The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
Outstanding Stories from the Web 2009/2010
Edited by Michael Beeman, Sean Clark, Eric Markowsky, Marcos Velasquez, and Nico Vreeland
Cover designed and illustrated by Mike Annear
Published by Chamber Four LLC
Cambridge, MA
2010
visit chamberfour.com/anthology
for links to the magazines these stories appear in,
interviews with authors,
and more
Published by Chamber Four LLC, 2010
Direct inquiries to:
[email protected] The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology. “Introduction,” copyright © 2010 by Chamber Four.
“Liz Phair and the Most Perfect Sentence,” by Andrea Uptmor. First published in Hot Metal Bridge, Spring 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Andrea Uptmor. Republished by permission of the author.
“Eupcaccia,” by Angie Lee. First published in Witness, Volume XXIII, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Angie Lee. Republished by permission of the author.
“Watchers,” by Scott Cheshire. First published in AGNI, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Scott Cheshire. Republished by permission of the author.
“How to Assemble a Portal to Another World,” by Alanna Peterson. First published in failbetter.com, Issue 33, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Alanna Peterson. Republished by permission of the author.
“Seven Little Stories About Sex,” by Eric Freeze. First published in Boston Review, March/April 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Eric Freeze. Republished by permission of the author.
“Men Alone,” by Steve Almond. First published in Drunken Boat, #11, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Steve Almond. Republished by permission of the author.
“For the Sake of the Children,” by Sarah Salway. First published in Night Train, Issue 9.1, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Sarah Salway. Republished by permission of the author.
“Semolinian Equinox,” by Svetlana Lavochkina. First published in Eclectica Magazine, Jan/Feb 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Svetlana Lavochkina. Republished by permission of the author.
“The Girl In The Glass,” by Valerie O'Riordan. First published in PANK, Issue 4.08, August 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Valerie O’Riordan. Republished by permission of the author.
“Peacocks,” by L.E. Miller. First published in Ascent, March 2010. Copyright © 2010 by L.E. Miller. Republished by permission of the author.
“The Naturalists,” by B.J. Hollars. First published in storySouth, Issue 29, Spring 2010. Copyright © 2010 by B.J. Hollars. Republished by permission of the author.
“The Affliction,” by C. Dale Young. First published in Guernica, February 2010. Copyright © 2010 by C. Dale Young. Republished by permission of the author.
“Bad Cheetah,” by Andy Henion. First published in Word Riot, April 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Andy Henion. Republished by permission of the author.
“Nothings,” by Aaron Block. First published in Alice Blue Review, Issue 11, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Aaron Block. Republished by permission of the author.
“Dragon,” by Steve Frederick. First published in Night Train, Issue 10.1, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Steve Frederick. Republished by permission of the author.
“On Castles,” by Trevor J. Houser. First published in StoryQuarterly, November 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Trevor J. Houser. Republished by permission of the author.
“Black Night Ranch,” by Roy Giles. First published in Eclectica Magazine, April/May 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Roy Giles. Republished by permission of the author.
“The Eskimo Keeps Her Promise,” by Emily Ruskovich. First published in Inkwell, Spring 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Emily Ruskovich. Republished by permission of the author.
“Helping Hands,” by David Peak. First published in PANK, Issue 4.10, October 2009. Copyright © 2009 by David Peak. Republished by permission of the author.
“The Next Thing on Benefit,” by Castle Freeman, Jr. First published in The New England Review, Volume 31, Number 1, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Castle Freeman, Jr. Republished by permission of the author.
“The Night Dentist,” by Ron MacLean. First published in Drunken Boat, #11, 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Ron MacLean. Republished by permission of the author.
“Pool,” by Corey Campbell. First published in Anderbo.com, 2008. Copyright © 2008 by Corey Campbell. Republished by permission of the author.
“Everything is Breakable with a Big Enough Stone,” by Taryn Bowe. First published in Boston Review, January/February 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Taryn Bowe. Republished by permission of the author.
“The Abjection,” by Michael Mejia. First published in AGNI, Issue 69, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Michael Mejia. Republished by permission of the author.
“American Subsidiary,” by William Pierce. First published in Granta, Issue 106, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by William Pierce. Republished by permission of the author.
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ISBN 978-0-9829327-0-4
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Liz Phair and the Most Perfect Sentence
by Andrea Uptmor
from Hot Metal Bridge
Eupcaccia
by Angie Lee
from Witness
Watchers
by Scott Cheshire
from AGNI
How to Assemble a Portal to Another World
by Alanna Peterson
from failbetter.com
Seven Little Stories About Sex
by Eric Freeze
from Boston Review
Men Alone
by Steve Almond
from Drunken Boat
For the Sake of the Children
by Sarah Salway
from Night Train
Semolinian Equinox
by Svetlana Lavochkina
from Eclectica Magazine
The Girl In The Glass
by Valerie O’Riordan
from PANK
Peacocks
by L.E. Miller
from Ascent
The Naturalists
by B.J. Hollars
from storySouth
The Affliction
by C. Dale Young
from Guernica
Bad Cheetah
by Andy Henion
from Word Riot
Nothings
by Aaron Block
from Alice Blue Review
Dragon
by Steve Frederick
from Night Train
On Castles
by Trevor J. Houser
from StoryQuarterly
Black Night Ranch
by Roy Giles
from Eclectica Magazine
The Eskimo Keeps Her Promise
by Emily Ruskovich
from Inkwell
Helping Hands
by David Peak
from PANK
The Next Thing on Benefit
by Castle Freeman, Jr.
from Th
e New England Review
The Night Dentist
by Ron MacLean
from Drunken Boat
Pool
by Corey Campbell
from Anderbo.com
Everything is Breakable with a Big Enough Stone
by Taryn Bowe
from Boston Review
The Abjection
by Michael Mejia
from AGNI
American Subsidiary
by William Pierce
from Granta
About the authors
About the publisher
Introduction
This anthology took shape over the course of many discussions about the short fiction being published online. With an ever-expanding world of fiction on the Internet, we wanted an easy way to find the best stories. If only someone would compile the many great short stories appearing for free online, and make them available in a number of ebook formats so that we could read them wherever and however we wanted, on any device. As we kept talking, it became obvious that this was a job for Chamber Four.
In this collection, you’ll find traditional, Carver-esque stories alongside magical realist tales of teleportation. A chronicle of the social awakening of young mothers in a New York apartment building appears beside an existential horror story about a new bed. These stories take place in America, in Ukraine, in Africa, on a sheep ranch, in a nudist colony, and inside a poet's head as an extended daydream about Liz Phair. Some are traditional in form and some are dazzlingly experimental, some are long pieces that slowly pull you in and some are single-page punches to the solar plexus.
Some of these authors you’ve heard of, read about, and discussed with your friends; others you’ll be discovering for the first time and can be sure to see again. We found these stories in magazines with long histories and on sites that belong to the post-millennium eruption. There is no factor that unifies the pieces collected here beyond their availability online and that hard-to-define but unmistakable hallmark of quality. The stories we selected are as diverse as the Internet, as wide in scope as all literature, and each true to their shared subject: the attempt to reconcile our world to the struggles of the human soul.
The result is a collection of stories we have read and enjoyed since our website has been up and running, and we offer it freely to readers everywhere. This collection is not a definitive “Best of,” because, as much as we read, we couldn’t claim to have covered everything. Instead, think of The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology as a mixtape, a gift slipped into your hand in the hallway between classes by a friend who insists, “Trust me: You're gonna love this.” But you can skip freely between stories, reading in any order you choose, so maybe a mixtape is an outdated metaphor. Call it a CD, then, burnt on our desktop with tracks from all over the world of music. But a CD? Who’s going to know what that is in ten years? It's our playlist, then, our “cloud,” our whatever-will-come-next. These are the stories we have read and enjoyed and now press upon you, insisting that you read them.
Trust us: You're gonna love this.
―Michael Beeman, and the rest of Team C4
Liz Phair and the Most Perfect Sentence
by Andrea Uptmor
from Hot Metal Bridge
It always starts with me getting hit by a car. I am walking along the edge of the road, scuffing my sneaker on the curb. I am in a funk. My shoulders are slumping in a sort of what’s-the-purpose-of-anything posture. Maybe I got another rejection letter at the post office, or the grocery store declined my credit card. No, scratch thatI did get groceries. Yes, I am carrying them, and in fact, a pair of apples flies into the air upon the enormous impact, blocking out the sun in two distinct spots like a reverse domino. It is a very sunny day. When I hit the ground, I break something—an arm, an ankle—and I hear it crunch. The driver of the car gets out and runs to my crumpled body, pieces of blonde hair twisting behind her like prayer flags in the wind. She looks down at me.
It is Liz Phair.
Her face blocks the sun completely, and thus she is shrouded in a nimbus of holy yellow light like a William Blake revelation angel. Her beauty commands a profound silence over all of the elements. The wind stops, the traffic falls mute. Then Liz Phair says, “Oh fuck,” and the world begins to spin again. White bone is sticking out of my arm or ankle. A bus has run over the rest of my groceries, smearing peanut butter as if the pavement was toast. I am not in terrible pain. I watch her panic. I have never thought Liz Phair would be the kind of woman to wear a hoodie. It is faded green, softer than kittens.
She takes me to the hospital. She curses the whole way. She is Liz Phair. The radio is off when she helps me into the car, and at first I am surprised that she was not listening to something hip and indie when we encountered one another on the road, something Michael Penn-esque, not the album stuff but maybe a bootlegged acoustic show in a small venue, but as she pulls out in front of a truck and rolls down her window to call the driver a cum dumpster, I realize Liz Phair is like me. She does not listen to music in the car. She uses long drives to talk aloud to herself about the nature of all things. That is why she is so wise. My arm is beginning to throb, and I grip the seat. She curses again and accelerates. We are moving together through the summer streets in this silent car, zipping toward the Emergency Room, Liz Phair and me.
The doctor tells me he must re-fracture my arm with a large hammer-like device. Liz Phair curses. She has a fear of blood, and of bones sticking out of skin, but she has stayed by my side this entire time, pausing her steady stream of foul language only once, to ask me what my favorite book is. When she asked that, back in the car, her eyes darted down my body for just a second before returning to the road. I told her it’s Tolstoy’s A Confession and Other Religious Writings. She squinted at the road for a long time, like she was confused, before she finally said, “Mine too.”
At first I think she is being so attentive because she is worried about me pressing charges for getting run over, but as the doctor touches my arm and I cry out in pain, she grabs my unbroken hand and looks down at me, head eclipsing the examination light, face haloed by stainless steel and tiled ceiling, upper lip shaped like a rainbow, and I see the truth—Liz Phair has fallen in love with me today.
There are a lot of different first kisses. In one, I can imagine it happening right there, in the emergency room, at the same time my arm is re-fractured. Liz Phair touching her rainbow mouth to mine at the exact moment of the crunch, so my mind explodes in a fountain of dopamine and adrenaline and serotonin. But I also like thinking that it’s in a more quiet, private setting. Maybe she walks me to my door that first night, after bringing me home from the hospital. Maybe it’s not for a couple of weeks, after several tension-filled nights sitting side-by-side on my couch, watching Project Runway episodes, until finally she gets up the nerve to put her hand on my knee and I just go for it. Either way, no matter the circumstances, it is totally ideal, and afterwards she says, “You are the best kisser ever,” and it doesn’t sound corny at all.
Pretty soon I move into her house. We buy a yellow couch. We adopt two cats. We throw dinner parties and watch Top Chef and carve things into the tree in our backyard. Our beautiful oak, in our beautiful backyard, big as the ones in my childhood. We make love under that giant oak, and afterwards we smoke cigarettes like teenagers. Liz Phair loves my writing. She leaves insightful comments on my blog and asks me to read my stories to her at night. I read them in funny voices, and popcorn shoots out of her mouth when she laughs, shoulders shaking, her butterscotch hair slick from the bathtub. My parents love Liz Phair. They are proud of me for not bringing home another unemployed guitar player. Her parents are dead at this point, so I don’t have to worry about what they would think. But sometimes she tells me about them, how they were kind and good and even though I am fifteen years younger than Liz Phair, and a girl, and I only weigh 103 pounds, she swears they would have loved me because all they ever cared about was her happiness, and with me, she is content l
ike a golden eagle who swooped around the skies for years before finding its one true mate. One time when she says that, she is holding our cat Johnny, and the moon sneaks in the window and wraps the both of them in a thick yellow fuzz of air. I write a poem about this fuzz of air, and I wrap her sandwich in it the next day.
Liz Phair and I like to go on long walks, and we like to drink beer in pubs. Her son joined the Peace Corps and got sent away to Zimbabwe, so we don’t have to deal with him much, and her ex-husband got remarried and then he surprised us all by also joining the Peace Corps. So it really is just the two of us, Liz Phair and me, taking long autumn walks along our neighborhood, hand-in-hand, my arm healed completely, bone tucked back inside. We crunch piles of ochre leaves with our sneakers and tell each other stories about our childhoods. Sometimes we pass some of my ex-girlfriends and they get this look of misery on their faces at seeing what they missed out on. Liz Phair tells me about car trips to the muggy Florida beaches while I describe strawberry cupcakes on my grandmother’s front porch, white wicker furniture and ice-cold lemonade. That reminds her that lemonade was her favorite childhood drink too, and she stops right in the middle of the sidewalk to stand on her tiptoes and kiss my forehead. When she leans back, I look at her. Puffs of fall breath burst out of her mouth. I see that Liz Phair really is bathed in a glow that is separate from any lighting source I can find in the physical world. Pre-winter trees scissor the sky behind her head—a purple sky, with a big orange sun. It is not a glow that I have ever seen anyone in before. I cannot think of a word to describe it, my first time ever.
At first it is just a rough patch, a few weeks sitting in front of the blinking cursor, but by Thanksgiving I have full-on writer’s block. I can only pace the hallway and peek in to Liz Phair’s guitar room to see what she is up to. It is always something genius. Everything that comes out of Liz Phair’s mouth is genius. She has a way with words, and a warbled voice that infuses her songs with a vulnerability that I can never seem to capture sitting at my desk in my room. All of my stories are gone. Sometimes I am able to hit a stride, just briefly, and the words flow out of me. But they puff into the air and down the hall, where they collide with Liz Phair’s new song like a 103-pound frame being taken down by a Mazda, and they fall, defeated, to the rug.