Gale Massey and Louise Marburg met in 2016 at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference over a tarot card consultation. Discovering a shared interest in exploring the dark side of human nature, they immediately clicked and have been friends and writing…
September Every day we met for lunch in the art classroom in the school’s east wing. It was the woodshop before the woodshop closed—a cavernous space full of defanged band saws and belt sanders stewing in desuetude. The art…
Moores lived next door. He worked construction; she stayed home. I don’t know how old he was, but I remember that on her birthday, she turned twenty-two. It seemed old. I was twelve. Moores had a baby, Sidney. Their…
I am humming along to Lucky Dube’s voice over the radio on the windowpane. The cavernous room swallows his tenor, leaving his words bare, airy, like scattered feathers in the sun. I do not know what it means to…
By Lee Upton • Probably like many writers I’m protective toward my characters—even though I put them in impossible situations or give them unfulfillable longings. I pretty much pickle them in vulnerability. Sometimes I let them avoid any action…
In Katya’s house there are eight women who will never leave. They are splayed across a big, black, L-shaped couch in various states of beatific decline at two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. They are arranged haphazardly: Some dozing…
Essay by Jahzerah Brooks • The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival is, at its core, a story about tearing down and building up. In this debut novel set against the backdrop of a working carnival and a wartime munitions factory,…
Hunger never came naturally to me. As a baby, I didn’t cry for milk, preferring to gaze at the mold-splashed ceiling and grab at dust motes, twining my tiny hands through their light. Elaine told me this was because…
By Audrey T. Carroll • Dreams have woven their way into fiction from The Iliad to The Lord of the Rings and beyond. They can, of course, serve all kinds of purposes—deepening understanding of a character’s fears, desires, or…
You came and I was longing for you You cooled my heart burning with desire. — Sappho, fr. 48 The days run together now Monday is a Wednesday is a Saturday is a Thursday and most days I…
The night before I drafted this piece in a workshop, I had been reading A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes and sharing sections such as “The Orange” and “Blue Coat and Yellow Vest” with John, my husband, the unnamed lover in “Like Water Flowing.” If you haven’t read this particular book by Barthes, I can’t recommend at this moment a more tender and empathetic meditation on love and desire. I lingered on “Love’s Languor,” the “subtle state of amorous desire, experienced in its dearth, outside of any will-to-possess,” where Barthes quotes a beautiful and evocative translation of Sappho’s fragment 31. When Kathy Fish directed the workshop participants the following day to write with an intentional scaffolding of structure, I immediately reached for Sappho to capture the emotional experience of desire for John in the context of the overwhelming blursday sense of existence that had become texturized and demarcated by our lovemaking.
Only, the draft veered away from passion toward wearying and quotidian concerns—the unrelenting pressure of the pandemic, our mutual and divergent pasts, what we each bring to a new, second marriage, the noise and distractions of other people, parenting under tremendous stress. Life, the living, and loss perpetually intrude upon lovers living in time. And so, the temporal setting of this storied piece of creative nonfiction is one year into the global pandemic, a glimpse of when I became grounded and isolated at the home I share with John and his children—my stepchildren—in Durham, North Carolina, along with the strangeness and panic of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the fear and ache of living away from my young adult daughter for the first time, and the inevitable unraveling of our lives.
If there is a particular reader, it is John, except that I invite others in, don’t I?
I’m sharing our love story.
APRIL BRADLEY is a Durham, North Carolina-based writer and editor. Her work appears in such publications as CHEAP POP, JMWW, Heavy Feather Review, Narratively, New Flash Fiction Review, and South Florida Poetry Journal. She is the publisher and editor of Ruby and serves as an associate editor for fiction at Pidgeonholes and as a submissions editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. April is a Best American Essays, Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions nominee and a graduate of Yale Divinity School. Find her on Twitter @april_bradley.
