Fiction of the Day
The Beautiful Salmon
By Joanna Kavenna
I’ve always loved salmon. Not to eat, as I don’t eat fish, but I’ve always loved salmon in general because salmon jump and no one knows why.
I’ve always loved salmon. Not to eat, as I don’t eat fish, but I’ve always loved salmon in general because salmon jump and no one knows why.
As the army prepared to set out on its homeward march with my body, leaving behind only my blood gathered in a leaden vessel, I felt for a while that the world had fallen silent forever.
My job as an elementary-school teacher ended abruptly after eight weeks. Walking heavily to my car, I was devastated, but I recognize now that I was never cut out to be a teacher, for reasons that have nothing
Today I helped bury Reinhold Wladyslaw Bezinski, the man who saved me from becoming an embittered, second-rate French horn player, I once thought telling this story would pay my debt to him.
What I had with Stern, I suppose, was a kind of friendship, a blasted mutuality because we were the only Americans in Lecce, thrown together because we had taken a job teaching there at an American language school.
Marguerite took her show on the road, a last tour, to end at the Capitol, where the senior senator from Rhode Island had arranged a performance for the combined Houses.
Marimba had beautiful teeth. They were not especially good teeth, or strong, but they were well-honed —small, white was the white keys on a piano, and lewd as the rosewood keys, come to think of it, on a marimba.
When she smiled, her front teeth rested on her lower lip,and she felt the angle, the bevelling, identical tooth to tooth.
The best day I remember was the Easter we lived in Detroit, locked in the apartment all day. The furniture, the rugs, began to breathe. Geraniums hummed. I thought, so this is a lively place.
Where woods and wall began, she got off the bicycle and wheeled it the rest of the way up the hill, glancing uneasily at the wall. Higher than a man, it was topped by jagged triangles of glass—a clear statement that the De Rogiets had no use for intruders.