RIVER STYX ONLINE
FICTION
OCTAVIO’S STORY
“The tour guide Octavio has a half-inch brown rectangle of decay between his two front teeth.”
CUSTOMER SERVICE
“My grandma Borka referred to one’s other half as an esh, or more precisely iesh, because people in the part of Bulgaria closer to Russia speak in that dialect, softly. Iesh means the second thing in a pair…”
THE ANIMAL CRUELTY HANDBOOK
“As soon as you see me, net me. Keep me in a cage and jab out my eyes with a pair of golden nail scissors.”
GARDEN ELECTRICITY
“Hand bleeding, he grabs the broken neck of the bottle then tipsily conducts glass shards, cat hair, and spaghetti bits to a pan.”
CLEVER GIRLS
“The men filled the hall, reeking and filthy from their journey. Hard sets to their bristled jaws, fists clamped on sword hilts. Muscles bulging. Male power, male presumption.”
AN INCOMPLETE CATALOG OF DISAPPEARANCE
“The subject of the missing painting is unidentified, though many believe it to be a self-portrait. Although the painting was never recovered, it has been known for years that the painting survived the war and it is not believed lost, but stolen.”
THE STATELY OLD CHEMISTRY BUILDING
“An 1898 photograph from McClellan Hall’s earliest days shows maples, forsythias, and a grove of apple trees flourishing on the quadrangle’s lush natural carpet.”
THE WISEWOMAN TELLS A STORY ABOUT COMMERCE BEFORE RENOUNCING WORLDLY POSSESSIONS:
“A rich man wanted to be richer, so he sold stars. How to sell a star? What people desperately want, they choose to believe they can buy.”
CHARACTERS
“Tonight, I’m in my gazebo that sits on a spit of land, narrow as a writing brush, that juts into the pond. No typing on screens tonight. My wine cup of white celadon sits on its matching saucer.”
RIVER AS INTERMEZZO
“Leekin ends at the river. The first people, the Catawba Nation, harnessed it with granite weirs.”
THE GRAIN ELEVATOR
“In the elder night when wheat hide their spotty heads below their wings, we climb the grain elevator, scratching up the side of each bin, which contains enough grain, teeming like locusts, to drown us like the bad guys in Witness.”
THE PATENT GUY
Among his classmates from his alma mater, the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), he was a legend, the guy who had made it. At forty, Mirza was head of his division at a multinational engineering company in Houston, with fifty engineers working under him. His salary was half a million dollars. He lived in a one-point-two-million-dollar home in The Woodlands, built on a two-acre lot that backed onto woods.
LEST SHE GO OFF
When dad left to go live with a Ruby Tuesday’s waitress, the house felt dank and cavernous––like an empty dragon’s lair where helpless worms wriggled about, wondering what to do now that their beast was dead. Mom filled the void with reality television, volume set to MAX. She sat on the brown plaid couch in an unlit living room from morning to night and hunched forward until her glasses were two feet from the screen. The more sexual the show the closer mom’s face was pulled into it.
FOUR PREPOSITIONS
When the bald spot formed, he started wearing a yarmulke, exactly the right size.
GUEST OF HONOR
Creating stresses in the social fabric was one of Fräulein Agata’s great joys, so when the general’s friend, a society lady, asked her to bring the school’s top students, my German teacher brought us instead. None of us marriageable by real standards—me, basically a penniless orphan, Hanna, not a student and Jewish enough not to mix her milk and her meat, and Olga, with a pince-nez and stern expression that Freud would have described as castrating. It’s possible Elsie was with us too. I keep forgetting about her.