fiction

Joy seems hard to sustain these days if you’re paying close enough attention to the world around you. A somber mood with which to kick off a Summer Fiction issue, but it lands amid crises both familiar and new.

He was doing the dishes, midmorning, when he noticed the white car drive by, and drive by again. A quiet street, on the way to nowhere. At eleven, the school bus would show up, to deliver lunches to the children who couldn’t go to school. Otherwise, almost no cars he didn’t recognize.

If there was a shack by the side of the river, what would it look like? How big would it be? If we opened the door to the shack by the river, what would we find there? There’s no light in the shack except light that eats through the gaps and the cracks in the day, but now it is night. 

To say he wasn’t having fun would be imprecise.