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.
I wonder what we looked like then, that day we drove over into California. My mother could probably still tell you what we wore.
They all knew him although no one in Bałtów spoke to him and he spoke to no one.
My father was not really an unusual man but he was, after all, more than eighty years old. My wife and I had to learn to live with the various problems of having him around and with his little eccentricities, brought on by his age. But we did just that, and without too much difficulty. Or so we thought. And then it happened.
It was raining as they drove out of Tacoma that morning. When the first car appeared he could see it from a long way off, dragging a cloud of mist like a parachute, and when it passed he touched the wipers to clear
The Verbal Metrics Department filled a single corridor of Building M, a squat Bauhaus knockoff with one glass face that presided over the northwest corner of 275 acres of former farmland that everyone at the Scholastic Achievement Service referred to as a “campus.”
That night, lying by the fire under a set of stars that looked so fresh and clean they could have been minted that morning, in the chilly air that carried on its sleek back the sounds of nightbirds and the splash of fish —maybe this far south a gator tail —I watched the two of them sitting across from me, as Frank, snugged behind her broad shoulders, combed out Hazel’s hair with slow, gentle strokes.
The name on the card was Clark: they were to meet in the ten-minute waiting zone just outside departures. But Clark was late and the morning frigid. McRae got back in his car, drove around, parked in the lot, and walked into baggage claim.
I was on the back porch washing greens when Harold drove around the side of the house with a stolen canoe on top of the truck and a bushel of oysters in back.
“I thought you were down fishing on the flats,” I said as he came up the steps with the oysters in a sack over his shoulder.
Aside from the nights she worked, Miss Adele tried not to mess much with the East Side. She’d had the same sunny rent-controlled studio apartment on Tenth Avenue and Twenty-Third since ’93, and loved the way the West Side communicated with the water and the light, loved the fancy galleries and the big anonymous condos, the High Line funded by bankers and celebrities, the sensation of clarity and wealth.
There are four hundred fifty-seven names for heroin. I have learned eighty-two of them. The drug sellers tell me the names, the pushers, the smack heads, the needle-specked little boys pulling their pants down to display their swollen red puds tell me