Several lifetimes ago, as an undergraduate student at St. John’s College, I undertook the study of seminal works of Western literature and philosophy. To my provincial teenage mind, these books offered a sense of location and identity in the flow of history. I marveled at how stories could stretch across millennia to articulate something I hadn’t known was inside me. Here, the authors seemed to say, these will help you make sense of the world. Now, nearly twenty years since I began that adventure, I find myself more than ever in need of new stories that capture or illuminate some piece of the world. Here, in these pages, we have found some. Stories that stretch across continents, cultures, and generations to gift us with an experience, an understanding, or a question. May they be stars in the constellations of your own understanding—guides that remind us that wherever we are going in this terra incognita, we are not alone on the journey.
—Jonathan Freeman-Coppadge
Fiction Editor
We turn to fiction because, at its core, it reminds us of our humanity. At once of this world and apart from it, short stories validate our need for identity, the importance of place, and the power of relationships. The emerging voices featured in this edition of Oyster River Pages each explore the foundations of belonging and becoming: we meet characters who are either unexpectedly alone or rushing toward independence, who consider how (and if) knowledge gets passed from one set of hands to another. We take winding roads in desperate search of something familiar, play tabletop jukeboxes and balance between past and present. We are reminded, as the Skin Horse once told the Velveteen Rabbit: “It doesn't happen all at once. . . . It takes a long time.” It is my hope that you find a piece of yourself in these words, that they hold you tight as you persevere and push forward into the great space ahead.
—Stephanie Trott
Guest Editor, Emerging Voices in Fiction
The astronaut, when she is young, goes to the prom with a boy from her AP Calculus class. His name is Sidney and he drives a blue sedan. When he is twenty-three and the astronaut is earning her master’s degree, he will die in a car wreck.
Read MoreDawn’s father is coming to visit. Not that he told her; Dawn heard from her brother. Men in their family didn’t make phone calls, but there are always exceptions, and since Dawn’s mother died, Dawn hasn’t done much calling of her own.
Read MoreI am writing to return your name to you. To leave you a word and whisper in its ears put laughter in his mouth. To leave you a kind of body to point to when you are led to ask the question what did she leave me? Because what keeps us among the living is the body we have not left behind.
Read MoreInstead of donating the remainder of our GoFundMe collection to a missionary school in rural Thailand where my parents volunteer, as we claimed we would do after memorial service expenses, we took the kids on vacation to Central America.
Read MoreI walk to my front door, push it open, and step through. As soon as I seal it between me and my family, everything feels quiet like the middle of winter. I step away and stumble down the front steps.
Read MoreShe stood up, took the keys from the dining table where she and her husband always left them. She would go for a walk. She wrapped her hand around the keys, feeling their sharp teeth, their cold greeting, bite into her palm, wake up her hand.
Read MoreI saw him again. The ghost. Standing on the trail that makes its slow, bumping way to our village. Overnight, fog slips down the mountain, spilling like water between the gorse and banana palms and cacti, dampening all sound. Our pueblo is haunted, Mamá says.
Read MoreNo one notices the first miracle. It happens to a boy on the JV football team who, at practice on an unseasonably warm February day, becomes dimly aware that his sweat seems to smell of citrus.
Read MoreHe wanted me to teach him how to kill a chicken. I’m not sure when his lurid fascination with killing a chicken first began. Perhaps my sister had pressed him to spend more time with me and he thought this would be an interesting story to add to his repertoire.
Read MoreThe doorbell rings. I can see through the glass in the door that it’s my fat, sad sack neighbor, the one whose name I never remember. I open the door. “Hey,” he says, shifting his weight from foot to foot in that nervous way he does…
Read MoreThe nubby heads of a pair of carpenter’s nails bit into the low slope of my skull, and I rocked back and forth so my view of the verandah’s defunct ceiling fan blurred. I wanted to feel the sharpness of the nails, pain that would distract me from the heat coming from Charlie, who wasn’t wearing a shirt…
Read MoreHer body had become a fortress of leaves. She took to wearing long sleeves and bag-like-things to hide her shape and deter people from seeing her clearly. Her face was hers, and yet it wasn’t anymore. She felt as if the wind could take her.
Read MoreNkwo is sitting in the housefront, drenched in glares and hisses from passers-by. She is waiting for the day the villagers will drag her to the public square, pour petrol on her, scratch a match and set her ablaze like they do to anyone who is a witch…
Read MoreI stood in the rain on Daming Road before an open gate of rusted iron bars. It was in the summer at the end of my first college year. Before I went to a university in the United States, there used to be a cluster of more than a hundred tiny houses on the other side of the gate, one of which, Number Eighty-One, was my home…
Read MoreDad’s in the kitchen when I get home from school, instead of hiding out in his study. Crazier still, he’s gone grocery shopping. He surveys the thin paper bags lining the counter, clutching a bottle of red wine like he can’t decide whether to pop it open or put it away.
Read MoreNow the sky is dark with rain, and the new telephone from the thrift store rings. Lift the receiver: there is a rustling noise or creak, the muttering surf of voices on adjoining lines, and after your second hello there is something that might have been a sigh.
Read MoreI never thought it right to blame the man on the bicycle, likely heading home to see his family, his pregnant wife, or his little girl with wildflowers in her hair. Perhaps the sun was in his eyes, or he worried that he’d fly over the handlebars when he slammed on his brakes…
Read MoreDid you know we’d end up using this picture for your obituary? I don’t think you did. I didn’t know that we would, and I know that you’d hate that we’re using this picture. I hate it too. This isn’t how I want to remember this picture, because you were so full of life on the day we took it.
Read MoreGool’s urge, when she stepped into the heated, chandeliered foyer and realized it was him, was to hide behind her friend Abigail, the hostess, who’d opened the door. Coward, Gool told herself and observed the strobe lights pulsing on Amol’s body, illuminating in flashes the radical slant of his shoulder…
Read MoreNew Year’s Eve: the masses seek champagne and sex and new ways to forget who they are, and I’m alone inside my house, trapped in the memory of who I am. Not quite alone. My new child sits in my lap: a hyacinth flower, whom I love very much.
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