My short story, “The Last Villagers,” came out today at Xenith:
The noises of his waking reach her at the stove. She starts, moves toward the bedroom but does not enter. The day begins and will conform exactly to the day before, and to tomorrow. His presence, her attendance. Small tasks and silent communion.
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My short story, “Heartbeat,” was published today at Necessary Fiction:
I am not a man to quibble with such a firmly-delivered directive, even if I did not quite understand. I started dialing a phone number at random. I held the cell phone to my ear while Frida began to take the furnace computer apart with a screwdriver she had pulled out of her purse.
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My short story, “Translating Christina,” was published today at Necessary Fiction:
He wanted to smile at them, to give them permission for such thoughts, but he could not speak. Someday they would understand, would know what it meant to wake in the night and for a moment, in the blur of waking, be certain that beloved person was in the room. And then the blur would sharpen and that not-so-recent death would wound as deeply as the first day.
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My translation of “Pastoral,” a short story by C.F. Ramuz was published in the Winter issue of The Kenyon Review. This is a lovely little story about a young shepherd girl and teenage boy. Ramuz’s particular eye for village life is so clever, so sharp. Here is a short excerpt:
The magpies are carried away like pieces of half-burned paper in a fireplace. They are standing a little below the forest. A pine tree forest. The forest cracks, the forest leans. They watch it tip backward all of a sudden, showing the red of its trunks, and then it leans forward again. It disappears beneath its foliage. The forest is red, the forest is black; it takes turns shifting from red to black. There is an explosion, a crack, and then they stop watching because they’ve thrown their two hands forward against the ground (turning their backs to the forest). The goats stop grazing, astonished at this grass that keeps moving, which seems to escape them like water running up an incline.
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Michelle Bailat-Jones 