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SSM: “A Simple, Rigid Structure” by Andrea Kneeland

23 May

There’s been a lot of humbling, wonderful things said to me about my essay about how books saved me that I wrote here at Vouched a few weeks ago, and I thank everyone for all of them. But I have to confess, in the weeks that followed, I’ve realized how good I made myself look in that essay. It was my past I made to look ugly; myself I made out to be a redemption story, a conquerer of sorts over a life that could have pushed a lesser man to lesser things.

I’ve collected my fair share of lesser things.

Through college, I was at best a pompous ass, concerned so much about my own aspirations, I basically drug whatever girl I was dating at the time along through the swirl and mess of them. I lived like I thought an artist should live, carefree and fleeting, one idea to the next, believing that to regret my mistakes was to regret who I was. I probably still do much of that today, and I can’t help but to thank my wife for her grace.

The thing about being able to fold yourself up is that you can’t have any real plans or ambitions; at least not any that you allow to float to the surface very often. If you allow yourself to want too much, that wanting will start to take on a definite shape, will start to need room, and your ability to bend is compromised.

The problem with this is that when you are suddenly confronted without a safety net, and decisions need to be made, one thing seems exactly the same as the other. So when Luke left, she just gave notice at the Denny’s on Broadway, boarded a Greyhound bus, and tried for the exact same life in another state.

When she met Richard, she didn’t know he wasn’t the type to eat at Denny’s, that what he actually enjoyed were things like jogging and organic free trade coffee. He’d pulled in with some friends around one in the morning and they all ordered pancakes and Moons Over My Hammy and other drunk foods. He was the quiet one, the designated driver, and when one of the girls in his group didn’t quite make it to the bathroom before she vomited, he was the one to apologize profusely, to leave Susan a $40 tip plus a note to give $10 to the staff member that had to clean up the puke. His phone number and email address was on the bottom of the note. She felt both obligated and hopeful when she wrote him the next day to say thank you. He immediately asked her out for drinks.

Read the full story at Barrelhouse.

SSM: “Three Bodies” by Mike Meginnis

22 May

My grandma has dementia. My grandpa died years ago of cancer. She wakes everyday to the belief that he is alive. I don’t know if the nurses at the home tell her he isn’t. She’d forget again in a matter of minutes anyway, so it’s probably best to discount her the grief.

I once asked my grandma if she’d eaten that day. She asked me, “What’s it matter if I’m not hungry?”

Sometimes I’m terrified of the thought of forgetting who I am, and sometimes it’s comforting. I can never make up my mind. I’ll likely never make up my mind until I lose the capability of it. One day, like this body, I’ll remember you only by the feel of your body against mine. Please don’t take your body from me.

This body cannot remember the faces of other bodies. Not its wife’s body’s face. Not it’s father’s body’s face. Not its mother’s body’s face. It can only recognize hands. It turns the hands over in its hands. Remembers the moles. Remembers the wrinkles.

At night it holds its wife’s body’s hands in its own. It speaks to these. They seem to speak when her body speaks. Its body is therefore most recognizable to its wife’s body when its face is downcast.

Read the other bodies at Smokelong.

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SSM: “The Ceiling” by Kevin Brockmeier

21 May

If the Rapture/Judgement Day actually does come today, I hope it at least has the common decency to hold off until people can read this story. I thought a good end-of-the-world type story would be great to celebrate today, given the imminent end of the world and all. This story will crush you.

Melissa added an ice cube to her glass, shaking it against the others until it whistled and cracked. I watched a strand of cloud break apart in the sky. The moon that night was bright and full, but after a while it began to seem damaged to me, marked by some small inaccuracy. It took me a moment to realize why this was: against its blank white surface was a square of perfect darkness. The square was without blemish or flaw, no larger than a child’s tooth, and I could not tell whether it rested on the moon itself or hovered above it like a cloud. It looked as if a window had been opened clean through the floor of the rock, presenting to view a stretch of empty space. I had never seen such a thing before.

“What is that?” I said.

Melissa made a sudden noise, a deep, defeated little oh.

“My life is a mess,” she said.

Read the full story here.

Much thanks to Kyle Winkler for recommending this story.

SSM: “Sustenance” by Samantha Cohen

20 May

Out for pizza tonight, my wife, our friend Andi, and I somehow settled on the topic of the survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, the Uruguayan rugby team that crashed in the Andes Mountains and had to resort to cannibalism to survive. I don’t know. Conversation is weird, man. I’m terrified of it sometimes.

We leave today for a camping trip. Along the Kentucky/Indiana border runs a line of whiskey distilleries known as the Bourbon Trail. We are going there. We will not have to resort to cannibalism, which is probably a good thing.

“If we get really lost in here,” Aphra says, “I might kill and eat you.”

“If we get really lost in here,” says Seth, “I’ll cut off your arm and we can roast it over a spit.”

Aphra and Seth are driving through the Angeles National Forest and the GPS lady has no idea where they are. Aphra’s car’s a mess, picnic remains crowding the backseat: a Ziploc containing three apple cores, two avocado stones, and half a tomato; another Ziploc containing two spoons and a cutting knife; a nearly empty multigrain crackers box and a half-drunk bottle of wine; tomato-streaked plates. As they watch the sky darken, they are thinking words like “bluff” and “crag,” but they aren’t sure these are the right words. They only know words like these from stories, but this is close to what they pictured.

“What about your arm?” Aphra says. She says this, but she doesn’t mean it. Aphra’s never eaten meat before, not that she can remember, and she prefers the idea of eating her own meat to eating Seth. She figures this means she might not love Seth, but she also figures she probably already knows that.

Read the full story at PANK.

Deeper into eastern Kentucky is the Red River Gorge area. What they speak of, “bluffs” and “crags” exist there, beautiful sandstone. I don’t get to climb much anymore. I miss it. I miss the tiredness in my hands, the sting of busted skin left on the rock, the burning of muscles and tendons. I miss the language of it–’biners and gri gri’s, crimps and pockets and jugs, throws and dynos.

We’re not going deep enough into Kentucky for that. We’re not going deep enough to find ourselves without sustenance, in that animal spiral where all you know is thirst and the burning of your belly. We’re not going deep enough for any of that.

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SSM: “from Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City” by Michael Bible

19 May

I’m trying to figure out how I feel about the Electric City. I’m trying to figure out how this fits into Short Story Month. I suppose it’s another excerpt, but I’m okay with that. The whole of Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City works in vignettes, and so to excerpt these, to me, fits into SSM quite well, like in featuring this series of vignettes from the Electric City is like featuring 10 stories in 1 day.

There is just something about the language here, something about how the vignettes work and tumble, separate but together as a whole. It reminds me somewhat of Berryman’s Dream Songs meets Hunter S. meets Jamie Iredell’s Prose. Poems. a Novel.

The stars are incumbent out here in the mystery. A long electric hum comes from the city. The Apache named Shoe is hunched in half shadow, half light. His headdress makes him seem wise. He holds a hot knife between his teeth and rubs fresh blood on his cheeks. Christ killed the deer and the Apache cleaned it.

***

Forever found me eating wild apples on an island. He nuzzled my ear with his nose. He is calico, strong of spirit and body. The first morning we rode from the beaches to the end of the forest where we rested and I sang him a song.

***

Charlie West and I have twins in the old abandoned hospital. His twin is a bank teller, mine is a kindergarten teacher. We take them back to the old surgical theater and lick them. They are redheads and chubby and there is blue light coming from a crack in the door. I hear a noise and it is the cops outside. There are the ghosts of all the dead patients and Charlie and I are laughing, running half naked through the ward.

Read the full story at Barrelhouse.

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Announcing the Vouched Online Table!

18 May

If you’ve been to Vouched Online since last Friday, you may have noticed the little badge in the sidebar about the Vouched Online Table.

Well, that takes you to our new online store where you can buy the Vouched titles even if you can’t make it out to First Friday at Big Car or to a Vouched Presents reading, or maybe you could, but didn’t have the money at the time and really wanted to buy that one book.

Also, in celebration of Short Story Month, we’ve launched the store with all titles featuring short fiction, collections as well as journals, marked down a couple bucks.

Happy Short Story Month!

SSM: “Lock Box” by Kim Chinquee

18 May

When we cleaned out my mother’s house, we had to wear masks, bandannas over our faces, the smell and the grime and the dirt in the air was just too much. There were boxes yet unpacked from the move, 5 years before–stuffed with old copies of Redbook dating back to 1979, canned goods expired a year or 2 past, broken calculators, candlesticks wrapped in newspaper.

There is a dirty business to cleaning up after one’s life. There are bills left unpaid. There are spoiled leftovers growing cultures in the refrigerator. There are arrangements to be made–there is the word, “arrangements.” There are memories long and sometimes better left forgotten.

I was in the other room, checking his pockets, putting clothes in boxes. I wanted to wear his shirts, though they smelled like something bad I couldn’t remember. The flowered one he’d worn once on vacation. I remembered him in it, or maybe it was pictures. I was sure then, he didn’t want to be there, at the petting zoo, feeding deer and horses. I touched his clothes as if they were him, alive, as if I could have touched him.

Read the full story at Used Furniture Review.

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SSM: “The Geologist” by Megan Cummins

17 May

My mind today is disquiet. There is weather outside, and it is awful. I have a story to write about, I know this. Maybe I’m burning out. Maybe I’m out burning.

Days like today, I tend to reach for Sigur Ros. If you’ve not heard or listened to them, you should. Here. Here is this. Watch this. Listen.

It only makes sense that listening to this, watching this video, reminds me of “The Geologist” by Megan Cummins. It’s an old story in internet years, published I think 2 years ago, maybe 3. The story takes place in Iceland. It has passages like this:

So we stayed. We didn’t know where we would go when the tour ended, when the bus dropped us off in Reykjavik and drove back to its base in Selfoss. But it wasn’t important, not right away, not while he looked and I listened. Rocks: they were art to him, art and beauty and truth and history he could break apart with his hammer. He laughed when I closed my eyes just to hear: the water, the wind, the birds that made noises I didn’t know—when I first heard their calls, I thought a child was dying somewhere, or a cat. And all the beautiful words, the way the language fell like hair to the ground. It made English sound slow, weary, worn out. On the page, the Icelandic words were as full of consonants as they could be; but spoken, they had as many vowels as water. They slid. They moved as the human body does to music, slipping between all the cracks we didn’t know existed.

This story takes place in Iceland. In it, a lady breaks her leg on a trip to Iceland, befriends a geologist who cares for her throughout the tour. It has passages like this:

I even tried to follow to the edge of the water in Vik, to the storm in each wave of the North Atlantic. Walking on crutches in sand: it was a comparison I would use for years after to describe difficult things in my life. I made it only to a cave of columnar basalts; water ran like tears from its ceiling, and I looked up to find the source, but I had found the only darkness in the whole country. Why were the rocks crying? I wanted to ask, but Andrew would have laughed.

I leaned against the edges, let the water trickle down my neck. The columns felt like the spines of books against my back as I let myself rest, breathing heavily, as though I had walked on water and knew better than to think it easy.

This story takes place in Iceland.

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SSM: Congrats to our Annalemma subscription winners!

16 May

That terribly lit photo is a picture of the winners of the Annalemma subscription drawing held last night at Vouched Presents. Congrats to Jonathan Berkey and Laura Adamczyk, who actually already had a subscription and instead gifted her winnings to her friend Katie!

Thanks to Elysia for having a hand small enough to fit into the jar, and thanks to everyone who entered!

I really hope and encourage all those who entered and didn’t win still to subscribe now for $5 off the regular yearly subscription price. They are almost to their goal for the subscription drive, and it’s a beautiful magazine worth reading, worth holding in your hands.

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SSM: “The Heliocentrist” by Eric Beeny

16 May

I just came across this story from a post on facebook. For a good while now, Crispin Best has been compiling this collaborative effort called For Every Year, where writers submit works in honor of every year since 1400 AD.

Up now is a story by Eric Beeny for the year 1634:

Galileo observes small things through his telescope as the planet he lives on revolves somewhere in space.

He doesn’t think God gives a shit if humans think the Earth is where they think it is, whether or not it’s in the middle of everything.

He goes up to the roof of his villa in Florence and looks at the stars, imagines those small things falling on his head.

Galileo wishes it was his birthday, but for that he’d need a cake with candles to blow out, and since it’s not his birthday he doesn’t have that.

He doesn’t know what he’d wish for other than that it be his birthday, and that he’d once again be young enough to not have to appreciate it.

Galileo’s not sure how small the stars he’s observing are, but he knows they’re far away, and he thinks that must mean something big.

Read the full story at For Every Year.

I’ve always had a small fascination for Galileo. For the past couple years I have been cooking up an idea for a children’s book about him. It’s a good idea, a strong idea. It’s an idea I’m proud of and want it to be great when it becomes more than an idea. I have the first sentence written. It goes, “After they arrested Galileo, the great astronomer, no one dared to look at the stars.”

This story makes me want to write the second sentence, and the third. Maybe more. I write slow. I want people to look up into my words and think they mean something big.

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