Great new(ish) stories from around the Web. Forget work for a minute and read a story. It’s good for you.
– Quietly, covertly, bears have toddled into the name Berlin. They took the Polabian-Slavic route through the root word brl, meaning swamp, but once the residents of Berlin levied the swampy banks of the river Spree, the bears walked right into the T-shirts and key pendants of tourists, they stuck their tongues out at the world from the city’s coat-of-arms and, after their winter sleep, they reared up into the caps of skaters and the balustrades of bridges. Instead of damp socks and riverine dwellings sloshed by swollen waters, people started to think of these shaggy ones when they uttered the word Berlin, even after the bears fled South. – Aleš Šteger in Conjunctions
– Ed never held it against us, even though he’d never smoked. At lunch, he’d walk serenely through our cloud to his Toyota, where he slugged whiskey. He was depressing his brain function, depleting its oxygen supply, with the booze on top of the Vicodin he took for the transplant pain. Someone really ought to have a talk with him, we’d say as we watched him stroll off in his green scrubs toward the long guardrails that hugged the parking lot. — Jean Kane in American Short Fiction
– It’s Rita, my brother’s wife, and we’re sitting at a booth at The Flamingo, a club east of Millington, away from Navy row as they call it, where strip clubs and night houses line both sides of Highway 51. Rita is across from me with a box of Kleenex, and this is the third time she’s called me and we’ve met, the third time since my brother Del spilled his guts to her about a woman in Singapore named Sashi or Shasha. He was in the Navy then, two years ago, lonely, apparently. — John S. Walker in Carve Magazine
– Mama Rita is wearing a robe and slippers. Her dark skin and white braids has her looking like an old photograph, and I wonder how long she’s been in business. She bolts the door and turns her back to us. I finger the button hole of my blazer and watch as she walks the few feet from doorway to kitchen—a pigeon-toed shuffle. A skinny dog sniffs my crotch then curls up by Mama’s feet. Something’s on the stove. She cuts a tomato left waiting on the cutting board. It’s in fourths, spilling it seeds, before into the pot it goes. — Rachel Ephraim in Word Riot
– While the baby burned, the substitute teacher said second graders ought not be pushed. She led the games. Around the World. Heads Up Seven Up. Monkey in the Middle. At recess she stuck another nicotine patch and talked cigarettes with the phys ed lesbians. After lunch she showed a cartoon movie. At the buses she said Hardbutt. Mrs. Green is a Hardbutt. Who said this job ain’t easy? Look at them angelfaces. — Kyle Minor in Juked
