“Petaluma,” by Daniel Tam-Claiborne (Fiction ’20)

Daniel Tam-Claiborne, a 2020 fiction alum, was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “Petaluma” below:

Petaluma

         “Do you ever feel like you’re losing it?” she asks. We just finished dinner—shrimp fajitas from La Cocina—and Chloe glares at me across the table. She’s smiling the smile that, in a former time, I might have perceived as an opening, but by now has already changed into something else.
          “What do you mean?” I say. I’m leaning in too close, I know, my elbows hunched over the table.  I’d insisted on keeping the sitting table, which I bought at an estate sale when Chloe and I moved in together. The rest we split fifty-fifty. It must have looked ridiculous the day I came home with it: a table in the living room and not a single other thing to my name.
          “I wake up in the morning and I can’t find what I left out the night before,” Chloe says, pressing a napkin to her unmade lips.
          “Where all have you looked?” She hasn’t asked me over to her new apartment yet, but I can picture what’s inside.
          “Everywhere,” she says, taking in the whole of the room. The shoji screens are drawn in from the walls and there are candles flickering on the table. It’s a trick I learned from a video a friend posted about how to make plain spaces more intimate. It feels now like we’re floating in a cloud, a refuge of gray and white entirely our own.
          “I swear I think my new place is haunted,” Chloe says. “Like someone is moving my stuff in the night.”
          I stifle a laugh. “Like your clothes are sprouting ears and hopping like a rabbit?”
         “Jun,” she says, rolling her eyes, “I’m serious. Nothing is ever where I left it.”
          I remember when I first moved to San Francisco. Friends lectured me all about soaring rent prices, homelessness, summer nights that made you curse not bringing an extra jacket. But they’d neglected to mention the most basic warning of all.
         “I think I’m the wrong person to ask,” I say, taking a sip from my glass. “My things have a history of disappearing.”

  

Read the story in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-7-daniel-tam-claiborne/