RIVER STYX ONLINE
FICTION
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.
BRANCHES OF THE SERVICE
The attaché looked out the window and knew that something was wrong about the wing. He absolutely knew. But he couldn’t say what he knew other than he knew and that he couldn’t say what he knew.
THE LAST THURSDAY OF THE CENTURY
As winter nears its end, the sky acts like a lunatic, its behavior mirroring the chaos of Iranian lives preparing for Nowruz. When you think that spring has arrived, snow appears outside the window, causing confusion between Nowruz and Christmas. One can only hope that an evening thunderstorm doesn’t kill the newly planted violets. Perhaps the sky is reflecting on the past year; Saturday thinking about summer, Wednesday evoking the memories of autumn. Maybe it’s showing its sense of humor in preparation for the upcoming Nowruz. Either way, the old adage rings true: “The sky goes crazy before Nowruz,” making it difficult to predict what the afternoon will bring based on the morning.
STRAYS
There was something in the way the kid worked, as if pushing around stacks of pressure-treated two by sixes in the heat wasn’t actually hard, as if the wood weighed nothing at all, as if gravity chose not to assail him while it pressed down on everyone else. The kid had shown up on island two weeks ago, at the start of August, and ever since, Thad had been watching the boy.