The Rake: Fiction

Sometimes All the Time

Cristina Cordova — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:26:24 -0500

Jonah's throat was sore, lately. It hadn't bothered him in the last couple days, but Jonah still waited for the pain to resurface, so that whenever he swallowed it would feel like swallowing sand, like it had for the past month or so. This waiting made him impatient, but the painkillers he took somewhat tempered his anxiety. Right now he had a eucalyptus lozenge in his mouth, and he bit down on it - not all the way through, just so his molars sunk in halfway.

Cherry on a Spoon

Cristina Cordova — Sun, 11 May 2008 15:55:10 -0500

What she didn't understand, Miriam thought, what she really didn't understand was this stupid cherry on a spoon. The huge sculpture sat there in its lake, its bright red cherry poised happily on the grey spoon-bowl's ridge, a symbol of Minneapolis. What about it excited people? What, exactly, was the point? She sat on the grass by the pond, head tilted upward, mulling it.

The Neglected Breast

Cristina Cordova — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:14:25 -0500

He couldn't help glancing at her legs. It wasn't just that they were long and slender and perfectly tapered, or that she had swung one over the other and now tapped the air with a sling-back stiletto, or that they were smooth and tanned and flawless, but that they were bare. Like so many young professional women down here, she did not wear stockings and for a man of his age and tradition, he found that slightly crass and sexy as all get-out.

Campfire

Cristina Cordova — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:42:07 -0500

One muggy Minnesota morning during the summer straddling the scrawny divide between my fanciful childhood and jaded adolescence, my best friend Robby and I found religion. It'd been hiding, not surprisingly, inside the whitewashed pine chapel of Lake Bronson Galilee Lutheran Bible Camp.

Monster

Lisa Pahl — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:26:03 -0600

Benjamin Blake is a freak. He is part of the new freshman class of Adelphus & Smyth Financial. He is also absolutely out of his mind. He likes to walk around his apartment with his dress socks over his hands, making his fists talk to each other. The left is always his supervisor TJ Anderson and the right is the sock version of himself—or Monster Ben, which is what he likes to call it. The hands bicker back and forth, always ending in an argument where Monster Ben seizes TJ Anderson’s neck in a death bite, punctuated by his left hand’s fading scream.

Bitter

Lisa Pahl — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 14:24:42 -0600

After the radiation treatments, my mother wanted only green bananas. Bananas that weren’t even fruit yet, not a drop of sweetness throughout.

“These I can taste,” she said. “My tongue has all but died.”

She hadn’t died. Yet. Although she was past bargaining with God, she still wanted to barter with me. She would try to quit smoking, she said, but only if I promised not to drink and drive.

One Reason I Don’t Go to the Beach Anymore

kristin harper — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:41:30 -0600

A long time ago, a lifetime ago, really, I rented a lovely summer house by the sea. Not exactly by the sea, but close enough, and it had a big pool, and five bedrooms and a sunroom and an English box garden and you could see the ocean from a widow’s walk on the roof. It was owned by these two interior decorators so everything was just so and it was all kind of perfectly done in an English country house kind of way and filled with light and shadow. It was everything my apartment in town wasn’t and it was just swell.

Family Arrangements

kristin harper — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:48:57 -0600

The neat, large farmhouse was different from what he remembered. Even though he had been back for a few months already, it still took him by surprise some mornings: the wide plank, light wood floors, butcher block countertops in the kitchen, cool tones on the walls, books everywhere, fresh coffee brewed by the time he stumbled in from his bedroom. It was a bright house. Clean everywhere, new towels hanging in the bathrooms, even his sheets coming up crisp and changed every few days, his laundry hung in the closet, folded into the dresser.

Moon Pies

kristin harper — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:43:24 -0600

I go over and over the day that the blue girl drowned, and still I can’t think why I didn’t help. I turn it over in my mind, that first image of her out in the lake, already blue, the girl who turned blue and stayed blue, the girl who drowned and yet still lives. Why didn’t I jump in, why didn’t I swim out to her?

1984 Dodge Ram Roadtrek II - $4500

kristin harper — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:50:44 -0600

I bought this Roadtrek II, “the motorhome that drives like a van,” from a private seller (I want to say his name was Dan) three years ago. As transportation and sometime residence, the Roadtrek II has performed yeomanly. It is only because my mental health seems to be calling with some urgency for full-time non-vehicular lodging that I’m selling her at such an act-now price. I paid seven thousand dollars, cash on the barrelhead, for the Roadtrek II, on 7 April 2004.

The Prairie Town

kristin harper — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:45:33 -0600

She says, everything happens somewhere. Directs those eyes like lighthouse beams someplace west. Doesn’t find what she needs. Looks at her feet. What she is out here: alone. It’s not so bad.

When he landed he was only sixteen and piloting a light craft. One wing bent earthward and the old man slumping. Alone among planes of sand. Goggles to keep out the glare, met no one for hours by his watch. In three o’clock radiance he rested under a shelf of rock.

National Guardsmen Roamed the Subway

kristin harper — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:47:24 -0600

Things changed. National Guardsmen roamed the subway terminals now in their fatigues and black berets, brand-new assault rifles cradled in their arms. The homeless were suddenly visible again. Irony had reached the far end of its arc—Johnny Cash was covering Depeche Mode’s homage to Johnny Cash. It was a confusing time for me, after my neighbor went missing.

“Who?” Jenny said.

“The guy in 2B,” I said. “I forget his name. But it’s been days since I’ve seen him.”

Buona Sera

cristina — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 16:54:10 -0500

“I’m home!” Lydia cries out.

“Dov’è la biblioteca?” says Lyle. He’s at the stove, his back to her, tossing something into a pot. His voice is steady, reassuring, as seductive as the all-night jazz radio host who inhabits the parallel universe that of late has revealed itself to Lydia—a world populated with graveyard shift workers, or people like her, who have lost the innate ability to sleep.

Storage

admin — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Last week we played out the deathbed scene and it wasn’t a life-changing experience, but with Dad dead my tool collection tripled. I have enough power drills to arm a framing crew, which I do in fact arm, since I run a framing crew. We’re the guys who put up the outlines of houses—braces, trusses, etc.—and then other crews come in for the interior and surface work.

Destination

admin — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Excavation

admin — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Dog Day

admin — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0500

The Bog Body

admin — Tue, 29 May 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Chucho and I were searching for golf balls in the protected wetland on the twelfth hole when my feet found a body. There were already several hundred golf balls sitting on the edge of the marsh ready to be cleaned and sold and I’d dug my feet into the mud expecting to feel the cool dimpled cover of another one, but instead, I felt a face.

Nude School

admin — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0500

The Debt

admin — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0500

House of Anything You Wish

admin — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0600

The Migration of Snakes

admin — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0600

Animal Crackers