a tousled gamine haircut, dyed white as only a very young woman will risk.