Fiction of the Day
Unit One
By Caleb Crain
There is a nothing sound that rooms make that is easier to hear when a room is empty.
There is a nothing sound that rooms make that is easier to hear when a room is empty.
Mary believed there were two kinds of people in the world. There were those who were seen and those who were not. Mary considered herself the latter.
Many of us demand a living wage. Others demand health insurance. At least one of us demands some dress-code wiggle room.
Marilyn Minter was a photography student at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, in 1969.
For a long time I worked on an essay about a fairly obscure American film made in the seventies by an actress, the only film she directed, which she starred in herself, an essay that I published in a small journal and thought perhaps I would turn into a book.
For a long time we wanted to get a second dog. Then we had a baby, and I had to give up this desire for a while.
There are three elements to the photograph. There is the grocery cart in the background, the white Renault hatchback in the foreground, and then at center there is the reclusive philosopher who explored literature’s impossibility.
After graduate school I hung around another year and drove a cab for Iowa City Yellow Cab. The cab was a boat, a Chevrolet Caprice wagon. I could have put a mattress in the back and lived in it.
By the glow of the headlights, Reney counted again. A calf was gone. A bawling cow trotting ruts into the fence line confirmed Reney’s count.
Pushed from its hidden end, a sofa drifted into the parking lot under my window. The pushes became feeble thrusts and then short convulsions, until, with a final spasm, the couch nudged one of the abandoned supermarket carts by the trash containers and came to a rest.
Two sisters lived together in a two-room apartment. They were very poor. For lunch, they usually had a boiled potato; for breakfast, a slice of bread with a glass of hot water.