Stories, Etc.: Selected Short Fiction

By E. M. SCHORB

These previously published stories and short fictions, whether realistic or surreal, are always imaginative and sometimes startling. On the opening page, we meet a man who takes a walk at Coney Island, writes an open letter of confession in the sand, believing it will vanish with the tide, but shockingly discovers that his secrets have been revealed to the world.

We find a man who buys a living room carpet that becomes a terrifying jungle and a man who just missed becoming a movie star. There is also the manager of a shop in Harlem whose salesmen peddle portraits of Christ whose eyes seem to follow the viewer and who unconsciously overcomes his racial bias, back in the Sixties. In Bad Trip, a man kidnaps and murders a younger version of himself in the desert and lives to tell the tale.

Nothing Forever, C. Kenneth Pellow notes in Writers Forum where the story first appeared, is constructed almost precisely backwards, although a more useful key to opening the storys meanings may be the metaphor, the trope, embodied in AND/OR.

There is a fairy tale about a golden squirrel kidnapped in Czarist Russia and a fable featuring a white stallion whose fierce fight for freedom gives hope to the homeless huddled around a campfire deep in the Great Depression. (This story was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.)

Schorbs stories are various in form and style but uniformly entertaining. Enjoy!

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496953148

E. M. SCHORB

E.M. Schorb began publishing in small literary magazines as an undergraduate at New York University.  His work has since appeared widely, here and abroad, in such publications as The Yale Review, The American Scholar, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Notre Dame Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and The Chicago Review .  He has received Fellowships from The Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, The North Carolina Arts Council, and The Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation.  Murderer's Day, his third collection, was a recipient of the Verna Emery Poetry  Prize and published by Purdue University Press.  He now resides with his wife, Patricia, in North Carolina.

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© 2014 E.M. Schorb. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Published by AuthorHouse   11/20/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-5315-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-5316-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-5314-8 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

The Moving Finger

Open Letter, Closed Book

Red State Blues

Ready to Walk

Signs

Charlie … For the Lord

Snowbound

A Fable

The Kaiser Comes to Orlando

Nothing Forever

The New Green Carpet

The Sandal Shop

The Campers

The Liar

A Very Practical Nurse

Last Exit to East Hampton

Darkling, I Listen …

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

Marijuana at Monticello

Detour

Deep-Sea Drifter or Weightless

An Experiment in Governance

The Golden Squirrel

The Man Who Sold Words

Movie Money

The Thin Disease

Pour Les Oiseaux or One Hardboiled Egg

The Sinister Clothesline

Murphy’s Star

Bad Trip

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the editors of the magazines in which these stories were first published.

Best New Writing 2015: Bad Trip

Camera Obscura: Red State Blues

Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts: Deep Sea Drifter

Eclectica: Detour

ELM: Eureka Literary Magazine: A Fable

Gargoyle: Deep-Sea Drifter (under title Weightless)

Ginosko Literary Journal: Darkling, I Listen …

Modern Day Fairy Tales: The Golden Squirrel

OffCourse: A Literary Journal: The Man Who Sold Words, Murphy’s Star, A Very Practical Nurse

Oxford Poetry (England): Last Exit to East Hampton

Quick Fiction: The Campers

The Bangalore Review (India): Movie Money

The Carolina Quarterly: Snowbound

The Chattahoochee Review: The Liar

The Great American Poetry Show: The Kaiser Comes to Orlando, Pour les Oiseaux

The GW Review: The Sinister Clothesline

The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal: The Moving Finger

The Interpreter’s House (England): The Thin Disease

The Kit-Cat Review: What I Did on My Summer Vacation

The Mississippi Review: An Experiment in Governance

The New Laurel Review: Ready to Walk

The Roanoke Review: Charlie … for the Lord

The World of English (China): A Fable in English and Chinese

University of Windsor Review (Canada): Signs

Wascana Review (Canada): Open Letter, Closed Book

Willow Review: The New Green Carpet

Writers’ Forum: Nothing Forever

Special thanks to Shea Thompson who directed the premier performance of Marijuana at Monticello at the M.T. Pockets Theatre, featuring Glen Clifton and Lousia Copeland.

An Experiment in Governance was anthologized in Best American Fantasy.

The Sandal Shop is an excerpt from the Eric Hoffer Award winning novel, A Portable Chaos.

for Desi

The Moving Finger

THE MOVING FINGER

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

—Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Edward FitzGerald

Sad, suffering a mild depression, I went to Coney Island one winter day to walk along the beach and see the sea, when I came upon what I took to be a huge sandbox, four boards, at least twenty feet each, joined into a square, brimming with wet sand of a somewhat different shade than the rest of the beach, a sort of olive drab, and I immediately saw in this square a frame suitable for writing. It was a cold windy day and there was nobody about to bother me as I focused my attention on what I would write on this beautiful big page that looked up at the sky. I decided to write my sins for God to see, or perhaps for low-flying airplane travellers, or balloon people, anyway somebody up in the flowing clouds. Of course, one of my sins is that I am always looking for a way out, so I was counting on a high tide or rain or snow to wash my sins away before anyone got a good look at what I’m made of, deep inside. I decided I would tell the absolute truth about myself and my many misdeeds. I would attempt to do what Jean Jacques Rousseau meant to do in his Confessions, but did not succeed in doing; I would attempt to be perfectly honest, absolutely honest, come water or high hell. And so, having a tendency to hyperbole, another of my many sins, I went to great lengths to defame myself, mixed emotions rocking my heart, forcing me to stop several times in order to throw up on the beach—not of course, in my beautiful frame. With first thoughts best thoughts in mind, I did not want anything I scratched in the olive drab slurry to be smudged or lost to the sky by being covered with nervous vomit. And I told of my misprisions until the huge page was covered. I signed my confession at the bottom and placed my address and phone number below my signature, then threw the stick down and surveyed my work. Confession is good for the soul, I had always heard, and there it was, my masterpiece, the truth and more than the truth about me. The work had taken most of the afternoon and the sun began to set out at sea. I was exhausted with all this truth-telling. I looked once more at my huge page of sins, and walked on along the shore where the tide was rising, soon to wash away all that I had written. Tired as I was, I felt new life surging through me, an exhilaration, for the worst was said and done and over. I slept well that night for the first time in weeks. I rose from my bed feeling like a new man, buoyant, weightless, with a new life before me, free of the terrible burden of my sinful past. I resolved to live in a new way, clean, straight, honorable, fruitful, with malice toward none. The sandbox had turned me into a child again, and I whistled my way through the day. That night I turned on the evening news to see what sins had been committed by the rest of the world that day, when one item caught my attention. A man had written a full confession on a cement slab at Coney Island. The slab had been intended to hold a concession stand. The phone rang, and I realized my voice mail was full of messages. Most of them were crank calls, many containing improper suggestions. Some gave me the news that I was in the papers, on TV and the net. One was from the police, another from the DA’s office. I was to be called before a Grand Jury. Several others from various priests and ministers—You need spiritual help, they claimed. A psychiatrist offered me his couch and a lifetime of psychoanalysis, free of charge. The contractor who had laid the cement slab offered to reconstruct my nose but opined that he would settle for a law suit and a nice chunk of money. Several lawyers offered to fend off any lawsuits that might be brought against me, thus relieving my anxiety about the contractor. Finally, my girlfriend left a message to say that she was breaking off with me, a truly corrupt and perverted personality.

Open Letter, Closed Book

OPEN LETTER, CLOSED BOOK

Veilsville’s quiet. Wind’s playing low tunes through the whitened, skeletonized trees in the woods surrounding the house. I survive the nights with sleeping pills and bourbon, dull books and dying fires. But the days, George!

When I stepped out to collect the half-frozen milk this morning, a young woman poet was in the hammock on the porch. Late November! Bittercold! She lay snoring in a thin dress under a raincoat without a lining. Another of my crazy conquests. They come from all over, everywhere, anywhere! This was a good-looker. You’d be surprised at how many are good-looking. What do they want? I’m a serious man. I’m a heart-broken man. Don’t they know? Where’s all that much talked of poetic sensitivity? Can you imagine me, of all people, with stalking fans? It’s too fantastic. Sometimes I think I’ve gone mad, that I’m hallucinating all this.

What was it? A year ago? A year ago! Here I was, a plain ordinary Professor of English in the English Department of a little backwater, jerkwater college with an enrollment of 600 students in the unheard of hamlet of Veilsville, Tennessee—and, George, I was happy! You, who weren’t even satisfied to hold a chair in literature at one of the best—if not, etc.—Ivy League schools in the country; you, who must have power in New York as a critic; you, sophisticate, bon vivant, etc.; you, who have never been happy—you would not and probably still cannot believe it; but I was happy. I remember your constant jibes; your: Why bury yourself with the hillbillies in the Appalachians? Your Erewhon/Nowhere ribbing. But George, you were fully grown, a mature man. I’ve only recently been born. At forty!

I interrupted this letter for a few minutes to send my young stalker back to bed. Can you imagine? She’s about twenty and simply steaming for me. Think of it! Charlie Fallon, a sex object! It’s so ludicrous it must be true. Now don’t cluck your tongue. Yes, I let her in—yes, I let her stay. Why not? She’s of age, and I’ve never been so lonely in my life. Maybe she’ll help. I don’t know. Her poetry’s execrable but her legs are great; and she must be healthy or she’d be sick from sleeping out last night. Not a clogged sinus do I detect. Don’t worry about me; it doesn’t matter anyway.

What I mean is, George, that the past—one might say my pre-birth years, the ones from that false start my mother gave me to that period of a year or so ago—seems to me now like some sweet dead happy dream. I’m in the real world now, bloody born at last. Now I’m like you—tough old George—in a way. Except—I have a dream of happiness and yes even of beauty to recall. I can draw on it, like a big bank account. The Pulitzer was nothing, George. I’m going to be a great poet now. I hurt enough to send me right up to and on past the Nobel and into history. What poor Kathleen always wanted!

I suppose you see them occasionally. The cocktail circuit, or The White Horse, or wherever the literary chic waste their breath these days. Pardon my ignorance. I was a literary anchorite. I never knew that life. Whistler is a good poet—hell, a fine poet, maybe a great one—but he’s had no luck. Not really. How odd that I of all people should have had such luck! Strange, strange luck! Whistler offended too many important people. But five fine books! And I, with just my one absurd sad long account of forebemoaned moan, and suddenly—as one of the New York papers put it—I’m a Cinderella poet (my God!), a Big Prize Winner! I’m more popular—I shy from the word famous—even more academically respected (but there I’ve got Whistler who never stopped to pick up a degree) than poor Kathleen’s hero roaring boy. Add to that, that, at the age of forty (now forty-one) my ridiculous career, unlike Whistler’s, has been called meteoric. The world is truly tilted. And that embarrassing letter I wrote to my subscribers a year ago, when I was in the middle of my worst agony and confusion. Did you ever see it? I don’t suppose so. You never would subscribe to what you called Charlie’s Little Poetaster’s Journal. I can hear you now: Don’t encourage him. If you do, he’ll stay buried out there in the boondocks forever. Charlie’s a dear soul. He’s got talent, but he wants bringing out. He’s pathologically retiring. No, George: perhaps I was simple but I wasn’t sick. Now I’m sick—and I’ll never be able to be simple again.

When I look over copies of A Poet’s Journal now, I can’t believe that I was its editor, that I chose the pathetic (sometimes bathetic) poetic stuff that mimeos its pages. Was that Charlie Fallon? Did I think such stuff of merit? It’s a wonder you didn’t kick me down the stairs, George, as it’s said Schopenhauer’s mother did him. But, you see, I must have been a happy man. Innocent beyond belief. But nothing, George, absolutely nothing, had ever gone wrong for me. Now I understand that I didn’t understand poetry at all, though I taught it. Think! I spent my summers at The Writers’ Camp, giving my seminar on Poe and the Dark Side of the Mind! Well, here’s a copy of the letter I sent out to the subscribers