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.
Little Frank came from Unicoi County up in the east end of Tennessee where the Unaka Mountains seemed to drop off under the roadside into valleys that made a man think perhaps he might be happiest if he were a bird and could soar above those green woods and meadows.
I am so tired. So very tired that I started writing this letter all wrong. Haven’t been any too well and hot weather coming on. I have a very sore thumb on my right hand. But I never give up my work. I never have gotten all my housecleaning done as yet but except to maby before long.
Bernstein, the translator, warily climbed the first of the forty-nine steps that led to Misha’s room: he was on the lookout for spiders and rats. He stopped after the twenty-fifth step and removed a lumpy handkerchief from his vest pocket.
Amelia and Paul moved dreaming through the color photographs of human lives in articulo mortis, in Europe, in the album. “First,” Paul said, regarding the first photograph closely, “we visit Denmark’s unique Tivoli Gardens with their bursting green, red and blue and silver fireworks at a quarter to twelve.
The following is an excerpt from a novel entitled The Confessions of Nat Turner, based on the life of the leader of the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery.
I am up to my calves in the sea, the very beginnings of the sea which stretches before me out to the edge of the sky. My ship, my tiny ship moored in the shallows, rocks back and forth anxiously, like a schoolboy. The waves lap at its side, the cool waters. Ah, let us go, let us set forth, my ship!
At last Helen rose and began to dress herself, selecting for the day a fawn outfit. She pulled on her Wellingtons and stowed away her town clothes in the wardrobe. Then she went to the window and drew up the Venetian blind.
A foolish trip up to a dark. Midlands town, the pelting cold rain soaking into the black brick of the factories like old bad oil, glistening nothing. A wasted trip, through the good offices of the local M.P. Town fathers showed me everything and showed me nothing.
From the small, flat, hot, treeless, asphalted valley town of Tracy, California—split by a six-lane highway and surrounded by fields of sugar beets, alfalfa, and tomatoes—an enormous pink car one day departed by the eastern end without previously entering by the western end, this car being the property of a permanent resident, Ernest Grubb, nineteen, who was in turn the property of a finance company.
The proud red glow was gone and for a terrible moment Henry thought the gateway to the west had been wiped out in the night. Then he reached for his field glasses, sighted along his secret tunnel off 95th Street, out over the river, over the folded layers of laminated shale (known to the dumber guys as the Palisades) and closed his eyes.