Fiction – Page 4 – Mid-American Review Blog

Accepted: “No Paper Cowboys” by Bryn Agnew

In our “Accepted” column, Mid-American Review editors discuss why they selected stories, poems, or essays for publication. In this post, Fiction Editor Tom Markham discusses the marvelous “No Paper Cowboys.”

Genre: short fiction

Title: “No Paper Cowboys”

Author: Bryn Agnew

MAR Issue: 36.1

First Line: “Your parents stand on the porch as you park your car under the awning where the chicken snake ate the baby swallows.”

The evocative image in the opening line of Bryn Agnew’s “No Paper Cowboys” sets the stage for a tale of consumption. That the story is told in 2^nd person—“Your parents stand on the porch”—brings us close to the affected character, allowing us an interiority crucial to understanding the unavoidable struggle that consumes this main character.

The setup is one we’re all familiar with—a young college student returns home for a family Thanksgiving celebration—yet the insight here feels fresh, cutting to the core a young person’s first real identity crisis: feeling like a stranger both in that new living environment as well as in the old. This sense of having one foot in one world and one in the other is brought out nicely through the italicized lines that are interspersed throughout the narrative. These lines, usually quotes from, we can assume, texts and situations the boy encountered at school, are often direct, internalized responses to the actions or requests of this main character’s family. Sometimes the interactions between internal and external are simple—“’Why don’t you go for a walk? Get some fresh air.’ It’s plain to see, the sun won’t shine today, but I ain’t in the mood for sunshine anyway”—while other times they are a little more abstracted, pointing to the unease deep within the main character’s psyche.

The main character, the “You” in the story, is doing his best to reconcile his estranged world of the past with his new fresh but ultimately unsatisfying frame of mind, but the efforts are fruitless. The futility is shown most starkly in his family’s frustrated attempts to cheer him up with mundane, homey tasks. Sandwiched into this doomed task of fitting his new self back into his old life is the revelation that things don’t appear to be going so well socially at college, either, so at the story’s core, we are given this bit of insight—the boy is unhappy in both worlds—and we watch it eat away at him while his family attempts, always uselessly, to rescue him.

When the boy finds himself relating to a hunted deer shot by his family for the meat we know things won’t end well. The boy gets injured wrangling a cow on the family farm, a task his father conscripted him to, and in the final moments of the story, a fleeting image of the deer comes across the boy’s visage, leaving us with one lingering italicized thought: “You cannot believe such a monstrous energy of grief can lead to nothing.”

“No Paper Cowboys” is a poignant look at the inexplicable pain that comes in periods of life’s tough transitions. It ends on a very somber note, but it is one that leaves us strangely hopeful, for we come back to the 2^nd person voice, reading these words with our own voices echoing in our heads, realizing we’re not alone in this struggle, even though it sometimes feels that way.

What MAR editors said about “No Paper Cowboys”:

“I really enjoyed the narrator’s silence when everyone else is constantly discussing him. I feel like this was a very effective way of seeing inside this character.”

“The second person is done really well, and to a wonderful effect. Lovely prose, lovely energy, lovely sadness; it packed a punch for sure.”

Accepted: Night Watch At The House of Death by Sam Martone

In our “Accepted” column, Mid-American Review editors discuss why they selected stories, poems, or essays for publication. In this post, Fiction Editor Lydia Munnell discusses a story that appears in our Fall 2015 issue.

Genre: Short fiction
Title: Night Watch at the House of Death
Author: Sam Martone
MAR issue: 36.1
While reading or discussing work with the MAR staff this past year, I’ve occasionally thrown a fit about what I call “Boring Couple Stories.” Of course this is ridiculous; Some of the best stories we’ve told since we started telling stories deal in the currency of love and heartbreak. We love an affair. We love a breakup.

But I will stand by the fact that, in general I could do without another interior rendering of here we are, in the same house, and it’s ending, and we both know it’s ending, and what’s going to happen? I could do without another thinly veiled short story about a lurid affair between an aging professor and an airy undergrad.

But I can always, always read more stories that frame old love anew, that teach me something I feel like I always should have known.

That’s what Sam Martone’s “Night Watch at the House of Death” manages to do, and, ultimately, why the story warranted such an enthusiastic acceptance in my first semester as Fiction Editor. Martone’s is a story about the sublime nature of love because it’s also about death, or maybe just loss, or maybe just being alone.

The speaker in “Night Watch…” is a worker. He is a sentinel at a death house whose responsibility it is to wait for the likely-dead to show signs of life. In inventing that job, Martone captures the all-too-familiar drudgery of work, the language of waiting and work that colors the kind of purgatorial world that’s so beautifully rendered here.

Martone does a remarkable job with all the intricacies that mandate life inside and outside the death houses. Medicine, in this world, is a kind of alchemy, and as the speaker’s relationship with Hannah emerges, it’s clear love is governed by alchemy as well. Writes Martone, “I imagined Hannah undressing, one garment at a time, and seeing all the things she stole spilling from her clothes: waffle irons, withering cabbages, hand soap dispensers, step ladders, until she was completely naked atop a mountain of all she had taken, and I was clambering up toasters and ironing boards to meet her.” The world of “Night Watch” is sketched with clear lines, but love is about trial and error, a combination of semi-precious objects that, for the speaker, seem like they might add up to something.

But the other element here is time (manifest in the form of a stolen clock), and Martone’s moves in the second act fulfill the story’s promises about what it means to wait. After some too-enjoyable-to-spoil-here twists, “Night Watch at the House of Death” grants us this: we can see work and breakups the same way. They’re both about waiting, the nebulous space between.

The worst kinds of love stories leave sullen characters brooding on a rainy New York City boulevard. But the best kind—and Sam Martone’s is the best kind—leave them cleaning gutters and listening to the wind. They end the way they start without promise of death or happiness or sure resolution. And uncertainty becomes its own kind of loss, and it aches the way a good love story should.

Lydia is a native of rural western Pennsylvania who has spent the last several years on the east side of Cleveland coordinating the after school program at Lake Erie Ink, a non-profit writing space for youth. While in Cleveland, she was DJ of a folk radio program, Revival and previously did freelance writing for Cleveland Scene Magazine.

Contest Deadlines Extended!

The weather’s changing, the clock hands have been struck back an hour, and the winter darkness is upon us. But there’s a bright spot on the horizon: MAR has extended the deadlines for the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award and the James Wright Poetry Award until November 15.

That’s right – you still have some precious time remaining to submit to these two contests. With a $1,000 prize + publication in each category, and with Alissa Nutting judging fiction and Oliver de la Paz judging poetry this year, you don’t want to miss out. The entry fee is only $10 (hey, compare it to other contests — $10 for a $1,000 prize is not too shabby) for each story up to 6,000 words or up to three poems. So learn more here and enter now!

Photo: stnorbert

Accepted: “War Stories” by Lesley Nneka Arimah

In our “Accepted” column, Mid-American Review editors discuss why they selected stories, poems, or essays for publication. In this post, Fiction Editor Laura Maylene Walter discusses a story that appears in our Spring 2014 issue.

Genre: Short fiction
Title: “War Stories”
Author: Lesley Nneka Arimah
MAR issue: Spring 2014
First line: “This time, my mother and I were fighting about what I had done at school to prove with no question that Anita Okechukwu was not wearing a bra.”

“War Stories” opens with an immediately compelling conflict: the narrator, twelve-year-old Nwando, has exposed her classmate Anita not only for her lack of a bra, but also for the pretenses that allowed her to become the dictatorial leader of the school’s exclusive Girl Club. Thanks to her actions, Nwando finds herself an unwitting hero and the head of a new “girl army” regime. As Nwando experiences the rise and fall of her own power at school, she listens at home as her father covers new ground in his wartime memories and reveals more than he perhaps intended.

Along with many other Mid-American Review fiction readers, I was immediately engaged by the story’s premise and read on with increasing interest as Nwando’s struggles at home and school escalated. The story illustrates adolescent tension in fresh and surprising ways, and author Lesley Nneka Arimah masterfully blends Nwando’s schoolyard conflict with her father’s recollections of his time in the war.

The language in “War Stories” is also infused with a reflective quality that expands Nwando’s story into more universal territory. For example, when Anita experiences her fall from social graces after the bra incident, Nwando considers the broader consequences for her classmate: “What I hadn’t expected were the boys who ran behind her during recess and lifted up her skirt, as though my actions had given them permission, as though because they had seen her bare breast, they were entitled to the rest. It was a boyish expectation most would not outgrow even after they became men.”

The storytelling is also lively and takes surprising turns. Take, for instance, the scene that occurs after Nwando is punished for punching her classmate: “During dinner, which I wasn’t permitted to share with my parents, I sat on a stool in the kitchen, soothing the shrapnel sting on my behind with daydreams of how upset my real parents would be when they discovered these temporary guardians had used me ill. I tried very hard not to think about the little girl and her nose, how it crackled beneath my fist.” The vivid language and storytelling gain momentum throughout the story as Nwando’s father begins sharing his wartime experiences.

“War Stories” is more than a gripping, beautifully told story about a young girl navigating the poisonous social structure at school and a haunted father at home – it’s also about the power of the many kinds of stories we tell.

What MAR editors said about “War Stories”:

“…strong and engaging…an example of well-managed realism. Touching without being sentimental and a light touch with humor. A quirk without being crazy.”

“This story offers a lot in these nine pages about the pain this family has experienced with loss. It may not follow a traditional path, but I enjoyed the details of this family connecting. The emotion feels authentic, the details engage, and the flaws of people trying to be leaders to those around them – moving.”

Laura Maylene Walter, Fiction Editor

Photo: legOfrenis

“Paco” by Winona Leon

The magic continues! In the latest installment of our winning My Little Pony Writing Contest entries (if you missed the magic, go here and here.) Today, we present the flash piece “Paco” by Winona Leon. Photo, above: OakleyOriginals

Paco

Riding Paco makes my legs melt like wax. Beneath me, I hear his body move like an insolent child’s heartbeat. Tense and excited, he unfurls his legs and then stomps on the ground. His gait feels so light that it doesn’t take much to imagine that we’re flying. It’s because of his paso llano, proof of his proud heritage as a Peruvian Paso. I can imagine those who must have brought these gravity-defying stallions across the arid deserts. Poor stallions: horses that were meant for flight were confined to sugar and cotton plantations because of their strong-willed endurance. It was almost too late until the Peruvian people remembered the importance of these passionate and elegant creatures to their culture.

I’ve never forgotten. After my grandparents purchased him, I quickly discarded my drawers of Barbies and My Little Pony in order to spend time learning to ride. Oh, Paco, my Francisco. I think that he must dream vividly in color, like me.

Usually, I am not afraid of Paco. We often ride together bareback, and I use his mane as my reins. It is Dulcinea sweet, to have such a companion also eager to escape and explore.

But now, he knocks his head back impatiently, and I feel unsure. He bites at flies and will not listen to my demands. When we run, it is too fast. I yield him to stop, slow down, “there, settle, boy,” but he only moves faster. We run past the arena and into the grassy pasture. When we crash through the wire fence, I still can’t help but clutch the reins. Barbed wire ruthlessly slices against my legs and arms. I’m barely conscious as I struggle to hold on, thinking, we’re falling, falling. Icarus, you’ve gone too far. But in the end, it is only me who falls. The ground catches me with arms made of the cruel sharp ends of dead grass and agave lechuguilla.

When my grandparents come for me, I can only ask, “Is Paco all right?”

They look confused, but I understand once I see a brown fleck still sailing through the unfenced pastures beyond our acre. The speck grows smaller and smaller as Paco travels onward, perhaps, meeting the gods.

Later that evening, a neighbor finally catches Paco. This time I will not wait for him. None of my bones are snapped. Nothing will scar. Yet, the taste of betrayal is sharp and hurts more than any physical injury could. He has left me, and there is no room for forgiveness. My grandmother brings Paco in like a prisoner. His South American heritage now hangs around his neck like chains, and his coat is matted, wire still caught around the neck and flank. In that moment, I cannot help but think we tasted infinity together. But Paco had been set on immortality. I watch with sad, knowing eyes while his blood seeps like the sunlight.

Winona Leon currently studies creative writing and fine arts
at the University of Southern California. She also serves as
Fiction Editor and Co-Founder of Fractal Literary Magazine
and works with both Kaya Press and Gold Line Press. Originally
from West Texas, she grew up entranced by a sky full of stars
and all the words that could describe it.

The magic hasn’t fizzled yet — check back soon for our final My Little Pony Writing Contest winner.

Other winners:

“Friendship is Magic” by Marci Rae Johnson
“My Little Pony’s Easter Message” by Debbra Palmer