Stories by Michael Cunningham, Jim Shepard, Lydia Millet, T Cooper, and Diana Wagman

Electric Literature is just that, electric – five great stories that grab you. Our Summer 2009 debut anthology features the first published excerpt from Michael Cunningham’s forthcoming novel. This issue also features new fiction by some of America’s most innovative and important contemporary writers, including Jim Shepard, T Cooper, Lydia Millet, and Diana Wagman. These stories are charged with wit, incident, and emotional gravity right from the first sentence.

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“Your Fate Hurtles Down at You” by Jim Shepard

**2011 PEN/O’Henry Prize Story & juror favorite**

We call ourselves Die Harschblödeln: the Frozen Idiots. There are four of us who’ve volunteered to spend the coldest winter in recent memory in a little hut perched on a wind-blasted slope of the Weissfluhjoch 9,000 feet above Davos. We’re doing research. The hut, we like to say, is naturally refrigerated from the outside, and a good starting point for all sorts of adventures, nearly all of them lethal.

“Three-Legged Dog” by Diana Wagman

My girlfriend is missing her left breast. She has a horizontal scar across half her chest, like the seam of a pocket that holds her heart. She had cancer before I met her. I don’t mind. I once went with a girl who had multiple labia piercings and that was more annoying. This is kind of cool. The skin around the scar is darker than the rest of her as if shadowed by a permanent cloud. A constellation of tattooed points circumnavigates the incision: on her sternum, beneath her collarbone, under her arm, along her first rib. The radiologist put them there as guides. One night, I took a marker and connected the dots. No hidden picture emerged, just an awkward box around the void. I like the bare expanse of that half of her chest, an empty sky, an open question about what will happen next.

“The Time Machine” by T Cooper

After I hung up the phone, I went over to my desk, flipped open my check book, and wrote a check for a thousand dollars, then stuck it to the fridge with a magnet, right over her note.
No I didn’t. Actually, I picked up the phone and called my mother and asked her to FedEx me my grandmother’s old wedding ring, which was taken from her at Buchenwalk but magically returned to her decades later by a well-meaning and reformed ex-Nazi SS officer. No, that didn’t really happen either; we just told Nana that when she got Alzheimer’s.

From OLYMPIA, a novel in progress by Michael Cunningham

Peter tried to murder his brother only once, which, by the standards of brothers, is modest. He was seven, which would have made Matthew ten.

Matthew at ten.

Most little boys are girlish. Mathew’s… Mathew-ness wasn’t fully apparent until he got a bit older. By the age of seven he could sing (badly) ever song ever recorded by Cat Stevens. He insisted on a paisley bathrobe, which he constantly around the house. He seemed, at times, to be developing an English accent.

“Sir Henry” by Lydia Millet

Neatly they jumped up onto the curb. They did not pull him and he did not pull them. Could you go forward forever, with your dogs at your side? What if he just kept going? Across the city, over the bridge, walking perfectly until darkness fell over the country. Sometimes he wished he could gather all the dogs he loved most and walk off the end of the world with them.

Cover Artwork: Glassy by Fred Tomaselli

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