Stories by Nathan Englander, Mary Otis, Matt Sumell, Steve Edwards, and Marc Basch

Electric Literature’s sixth anthology travels highways, the waters of New York’s harbors, and the grooves of a burned out LP. In Matt Sumell’s “OK,” a son visits his stubbornly suicidal father at his flea infested home. In “Where We Missed Was Everywhere,” by Mary Otis, a brother and sister seek refuge from a funeral in a Beach Boys classic. The siblings in Marc Basch’s “Three” react to one brother’s dealings with a kid bully they encounter on a back country road. The subjects of a starvation experiment in Steve Edward’s “Daily Bread” find their worlds reduced to the size of their stomachs. And the anthology’s final story, “The Reader” by Nathan Englander, chronicles a discouraged author haunted by his one remaining reader.

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**Check back soon for more Single Sentence Animations of issue 6**

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“OK” by Matt Sumell

“It’s the worst fountain I’ve ever even seen, Ma,” I said, “I hate it. I hate it. Oh man I hate it so bad right now.” Then I got hysterical, like a baby, like Fatlegs, like I was rubber-chinning and couldn’t catch my breath until I remembered to tell her what I came to tell her, that AJ had a daughter and she’s not retarded. “He named her after you,” I said. “Kid can’t even hold her head up yet, just shits black stuff and cries and it’s Marie this Marie that, Marie, Marie, Marie. It kills me. Every time they say it, there’s a pang and my heart starts chewing tinfoil.”

“Where We Missed Was Everywhere” by Mary Otis

Downstairs everyone cries more, drinks much, sleeps faster. The funeral party has just begun. My brother and I have nothing to do with that. We are small, but we’ll add up later. We dance without moving, silently and violently, and we are the boss now, ripping the needle off the record before “Surfer Girl” can even begin. Not a single word! We shake as hard as we can, dancing without moving, as if the lady is coming, and she’ll save us for free.

“Three” by Marc Basch

The weather gets colder. While I sit lengthwise on the couch, listening to the radiators ticking to get warm, I imagine that something, some awful tempest or explosion, any minute now, will rip the windows and roof away in a blue blast, and I will look up and just see stars, like an outpouring of sand against the black. Everything else has receded. There is no shelter, there is no wind. The ceiling, the thing in the way is gone, the other shoe has dropped, and there is just the clearest nothingness and stars.

“Daily Bread” by Steve Edwards

Whoever knew the book best led the discussion. I think Thoreau was everyone’s favorite because none of us ever got to be alone anymore, especially not at a place like Walden Pond, and in a way it made children of us again. If that makes sense. Because it was us walking around the water and watching the animals and thinking the thoughts only a free man thinks. When we were on 3,200 calories a day, we could even understand why he would apportion a percentage of his beans to the squirrels. Now, I don’t know. I think now we might get up in arms about it. The waste. But now we don’t talk about books much—the whole enterprise sort of faded away. The doctors say we’re still functioning at the same cognitive level on mental tests, but it doesn’t feel right to read a book when all you really want to do is eat it. Even Henry David Thoreau went home for Sunday dinner.

“The Reader” by Nathan Englander

Forgive the author his relentless commitment. Forgive his belief that even if the next city promises nothing more than this one old man, still it’s his obligation to drive on. A writer never knows if perseverance is his terrible weakness or his greatest strength. and with all those headlights floating divided in his rearview mirror, Author never can tell which belong to his reader, which pair is his beacon, a North Star, split, cast back, guiding him on.

Cover Artwork: Around the World Alone (Lord of the Seas) by Sean Landers

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Stories by Kevin Brockmeier, J. Robert Lennon, Lynne Tillman, Carson Mell, and Ben Greenman

Our fifth anthology takes you on a journey from the suburbs to the underworld. In Kevin Brockmeier’s tale, “A Fable for the Living,” notes are passed between the living and the dead through a fissure in the earth. J. Robert Lennon’s “Hibachi” unleashes the unexpected cathartic power of a hibachi grill on a paralyzed marriage. In Carson Mell’s “The West,” a father and son join the insatiable Mackenzie Horselover on a quest for the perfect hamburger. Ben Greenman rekindles old rivalries in “Come Out,” a story of friendships, love triangles, and repurposed bathtubs. And in Lynne Tillman’s “The Original Impulse,” a woman cycles through memory, encountering an old lover with every pass.

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“A Fable for the Living” by Kevin Brockmeier

Throughout the day, at various angles, the sun pierced the hills and the pastures, sending bright silver needles through the ceiling of the earth, so that it was never completely dark, and at night, when the land was soaked in shadows, the people around her glowed with a strange heat. She watched them flare and shimmer through their skin, their bones going off like bombs, every limb a magnificent firework of carbon, phosphorus, and calcium. It seemed that the surface of the world had two sides: on one were the bereaved spouses, the outcast teenagers, the old men and women who had no one left to reminisce with, and on the other were the lovers and friends and parents they had outlived—all of them, whether above or below, aching for those who were gone; all of them, whether above or below, pressing their fingers to the soil.

“Hibachi” By J. Robert Lennon

**Named a Distinguished Story of 2010 by The Best American Short Stories**

Now she brought out the onion half. Philip knew what was coming, he had seen it already, but he couldn’t help grinning at the prospect of watching Evangeline do it. she balanced it on edge, launched the butcher knife from her belt, spun it in the air before her, and brought it down on the onion once, twice, three, four times. She hollowed each ring with the knife’s tip, flicking the inner layers onto the rice pile, and she stacked the shell into a dome with a tiny hole on top. She sheathed the knife, reached behind her for the oil, and squeezed it into the onion half. And then, with a motion so swift and subtle it was hard to be certain it had happened, she pulled a wooden match from a pocket, scraped it against the exhaust hood, and set the onion alight.

“The West” By Carson Mell

Horselover took his three rings off, pulled a paper napkin from the dispenser, and began to clean them. “My father’s friend had a big ranch down in Guadalajara, down in Mexico, a whole valley, over five hundred head. And down there they used to grade the meat judging by how many bites the animals got from vampire bats. ‘Cause the vampire bats knew which of the cows were healthiest, they had a preternatural sense for it, and they’d fly back to the best ones for a drink every night.” Horselover wadded up the napkin and set it at the edge of the table, stacked the rings beside the dispenser. “So at auction they’d count the bites, stamp ‘em with an A, B, or C, depending. Worked well enough until some ranchers started to get creative with their ice picks.”

“Come Out” By Ben Greenman

The house is additionally distinguished by the absence of children. Early in their marriage, he and Louisa had discussed having kids, possibly even discussed it in the center tub, and voted against it unanimously. Now they are the only house on the block without them. The house to the north has two little girls who sing sweet high-pitched nonsense songs in the afternoons. The house to the south has a boy who speaks to his parents as if they are his children. The day is bright and clear and Bill looks out across the tubs and thinks that they are full: not of water, but full of something. Hope?

“The Original Impulse” By Lynne Tillman

She was eighteen and lay in the arms of a married man who respected, he said, her innocence, and held her close, saying he’d always remember this moment, but she wouldn’t, because she didn’t know how beautiful she was. There was a cool slip of a rough tongue on an inner thigh and a sensational confession. There was a southerner whose sexuality was fiercely, erotically ambiguous. He stayed in her bed too long. She roared here and soared there, dwarfed by three massive white columns as she and her best college friend mugged before a filmless camera.

Cover Artwork: The Gamer by Alison Elizabeth Taylor

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Stories by Javier Marías, Joy Williams, Patrick deWitt, Ben Stroud, and Roberto Ransom

Our fourth anthology celebrates the transportive joy of entering a vividly imagined world. Celebrated Spanish author Javier Marías spins a tale of a mild-mannered teacher turned ghost-hunter. Mexican writer Roberto Ransom (translated here into English for the first time) introduces us to a master fresco painter and the conservationist who tries to recapture his magic hundreds of years later, with mystifying results. Pulitzer Prize-nominee Joy Williams pens a fable about Baba Iaga and her pelican child, kept safe in a hut on chicken legs, until a mysterious historical figure asks to paint her portrait. Ben Stroud tells the harrowing story of a destitute cripple sent by his emperor to destroy a holy man and preserve the kingdom, and Patrick deWitt chronicles the deviant adventures of a man known only as “the Bastard.”

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“Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child” by Joy Williams

After this, Baba Iaga continued to fly through the skies in her mortar, navigating with her pestle. But instead of a broom, she carried the lamp that illuminated the things people did not know or were reluctant or refused to understand. And she would lower the lamp over a person and they would see how extraordinary were the birds and beasts of the world, and that they should be valued for their bright and beautiful and mysterious selves and not willfully harmed, for they were more precious than castles or the golden rocks dug out from the earth.

But she could only reach a few people each day with the lamp.

“The Resignation Letter of Señor de Santiesteban” by Javier Marías

Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa

Whether it was one of those bizarre occurrences to which Chance never quite manages to accustom us, however often they may arise; or whether Destiny, in a show of prudence, temporarily suspended judgment on the qualities and attributes of the new teacher and delayed intervening, in case such an intervention should later turn out to be a mistake; the fact of the matter is that young Mr. Lilburn did not discover the truth in the strange warnings issued to him by his superior, Mr. Bayo, and other colleagues only a few days after he had joined the Institute, until he was well into the first term and sufficient time had elapsed for him to forget, or at least to postpone thinking about, the possible significance of the warnings.

“Three Figures and a Dog” by Roberto Ransom

He never managed to interest the dog in accompanying him home, and where it came from was a mystery since the painter and his wife had no neighbors for many kilometers around them; besides, it was strange that an animal so small could survive on its own a region rife with wolves. Furry, with short legs and a big, round head, it wagged what remained of its tail–the other part seemed to have been left in a trap–every time it saw the master painter, although it never barked.

“Byzantium” by Ben Stroud

At dusk I would escape through the back entrance to wander the dark streets, going as far as the Hippodrome. There I would watch others taking their pleasure—keeping to the shadows, my hand hidden as I studied a chariot racer leaning into a prostitute, her leg wrapped round his torso, or libertines goading a gilded crocodile in the bearpit, their bodies slurred by powders from the east. When the Persians came and encamped across the Bosporus, laying siege to the city, I went up to the roof every night to watch their attacks and then their slow retreat. When a traitor’s body was dragged through the streets I would join the mob, unnoticed, and kick at the corpse and curse it as the chariot pulled it toward the harbor. I had no vocation. I had no life or standing beyond our house’s walls. So I lived until my twenty-eighth year, a rattling ghost in the great hive of the city.

“The Bastard” by Patrick deWitt

The Bastard wrenched the mug from the drunkard’s claw and returned the rye to the bottle. There was enough left to poison the farmer once more, perhaps twice. And after this, then what? I don’t know, and I can’t care, he thought. He had never been one to fret about the future. He stood and stepped further into the room, taking in his new surroundings with his hands behind his back, like a man luxuriating in a museum or rose garden. Each time this crucial maneuver of entering a home was accomplished, he was struck by the image that a house was, after all, much like a human skull.

Cover Artwork: Now We Hunt Hippopotamus by Aaron Johnson

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Stories by Aimee Bender, Rick Moody, Patrick deWitt, Matt Sumell, and Jenny Offill

In our third anthology, Aimee Bender introduces us to a young woman unable to summon the desire to sleep with her husband without payment in cash, Matt Sumell’s protagonist feels capable of anything but can save no one, Rick Moody charts the rise an fall of a romance via Twitter, Patrick deWitt presents a bleak, funny tale of two movers who are going nowhere, and Jenny Offill chronicles the awkward vigil of a man caring for his terminally ill ex-wife.

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“The Red Ribbon” by Aimee Bender

When she left the store, receipt tucked into her purse, folded twice, emboldened, Janet thought of all the chicken dishes she had not sent back even though they were either half-raw or not what she had ordered. Chicken Kiev instead of Chicken Marsala, Chicken with Mushrooms instead of Chicken à la king: her body was made up of the wrong chickens. She remembered Daniel’s first insistent kiss by the bridge near the Greek café on that Saturday afternoon. She hadn’t thought of it in ten years and she could almost smell the schwarma rotating on its pole outside. He had asked her out again, and again, and told her he loved her on the fourth date, and bought her fancy cards inside of which he wrote long messages about her smile.

“Little Things” by Matt Sumell

I dated a chubby Catholic girl who told me her parents never touched her, that as a kid she wanted to be touched so badly she looked forward to the lice and scoliosis tests at school. I knew a guy in junior high who told everyone he owned a baby elephant; years later he murdered his stepmother by beating her head in with a can of chicken & stars soup. I saw cats, dogs, possums, raccoons, and squirrels; a fox, a kangaroo, a bear, deer, rabbits, birds, and toads; rats and mice and snakes with their guts smashed out, their insides outside, their heads crushed and dead on the sunny roadsides. My mother got cancer.

“Some Contemporary Characters” Rick Moody

“You were just waiting to condescend,” I said on the train, and I got up and moved to the other side of the car.

On the train I thought: I just held this woman, this china vase, this wolverine, and now I’m no better than the vagrant in the two-seater.

There’s a point when you can start repairing all the awful shit you said, but then you kind of dig in and say some more awful shit.

I was a social worker at a halfway house back when and I used to say to clients: when you are becoming angry you are becoming reverent.

“Reed & Dinnerstein Moving” by Patrick deWitt

The jumper was standing now, disrobing atop the bridge. He was young and white, handsome, blond, crazy-eyed. He removed his pants to reveal and abnormally large organ. “Don’t jump!” Dinnerstein said, “I can make you famous!” The jumper took of his shirt; tattooed on his stomach was a large black swastika. “Jump! Jump!”

The man did jump, though half-heartedly, ping-ponging through the rafters and crashing to the ground near the edge of the bridge. The cops were running around, coffee flying though the air. The jumper was loaded into an ambulance and Dinnerstein groaned when they wrapped him in blankets. “Did you see the pole on that baby?”

“The Tunnel” by Jenny Offill

**Named a Distinguished Story of 2010 by The Best American Short Stories**

At first, it was hard to look at her. She had those bright eyes that the dying do. They say time turns hawkish, that you feel it like a wing crossing over you.

He;d read that in a book someone left for Helen. It had a sunrise on the cover. Or maybe it was a sunset. Probably you weren’t meant to tell. The book had enraged him, not an ounce of science in it, not a feather of a fact. It was all heaven-hungry, full of soft voices and creatures made of light. Light! As if that wasn’t the one thing anyone knew. That it would be dark, dark, dark with nothing but the earth all around you. “I don’t want to be burned,” she told him years ago. Don’t let them burn me.”

Cover Artwork: Trimspa by Adam Cvijanovic

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Stories by Colson Whitehead, Lydia Davis, Pasha Malla, Marisa Silver, and Stephen O’Connor

In our Autumn 2009 anthology, Colson Whitehead charts the rise to fame of a truth-telling comedian. Stephen O’Connor transports us to a cabin in the woods, where a young woman attempting to finish her dissertation in solitude becomes increasingly convinced she’s not alone. Pasha Malla follows a young writer as he explores how tragedy influences art-and how life falls short of it. Marisa Silver tells the tale of three sisters who perceive the truth about their parents through the eyes of some unexpected visitors, and Lydia Davis’ solitary narrator acutely details the behavior of three cows who live in a pasture just across the road.

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“The Comedian” by Colson Whitehead

One time on a talk show, before he made the change in his comedy, the comedian was asked why he started telling jokes. He took a sip from his mug and responded that he just wanted some attention. As a child he’d felt unseen. He was a handsome baby (photographs confirm) but his impression was that no one cooed at him or went cross-eyed to make him smile. Common expressions of affection, such as loving glances, approving grins, and hearty that-a-boys, eluded him. His mother told him, Hush, now, when he came to her with his needs or questions and he frowned and padded off quietly. He received a measly portion of affirmation from grandparents, elderly neighbors, and wizened aunts who never married, folks who were practically in the affirmation-of-children business.

“Love” by Stephen O’Connor

As she and Ian peered off across the water toward where the boat had overturned, Alice noticed something moving in the high grass at the far end of the lake’s western shore. As she squinted, what had seemed a tall, weathered tree stump suddenly morphed into a stocky, gray-haired man, half-crouched and looking right at her.

The Slough” by Pasha Malla

He had felt, lately, that his life had become a raisin–if only he’d gotten to it sooner, when it was ripe from the vine and bursting with juice! But, no, it had shriveled. If he handed out his life to trick-or-treaters at Halloween, a retributive bag of feces would appear flaming on his doorstep. Or maybe someone would just pee onto his mail.

“Three Girls” by Marisa Silver

The tow truck maneuvered back and forth until the car broke free of the snow bank. When the truck drove off, the car followed along like an unwilling child. Connie realized that had the car not become stuck, it would have gone off the edge of the road and fallen down the embankment that led toward the river. She remembered how fragile the ice had been the day before. Now she imagined the car sliding beneath the water, and the ski hats–blue, green, and yellow–floating out of the window and rising to the surface, their tassels wavering atop the water like small flags, wile below, three girls sat in the back seat of the car holding hands. They would have been a help tp one another, they way sisters can be.

“The Cows” by Lydia Davis

The third comes out into the field from behind the barn when the other two have already chosen their spots, quite far apart. She can choose to join either one. She goes deliberately to the one in the far corner. Does she prefer the company of that cow, or does she prefer that corner, or is it more complicated–that that corner seems more appealing because of the presence of that cow?

Cover Artwork: Within a Given Day by The Clayton Brothers: Rob Clayton & Christian Clayton

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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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