by Robert Shapard | Jul 20, 2023 | flash fiction
“The air on Mars—what there is of it—is leaking away,” he said. “About half a pound a second sputtering into space. P-p-poof. Stripped away by solar winds.” He was still in bed reading a NASA report in the Sunday New York Times.
It was a month since she’d moved into his house, more like a cottage, with a tiny yard. They’d dated in college, then hadn’t seen each other in ten years, happened to run into each other and remembered they liked each other. They were still learning how to talk to each other again.
“I got so stoned once,” she said, “I lay on the floor and listened to the air squeaking in the vents all day. I thought I was on another planet. That was about a year after I met my jerk ex-husband.”
He said mp, waited a respectful five seconds, and put his iPad on the bedside table. “Mars’ early atmosphere used to be like Earth’s,” he said, “but it didn’t have a magnetic field like Earth’s to hold it close. Now it’s just wisps.”
It wasn’t working, she thought. Not that she was giving up.
In one motion, she slipped out of her exercise pants and panties, hopped up on the bed, and did a graceful half-roll toward him. “When I think of space, I think of the attic,” she said. “I thought I heard something up there last night, did you?”
He liked to kiss the inside of her knee. She couldn’t understand why but was patient about it.
In college, they’d had only three dates. On the third, he’d given her his engineering society pin and kissed her passionately. She said okay, weirdly pleased. He was not at all bad looking. But by the end of the evening, she was freaked out by the whole idea of the pin and gave it back when he took her home. He shook her hand, shook her hand. And they went on to other people. She’d liked him, though.
Now, in their early thirties, they were both divorced. She was childless, he had a daughter, who lived with his ex in a nearby city. He drove up, or flew up, every other weekend. He was an ecological engineer, worked for Boeing for a while, then went out on his own as a consultant. Lately, all he could get was low-level number crunching. Yesterday he was out at the lake evaluating a small dam, which he said beavers could have built better. She thought beavers were sweet, weren’t that important. Should he be competing with them? Before that, he had a job with a Bay Area steel mill, designing scrubbers for their smokestacks, but got laid off because the political winds had changed. That she could understand. Politics had been her life. She had a poly sci degree, from a good program, was a Democratic party girl (her words), then lost her way, marrying a conservative politician who cheated on her. Ever surrounded by ambition, she’d grown bitter and snarky. After the breakup, she had devised her own recovery program by temporarily working for an animal shelter and training for the Iron Man. She told friends it took an iron will not to bring home a pet from the animal control shelter. She didn’t want to bond with it. Another breakup would be too much pain.
Now, even though they only had three dates in college, they were like old lovers, with new ground rules. They agreed not to talk about love. She let him know how she felt by patting him down before he jogged out to the park, a joke, to make sure he didn’t have his engineering pin with him in case he wanted to kiss another woman. In response, he said, “It’s just chemistry, mine’s attracted to yours.” He had a tin ear, but she could live with it.
Then why was she feeling so nettlesome this morning? His wife and daughter hadn’t lived here for a year, but she felt like any minute, they’d come bustling in the door with groceries or after-school friends.
He had quit kissing her knee, and started working his way up the inside of her thigh. “Is that supposed to drive me crazy?” she said, not meaning to sound snarky.
“No, it’s to drive me crazy,” he said. “Think of me as a spacecraft coming in to dock.”
“I see,” she said. “Are we going somewhere? In space, I mean?” She sighed, “I’m not trying to ruin your day, I just like to make sense of things.”
“None of it makes sense without us,” he said. “It makes sense if we want it to, you and me.”
He eased beside her, head even with hers, pinned her hand comfortably back, his fingers interlaced with hers.
“You sound like some poly sci theorist,” she said.
He fell silent. She’d done it now. Again. Silenced him. His default was to not talk. She squeezed his hand and got no response. It could be over, she thought.
But he said, with effort, “As long as I have you … maybe I can figure out what’s important.”
It wasn’t something her ex had ever said. Or anyone else she could remember. This is a breakthrough, she thought.
She did a dope slap, to keep from crying, “Duh, of course, what’s going to prevent those particles from the sun from stripping away Earth’s atmosphere, too? We have to save our atmosphere. Is there enough oxygen in the spacecraft? We have to dock together.” She was babbling.
He said mp softly in her ear. “You’re a good listener,” he said. “Module coming in to dock. Permission to enter,” he said.
She realized mp was a small laugh. “It’s so polite in space. It’s nice to ask permission first. Am I the spaceship?” she said. “Are you going to knock first?”
He let out a groan, having already entered. He managed to say, “What?”
“Never mind,” she said, “I’ll just keep talking and …\” It seemed right to begin to lose track of what they were saying. “Just keep … keep knocking.”
by Fractured Lit | Jul 17, 2023 | contests
judged by Rion Amilcar Scott
July 21 to September 22, 2023 (Now Closed)
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And the winners are:
- Sideways by Cassandra Parkin
- Canarsie Zuhitsu by Geri Modell
- Every Thought and Prayer by Stephen Haines
Thank you to everyone who submitted to this contest! We’re busy reading every submission! We announce a longlist in 10 weeks!
This month, we’re launching a new contest for our writers. From July 21 to September 22, 2023, we welcome submissions to the Fractured Lit Elsewhere Prize.
Life–how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
-V. S. Pritchett.
For this contest, we want writers to show us the forgotten, the hidden, the otherworldly. We want your stories to take us on journeys and adventures in the worlds only you can create; whether you make the familiar strange or the strange familiar, we know you will take us elsewhere. Be our tour guide through reality and beyond.
For the first time, we are also accepting sudden fiction, so we’re inviting submissions of stories from 100-1,500 words.
We’re thrilled to partner with Guest Judge Rion Amilcar Scott, who will choose three prize winners from a shortlist. We’re excited to offer the winner of this prize $3,000 and publication, while the second- and third-place place winners will receive publication and $300 and $200, respectively. All entries will be considered for publication.
Good luck and happy writing!
Rion Amilcar Scott is the author of the story collection, The World Doesn’t Require You (Norton/Liveright, August 2019). His debut story collection, Insurrections (University Press of Kentucky, 2016), was awarded the 2017 PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His work has been published in journals such as The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, and The Rumpus, among others. One of his stories was listed as a notable in Best American Stories 2018 and one of his essays was listed as a notable in Best American Essays 2015. He was raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, and earned an MFA from George Mason University where he won the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, a Completion Fellowship, and an Alumni Exemplar Award. He has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writing Conference, Kimbilio, and the Colgate Writing Conference, as well as a 2019 Maryland Individual Artist Award.
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by Emily Anderson Ula | Jul 17, 2023 | micro
I have this dream: We’re back in the church of Santa Margherita de Cerchi. You’ve written a letter to Beatrice Portinari on a receipt for leather shoes—requesting our love last through this life and the next. Me, I don’t pray this way. I go down to the river, which morphs into a highway, and stick out my thumb.
In this dream, there’s traffic on the Arno. Bumper to bumper. Tourists board conveyances.
Me, I just float on my back. I’ve always been easy like that. A man on the bridge mistakes me for a vessel and asks if he can come aboard. He looks like you. An idealist. You’re all the same, really. Searching for a muse.
“All full,” I tell him. This sounds a bit harsh, so I toot-toot an imaginary horn and tip an imaginary hat, compelled to be cordial. A curse.
Up ahead, a woman beneath a parasol points to a rat in the water. “My God, it can swim, Charles!” The gondolier winks at me and shouts, “It’s ah-Mickey Mouse!” His standard joke for American tourists. For some reason, my heart swoons with love for him.
I still think of that day in Florence. An afternoon stop on the rattling train to Lucca. I wanted to see the David, but the replica outside the Academia was just as good, I agreed. I ordered an Aperol Spritz at a café near the Duomo. You said my accent was wrong.
I think of Beatrice. How you would call me by her name. Featherbrained, ethereal Beatrice. So sweetly uninhabited, bless her heart. I can still see you at that altar, where she’s not even buried. This is where I left you. My soul got hungry and wandered off in search of sustenance. It was like kicking off my shoes.
by Alberto Vourvoulias | Jul 14, 2023 | flash fiction
●Suit jacket and pants. White shirt.
●Brown knit tie, too narrow, too long.
●Pocket square, folded and stapled into shape.
●Battered Florsheim wingtips with white athletic socks —a sign of decline.
This is how my father dressed at proper occasions: dinners out, sales calls, any meeting with money on the line. He married my mother in one. Buried her in another.
The duty nurse hands me his clothes and a battered leather briefcase in an overlarge plastic bag. He hadn’t informed me of the procedure. The neighbor he’d enlisted to pick him up afterward called. “Your father is dead,” she said. “I can’t stay. I have to get home to make dinner for my family.”
Father’s body is cold by the time I arrive at the hospital. His skin glistens like bee’s wax, sluggish to the touch, soft and inert. I find my way to the address listed on his driver’s license. The efficiency is hard-scrubbed and pin-neat. It smells of lemons. The bed’s made with a military tuck. There’s a card in a blank envelope on the bare kitchen table. “I Love You” is the pre-printed message. No name. No signature. No instructions.
●Wash the hospital stink out of the clothes.
● Lay them flat on the mattress in the shape of a man.
I’d seen him a handful of times in fifteen years. I sleep on the couch, unwilling to rumple the last careful thing he’d done. In the morning, I force the briefcase with a hammer, after failing to guess the combination. The case was an extension of his body, a portable organ where he secreted treasures.
●Three legal pads, yellow lined paper, unmarked.
●One silver Cross pen, blue ink.
●Two packs of Post-its, one pink, one yellow.
On the rare occasion that he sent me a letter, it consisted of a note affixed to an article torn from a newspaper: “Thought you might be interested.” Or a bill that had lost its way: “This came for you. Opened by mistake.”
●Half-a-dozen sales brochures for hearing aids and vitamin supplements —products he sold but refused to use.
●Mother’s wedding band zippered into a mesh side compartment. Father’s, taken from his swollen finger on the operating table, glimmers in my pocket.
●Keys to the old house, long sold.
●A religious medal, St. Christopher. Must have been a gift from her.
She was the Church-regular; he, the pagan who believed in a God of motion. At her funeral, Father consoled me by saying, “She gets to rest. We keep going.”
I didn’t go far. Back to school, then to a job I would quit and a wife who would leave me. Every Sunday, I joined him for early dinner. We sat across from each other, trusting to silence more than words. We each bussed our own plates and watched the Phillies or the Eagles on the tube. Then, every two or four. Then, not at all.
Father pushed into new sales schemes and territories, each more far-fetched and far-flung. I came to think that it had been us who had died.
●Certificate of Birth, Honey Brook, PA, 77 years ago.
●Honorable discharge —which entitles Father to a flag every Memorial Day. I never asked if he had killed someone for the privilege.
●Last will and testament, duly signed and witnessed, leaving all to me.
The last time I saw you alive, Father, you rang my apartment buzzer without warning in the middle of a hurricane. We chased Ida’s track through Pennsylvania and New Jersey. We drove through wind and rain so thick it lashed like waves. We skirted flooded fields and rolled by homes torn open by fallen branches. We passed great oaks toppled in the mud and vast whirls of uprooted stalks. When I finally got up the courage to ask, you said: “I just thought that it was something you ought to see.”
by Beth Gilstrap | Jul 10, 2023 | flash fiction
Unsecured in the back seat, I stretched my legs out where my sibling usually sat next to me, preaching about personal space, railing on how much I needed to grow up, give them some room, goddamn it. I’d kicked off my shoes like always, and as the good old country, not that new Randy Travis horseshit Papaw never stopped bitching about, played on and on so loud Granny June couldn’t hear herself think, I went upside down at the window, the gray flash of the highway and road weeds whirring by, thinking about what folks did in all those houses—I gave up counting gliders and flags and tarps on rooftops—we were going too fast. Granny June must’ve thought so, too, because she’d grunt every so often and grab the oh shit handle. Mama says I ain’t supposed to call it that or answer the phone with that word neither, no matter what they do, but I wanted to so bad I could feel it coming like how you know when Mama locks herself in her room again, you’re gonna slide the chair over to the fridge and pull yourself up on the counter to sneak handfuls of the good chips in the big can ain’t nobody supposed to touch but Papaw after church. My head felt fuzzy from the vibrations against the glass, and my teeth likened to fall out, too, but I kept up with it, testing, testing my limits, how close I could get to pure misery without whining. We know something about pure misery, we do. Uncle John got electrocuted trying to fix the powerlines after the storm. All it took was one line. One line come down, hit him in the head, and that was that. When they told me what happened, I asked whether or not his plastic hat melted to his head, but I’m inappropriate, and the grownups said it was time to call it a night. We went to the funeral home to hug Aunt Joe’s neck and bring her a bucket of green beans in case she forgot to eat a vegetable with all her sadness. We went to see the body. The vessel. He ain’t in there anymore. We went to pray for his soul. Granny June says not to mention the bit about his soul to Papaw. Their family don’t see it the way we do. I got to light and hold a candle while they talked about what it meant to be a good man and how can’t none of us judge no one lest we’ve walked a mile. I wanted to ask why the preacher didn’t say lest we’ve been up in the bucket, which is what anybody who knew Uncle John would’ve said, but I stayed quiet and watched wax pool on the piece of paper meant to protect our hands. When I closed my eyes and the bright light hit, teeth still rattling in my head there against the window, I couldn’t remember if it was Uncle John or Papaw who told me the way the sun broke through the clouds warn’t no souls going up to heaven; they was just sunbeams and ain’t that beauty enough?
by Fractured Lit | Jul 7, 2023 | interview
Myna Chang’s new flash collection, The Potential of Radio and Rain (out now from CutBank Books), is a revelation on the ferocity of human need set against the epic forces of nature. Her sentences snap as fast as a cyclone, whipping misfit characters across a prairie landscape to “resonate past the boundaries of this closed life.” Each flash clears away the stale air around human struggle, narrative storm fronts that offer new ways of understanding the world. Ultimately, Radio and Rain lures the reader out of the safety of the emotional tornado shelter in order to engage with each barometric pressure change. Chang and I discussed her lightning-sharp collection through a series of questions framed by storm systems, and her answers blew open the windows on her brilliant collection. ~Erin Vachon
EV: Your characters often yearn to transform into radical forms, like hybrid creatures or runaway storms: “If she had a choice, Grandma would say, she’d forgo Heaven and become a dust devil herself.” Could you speak about the relationship between transformation and freedom when writing your protagonists?
MC: I grew up in a tiny, isolated farm town in the Oklahoma panhandle, where most of us looked alike, and no one was allowed to be unique. Girls weren’t supposed to read science fiction, and boys weren’t supposed to paint landscapes. White girls weren’t permitted to date Mexican boys, and we certainly weren’t supposed to kiss other girls. We never divorced our husbands or started our own companies, and when we got old, we were expected to disappear.
My mother set a strong example by breaking some of these rules — by having the gall to find her unique happiness. Even so, I was very young when I realized I would never fit in.
I can’t go back in time to give myself a science textbook or encourage my friends to date the people they really liked. The best I can do, now, is grant my characters the freedom to live their fullest lives. Maybe that means the jackalope no longer has to hide her antlers or pretend to fit in with the rest of the rabbits. Maybe it means sprouting nightwings and flying away. And maybe my grandma can finally be as free as the wind, even if it is only through a story.
EV: In “An Alternate Theory Regarding Natural Disasters, As Posited By the Teenage Girls of Clove County, Kansas,” the young narrators push back against their surroundings, declaring, “Sometimes, a tornado is just what a town needs.” How did the unbiased violences of storm systems help you reconsider human trauma in this collection?
MC: First, I have to state that I do not believe a tornado is ever a good thing. But I am drawn to the idea of disruption, specifically the disruption of harmful societal systems. In “Alternate Theory,” the storm destroys wheat crops and property, but it also clears space for fresh growth. Teenage girls observe the shifting power dynamics as women shed abusive husbands, launch businesses, and discover unexpected love. The girls get to be the ones to pass judgment for a change, and they like it. They are not going back to the way it was before.
Growing up, I noted the incremental steps toward equality that helped me achieve a happier life than my grandmothers did. I thought we were on the right track! It’s been extremely disheartening to watch the de-evolution of our society over the last decade, especially in rural areas. So, this is my fantasy: a cleansing storm, a freeing wind, to help people see how the “norms” they cling to are often the very things causing their trauma and give them the clarity they need to build something better.
EV: I’m obsessed with the furious “power of the Binding Wind” in “Prairie Alchemy: Advice for the Newly Transformed,” which swells into a dizzy incantation for outcasts. What external limitations are you pushing back against in your work, structurally and thematically?
MC: In terms of theme, I love the idea of diverse people finding each other and building a welcoming community. I see this in my son’s group of friends—teenagers texting and chatting in games, sharing common interests, and recognizing the value in each other’s differences. These kids have grown up supporting each other, and they are vocal in their views of inclusion. They give me hope.
In “Prairie Alchemy,” my goal was to bind such expressions of inclusiveness to the structure of the story. I wanted to weave together a group of micros, with each thread focusing on a different kind of “misfit.” The finished piece is intended to be an interconnected tapestry, where the individual outcasts find safety and belonging in their newly forged community.
EV: Restless teenagers frequently take center stage in this collection, with “the melody of youth woven through the beat of your heart, like limeade thunder on a gear shifter.” What appeals to you about writing that young, whirlwind stage of life?
MC: I’m drawn to the sensation of potential and the lure of the open road ahead—both the brilliance and the folly of youth. Of course, I’m also haunted by nostalgia, especially when I hear an old song. “Limeade Thunder” came to me in a flash, in the parking lot of the grocery store (where most of my ideas take shape nowadays), when ZZ Top blasted out of the radio in my grown-up minivan. The guitar riffs brought back the taste of cheap beer and the discomfort of the long hot drive from our little town to the concert venue 120 miles away. It’s a good memory, but it is steeped in the bittersweet tang of “now I know better.”
EV: In “Hometown Johnnies,” the narrators curse the sky for holding back rain, saying, “We wanted to scream let go! but heaven wouldn’t unleash that water, held it fist-tight, just out of reach.” Your characters struggle against poverty and power, fumbling for release beyond their grasp. If nature showcases the gravity of being human, what hope can writing alongside its forces offer?
MC: In much of the shortgrass prairie, prosperity is intimately tied to weather. The cycle of drought can dictate the course of a life, so it feels natural to me to use drought as a metaphor for hard times. In “Hometown Johnnies,” I wanted to capture the commoditization of the poor and the young, the boys like my step-father, who worked summers in grain elevators or on oil rigs or served in the military in lieu of finishing high school. Jobs that promised a “good enough” wage to live on but that ground them up and spit them out, sometimes literally, were often the only option for boys in my hometown. They hoped they’d be the lucky ones who made it through unbroken, the same way we all wished the thunderheads forming over the Rockies would bring a sprinkle of relief.
Finding hope in the prairie isn’t always easy, but there are moments of beauty. My grandfather thought the morning sun was the prettiest thing in the world, and my dad wouldn’t trade a day in the wheat field for anything. Even though we had to drive two hours to see a doctor or buy a prom dress, we could count the stars in the Milky Way almost every night. Sometimes we did get lucky, and a few of us found our wings. The stories in this collection focus on desperation and stubbornness, but I think they also provide a glimpse of starshine and sunrise.
EV: One last fun question: if you could transform into any storm system yourself, what would you choose?
MC: I’d be that slow shower that comes on a May night when the moon limns the edges of the clouds, and you swear each raindrop is bursting with magic—because it is. Those rains come only once or twice in a lifetime, and you never forget them.
***
Myna Chang (she/her) is the author of The Potential of Radio and Rain. Her writing has been selected for Flash Fiction America (W. W. Norton), Best Small Fictions, and CRAFT. She has won the Lascaux Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the New Millennium Award in Flash Fiction. She hosts the Electric Sheep speculative fiction reading series. See more at MynaChang.com or @MynaChang.
Erin Vachon is a gender-fluid writer and editor, and a Recipient of the SmokeLong Fellowship for Emerging Writers. Their multi-Pushcart, Best of Net, and Best Microfictions nominated work appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, and Brevity, among others. An alum of the Tin House Summer workshop, Erin earned their MA with distinction in English Literature and Comparative Literature from the University of Rhode Island. You can find more of their writing at www.erinvachon.com.
by Daniel DiFranco | Jul 6, 2023 | flash fiction
“The letter opener?” I said to my husband in the middle of the night.
“I panicked,” he said, rolling the letter opener between his fingers by his side as if it would disappear.
There was a fire next door, but we lived in a rowhome, so there might as well have been a fire in our house. The smoke alarm pushed us outside at 4 am, and water from the firetruck pushed in through our windows when the flames threatened to spread. By the time they were done, our front rooms were totally fucked.
“We have to leave soon,” I said. The saturated carpet made sucking sounds and pulled on my knee when I walked. “I can’t find my x-rays and discs.”
“I’ll help,” my husband said, on hold with our insurance company. He put his phone on speaker mode and set it down on the dining room table along with the letter opener.
“Billy Joel?” I said.
“Underappreciated.”
It was March during the first days of this false Spring. I took a coat out of the closet and then put it back. “If my coat shrinks…” The line went silent. My husband looked at his phone. The song restarted.
“The doctor said we could reach out this morning for anything. I’m sure they have copies,” he said. “It’ll be ok.”
“Todd, nothing about this is ok.”
“I didn’t start the fire,” he snapped back, Billy Joel infiltrating his vocabulary. Then, “I’m sorry. We’ll get new stuff.”
He looked away, and I could tell he knew what he said was stupid.
We later learned a careless worker left a space heater on overnight to speed up the drying time of some joint compound. The prefabbed house—the kind that rich New Yorkers move into—constructed of cheap, porous timber and air-invited combustion.
“We can get a hotel near the hospital,” Todd said.
Walking was a chore. Surgery imminent. Radiation on Wednesdays to shrink the tumor. A new knee, perhaps. I hoped it didn’t spread—I’d seen the ravages firsthand with my sister.
Todd was shuffling through the stack of magazines and mail on the dining room table. I was adamant about not having a dining room table.
We’ll entertain, he said when the movers showed up with a table.
Who?
I don’t know. Our friends? The neighbors?
That was five years ago, and beyond a small housewarming party, we had used the table for eating exactly zero times. For his birthday that year, I got him the letter opener.
The piano I wanted instead probably wouldn’t have been used as much as I intended either, but it could store only so much junk, and it at least held the possibility of beauty.
I was getting irritated. I hadn’t eaten since dinner and wasn’t planning on being awake through missing breakfast. I was supposed to get up, shower, and then go to the hospital. I was supposed to be hiking in Arizona. I was supposed to be preparing for a guest faculty spot at Penn.
“Elliot,” Todd said.
I looked up. He was holding a large envelope.
“The refrigerator?” he asked.
“Right,” I said and deflated. “I put them there last night.”
Todd put the envelope on the table and his hands on my shoulders. He kissed the top of my head. Kept his lips there.
“I worried they’d be useless today,” I said. “I should have put them there last week.”
“You’re going to be ok.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to discount how you feel,” he said.
I put my hand on his. “We should get going soon.”
“I’ll pack our bags with what we can.”
I sorted through the junk mail and magazines and weeks of brochures and bills that were on autopay. I put them all in neat stacks, squaring up the edges, organizing the clutter. I took the letter opener and absently began tracing the one-way correspondences destined for the trash. Lightly at first, and when the tip of the opener caught a ridge in the wood and chipped it away, I pressed harder. And then harder, carving out the space around the piles that had been growing for months. Flecks of laminate and particle board came away, and I kept tracing and tracing until I heard my husband behind me, standing over me.
“This won’t be here when you come home,” he said. He set down my rain boots and a pair of dry socks. I put them on and stood, and we walked towards the front door.
“Todd,” I said. “It is going to be ok.”
Outside, our brick house was still intact as it was before the fire, and the charred shell of the new building lumbered uselessly under its own hollowness.
“I’d really like a piano,” I said.
“We’ll get you an upright.”
“They practically give them away now.”
“They do, don’t they?”
by Andrea Lynn Koohi | Jun 29, 2023 | micro
Why not the boy from high school with the red hair and freckled skin? Classmates said he liked you, said he was too shy to ask you out, but you knew that wasn’t true. You knew because he was a Nice Boy, an Above You Boy who was friends with the Jock Boys and the Above You Girls with their under-breath insults and switchblade eyes. You knew to look away when he picked up your fallen book, to distrust him when he said he read your poem and liked it. You knew because boys were nearly men, and you knew no men who were soft and kind. You knew because letting him lift your shell would reveal flattened pieces, shoe-printed, unlovable. It was all a ruse, you were sure, or almost sure, so you decided to prove it. You found another boy, a Not Nice Boy with careless eyes and Next Girl thoughts, and you made out with him under a tree behind the school where Nice Boy could see and the Above You Girls could say, see, we were right about her. So when Nice Boy avoided your eyes the next day and forever, it was clear you were right. You were spared further need to raise walls between you, spared but for a lurch in your chest when he passed, a battle of fragmented parts beneath your shell. And 15 years later, when his name pops up, an algorithm offering, you open his profile, search his smiling face, cheek to cheek with Smiling Girl. Red strands turned blonde, blue eyes on yours again. And you don’t look away, just hold his gaze and imagine the words you needed to hear. Imagine this time believing them.
by Fractured Lit | Jun 29, 2023 | interview
Avee Chaudhuri: Children at play seems to be of recurring interest in the collection. There are all these powerful and evocative instances and sentiments of children at play, and the chapbook’s longest piece is “The Rumpelstiltskin Understudies, (play)” which is about children ad-libbing their way through a stage adaptation of the fairy tale. So I guess the actual question part is, has childhood always been a muse for you as a writer? Or are these recent developments?
Tucker Leighty-Phillips: I think so, but it may not be in the way you would imagine. I didn’t start writing until I was in my mid to late twenties. I’m 32 now. I’m about to be 33. So before I was writing, [childhood] was something that was really present in my thought and modes of connection with people. I was definitely one of those people at a party who would sit around and be like, “Yo, remember Legends of the Hidden Temple?” I was like, “Remember this thing from being a kid? Remember this?”
There’s this thing I’ve read about online, a very common occurrence that when two young guys don’t know what to talk about, they just name athletes from their childhood. Like, “Remember Jerry Rice? Remember Latrell Sprewell?” and I feel like that sort of reliance on childhood memories, or telling stories from middle school and high school—like asking about your school’s thing—a lot of that stuff has been a means of connecting with other people, especially acquaintances or strangers. So I feel like it’s something I’ve relied on a lot, and I think that translated seamlessly to writing; all these stories or experiences that have connected me to other people seemed like sensible places to analyze my childhood through writing.
AV: That’s really cool to hear, that the book is a natural mode of communication taken further. So you said these stories allowed you to analyze your childhood. This is not the right way to phrase the question but, what have you learned?
TLP: Oh, man, that’s a good question. Well, one of the big takeaways is I feel like there’s a certain—I moved. I moved north when I was like 19 or 20, right after high school, and I felt like growing up in the [small town] South was a different experience from growing up in a city or in the North. And that public school, especially in a super underfunded state like Kentucky, was a different experience. I tell some people stories, and they think Kentucky public schools are like the Wild West, you know—there are no rules. And everything was happening all the time.
It’s been a space for me to see the similarities between lived experiences, especially in Appalachia, and a larger cultural network, that living in Appalachia is its own thing, but also, it is not a completely removed thing. There are ways that I found myself connected to people in big cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and people in other countries. I was just in Europe a month or two ago, and did the same thing, I was hanging out with new people, telling stories from childhood, and we found that there were a lot of similarities, even though we were on other sides of the world. And I feel like that’s cool; it’s been nice to see it as a way to feel like an Appalachian narrative is not strictly for Appalachians; it can be something that other people will read and be able to imprint their own experiences onto.
AV: No, I don’t think so. I’m really glad that you addressed region. I think the imprinting you’re describing is a really tangible part of the reading experience since a lot of the collection is flash… When I came across the story “The Rumpelstiltskin Understudies, (play)” I was hit by a sense of envy. It’s so rich! It’s presented as a retrospective about a disastrous stage performance directed by a fictional version of yourself based on a story you’d written that seems no longer extant, based in turn on the fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin. There’s an architecture to it that is formidable and like something out of Borges, but humor serves as this great leavening agent. What was the process of writing that story?
TLP: Well, there were two processes. There was a process in content and a process in form, and I think that the formal process was that I was reading a lot of Michael Martone at the time. I don’t know how much of his work you’ve read, but he has The Blue Guide to Indiana, which is like a fake guidebook to Indiana tourist sites and history that was so similar to other guidebooks that it was being sold in bookstores under the travel section, and then he had to add a disclaimer that it wasn’t real. He also has his book, Michael Martone, by Michael Martone, which is a book completely of contributor bios. You know, “Michael Martone is a writer from, you know,” over and over and over.
AV: Isn’t there one biography in there where he just takes Shaquille O’Neal’s biography?
TLP: I wouldn’t be surprised. I don’t remember. But because there are like 200 of them. Yeah. And they shapeshift. I was really interested in looking into quote-unquote “objective forms of writing” and interrogating that. And I’m not the first person to do a Wikipedia article creatively, but that was a form I was interested in.
For the story itself, I knew I was trying to move back to Kentucky, I had moved away a decade before, and while I was gone, I went back to college and graduated and went to grad school, And I was afraid of coming back to my hometown and seeming like a pompous asshole. You know, I didn’t want people to think I’d left and gained all this big city culture and thought I was too big for my britches. And so I was trying to channel that energy, telling the story about an evil version of myself, who was coming back and being super manipulative, exploiting children for my own artistic gains. I think it was me trying to channel a bunch of anxiety into a weird creative story. I was playing with those concepts and also wanted to play with that form. So that’s what it was born out of.
AV: I’m curious about putting together this collection. How much did you have to leave on the cutting room floor? Can you talk about those decisions?
TLP: There was definitely a version of this chapbook at first that was like, “I want to have a chapbook,” and I was just throwing a bunch of shit together, giving it an umbrella theme that didn’t really exist, and was just like, “here are my 15 or 20 most recent stories. Please publish them.” And that didn’t work, so I kept tinkering with it, and an actual theme evolved, so I tried to chase that by writing more stories that felt like they were contributing to that project. I did end up cutting a bunch too, and if I went back and looked at the ones that didn’t make the cut, they’re mostly more straightforward surrealist stories. They don’t feel as grounded in the autobiographical experience, they feel more removed from me personally, and I think I wanted this collection to feel personal. I wanted it to feel like it was coming from a place of experience. And those other stories that didn’t make the cut might still have a home somewhere, but it didn’t feel right to include them in here. It felt like it stunted an emotional ride or emotional register.
AV: So, as you said, the first attempt was, “Here are 15 to 20 of my most recent things,” and you said that did not work, but then a theme emerged in later attempts. Do you think that theme would have emerged in a 150-page collection, or do you think it had to be kind of the brevity of the chapbook form that allowed you to think in that sort of thematic way?
TLP: You know if a book publisher reached out to me and said, “We would love to explore this concept in a 150-page format,” I’d say, “Yeah, I can definitely do that.” But if it’s not motivated by accolades, I don’t know because I think one of my fears was the bit growing tired, you know. I’ve said this in previous interviews; the concept in this chapbook mirrors what Tim Robinson is doing in I Think You Should Leave. He’s done interviews where he says every sketch is built around someone who is too invested and reaches a point where they’re way too involved and should step away. I took that as a motive for this collection; stories about characters who are trapped in vicious cycles and believe that whatever circumstances they exist in are by their own doing, without regard to systemic injustice. It’s all individual failure, or it’s like, “I have brought this on myself in some way.” And I think my big fear—and this is something that stifled me for a while—was that I was writing the same story over and over, with a different title and character. I felt like I’d gotten formulaic, and the formula was going to be figured out. I need to keep exploring creative ways to explore the ideas I’m interested in, so it doesn’t feel like it’s a CD with the same song 11 times, you know. I want it to feel comprehensive, like there’s dimension to it. I don’t know if I could do it over a more lengthy work. I think it would need to evolve, or I would need to put it away and come back to it with a different lens or scope.
AV: Well, since you mentioned I Think You Should Leave, I wanted to ask about influences of yours, across genres, across media, that you think would genuinely surprise us.
TLP: I feel like any sort of intercom speaker at a department store. Imagine the person who has to say these sorts of predetermined things like, “Dive into summer. We’ve got swimming trunks on sale.” And then also the person who has to be like, “We need a manager to customer service.”
I’ve always appreciated the performance of that. And also the people who are completely unwilling to perform. I think the service industry plays a big role in my work and having worked in the service industry plays a big role in my work, and the performance of having to be a body representing a company while also being a human being, and toeing that line of if I can be professional for five more minutes than I can be human, but also wanting to insist to all the people who are coming into these stores and places that you’re a human, whether or not they see it.
Maybe that doesn’t surprise people. But I feel like doing those announcements and having to get on the intercom and sometimes wanting to say, “This is the worst day I’ve ever had at this job,” instead of the thing I have to say, like, “It’s the season of Lima beans.’ I think about that line of performance and non-performance, upholding something for the sake of keeping a job, but also wanting to be like, “please God, recognize that I’m a human being.”
AV: So who should we be reading right now that isn’t being read or is criminally under-read?
TLP: Let me look at my bookshelf. I think I want to recommend people with books. But I also want to recommend people who don’t have books. It’s legitimizing to have a book in the world, and that’s exciting that someone can have something physical they take with them. But there are also a ton of really incredible writers that have not published a book yet that I think deserve, in some ways, even more attention. I really love jj peña. I think his work is awesome—maybe I’m gassing myself up by complimenting him. But he does short-form, emotion-packed, really charming autobiographical or semi-autobiographical work that feels very similar to what I want to do. And I think he does it so incredibly well. I love Rhea Ramakrishnan, who also has published a few things that are very sharp, and she gives off the vibe that she will eventually—and I don’t want to put pressure on her!—but her work reminds me of a lot of the stuff published by The Dorothy Project. I feel like if you love stuff Dorothy is publishing, you’ll love Rhea’s work.
I just read Lindy Biller’s chapbook Love at the End of the World, which is really great and heartfelt. It’s about the sort of mundane nature of climate apocalypse, when the world is ending, but you still have to send your kids to school. Her work is very in the realm of Aimee Bender. It’s fabulist but also rooted in reality, all the terrible things the climate is going to do to us in retaliation for what we’ve done to it.
Who else do I love? I’ve been reading this newsletter! I’ve got to shout this guy out, Jack Vening. He runs this newsletter called Small Town Grievances. It’s like fictional gossip of this fictional small town. It’s hilarious. I’ve really, really been enjoying it. I want to see them compiled into some sort of collection. Any publisher would be stoked to get their hands on it if they read it. I think it’s a pretty popular newsletter, but it’s fairly new to me, and I’ve been really, really digging reading it. Our local newspaper has this thing called “Speak Your Piece,” it’s like an anonymous editorial section, and it’s mostly about local politics and transphobia. But there are also really good snippets of everyday life, like, “I saw a person’s dog pee on the cabbage at the grocery store the other day.” among other weird little anecdotes from this town. And I’ve been sending them to Jack because I thought he’d appreciate them. I just sent him one today. The front page headline of our newspaper was about the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile being spotted in our county. He always responds really kindly. I don’t know if he actually enjoys me sending them every day. I might just be a reply guy, you know. But yeah, I think those are, off the top of my head, people whose work I’m really digging lately.
***
Bio: Tucker Leighty-Phillips (he/him) is a writer from Southeastern Kentucky. He is a graduate of the MFA in Fiction program at Arizona State University and currently lives in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Maybe This Is What I Deserve is his first chapbook. Learn more at TuckerLP.net.
Bio: Avee Chaudhuri is from Wichita, Kansas.
by Fractured Lit | Jun 27, 2023 | news
Judge, Peter Orner, chose these 20 stories for inclusion in the next anthology!
- At My Job I Work the Robotic Arms by Kati Fargo Ahern
- Unfinished Equations by Reneé Bibby
- Odds and Ends by Brett Biebel
- The Cloud Lab by Megan Callahan
- Maid in America by Christine H. Chen
- Brain, Brian by Whitney Collins
- Patrons by Hillary Ann Colton
- Launch Day Conditions: 1986 by Elizabeth Conway
- Fact of Nature by D.E. Hardy
- Autopsy by Aimee LaBrie
- Submission Guidelines by Tonee Moll
- Into the White by Gillian O’Shaughnessy
- Galgalim by Eric Pahre
- Background by K. A. Polzin
- When We’re Empty Of What We Are Designed To Hold by Quinn Rennerfeldt
- Adrift by Kim Steutermann Rogers
- Two Cops Come To the Door by Arthur Russell
- Two Phenomena of Roughly Equal Importance by Robert Shapard
- Muse by Emily Ula
- Something to See by Alberto Vourvoulias
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