Rowing to Russia

by Ryan Effgen

When Kevin walked into the Miller's Pub dowtown, his father was finishing his drink and ordering another. He wore a charcoal grey suit and had a leather briefcase by his side. He looked tired. Though not an old man, Kevin's father came from a generation whose era seemed to have passed—not with the natural progression of time, but with the onset of a rapid, forced future. As a young man next to him flipped open a cell phone, Kevin's father raised a newsprint stained hand to his son.


Is Dog?

by Thomas E. Kennedy

Sklar jolts off his sweaty sofa in the ungodly dark to get the phone, thinking, Pop's gone. But his father's phlegmy voice, without greeting or apology for the hour, wheezes in his ear, "I'm alone here! I need things. I'm out of vodka!"

Sklar needs things, too. He needs his sleep. He needs to find a job. He needs to pick up a gift for Nicoline's twenty-fifth birthday and to make this crappy little place presentable for when she comes over this evening. And he needs to talk to his father. Resolve some stuff.


5751

by Mary Marcus

My life changed on the second night of Passover in the Jewish year 5751. I'm not sure what the calendar year was; though it was the early nineties, before the earthquake. Why do I remember the religious year in my mind, and not the calendar year? Even going to the trouble of creating a mnemonic as I used in law school? Fifty-seven rhymes with heaven and fifty-one's the one. Danny was forty-seven, add ten and that's another way I remember the year. It was after dinner and we were in the big living room on Mandeville Canyon Road. Danny was still upstairs. I was in the leather chair by the floor lamp, looking through a motorcycle magazine I had picked up on my way home from the office. Ellen and my mother were sitting close together looking through a pile of out-of-focus shots Mom had taken on a recent cruise. Once in a while I heard the wife say soothingly, "that's a beautiful picture," or "you must have had a wonderful trip." Ellen was good with my mother. She was the one who wrote and sent up to date pictures of our son and remembered her birthday; even the day my father died with a proper Yortzeit candle. Though Mom never came out and said it, she must have known she'd struck pure gold with Ellen. What real Jewish daughter would show respect to the religion and to the mother-in-law that this former Methodist from Texas did?


Undertow

by Richard Wirick

Gillian was relieved when his friends Matt and Sally invited him to dinner the following night. They would have Maddie come, a Swedish girl they had just met at a Mabou Mimes production in SoHo. Matt joked to Gill that there had been enough lag time after his break-up with Michelle, and though Gill faked a laugh, he indeed found himself reassured, calmed, grateful for the presence of friends who could be counted on to fill an anxious emptiness with an invitation from out of nowhere.


Post-Partum

by Martha Schwender

It was an accident, pure and simple. In the past she would've taken care of it with an afternoon at the doctor's office, but this time she'd been persuaded otherwise.

She was getting older. She was running out of time. She'd regret it later if she didn't do it now. Raising a child was a creative enterprise, an experience she didn't want to miss.

But everything had changed. Not just sleeping and working, but her relationships with other people. The baby had turned them into liars. It was like a conspiracy. Express any doubt or uncertainty and they'd bombard her with encouragement. The same friends who were nihilistic about their own futures were suddenly hopeful and optimistic about hers.


Urban Planning: Case Study Number Four

by Tim Horvath

The life of an urban planner is at once both more and less exotic than it might appear.

Raedmeon is a city built by a committee, riding in on slow, lumbering beasts of burden, and Weston a Committee Man if ever there was one. Among his secret joys is the way the dry cleaner folds and boxes his shirts, the new-map sensation of the creases cascading over his shoulders and chest each morning. He likes that he knows what the competing interests in the room are at any given moment: Camilla Barber's predictable cooing about "sustainability," Martinez's operatic enthusiasm for x, y, or z, swelling with his Adam's apple in the hour before lunch, then retreating into an afternoon of spent indifference.


Downward Drifting

by Patricia Schultheis

We cleaned for our mothers. Off boats and kerchiefed, they stood at conveyor belts, boxing brassieres or curling cartridges, their hands growing cramped, their ankles swollen, until, shift over, they scarcely could climb onto buses and ride to third-floor flats whose mean little rooms, we, their daughters, had cleaned.

Nine, ten-years-old, down on our knees, scrubbing linoleum fissured into battlefield maps. Like slender sappers, our arms tunneled under radiators that pocked the backs of our hands with blisters.

Tall and strong, by twelve I could run the carpet sweeper, iron my big brother's shirts, and start the supper before Mama's bus stopped.


Max Frisch at the City College of New York, 1981: Introduction

by Mark Jay Mirsky

Among the rewards of editing FICTION, has been my introduction to a number of writers whom I admire. Among them was Max Frisch, the Swiss novelist and playwright. Max was one of the most important writers of the Twentieth Century. His body of work contains several novels of profound meditation on the question of human identity, a set of searching memoirs and a number of plays that quickly became classics. In my capacity as a professor of English at The City College of New York, I regularly assign three of Max's novels, I'm Not Stiller, Homo Faber and My Name is Gantebein (in an earlier edition, known as A Wilderness of Mirrors) to my graduate students, as models of intricate plotting. Trying to teach undergraduates the skills of writing, passages from Max's memoirs, in which he questions death, have evoked prse of striking originality, even from students whose English is still shaky.


Five Ways My Wife Could Die

by Gregory Blake Smith

When the tree fell on my house, I was already on my way down. Wife gone, son gone, middle age just around the corner. There had been no hurricane, no stiff in-line winds: the tree just fell over—plunk! The rafters snapped, the window imploded, and there I was lying in bed going eenie-meenie-minie-moe as to whether it would be Seconal and scotch or a razor in the bathtub.

In probability theory we have an axiom called Littlewood's Law of Miracles. The Law of Miracles is based upon a paradoxical feature of chance, viz. that given sufficiently large numbers, unlikely events will happen unexpectedly often. (Hand me that piece of chalk.) If we define a miracle (M) as something that happens once in a million events, and take as a given that we see and hear such events (e) at a rate of about one per second (boy on his bike, sun coming out, Toyota approaching), then since we experience roughly a million such events in a month of waking life, by the laws of probability we should experience a miracle about once a month. The uncanny isn't uncanny after all. Jesus just happened to hit with Lazarus. The scotch is supposed to exacerbate the effect of the Seconal.


A Stain on the Sofa

by Kay Sloan

She piddled on the leather loveseat, the buttery soft one by the fireplace in her son's living room, listening to her daughter-in-law prattle about their latest trip to Seville and Marrakesh. It was the Morocco tales that had gotten her juices flowing, the way her daughter-in-law had interrupted the conversation she'd been having with her nice friends, a semi-retired couple who lived in the neighborhood. All this foolish travel talk, just when she'd got going about the horror of Medicare billing and the cost of her perscriptions. They were draining her life savings, all eleven of them, from heart to thyroid to an expensiveanti-depressant. Why was she taking that anyway? What good did those little white pills do when she worried about how in the hell she'd pay for them? She'd be penniless soon enough from the costs, she was sure of that.


How to Raise a Positive-Thinking Baby

by Michael Poore

When Carter Vaan was a baby, they put him on the cover of a book.

The book, How to Raise a Positive-Thinking Baby, sold about eight million copies. Cute picture. Carter, six months old, sitting naked in a nest of wildflowers. Big smile on his baby face. What a happy child! What a bright future!

Now, at the age of thirty-five, Carter Vaan looked like a Viking. Long blond hair. Savage goatee. Looked mean, but wasn't.

Carter looked at that old book cover sometimes.

He thought about how the baby's future had turned out. Like everyone's future, it was complicated.


The Fires of Krypton

by Michael Poore

Verna May sits in her trailer with the lights off, spying on her neighbor.

Her neighbor is a thief who steals TVs and things and always has them stacked up where you can see them through the window. Nobody ever turns him in because he might be from America's Most Wanted with a gun.


The Lord's Day

by Luc Lang

...we were stuck in a traffic jam, it was raining, dismal, the red and white lights wept and streamed with water, I was continually wiping the steamed-up car windows, we were all three trapped, to put it mildly, in a tin box...why on earth had she insisted on coming with him?...excuse me, came her voice from the back, I can't hold off any more, I have to light up!...she rolled the window down, produced a pack of Gitanes from her pocket, and he, sitting up front in the passenger seat, wriggled and complained...fifty-six years I've had to put up with her cigarette smoke! tobacco makes you sterile, didn't you know that?


Face?

by Luc Lang

True, we'd all overdone it with the blow, with joints as fat as cucumbers, and in the cabin we were seriously ripped, already in the wide blue yonder... but on the ground, earlier, we'd been clean, straight, planning the flight, readying the parachute gear, everything was thoroughly checked...there was a wait for a while before takeoff for the wind to drop, a cameraman from regional France 3 TV was with us, along to film us in free fall, we were supposed to create beautiful group formations...a long-drawn out hour on the ground chatting and smoking dope in a hangar, sitting on pallets, with this Laurent guy from France 3, he had a big Betacam on his knees and had already done several stories on skydiving.


Lonely Tylenol

by Kristin Kearns

I fell in love with a palindrome. His name was Otto and he was the same front and back, he had two identical faces, a matching set of scars, two penises, joints that bent either way. We had sex twice in the morning and twice at night, first one side, then the other. Otto knew all sorts of phrases that were the same forwards and backwards. Level, he'd say. Level, I'd say.

Never even, he'd say.

Never even, I'd say.

Now, sir, a war is won.

What I liked best about Otto was that he never turned away from me.


I Could Have Been a Great Father

by T. Duncan Anderson

If all the cards are on the table, it was her idea to have the abortion. That I agreed—and paid for it—is secondary. Her abortion was a bar tab I felt obligated to pay. I paid in cash.

"No-no," I said, "I got it."

"Here's the deal," Molly whispered. Her features were so delicate, her fingers those of a piano player. "You have to go with me." She wanted children, not just mine.

"Of course I'll go with you," I said.

She smiled, reading my mind, "In the room."

I don't even like dentists. I had no idea how I'd feel about an abortionist. "I'm not even sure they'll allow me in the room," I said.

She gave a crying smile, "They will."


No Man's Land

by Joseph McElroy

The little brother Ali was little enough but you didn't know what he would come up with, and they laughed when he told what his teacher had said, that we are all nomads.

His little sister laid the table, the mother from the kitchen calling Ali, the bread was waiting and the bowl of meat, and the very big brother Abbod tapped in a phone number while Ali's father and uncle, aware of Abbod because he's only just unexpectedly blown in from Canada, to say nothing of sleeping on the couch, were plotting a new business venture, eased by aromas of lamb and onion, herbs and crusty, paper-thin lavash just out of the oven—so no one asked at first why the 4th-grade teacher at Brooklyn public school had said what she did about nomad to Ali.


An Incident at Pat's Bar

by E. C. Osondu

The bars favored by American oil workers in Port Harcourt were named after girls. The girls were retired prostitutes called club girls. Short and memorable names—Pat's Bar, Stella's Bar, Abby's Bar, Christy's Bar, etc. The oldest of them was Pat's Bar; it was also the one most visited by the older oil workers. You could tell the older oil workers from the color of their skin. It was the color of anthills, a very dark brown color. You could spot the old timers, they smoked Marlboro Reds, they were usually potbellied like most of the prosperous locals and had their shirts unbuttoned to chests revealing wiry grey chest hairs. They spoke a smattering of Pidgin English and their speech was sprinkled with local expressions such as wahala, oga, ashewo, nyash, and na wah.


The One and Only Circle: Paul Celan's Letters to Gisele

Introduction and Translation from the French by John Felstiner

#5 / 7 October 1952 / Paris, 10 a.m. —Paul Celan to Gisèle Celan-Lestrange:

Maia, my love, I wish I could tell you how much I want all this to stay, stay for us, stay for ever.

You see, in coming toward you I feel I'm leaving a world behind, hearing doors bang shut behind me, door after door, for they're so many, the doors in this world made of misunderstandings, false clarities, scoffings. Maybe there are still more doors for me, maybe I haven't yet gone back over the whole ground with its networks of misleading signs—but I'm coming, you know I'm coming close, the rhythm—I feel it—speeds up, one phantasm after another flickers out, the lying mouths shut down on their slime—no more words, no more noise, nothing more dogging my step—

I'll be there next to you in an instant, in a second that inaugurates time.


If You're Looking For a Sign

by Anthony Farrington

There shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations...the sea and the waves roaring.
—Luke 21:25

There are three miracles in this story.

I had been teaching high school for several months—catching up on bills, organizing lectures, and gaining some semblance of order—when my ex-wife met us in front of my house on a Friday afternoon. (It was technically her weekend to have the children, so I wasn't completely surprised.) Jenny kissed my daughter and helped her out of her car seat. She kissed my son outside the car, and then—in passing, on elegant tiptoe—she kissed me sweetly on the cheek.