Glimmer Train Stories, #97

Excerpts:

Adam Soto
The Box
And Teenesee says, "Yes, I am the woman who appears when grown men cry out for their mothers. I am the ferryman who rows them to the other side." Aurora Brackett
Beginnings
My mom had been in the hospital a long time. She says her parents were trying to hide her away until the sixties were over, until Carter was in office.

Lillian Li
Parts of Summer
He was going to be a doctor, but no one at medical school told him about fan death. Sometimes, the Chinese are wiser. We've been around longer.

Zeynep Ozakat
Moving from Istanbul
He hadn't really traveled beyond the East Coast except for Los Angeles. And he kind of wanted to see where people carried guns, where the Mormons and the Amish existed.

Eric Thompson
The King of India
This was the beginning of an endless series of rash decisions about what their unborn child would and definitely would not be.

David Abrams
A Little Bit of Everything
It was garden pesticides, the accumulation of paper cuts, the sprained ankle from that brief try at jogging in 1982, the diets, the binges, the resumption of cigarettes in 1989 and the re-quitting two months later.

Eva Lomski
The Things We Build
Estelle's was one of the low-cost bank houses, built in the thirties for employees to buy at reduced mortgage rates.

Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly
Interview by Kevin Rabalais
These details of my own life began to infiltrate Crooked Letter, and it shocked me how autobiographical the novel had become.

Julia Strayer
Bright and Bleached
From the outside, my mother's house is the mirror image of Uncle Leroy's house. The builders were lazy, I guess. They flopped houses in pairs all down the street.

Sommer Schafer
In the Beginning
To combat minor depression, which he believed to be the cause of some spiritual weakness in himself, he got into vitamins sold under a company called Megalife.

Joshua D. Graber
Freeman Göttschall
It does not take a Lorenz to realize that the branching possibilities reached this way could drive a man paranoid.

Rowena Macdonald
My Brother Is Back
Fran is being her usual self. Completely furious with me. All the time. I'd forgotten how constant she is with her fury.

Omid Fallahazad
Arrested
Naser came to visit us unannounced. I was sitting on a chair in the bathroom, waiting for my wife to give me a haircut.

Soma Mei Sheng Frazier
Flyaways
There is the iconic flat line, and their mother is gone, too.

Marni Berger
Waterside
My body keeps on without me. I see it, running alone through the dark and white world: the navy blue night and the sparkling snow.

Christa Romanosky
Every Shape that the Moon Makes
Somewhere in Mexico there is a crater from the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs, another in Arizona large enough to bury a skyscraper.

Maxine Rosaler
The Red Cart
"No time," he told me. "Been fumigating for forty-five minutes." "That's very alliterative of you, but you can't do this to me," I told him.

Siamak Vossoughi
The Tune
All over the world, he would think, there were people wishing that the other person would listen as much as they spoke. He was the one man wishing a woman would speak as much as she listened.