Fiction Friday

Quick links for a few quality pieces of fiction I have read and enjoyed recently:

"When Cornelio first served the woman she’d had been a girl of sixteen, as striking as the woman who sat before him now. A Criollo twice her age had put his hand on her thigh and when she spat to the dirt he laughed and called her ‘Indio.’ She shattered his nose with the bottle of tequila she was enjoying. As the man moaned on the floor, liquor and blood mixing with the dust his movements stirred, the girl pulled the knife strapped under her dress and removed his right ear with a slight motion. The Criollo never showed his crooked face again and Cornelio always kept enough añejo on hand. "
Incarnation by Chris Deal

Chris Deal crafts a smouldering, embers hot, piece of borderlands noir for the excellent Rotten Leaves zine.



"All the stuff you block out each day catches up with you in hotel rooms. Specters made of mental malaise stalk the corridors of every airport hotel and inner city stop over. All those thoughts you drown out with iPods, Ikea catalogues and foreign holidays. All those neuroses stifled with gym memberships, new wardrobes and cosmetic surgery. All the creeping paranoia. All of these things find you in hotel rooms. Sat there alone at two in the morning, having drained the mini bar, is it any wonder people commit suicide in hotel rooms?"

Sketched 002 by Den Patrick

Den Patrick conjurers a lovely ruminative piece of location based flash.



"I asked whether we could go inside and close the door. “There are no rules,” he said. “But—” I began. “Except that it stay empty,” he interrupted. “Can I eat in there?” I asked, a few days later. “There’s nothing you can’t do in there,” my father said, mysteriously. “Our family eats together at the table,” said my mother. Charlotte asked if it was my father’s room. “It doesn’t belong to any of us,” he said. “It’s just a part of the house. In the same way that Arfy lives with us but doesn’t belong to us.” On moving upstate we’d gained a puppy, to prove we had a backyard. “Is it Arfy’s room?” asked Charlotte, perhaps misunderstanding. “Arfy, too, is free to use the empty room,” said my father. “If Arfy poops in there, who has to clean it up?” I asked. We all glanced at my mother."

The Empty Room by Jonthan Lethem

Some of the raw electricity of Lethem's early work may have dissipated over time but what has taken its place is a mastery of tone that lures the readers in and then gently twists their perceptions into peculiar angles.



Maybe I will do this one Friday a month, maybe I will think better of it and never do it again. Only the blog gods know for sure.