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.
Shaw used to be a model and is still beautiful, fierce and timid both, like a coyote or a wild dog—more beautiful, in that way, than when she modeled. Harley is strange-looking, as plain as butter, huge, and
Russell had quit his job as a coal miner on his twenty-fifth birthday, though still, five years later, he would, at various times of exertion, spray flecks of occasional blood when he coughed.
An ice storm, following seven days of snow; the vast fields and drifts of snow turning to sheets of glazed ice that shine and shimmer blue in the moonlight as if the color is being fabricated not by the bending and absorption
We used to go to bars, the really seedy ones, to find our fights. It excited Don. He loved going into the dark old dives, ducking under the doorway and following me in, me with my robe on, my boxing gloves tied around my neck, and all the workers inside the bar turning on their stools, turning as if some day someone special might be coming through, someone who could even help them out, perhaps—but Don and I were not there to help them out.
The first deer went through the ice when I was out in the barn working. It was January. Martha came running out of the cabin to tell me. She saw it all.
They met before midnight at the house of the richest man in Mississippi, and left shortly with a dark old leather country doctor’s satchel that was bulging with money, bulging as if trying to breathe, swollen like a dying fish’s gills: they were unable to even shut it all the way.
Karen was twenty-six. She had been engaged twice, married once. Her husband had run away with another woman after only six months. It still made her angry when she thought about it, which was not often.
After the fanfare of card tubes and broken tubes came the inevitable deluge of fall pies and the burning petals. The Mexican movie flickered here and the action became too faint to realize, but a wall beginning the chase through the hinterland set the tone for the afternoon.
Out on the plaza’s lozenge Momma’s kitchen commanded a fine view—spires, domes, towers and irregular columns of gray and green—filling her horizons. Slavishly exploring the avenues of a culinary technique adopted many years before she would rarely leave
Saturday morning at the zoo, facing the lions’ cage, overcast sky and a light breeze carrying the smell of peanuts and animal dung, the peacocks making their stilted progress across the sidewalks. I was standing in front of the gorge separating the human viewers from the lions. The lions weren’t caged, exactly; they just weren’t free to go.