Everyone but You (eBook)

Sandra Novack (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2011 | 1. Auflage
288 Seiten
Random House Publishing Group (Verlag)
978-0-679-64397-5 (ISBN)

Infos

Sandra Novack has earned great acclaim with her short fiction, which has appeared in more than thirty literary venues, including The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, and The Iowa Review. Now, in this new collection of stories, she further demonstrates her mastery of the form while exploring a universal theme: the desire for connection.In “Cerulean Skies,” a wife must deal with her husband’s artistic calling while reexamining the loss of her own creative passion. A young woman is forced to confront the truth of her past, and its affect on her present love life, when she inherits her late dad’s possessions in “My Father’s Mahogany Leg.” In “Memphis” a man walks a delicate line between caring for his schizophrenic brother and keeping his new marriage afloat. “The Thin Border Between Here and Disaster” finds two married college professors faced with the fallout from their divorce, and a boy wrestles with his faith after the death of his mother in “Morty, El Morto.”Fierce, sexual, and contentious, these moving tales place Sandra Novack’s prodigious talent on full display. Everyone but You illuminates the common truths behind some of the most profound moments in our lives.

Textauszug

Novack / EVERYONE BUT YOU

Fireflies

The night I met Lola was the same night Floyd's Used Cars seethed into an inferno. She leaned against a truck, picking pieces of cigarette filter from her tongue while firefighters ran past her, unleashing their coiled hoses and shouting to one another from under insulated coats and oxygen masks. The flames had already consumed the cars on the showroom floor, the chairs, and the rows of flakeboard desks before making an ascent, pushing through the roof and into the night air. Heavy plumes of smoke bloomed against the darkness. It was a dry August. The trees next to the car lot crackled and hissed. Brittle leaves ignited and then floated down around Lola like fireflies.

I felt the heat--intense, raw--I smelled the smoke adrift in the moonless sky, I sensed the possibilities. So when Lola drifted across the car lot to where I stood watching, when she breezily ran her hand over my crotch and said, 'I've always loved a quick blaze, Lucius,' I said, 'Yes.'

I guessed Lola was no more than twenty. In the firelight, her eyes appeared turquoise green, pale like smooth sea glass. Chunks of red hair framed her face and stopped short of her shoulders. Red hair on a girl sends me into a particular meltdown. Pleased with her self-assured groping of a stranger, pleased by my dick's affirmative response, she smiled and then looked around, finally, at the burgeoning crowd, at the people who walked out from their monotonous half-double homes across the street. A gas tank exploded. Smoke mushroomed up into the air and seemed to reflect the illusion of everything: Nothing was substantial and nothing lasted. My hands crawled along Lola's ribs. I kissed her neck--salty, hot from our proximity to the flames. A group of frat boys lingered behind Lola and me, their drink-induced laughter rising in the air as they gave each other high fives. One of the guys, a big, dumb jock, yelled, 'Bring it on. Let's see if you really got it in you.'

Lola seemed to be weighing her possibilities. She stopped my wandering hands for a moment, holding them briefly before letting them climb to her breasts. This acquiescence made most of the frat boys whoop and holler and curse in what amounted to a real scene, the kind of full-throttled force that said anything might happen on a night like this, when a fire blazes out of control and when the city is set to unpredictable motion. Lola searched my face for something familiar. I am not a bad-looking guy. I have a beer gut, yes, but my calves and arms are rock hard. I've been told by my old girlfriend, Sheila, that my dark eyelashes and blue eyes send women into a frenzy. I have two years of community college under my belt, and for someone twenty-six years old, I am aware, almost painfully so, of the larger world around me, which is more than I can say about the other guys I work with at Red Robin. I have a large Adam's apple and am perhaps too tall and (short of the gut) lanky, but Lola was also tall, and slouchy. I considered this fortuitous at the time, a meeting of the heads, lips, and middles.

My name, by the way, is Harold.

Lola turned and stared off into the flames. Fire, it breathes, moves. Smoke suspended in the air above us, and seized my lungs. My eyes burned, watered. Sirens blazed. The windows of Floyd's cracked and buckled. I swooned from the heat and from the close proximity of Lola. She said, 'So you want a girlfriend, Lucius?'

'Not really,' I said. 'Not on a full-time basis. But tonight we can pretend anything goes. Tonight I'll be your Lucius. Tonight I already love you.' Lola looked at me strangely, and then I...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 13.9.2011
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 0-679-64397-4 / 0679643974
• ISBN-13: 978-0-679-64397-5 / 9780679643975