A Letdown Squid

Runner-up: Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize

My story “The Ghosts of Takahiro Okyo” has been selected as a runner-up in the Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize.

Here’s what Gish Jen, this year’s judge, says about it:

“I found The Ghosts of Takahiro Okyo convincing, gripping, atmospheric, and shattering — a truly creepy, original, ambitious story that moves with great agility and touches on something profound.”

So yeah, stoked doesn’t even begin to explain it.  To be picked out of hundreds of submissions, to receive praise from someone who has been published in The New Yorker and The Atlantic and a B.A.S.S. anthology, is just unreal! Jen’s a freaking Guggenheim recipient! It feels good to be validated, to know there are people out there that like what you are do.

16 September 2011 · Comments

• Tags
• lit
• creative writing
• Prize
• Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize
• Gish Jen

“Sure Things Falling”

Here is the short story I read tonight at Coker College’s 9/11 commemoration event. 

Erica Zuckerman catches the train into Manhattan, gets off at Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall and cuts through the park, heading west.   She is on her way to see Andrew.  She asked him to meet her at Taj Tribeca on Murray, probably the most ambitious Punjabi restaurant in the Financial District.  Though Erica and Andrew are fans of the atmosphere and well-stocked buffet, Taj Tribeca holds a greater significance.  Major moments of their life together seem to revolve around its golden linens and paper dining mats.  It is where they met, him on a drunk takeout run for his fellow associates at Harris Beach, her on a blind date with a Junior Vice President from Fiduciary Trust whose dinner conversation included the words portfolio, big account and mutual funds.  Andrew stepped up to their booth with his hands behind his back, tapping the floor with the tips of his shoe, pretending to be shy like a little boy. He excused himself, slid his card across the table to Erica, and told her to phone him if things didn’t work out.  Appalled by his arrogance, it was weeks before she called but when she did she never regretted it.  Andrew reminded her that being unmarried at thirty-one didn’t mean she was a failure; she was waiting to be rescued from the prospects of settling. When he proposed to her in that same booth four years later over a chicken chettinad she knew she had been saved.  And now she is on her way to tell Andrew that after months of trying, after their first pregnancy had ended in a still-birth, they are getting a second chance at being parents, news that Erica feels is worthy of Taj Tribeca’s minty cornish hen hariyali.

She was propelled out of the apartment by the promise of the little pink positive sign and now she is too early.  She decides to stop in the public library and browse the stacks.  As Erica runs her fingers along the spines of books she will never have the time to read, she imagines a new life, the life inside of her, a little girl as precocious as Andrew or a little boy as practical as herself.

There is a boomcrunchpop comparable to thunder, a sound like doom.  The city takes a pause. There is something sinister in the milliseconds of silence that come next.  She can feel the floor shaking as people run to the windows.  Her heart skips a beat, or two, or three.  It sinks in her chest and rests on her stomach.  She is caught in the wave of people rushing down the stairs and out on to the street.  Back outside her eyes have to readjust to the sunlight.  The day is bright, clear except for a single thick cloud ripping through the sky like some airborne toxic event.  Everyone is craning their neck to stare up at the dark cumulus creeping towards City Hall. There are screams coming from windows above her. The air is beginning to taste like gasoline.  It isn’t a cloud it is a column of smoke.

The buildings are hemorrhaging; people are pouring out of their offices and apartments to trail the smoke back to its source.  Erica follows the crowds west past Taj Tribeca, her spirit chained to the collective.  Some instinctual switch has been flipped and suddenly she subscribes to safety in numbers.  When she gets to the corner of Murray and Church it is too terrible, smoke is bellowing out of the World Trade towers like a cigarette. She can see tiny dots raining from the building and it takes her brain a moment to recognize them as people, jumping head first to escape the flames, their bodies bursting on cars and atriums, crushing others trying to evacuate the plaza.  It is too terrible. She closes her eyes and counts back from five, like Andrew taught her whenever she was afraid or angry. FIVE. She feels the energy under her feet, the concrete is electric.   The smell of burning metal is wafting down from the tower and it hugs everything. FOUR. THREE. Somewhere a hundred taxis are blowing their horns all at once; men in expensive suits are choking on sobs.  TWO. In Hebrew there are many words for faith, aman, batah, mibtah.  Erica has always prided herself on her beliefs, for keeping the faith, not just when it is easy. ONE. And when she opens her eyes just in time to catch Flight 175 diving towards Andrew’s office all she can think to do is pray.

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11 September 2011 · Comments

• Tags
• lit
• creative writing
• 9/11
• September 11th
• 2001

Currently Reading…

Birds of America by Lorrie Moore

Though the characters in these 12 stories are seen in such varied settings as Iowa, Ireland, Maryland, Louisiana and Italy, they are all afflicted with ennui, angst and aimlessness. They can’t communicate or connect; they have no inner resources; they can’t focus; they can’t feel love. The beginning stories deal with women alienated from their own true natures but still living in the quotidian. Aileen in “Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens,” is unable to stop grieving over her dog’s death, although she has a loving husband and daughter to console her. The collection’s two male protagonists, a law professor in “Beautiful Grade” and a housepainter who lives with a blind man in “What You Want to Do Fine,” are just as disaffected and lonely in domestic situations. The stories move on, however, to situations in which life itself is askew, where a tumor grows in a baby’s body (the detached recitation of “People Like That Are The Only People Here” makes it even more harrowing ). In “Real Estate,” a woman with cancer?after having dealt with squirrels, bats, geese, crows and a hippie intruder in her new house?kills a thief whose mind has run as amok as the cells in her body. Only a few stories conclude with tentative affirmation. “Terrific Mother,” which begins with the tragedy of a child’s death, moves to a redemptive ending. In every story, Moore empowers her characters with wit, allowing their thoughts and conversation to sparkle with wordplay, sarcastic banter and idioms used with startling originality. No matter how chaotic their lives, their minds still operate at quip speed; the emotional impact of their inner desolation is expressed in gallows humor. Moore’s insights into the springs of human conduct, her ability to catch the moment that flips someone from eccentric to unmoored, endow her work with a heartbreaking resonance. Strange birds, these characters might be, but they are present everywhere. (Publisher’s Weekly)

I’m in love with this book, it’s like reading Self-Help for the first time.

(Source: amazon.com)

6 September 2011 · Comments

• Tags
• lit
• lorrie moore
• Currently Reading...