Fiction alum Candace Walsh was recently featured in Entropy Magazine. Read an excerpt of “The Birds: Little Birds” below:

The Birds: Little Birds

Before we were told to avoid air travel, but after the lines at Costco were thirty people deep, the house finches chose our ledge.

Through the window I saw one brindled dun and gray, cream-rimed at her wing’s scallops and striped breast, her mate the same but red-capped and cloaked. Tightly-locused hopping on their splinter-fine feet. Heads domed and darting. My hands washed the dishes with acorn-scented soap. My winter ears drank in their susurrating chirps.

We’d lived in the house less than a year. I thought, it’s lovely to be doing the dishes with a view of a little side porch with a pitched roof, boards painted gray and white with birds to match, our narrow muddy driveway, and beyond that, a grassy field.

* * *

Before there were cases in more than eight states, but after I mixed up a batch of aloe and vodka hand sanitizer because Purell was sold out, I flew to a conference after Helen said, I’m only gonna say it once. I think you should stay home.

Of course I went anyway. She’s the cautious one, I’m the queen of cockamamie schemes. I am the gas and she is the brake. Sometimes I get to bring us someplace far and fast. Sometimes she shuts it all down. Mostly we glide and lurch and rev our way through.

I returned on a Sunday morning red-eye. As always, my absence had sparked Helen’s drive for home improvement in ways my presence dulled.

I painted the mailbox, she said, as if she’d merely cloaked the metal thing with spray paint instead of applying her trompe l’oeil talent and toil to it. She transformed the flat-bottomed metal canister into a mini version of our house: white siding, smoke-gray shutters and window boxes, charcoal-shingled roof.

I imagined her standing out beside it last week in the tall ochre nudged by spring green shoots, as intermittent cars drove by too fast, wearing a baseball hat to thwart the wind’s reckless quest to flop her pewter hair over squinting blue eyes, paint brush in one of her sturdy-fingered hands, palette in the other.

“I love it.” I hugged her. “I’m sorry you stood out in the cold, though.”

“Silly. I unscrewed it from the post and painted it in my studio.”

“So handy,” I said, and she smiled, sun glinting off her right canine.

I went to bed without showering off the air travel taint. When she got in our bed beside me, our lungs quickened and our blood warmed and fluxed. Our bodies were quick to notch us together, slow and then fast, bringing me the last lengths home.

Read this piece in its entirety here: https://entropymag.org/the-birds-little-birds/

Fiction faculty member Peter Orner, along with 2020 fiction graduate Alberto Reyes Morgan, recently discussed “Luvina,” by Juan Rulfo, on Texas Public Radio.

Orner also recently wrote for The Believer. Read an excerpt of “Notes in the Margin (Part V)” below:

Notes in the Margin (Part V)

Robinson

It’s another scene at the kitchen table in a book of kitchen-table scenes. Morning after morning, night after night, the three of them gather at the kitchen table. I don’t have the novel here. It’s January 2020 and I’m on a bus in New Hampshire, heading home after a funeral. 

Some books you don’t need to hold to read. 

Marilynne Robinson’s Home. A reader might be forgiven if the kitchen scenes jumble in memory. But the one I am thinking of is unusual because it breaks a certain established pattern and it’s only, if I remember, fifty or sixty pages into the novel. Glory, her brother Jack, and their father, Reverend Boughton, are all at the kitchen table in Gilead. Jack hasn’t been home very long. Maybe a week at this point. 

Yet after twenty years (the amount of time Ulysses was away from Ithaca), heis, finally, home. Jack is no Ulysses. He’s been an ordinary failure, mostly down in St. Louis. I’m not sure calling him “prodigal” would be accurate. In my dim recollection of the parable, the prodigal son squanders his inheritance. Though it depends on how you define inheritance: it’s clear that Jack doesn’t have much to squander, at least in a material sense. Brains and charisma, sure, but these he’s still got, even in his current ragged state. 

Jack is someone—there are so many—who, once he stumbled, wasn’t able to stop falling down. Glory, too, has limped home. She hasn’t done such a bang-up job out in this misnomer of a real world, either. They’re a family of eight children. The other six are scattered throughout the Midwest, enjoying varying degrees of prosperity. They’ve got kids, jobs, busy lives. Teddy’s a doctor. The others, I forget, but they’re doing better than all right. Glory, though a dedicated teacher, is childless. Her engagement has fallen through. The guy turned out to be a cad. We’re in Iowa during the Eisenhower administration. It makes sense, a spinster daughter returning home to care for her aging father. 

So we know why Glory’s come back. But what about Jack? Glory and Jack’s mother died a few years earlier. On the long list of ways in which Jack’s let down the family: he didn’t turn up at her funeral. I can understand it. A funeral’s a tough way to make a reentrance. But why has he now reappeared in Gilead? And after all these years? I’m not sure we ever get an entirely straight answer, and for this I’m grateful. I wonder if there just comes a time, in all our lives, when we wash up at the only door that will open to us. 

Read the piece in its entirety here: https://believermag.com/notes-in-the-margin-part-v/

JOYLAND recently published “Family Ledger,” an excerpt of a novel-in-progress by 2009 fiction graduate Tommy Kim. Read an excerpt of “Family Ledger” below:

Family Ledger

She had not been invited to the wedding, but decorum—which was really nothing more than a mask for frailty and fear—would not stop her from attending. This was her niece after all, her deceased brother’s daughter whose choice in husband, if anyone with common sense examined this misadventure, was made out of grief and panic. It was not so much that he was not Korean—he was American—it was that he had not been vetted through Suk Ja’s scrupulous methods for determining the worthiness of a mate. No matter. This child still inherited the love Suk Ja had for her brother, and she was required to attend this wedding to provide the highest offering of love for the living and the dead. That was how important this wedding was—rotted sapling of a niece notwithstanding.

Suk Ja sat reading her NIV bible at the kitchen table. Her son, who was a groomsman for Janet’s wedding, appeared in the kitchen wearing his suit. 

“I’m going early,” he said. 

“Of course you are going early,” she said. “Being a member of the wedding party is quite the responsibility, especially when trying to corral the Kang women into their pens.”

He sat across from Suk Ja. His leather shoes squeaked.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said.

“And I am supposed to supply you with these elusive words?” she said.

Her son looked upon her in his fragile way. How the boy had been lavished with ill-treatment by his father, that coward who was now living in New York with his new bride, although Suk Ja and he had divorced some 15 years ago. It was unfortunate, the tendencies one inherits from one’s parents. In his embarrassingly earnest way, the boy plodded toward the door with his usual preoccupations—what was that boy always thinking about that was not about now?

“Stand up straight,” she said. “The suit makes you look short.”

“Call me if you need anything,” he said.

“Don’t play with such false charity,” she said. 

“Why do you always…” he said, trying in his feeble way to place the perfect word onto his lips. 

“Please, tell me,” she said. “Why do I always what? Tolerate mistreatment from my family?” 

“None of this is my fault,” he said.

“Be specific when you speak. What is ‘this?’ And you are slouching again. Up,” she said, pushing out her chest. “You are now twenty-one. There are no excuses for poor posture or your roundabout talking. You are a man now. Go straight.”

“Do you want me to choose between you and Janet?” he said. “Being offered such a choice really reflects my great upbringing.”

“Again with your refusal to accept responsibility. You are not offered anything. You are supposed to take,” she said. “Just go.”

She said this as if to hurry and immerse herself back in the biblical texts, a tendency to wholly be inside of the moment, ignoring the grievances of the past or the causal nature of the future. According to her sisters, Suk Ja struggled with understanding that this moment actually had a consequence for a time later in life, a habit of disregard which was partly to blame for her ban from the wedding. Oh Janet, her innocent niece—she knew that Suk Ja’s three older sisters would employ lupine tactics to perform properly at the wedding, but Suk Ja would not play such games and would not hesitate to elevate a disagreement on seating arrangements into global nuclear warfare. The glowering of these feckless siblings would not be ignored, and each of their actions would be responded to with fair and equal force. It was not her fault she would not submit to the gaming of her sisters. In any case, Suk Ja would never lose. 

When her son left, she pulled the pictures of her brother’s high school graduation out from the shoebox under her bed. Such handsome cheekbones. The prepossessing face that had been eroded by age and sickness. The last month of his life had been especially difficult as his cheeks, bloated from dialysis, submerged his princely eyes into the yellow folds of jaundice. Oh the sisters and their meddling! It was not Suk Ja’s fault that her brother loved her the most. But of course they poisoned her niece’s thoughts and spread rumors about Suk Ja. When her brother’s wife died ten years before his own death, Janet had been vulnerable to the influence of the sisters, who all vied with one another to take over as Janet’s mother figure. How she missed her lovely brother! The suffering he would have endured knowing his little sister was mistreated by the others.  Hidden at the bottom of the shoebox was a thick envelope. Inside were the green striations of cash she would give to her niece.

She could easily persuade her oldest sister to disclose the location of the wedding. For good measure, Suk Ja revisited her favorite section of Psalms: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?”

She quickly changed out of her clothing. She had stopped wearing a bra after her double mastectomy.  These old sutures angled downward like closed, benevolent eyes. By now the scars were just another marker of loss. She had lost count of all that had disappeared in her life. Better to live now than wait for possibilities later, as possibilities were the futile wishes of the foolish. Blink and another thing gone. She threw on the pink and blue hanbok dress she had worn for her son’s dol celebration twenty years ago. In the last moments of her brother’s life, she’d caressed his stubbled cheeks and promised she would take care of his daughter. This promise was a responsibility that none of the sisters would defile with their meddling. She would not allow it. 

Read the piece in its entirety here: https://joylandmagazine.com/fiction/family-ledger/

Sarah Cypher, a 2020 fiction graduate, was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “The Lord’s Tower Had Many Fine Rooms,” a selection from a novel-in-progress, below:

The Lord’s Tower Had Many Fine Rooms (excerpt from the novel The Skin and Its Girl)

       I met my father’s house in the scorching green heart of an Oregon summer.
       This house was a sort of enchantment. It had a gambrel roof that softened the crisp eaves and long porch. Inside, it was full of hardworking windows and honey-colored wooden floors. I’d never seen a place so clean. A weekly housekeeping service left the evidence of their work only in the absences: no crumbs, no smears, no laundry. He’d bring me back from the doctor, where people kept taking long tubes of my blood and little chips of my body, and the house’s very air would feel different, as though it had been shaken out and scrubbed; floorboards giving off an amiable gleam as though these rooms were friendly but kept forgetting who we were.
       Only his furniture was old and personal. Its walnut feet were heavy like wolf paws, and under its patina, the vanity table in my second-story bedroom had a rippling muscularity, as though it might go padding through the house at night. He decorated with the family relics, including a pair of antique cannonballs, and also gave me his mother’s crib, telling me only that the row of tiny punctures along the rail were from her teeth. He put it in my room and told me everything here was mine.
       I stood on the mattress at night, feeling the teeth marks in the wood, tracing with my fingers everything I could reach. The caulking around the bottom windowpane was whiter and rougher than the caulking around the top. This room, in other circles, had achieved a kind of fame. But it didn’t feel like the site where he and my mother had wept and shouted until she’d thrown one of the cannonballs through the glass. No, the room felt serene, even stable, like the surface of a frozen pond.
       What to make of this all-of-a-sudden father?
       He had been to medical school, before an accident that had taken his hand. We spent hundreds of cool hours in his basement office, a room that contained most of his life. The desk lamp was on ten hours at a time throughout his dim autumn workdays, spotlighting a coaster on his desk that always held a mug and drowned teabag. The only other place for adults to sit was a deep chair in the corner whose arm held an open New Yorker. His library took up all the other walls—law books and medical texts that stood in beautiful, soldierly ranks around his desk, giving off the smell of glued leather. Despite the susurration of rain and damp earth around the foundation, the air was warm and dry, incubating what felt like all the knowledge in the world.
       My mother helped often, driving down from the hill to show him what to do with the baby he’d amputated so carefully from her life. Even though the court had agreed to her petition for two days’ custody a week, she came late most evenings to help with dinner and end-of-the-day chores, in the hours when my father’s phantom left hand hurt the worst. She moved between the cutting board and steaming pan, her face a mask I’d never seen before. He sat with his wrist on the granite countertop. Propping a small mirror against the flushed skin of his left inner forearm, he stared hard at the reflection of his right hand in the mirror as it played invisible piano keys, trying to convince his brain that its sinister twin hadn’t been crushed under a falling motorcycle and removed.
       Those evenings, even though my mother never set foot beyond the living room, he always turned on the tall lamp in the basement office, the one that held the New Yorker magazine on the chair. Strange, that magazine was the only item in the house that never got put away; or more truly, it was in its right place already. The fold of its binding was almost gone, and its covers were rippled and stiff with age, showing a pastel map called “New Yorkistan.” Its date was December 10, 2001, the week my mother had thrown the cannonball through the upstairs window and moved out.

Read the passage in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-5-sarah-cypher/