Prose Fiction

The following stories have nothing in common except a certain sincerity about the hardness of the world. Two are witnesses of the agonies of filial love; two others of the agonies of self-delusion.

“Red Bricks” tells the story of a young man whose grandfather has just died; his hateful father has decided to sell the family ranch almost to spite the memory of the deceased. Then comes a lightning storm, an overflowing river, and a deluge of filial anger...

When our protagonist awakes several days later, his father and brother are dead as well. “Red Bricks” presents an arid world reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy and the claustrophobic family dramas of Robinson Jeffers; but one of humble sympathy, too.

“Pitching Marilyn” is an account of a failed marriage between a shy wife and her salesman husband, who also narrates the story. The salesman is a consummate manipulator: and as we read with disgust about his marital antics, we realize that the narrator is pitching us a hypothetical meeting with his ex-wife that may or may not happen. Who is Marilyn? We never know, for sure. The salesman has been too busy pitching himself.

“Band-Aids” offers a brief glance at the life of a Korean-American family whose mother is undergoing chemotherapy as she battles late-stage stomach cancer. Against a backdrop of fragile yet fierce familial bonds challenged by a foreseeable end, the real story lies in the daughter’s efforts to navigate through two different worlds—a home entirely eclipsed by her mother’s illness in stark contrast to the quotidian demands of life at work. Told in the daughter’s uncomplicated first-person voice, “Band-Aids” grapples with a fundamental human struggle familiar to us: what does one do in the face of inevitability?

Lastly, “White Girls Like to Party” recounts the adventures of a drunk coed on her way home from a night of drinking and clubbing. The story provides a fresh take on a familiar problem: the protected status of middle-class white girls in a world crisscrossed by dangers and desires that undercut their claims to privilege.

The readers of these stories are encouraged not to glide blithely over the duties of life or the easy derelictions in which we indulge. They are invited instead to linger for a moment on the edge of our unhappiness: what is this secret hatred I feel? What are the boundaries of my unreal world? What forces keep me suspended over nothingness but never quite let my drop into the abyss?