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.
Sky stood in the gray, sepulchral hallway of the University of Michigan library. He was early to return his Snorri Sturluson and Le Ménagier de Paris, both due at 8:00 A.M. And he regretted, he mourned, he pined indifferently, that those great structures of the heart must go back to the shelves in librarian time while he, Skyblue, waited in his skyblue levis, his Botticelli hair, his Billy Budd eyes, himself a gnomon of six feet and 150 pounds of undeveloped imagination, his nose aquiline, his ears quincunxes and his throat a pillar of cleanshaven agility.
The cell was not a literary cell. It was neither Nabokovian nor Kafkaesque. It was just a cell six feet wide, eight feet long and ten feet high. It contained (1) a steel cot, (2) a ventilating window five inches square, (3) no light, (4) a porcelain urinal and (5) Geoffrey Wolgamot, murderer of college students, whose execution was nigh.
Where darkness is on the rocks of the Morula Mountains, the stars twinkle in the frosty night like stars. Cold winds come from the east and thin snow skitters along over the frozen surface of the old snow. Some pines stand and whir in the gusts.
Light striking water in the vase of branches casts a sundog on the pale green blotter of the old man’s desk and he is halfway through the letter he is writing when it dawns on him the friend to whom this letter is addressed is gone. He’s dead, this friend. This friend of his who’d like this letter, how could he forget?
It was the middle of January and there was nothing to look forward to. The radio station went off at dusk and dusk came early in the afternoon and then came the dark and nothing to watch but a bleached out moon lying over fields slick as a frosted cake, and nothing to hear at all.
Each birth is not the creation of a soul but the completion of the transmigration from one body to another. There is no such thing as a new soul.
Mal Vester had a pa who died in the Australian desert after drinking all the water from the radiator of his Land Rover. His momma had died just like the coroner said she had, even though he had lost the newspaper clipping that would have proved it.
The driver and I got a late start. I usually decide on these excursions the night before, but it was late in the morning when I informed the friend who was coming to visit me for the weekend that I had to cancel, it was absolutely necessary for me to cancel.
I took a step further to meet Horace for health, for love, for a leg up.
And at Horace’s everything was gray there with some white accents—and the walls were gray, not paint. They were hung with fabric and he had a gray carpet on the floor.
The flags of the boats in the bay whipped in the wind and the gulls wheeled for snapshots and the sound of bicycle bells fell through the leaves of the chestnut trees and down the cobbled streets, and, on warm afternoons, on the porch of her summer home, Mrs. Harlan Case would often be heard to say, “I would have sown them like beautiful flowers,” for she had wanted many children.