Category Archives: Fiction

Excerpt from Franny and Zooey

He thought this over, then gave a mild snort. “I’d like to see him do it, the bastard.” He took a drag on his cigar. “Everybody in this family gets his goddam religion in a different package,” he commented, with a notable absence of awe in his tone. “Walt was a hot one. Walt and Boo Boo had the hottest religious philosophies in the family.” He dragged on his cigar, as if to offset being amused when he didn’t care to be.

“Walt once told Walker that everybody in the family must have piled up one helluva lot of bad karma in his past incarnations. He had a theory, Walt, that the religious life, and all the agony that goes with it, is just something God sicks on people who have the gall to accuse Him of having created an ugly world.”

Excerpt from Holidays On Ice

Santaland Diaries:: David Sedaris

I Photo Elfed all day for a variety of Santas and it struck me that many of the parents don’t allow their children to speak at all. A child sits upon Santa’s lap and the parent say, “All right now, Amber, tell Santa what you want. Tell him you want a Baby Alive and My Pretty Ballerina and that winter coat you saw in the catalog.”

        The parents name the gifts they have already bought. They don’t want to hear the word “pony,” or “television set,” so they talk through the entire visit, placing words in the child’s mouth. When the child hops off the lap, the parents address their children, each and every time, with, “What do you say to Santa?”

        The child says, “Thank you, Santa.”

         It is sad because you would like to believe that everyone is unique and then they disappoint you every time by being exactly the same, asking for the same things, reciting the exact same lines as though they have been handed a script. 

“Cold Reading” – Brendan Constantine

It’s really cold in here now,

easily forty below something,

and half the class is asleep.

Snow dazzles in the windows,

makes a cake of each desk.

It’s really cold in here now.

I’ve been lecturing on the same

poem for twenty six hours

and half the class is asleep.

I want them to get it. I start

to talk about death again

and it’s really cold in here now.

One student has frozen solid,

her hair snapping off in the wind

and half the class is asleep.

“See that” I say, “Lisa gets it.”

But it’s so cold in here now

half the class are white dunes

shifting to the sea.

Insomnia – Linda Pastan

I remember when my body

was a friend,

when sleep like a good dog

came when summoned.

The door to the future

had not started to shut,

and lying on my back

between cold sheets

did not feel

like a rehearsal.

Now what light is left

comes up—a stain in the east,

and sleep, reluctant

as a busy doctor,

gives me a little

of its time.

from The Virginia Quarterly Review

“In the Book of the Disappearing Book” – John Gallagher

It’s a spring flowered dress that was her effacement.

On a train, and because of what windows do sometimes.

Her face is floating above the landscape

unaware.

I used to think that I was reporting my life to someone.

I was a radio.

I used to think things happening was unfolding.

The trees are blooming all through her

and there’s no one to tell.

And the discipline of roads.

The icy discipline of to and from.

In the air of nothing, I used to think

I was understanding distance.

Green God, in your language of silences, tell me.

(Courtesy of LIT)

Excerpt from You Can’t Go Home Again

Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America — that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.

:: Thomas Wolfe

Excerpt from The House On Mango Street

You can never have too much sky. You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad. Here there is too much sadness and not enough sky. Butterflies too are few and so are flowers and most things that are beautiful. Still, we take what we can get and make the best of it.

:: Sandra Cisneros

Excerpt from The Velveteen Rabbit

“Real isn’t how you were made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real, you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.

:: Margery Williams