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.
His grandmother was asking for him as she lay dying, they had written, and even though his mother’s side of the family were strangers, he drove out to see the old woman in Plain- field, New Jersey, on a Saturday afternoon in August that fell in the middle of an oppressive heat wave. He, Goodman, took a girl, Libby, having always decorated himself with womanly trinkets on occasions that required solemnity; he felt more comfortable in the company of a woman and realized that the importance he gave to her aesthetic acceptability reflected his own disquietude at any prospect of going it alone. The prettier the womanly trinket, he understood, the stronger he thought he appeared.
Action and consequence, scene after scene, my father and I will remember everything from this moment on with the sharpness of an alarm that neither of us will ever be able to turn off again.
This is the story of K and B, analyst and patient; specifically, this is the story of their first session together, before K had cured his patient, “dispersed” B, as he’d say, helping him to become
What our grandmother keeps in her walk-in closet: pastel silks in pink and blue and peach, crepe de chine, chiffon, mousseline de soie, tulle, satin ribbons, boleros, corsets, hats with feathers, hats with cloth Rowers, cloches, a beaded cap, tunics, hobble skirts, gray wool suits, evening dresses and dressing gowns.
Bill saw him about five miles after he had powered past the Dornoch turning. The hitchhiker was walking with one foot in the newly minted road and one on the just born verge.
Right on the stroke of noon, and all of a sudden, when the revolution—at least according to the government radio station—was almost under full control, the eyes of Adias turned wild. They turned wild and at first I didn’t understand, because up until then Adias had been a calm and good man, with the pupils of his eyes quiet like those of a household pet.
Since few were living on those heights aside from the children, deaths were few as well and funeral arrangements simple. They carried him out on a farm wagon drawn by a work horse. On steep grades
Her son and his future wife took Suzanne out to lunch and asked her to do the wedding invitations. Not so long ago, she had been a successful graphic designer. Her own boss. They were anxious to make her feel useful. When the food arrived, it was vegetables sliced in long, nearly see-through strips, a pile of ribbons in orange and green and red.
The last time I walked up Cow Horn Hollow, it was such a hot day in August that even under the thick, towering trees the atmosphere seemed to rise and settle again as disturbed as the air in front of a fire, and the jar-flies were whirring so loud they sounded like a power line.
It was, inevitably, his mother who told him. Even in his generation of late-marriers, of self-made orphans affiliated with nothing but each other, forgetters of birthday cards and Confirmation