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Fiction: “Poppyseed” by Ramona Ausubel

Sat, 11 May 2013 15:00:00 +0000

Laura and I celebrated my new job for the sake of having something to celebrate. I picked up a mushroom pizza and a six-pack of Diet Cokes, and Laura and I sat on a picnic blanket in the middle of our suburban front yard. Poppy sat there too, only she was in her stroller bed as always. The grass was craning out of the dirt and the birds were going for all our scraps. We lay on our backs like Poppy does, flat down, and looked at the graying blue of the sky. It came at us. Storming us with its color, with its light.

That afternoon, when I accepted the job as the head guide of the ghost tour on the retired ocean liner, the boss told me I could write my own content for the tour. Mr. Peterson said, “We love that you are creative. We think that’s so cool!”

I shook his hand and then I sat in the car and let go of a few tears. I had to. It was the first time anyone was paying me to write something and it was the worst kind of writing. Shameful, jokey, forgettable.

“Thank you for taking this job,” Laura said, without turning to look at me. “I know you don’t want it.”

“I don’t not want it. I want to do whatever I need to do.”

“Do you want to ever try again?” she asked, looking at her middle.

Fiction: “Double Take” by Jessica Francis Kane

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 16:00:00 +0000

Six weeks after his college roommate died, Ben thought he saw him in London: the square jaw and pale skin, the round eyes and devilish grin. But it was only a stranger in the crowd on Oxford Street. In the weeks that followed, Ben saw lots of people who reminded him of Mike. It seemed the city was suddenly populated with dozens of men who shared his fondness for gray parkas, cheap tight jeans, baseball caps and bargain boots.

Of course, Ben didn’t know if these items were still in Mike’s wardrobe when he died. He hadn’t seen him for two years when he got word that Mike had drowned off the coast of Fire Island. He was just remembering him as he’d looked at Yale.

Ben flew in from London for the memorial service in New York. He couldn’t take any time off, but with the time difference he was able to make the trip work. He left Heathrow Friday night and arrived in the city an hour before the service Saturday afternoon. Saturday night he spent with college friends. A few of them took Mike’s mother, Maryanne, out for dinner -- he remembered a quiet Italian place -- then Sunday he woke up early, went to a movie with friends (one they told themselves Mike would have liked), and caught a late afternoon flight back to London. There was a mishap with the car service and he rode to LaGuardia in a long white limo only perfunctorily cleaned from its stag party service the night before. Back in London, he took a cab straight to work. It was a whirlwind, but he was glad he’d gone.

Fiction: Between the Sheets

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 17:00:00 +0000

I squinted at the woman sitting across the desk from me. I could have sworn she’d just told me there was a dead man in her daughter’s bed, which seemed like a strange thing to say, accompanied, as it was, by a pleasant smile and carefully modulated tone. Maybe I’d misunderstood.

It was nine o’clock in the morning, some ordinary day of the week. I was, I confess, hungover — a rare occurrence in my life. I do not drink often or much, but the night before I’d been at a birthday party for my landlord, Henry Pitts, who’d just turned eighty-two. Apparently the celebration had gotten out of hand because here I was, feeling fuzzy-headed and faintly nauseated, trying to look like an especially smart and capable private investigator, which is what I am when I’m in good form.

My name is Kinsey Millhone. I’m thirty-two years old, divorced, a licensed P.I., running my own small agency in a town ninety-five miles north of Los Angeles. The woman had told me her name was Emily Culpepper and that much made sense. She was very small, one of those women who at any age will be thought “cute,” God forbid. She had short dark hair and a sweet face and she looked like a perfect suburban housewife. She was wearing a pale blue blouse with a Peter Pan collar, a heather-colored Shetland sweater with grosgrain ribbon down the front, a heather tweed skirt, hose, and Capezios with a dainty heel. I guessed her to be roughly my age.

Fiction: Numb by David Abrams

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Three weeks before Christmas, my sister-in-law left her husband for another man. When Robin made her grand exit -- slamming the door so hard the Sears family portrait trembled, then seemed to leap off the wall -- my wife’s heart went out to Jerome. She homed in on his pain like it was an emergency distress signal blinking from a glacier’s crevasse. Jerome has always been Elizabeth’s favorite brother because, she says, he reminds her of me -- or vice versa, I guess.

My other brothers-in-law, Zeke and Sam, were always cruel to her, playing tricks, never telling the truth about anything, always keeping an emotional distance. Typical males. Elizabeth told me: “They never talked about anything but sex -- you know, what they were going to do to all the girls we went to school with. When I was in the bathroom, I’d catch them looking under the door with those little mirrors dentists use to examine your teeth -- except they were trying to see me pee. I’d scream and holler for Mom, but they’d keep right on sticking those mirrors under the door.”

Fiction: Ongry by Lauren Fox

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 15:00:00 +0000

April swallows a sip of her drink, tucks her smooth brown hair behind her ears, and scans the other guests at the table with a sly look on her face reminiscent of Mr. Fuzzy, a cat I once had who used to sneak up behind people and pounce on their backs. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” April asks. Then she dabs at her red lips with her napkin and laughs, a low, murmuring sound.

“I killed a man in Reno,” Brian says, “just to watch him die.”

“Me, too!” I say. Brian shoots me a wink, a silly, exaggerated scrunching of the entire left side of his face.

Erin, Brian’s wife, elbows him and rolls her eyes at me. “I never finished writing thank-you notes after Livi was born,” she says.

I’ve known Erin for three years, ever since we gave birth on the same cold day in November, at the same hospital, in adjacent rooms. Our shared terror brought us together. This feels like a bitch, she said to me, under her breath, when we met, pacing the hallways, in active labor.

Does this thing come with a money-back guarantee? I whispered to her from her doorway the next day, a hospital gown tied loosely around my blobby middle; pink, bald baby Daisy bundled in my arms like a precious little rat.

Fiction: The Harvest Moon

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 16:00:00 +0000

As far as Greta knew, there was nothing in the sky that night.

Lying on her back in the bathroom on the cool of the white marble tiles, she heard the summons again. Her husband tapped the horn of the car: one long, noisy beep followed by two shorter taps, as if in apology. She strained to close the zipper on a pair of jeans without pinching the soft flesh of her midsection. It was a task she found both onerous and humiliating, primarily since she had purchased the pair less than a month ago, having gone through the same depressing experience with every other pair that lay folded in her dresser. Another short beep to remind her (in case she had forgotten) that her husband and daughter were waiting in the idling car, but this really had been sprung on her, and there might be photos. She wanted to at least make an attempt at presentability. There weren’t many photos of the two of them anymore, not like the early days, before Charlotte was born. Now any photo seemed to be taken from their six-year-old daughter’s height — hardly a flattering angle: the upward tilt of Greta’s crooked smile, and the heavy lower lids of Phillip’s distracted and vaguely startled eyes, as though he didn’t quite expect to find himself there.

Fiction: The Autobiography of Allegra Byron

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 16:00:00 +0000

On the first of March, 1821, Allegra Byron entered the Convento di San Giovanni like a small storm, accompanied by non-relations, overdressed women who handled her with cool affection. It was a clear morning, so we met our charge in the prayer garden, a patch of grass where a few ancient olive trees were waking up to spring. Though lauded by her guardians as an early talker at two, three-year-old Allegra greeted us with silence.

This, her chaperone said, is your new home.

Allegra looked at our faces, then the grounds and buildings. I don’t like it, she said.

I stood with another Capuchin sister, flanking the abbess who lorded over the garden with a solemn stare. A breeze whipped our brown habits around our knees, exposing our humble shoes. I felt my job was to soften the harsh presence of the abbess. These moments, where a child was left in our care, struck me as pivotal in the child’s life, grievous even.

Fiction: You Live Here Now

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Sometimes I like to go to the fancy grocery store, walk around with a cup of coffee, get two things, and pretend I’m that person.

Early in the morning is the best time to do this. It’s less crowded, almost like a little walking meditation through the pricey things I sometimes covet, in their pretty, perfect wrappings, with fewer representatives of the native peoples to remind me that I am not really that person. Unnoticed and undistracted, I can sample imported cheeses, try on lotions that cost five times what they cost in a stripped-down package, sniff the loose teas, and eventually, put the couple things in my basket that I can’t find anywhere else, an herbal supplement or a bottle of sesame shiitake salad dressing.