Thanks, first of all, to Jen Michalski for inviting me to join the team here at jmww; it's been a real pleasure working with her. Thanks, too, to the stalwart team of editors, namely, B.L. Pawelek, Nathan Penksy, and Linda Wastila, for forwarding stories over to me for further consideration.
I really enjoyed putting together this issue of very short fiction. To have stories like these floating into my inbox or the submissions "pile" proved to be the highlights of my reading these past few weeks. For part of the time I had been reading these stories I was also in the midst of reading William Gaddis's The Recognitions, the thorough command of narrative technique of which was as daunting as it was inspiring, and I'm happy to say that the stories I've selected here measure up to this mammoth text, packing imaginative rhetoric and style in a necessarily much smaller package.
I thought of several ways to arrange the stories but decided to simply offer them to you in alphabetical order, which, on the surface, is rather unimaginative, but may, in the end, prove to be the best way to showcase these stories. So think of it as a short fiction abecedary, where editorial fiddling gives way to something less hierarchical.
Andrew Borgstrom's "525 Points" is a rompecabeza where seeming lack of connections between sentences gain power from forceful accretions of feeling, multilayered meaning, and evocative repetitions. Favorite sentence: "I said things about the things you told me not to call things."
Following this are three stories by Kim Chinquee, who delivers them with a cool, somewhat detached, voice. Duplicity, doubt, fear, and sometimes even violence, suffuse these miniatures. Favorite sentence: "Hearing a shot, a slap, the woman down, it was just like she remembered: her father, her husband on a rampage."
While ridiculously off the radar, although continuing to write brilliant, acerbic prose while also dismantling and reimagining genre tropes, Robert Coover remains, for me, one of literature's most important writers. Stylistically bland prose may reign supreme, but Coover persists and continues to thrive. At seventy-eight, he's far edgier than the current crop of testosterone-fueled, ego-driven bad boy bloggers and internet darlings with their juvenile outpourings, anemic diatribes, and glibness that some confuse for significant literature and criticism. Reviewing Noir, his recent novel, I encountered a passage that could easily function as a standalone piece. Fortunately, Coover agreed and let me take it out and recast it here. It's a hilarious, over-the-top piece that I hope will encourage you to pick up this short, breezy, witty, and weird book. Favorite sentence: "He decorated her belly with a bulbous raccoon-dog with testicles like beach balls, etched a crimson "4" on her forehead, the sign of death, inscribed a stormy seascape on her backside with giant waves crashing over the small of her back, and converted the target into a whirlpool with a fishing boat being dragged down into its dark center, giving one the sense, if one approached her from that direction, of entering the eye of the storm."
Jeremy M. Davies's fictions here attest to the brilliance that I first encountered while reading his debut novel Rose Alley, and they confirm, for me, his stylistic versatility. Favorite sentence: "That cunt on the bus shoved him down the last step with her shopping bag or papoose or whatever it was swelling out her midriff to poke to prod to give him a little oomph down that last step to land hard on the concrete sending a temblor up which smeared the light from the sun into, what, a Petri dish of hirsute, primary colored flagellates, unless he means flageolets, he's making a salad."
Stark, dark, sharp, Luca Dipierro's story "Brother Would Never Leave" is a scary thing, its scariness bolstered by its lines of severed and floating heads. Favorite sentence: I had to burn the house in order to leave."
The title "master of suspense" is given to so many writers that it usually rings hollow whenever I encounter it, but it really is apt when describing Brian Evenson, for not only does he deliver the kind of uncertainty about the future, powerlessness to change circumstances or outcomes, and constricting anxiety we come to expect from great mysteries and horror stories; he also furnishes the reader with sentences charmed to snake around your insides. Favorite sentence: "A male nurse, a Croat or a Serb—unless it was an Albanian—had bluntly informed him that they would have to inject his body with contrast and that there was a chance, albeit minuscule, that this would kill him."
"Collision" is really a perfect title Lily Hoang's piece here since these sentences, full of appositions, dislocations, and asides, do, in fact, collide, mirroring the narrator's jumbled state of mind. Alas, I'd have to quote the entire thing if I were to choose a favorite sentence.
Tim Horvath's fictions here seemingly merge the styles of such disparate writers like Borges, Nabokov, and Lutz, and mark Horvath as another great new writer. Favorite sentence: "You were so used to working around Artie's needs that you marveled at me, a butte of imperturbability so long as you didn't dock my toothbrush upside down in cup-scum or toss my protein powder the morning it expired."
On the Winding Stair, Joanna Howard's collection of short stories, is a treasure trove of lyrical gems where words are arranged into jeweled mosaics. And the two pieces here provide more of that brilliance. Favorite sentence: "My dress matches her dress except for the pattern in pink, and hers matches hers but for the pattern in green, and hers in blue, and hers in lavender, and so on."
Jamie Iredell's "The Woman and the Snake" is a departure from the muscular prose that I've come to expect from him. With a lightness befitting its mythological mode, he offers a storyteller's yarn in pellucid prose full of declarative sentences. Favorite sentence: "The woman huddled inside of a house that she had built from the reeds of the willows, bent, and lashed together, and covered with the bark of the incense cedars, and strips from the aspens that she had found growing in groves when the fall came, when the aspens burned yellow amongst the surrounding green pines."
Brian Kiteley's story, "April 1854: Richard Word, 30", is a melancholic rendering of a man's slow but certain unraveling. It's a wonder how so much sadness can fit within such a small space. Favorite sentence: "Her father died last month, which may be the stated fuel for my wife's departure, but the engine is the shock of her father's passing, the way her mother is treading life without him, and the fact that my wife is unable to conceive a child after seven years of marriage."
While the literary world sleeps, Norman Lock, one of our preeminent dreamweavers, subversive carnies, and acoustic alchemists, awakes wide-eyed and unafraid to fashion fantastic objects of beauty. Shadowplay was one of last year's highlights in reading for me, and so it's great to have some stories from him here. From the carnivalesque atmosphere he creates in "Pieces for a Small Orchestra" to the austere family portrait he draws in "Winter Trees", Lock's fictions here inspire. Favorite sentence: "I kept my eyes shut tight till first light lit up the room behind my lids." Read that one again.
There's some menace, an intimation of wrongdoing, in Robert Lopez's "Them My Real Ones Pretty Nice.". Lopez carefully depicts the narrator's somewhat skewed perspective and questionable judgment as well as her struggle to fabricate her own identity. Favorite sentence: "I'm not going to be one of them someones who's changed by whatever happens because something always happens and you can't always keep changing all the time to keep up."
You can always count on a story by Sean Lovelace to be filled with loopy and lopsided language, and the stories here deliver again and again. His playing with forms is always fun to follow; speaking of which, "After Doing Smiles" is formally fresh and may mark a new direction in his writing. Favorite sentence: "Glass-like is your skin, glass-like is the way I see through, off that ordinary painting on that ordinary wall, corner and corner...we adjourn."
For some reason, when I copied and pasted my favorite sentence from Stacy Muszynski's "Influence of Dreams" this is what appeared: "<0&%&"/$70&$=!>$4%$=-48>$)*$0'7&?$". How odd? I thought, and then realized that this was exactly what I thought when I'd first read her story. It's a prickly thing, something blown apart, shrapnel. As for my favorite sentence, I'll just let you guess which one the one above was since this story, too, will keep you guessing.
Trust me: Ken Sparling's day will come. I was surprised when I first read Sparling's "The genesis of my life as others know it". Its cycling repetitions were something I hadn't encountered in his writing. I anxiously await a book by Sparling comprised of sentences like this one: "Not knowing the slim core of the secret no longer keeps you alive, it rather kills you, and you no longer love the husk of who you are, or who you once were, in the husky silence of the secret that was always only a silence about how secret the secret of you was always being"; and this one: "Mornings, when you aren't likely to know anything about what you don't want to know about anymore, when you are not any longer most likely to know a single thing about what you don't know the least of what is no longer something you think you no longer need to think about anymore, the girl could no longer answer any of the questions she no longer longed to ask herself anymore."
So much is left unsaid in Terese Svoboda's "Credit", and this is, ironically, the aspect from which it draws its dramatic power. With incisive, well-tooled prose, she deftly captures the often crazed, tense, weird, sleep-deprived life of any mother with a baby, but especially that of, I would imagine, a single mother. Favorite sentence: "I want to look inside their minds, to see why those, but their smiles are big enough to lie in, real hammocks, and the bagels could be lifesavers."
J.A. Tyler's deliberately restrictive language, that is, his limited vocabulary sets, echoes, to me, the work of Gertrude Stein, Hemingway (sometimes), and Peter Markus. His passages, full of repetitions, often reverberate like mantras. Favorite sentence: "Tangleweeds are wrapped on her ankles and eating up her shins and making her fingers push for lung space and eye space and mouth space and nose space and head space until they are gripping thin green and stern yellow and white white white and there is always this fighting back."
John Madera, Senior Flash Editor