RIVER STYX ONLINE
FICTION
FOUR PREPOSITIONS
When the bald spot formed, he started wearing a yarmulke, exactly the right size.
GUEST OF HONOR
Creating stresses in the social fabric was one of Fräulein Agata’s great joys, so when the general’s friend, a society lady, asked her to bring the school’s top students, my German teacher brought us instead. None of us marriageable by real standards—me, basically a penniless orphan, Hanna, not a student and Jewish enough not to mix her milk and her meat, and Olga, with a pince-nez and stern expression that Freud would have described as castrating. It’s possible Elsie was with us too. I keep forgetting about her.
BRANCHES OF THE SERVICE
The attaché looked out the window and knew that something was wrong about the wing. He absolutely knew. But he couldn’t say what he knew other than he knew and that he couldn’t say what he knew.
THE LAST THURSDAY OF THE CENTURY
As winter nears its end, the sky acts like a lunatic, its behavior mirroring the chaos of Iranian lives preparing for Nowruz. When you think that spring has arrived, snow appears outside the window, causing confusion between Nowruz and Christmas. One can only hope that an evening thunderstorm doesn’t kill the newly planted violets. Perhaps the sky is reflecting on the past year; Saturday thinking about summer, Wednesday evoking the memories of autumn. Maybe it’s showing its sense of humor in preparation for the upcoming Nowruz. Either way, the old adage rings true: “The sky goes crazy before Nowruz,” making it difficult to predict what the afternoon will bring based on the morning.
STRAYS
There was something in the way the kid worked, as if pushing around stacks of pressure-treated two by sixes in the heat wasn’t actually hard, as if the wood weighed nothing at all, as if gravity chose not to assail him while it pressed down on everyone else. The kid had shown up on island two weeks ago, at the start of August, and ever since, Thad had been watching the boy.