“In a Small, Square Woodland,” by Steve Lane (Fiction ’20)

Steve Lane, a 2020 fiction grad, was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of Lane’s story below:

In a Small, Square Woodland

  The apartment thing was weighing on the man. The dog went on yanking him down the dim path, veering into the woods first one way then the other, per some plan of her own. There was no getting away from anything; the back decks of the nearest houses were too near, and from where the path doubled over the shoulder of a hill, the lighted shopping centers by the highway stood out in clear, crisp miniature against the twilight. He could hear but no longer see the stream that split the preserve’s handful of November beech-woods in two. He let himself be pulled along, risking a stumble.
       Finding a new roommate — that would be a bother. Lissa had been bothersome too, no question. She had found him two years ago, from an ad he’d put in coffee shops, with the little strips you could tear off. She’d brought the little strip to their first meeting; in a burst of enthusiasm, he’d written her into the lease, which they now both more or less regretted. She worked two jobs, one at a Whole Foods, the other at a pottery co-op, and always paid the rent on time. Sundays she slept till noon. She left hair in the shower, and buttery knives on the countertop, but nothing worse. So where had her odd, unappeasable grievances come from? That he’d drunk her milk (he hadn’t), that he’d been hostile about the use of shared space (he had asked her to pick up some magazines in the TV room once). That his habits were stressful. A headlamp moved along the trail below, whether toward him or away from him he could not tell.

Read the rest of this story here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-9-steve-lane/