Jeanne turned and smiled at her lunch guests. Not long before this charade was over.
She held the first
two plates – salmon roulade, rocket leaves, a drizzle of balsamic reduction –
in either hand as she approached the huge cedar dining table beneath their
kitchen’s weathered eaves.
Her husband, James
Bassett, looked round at her fondly as she approached the table, his glasses
sliding slightly down his nose. He’d started sweating already. But then, that
was hardly surprising when you were forty pounds overweight.
“Here we go”,
Jeanne announced with a forced grin.
She set a plate
down in front of Dave’s girlfriend, a blonde twig in her early thirties who
looked like she hadn’t eaten a full meal in years.…
It’s Monday night, and a car is blocking the dumpster with the DO NOT BLOCK ON MONDAY NIGHT sign on it. And there was never any hope that things would go as hoped.
Walking home from my job I wanted, on the morning of day one, to love, I might as well be putting a book over my heart and allowing the bullet through anyway. There was never any hope for such a thing
as being born to be ecstatic about everything. The traffic at this intersection is just terrible. The little store sells beer to minors. I’m out of gum. I refuse to go in there,
where the light of the world is so dim. God knows when you’re in a rotten mood you should just examine your knuckles,
as much as your skin will allow, get home from your job, or wherever you’ve been, and sit down and examine your invisible
The judge was a tall big man with blue eyes and a brown billy-goat beard and he seemed to me to be old, though he was only around forty years of age at that time. His manner was grave. On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife’s religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need of some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make. It is something to think about (True Grit 42).
I was raised
Methodist and have thought a lot about it. Most of my thinking occurred after I
left the church, for while I was a member, what I mainly thought about was the
drudgery of attending Sunday school and church each week; the horror of the
torturous deaths in both testaments; and the reality that my only interests in
attending church at all were (1) singing hymns both in the choir on Sunday
evenings and in the congregation on Sunday morning, and (2) sitting next to my
adolescent peers on those same mornings, playing games of hangman or, if I were
really lucky, rubbing legs with some equally squirmy girl.…
Stevie Z Fischer writes about “the dynamics of people, nature, and power in small-town New England.” Her first novel, River Rules, looks at “how everyday heroes can be forged as lives are changed by forces seemingly beyond our control.” Outside of that, she teaches at several universities. You can find her here.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Fischer about River Rules, her interests in environmentalism and social connections, the pros and cons of modern political correctness, and more!
Lake Victoria, it is said, is what sustains life in Uganda. The second
largest freshwater lake in the world, it breeds the White Nile and the Katonga
River. Transport cargos and ferries carry goods and passengers. Water is
harnessed for electricity. Fisheries are established along the edges.
And
yet, we cannot call it our own. The lake seeps into both Kenya and Tanzania. As
much as we’d like to think so, it belongs to us no more than it belongs to
them.
But that’s the problem of perspective. You might believe something is
yours, and only yours. It only takes a trip over the other side to see this is
really an illusion.…
