Author: Steve Himmer
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The Girl with Brown Fur
In the opening story of Stacey Levine’s The Girl With Brown Fur, a family is moving to Uppsala. It’s a real word and a real place, yet it’s one that sounds strange and slightly fantastic to an Anglophone ear. Suspending her readers between the familiar and the foreign is what Levine does best, and each…
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Abbott Awaits
Reading Abbott Awaits, Chris Bachelder’s third novel, felt eerily familiar at times, like reading the inside of my head. The book follows its titular character—first or last name, we don’t know—one single-day chapter at a time through his summer break from teaching at a state university, during which he watches his two year-old daughter, awaits…
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Kidz Love Klezmer
Look at little Gene dance. Spinning. Swinging his arms. Kicking out. His head down and then up. Look at his face. He’s ecstatic. What’s going through his mind? I call out to little Gene, This is a kolomeike, my boy. All the other kids are watching Gene dance. They are dancing like Gene. Kids love…
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Steven J. McDermott, 'When a Furnace Is All That Remains'
From the bus stop I walk up the gravel service road. All of the puddles are frozen over with thin windowpane ice and I amuse myself by stomping through the sheets of crystal. They break with a sharp crunch and a whoosh as the air escapes around my boot. No puddles in the potholes beneath…
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BJ Hollars, 'The Friends'
January 19, 1996 The day was cold, but the starter had not frozen over. Not entirely. A thin skin of ice veiled the ignition, but not so deeply that they couldn’t smash through with a key. It happened like this: Abby swiped the key from her father’s den and took Charlie by the hand. “Be…
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Peter Grandbois, 'Carpentry'
He started with the lowest branches. You can see them piled in the mud by the crabapple. He cuts them with a plain handsaw, working with a carpenter’s skill, though we’re guessing from the half-built racing engine in his garage and the tools hanging on the wall that he’s a mechanic, or was. He hasn’t…
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Paul Toth, 'And Took Him Down Where He Got the Bends'
The sun bent a-blurry on the Pacific Coast Highway. Charlie and Jim looked into the closest star and tried to blind themselves, but they hadn’t the guts. Charlie pulled to the side of the road. “There goes that idea,” Charlie said. “I see blobs of paint,” Jim said. “We’ll get going in minute. Try to…
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James Stegall, 'Third Order Effects'
When the shells hit the zoo five hundred exotic species spurted like awkward pollen and scattered all across the tan streets and plumbing-covered roofs of Baghdad. The leopards ran for the Tigris. An elephant wandered into the middle of the intersection where I sat in the turret of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, praying to the…