Fiction of the Day
The Beautiful Salmon
By Joanna Kavenna
I’ve always loved salmon. Not to eat, as I don’t eat fish, but I’ve always loved salmon in general because salmon jump and no one knows why.
I’ve always loved salmon. Not to eat, as I don’t eat fish, but I’ve always loved salmon in general because salmon jump and no one knows why.
The old days, the Chicago days, rooms full of the smell of chicken paprikash, coffee, roasting pork, simmering prunes and apricots. Dark rooms full of dark furniture, of horsehair, claw feet, doilies, crucifixes with palm fronds stuck behind them.
Captain Hipp and his background made me ever more fascinated by a theory I had often played with. Which was: you didn’t have to be a Southerner to be a good marine, but it certainly did no harm.
Like so much brain damage, the first symptoms that mine produced were almost indistinguishable from normal behavior.
Marguerite took her show on the road, a last tour, to end at the Capitol, where the senior senator from Rhode Island had arranged a performance for the combined Houses.
Pauline had forgotten about the straw seats on the train. She had a half-hour’s ride from Newark to the Hoboken ferry terminal, and the moment she took her seat she was attacked through
Felice lay on the shag carpet, a wet towel across her face. Beneath it, she pressed the telephone to her ear. Her husband answered on the first ring.
They met before midnight at the house of the richest man in Mississippi, and left shortly with a dark old leather country doctor’s satchel that was bulging with money, bulging as if trying to breathe, swollen like a dying fish’s gills: they were unable to even shut it all the way.
Tall and too thin, sometimes stooped but now bent bravely forward into the wind, old Duncan Elliott heads southward in Central Park, down a steep and cindery path—
For a few years I had a garden in a ruined village. I worked through the long summer afternoons on a limestone upland full of the sound of cicadas, in a place that I had found.
I had one friend named Connie Bronson who lived two houses up the street from me and was one year younger than I and two grades behind because she had had brain fever.