Assistant Editor Sakinah Hofler: From the first sentence to the last, both “Needlework” and “Gotunabe” pull the reader in with their odd, satisfying images. My first thought after reading Barbara Black’s submission was “I feel like I’m in a trance,” and that feeling returned during my rereads. These excerpts from Black’s longer project, Pequeñas Historias Fortificadas or Little Fortified Stories, are microfictions based on port, gin, bourbon, tequila, and scotch. Drink these wonderful pieces up. Can’t wait for the full cocktail of this book~~
To hear Barbara Black read “Needlework,” click below:
Needlework
For the body has its own time, and the stitch can be revoked.
After piercing the linen with the needle she falls into narcoleptic sleep. Within this sleep she sews herself into another dimension, spiderlike, undetected. This world is the inside of a buttercup: luminous. To an observer (of which there are none), she sleeps. One, two seconds go by. In another country a lighthouse keeper in brown stockings stacks sandbags in a storm. Seawater seeps under her door. The sleeping woman smells it. Three, four seconds go by, although these are different, more enduring seconds than the usual ones. They pass like butterfly wings in slow motion. The woman’s mind is a gossamer net, gathering time. Five seconds. In a high mountain meadow in Norway a widow looks out to the peaks beyond, missing her husband. The sleeping woman’s chest contracts. The air is thin. Six seconds. Seven. A young mother in a tropical country watches her five-year-old hang from a guava branch. It is too high. The child doesn’t know. Eight seconds. The sleeping woman’s eyes snap open. A young boy skateboards past her window. It sounds like a train: ka-lak, ka-lak, ka-lak, ka-lak. She pulls out her last stitch and starts again.
To hear Barbara Black read “Gotunabe,” click below:
Gotunabe
The boy lumbered to the gate, body swaying back and forth. I gave him the warm glass of water he had asked for. The lid on his one large central eye descended. “It tastes of tears.” The bottom cuffs of his pants were frayed, and an odor of overripe cucumber came off his body. “I don’t have no home,” he answered, when I asked where he lived. I wondered how the world was for him with that large monocular view. “Freight trains come from far, far away. But when they pass it’s like they’ll drive right through my middle.” He seemed to have perceived my thought. Or maybe everywhere he went with his tattered cowboy suit and his commanding green eye, people asked the same questions. He pulled a chicken foot from his pocket. “This is Graciela. Well, it was.” I admired his fetish and suspected the rest of it was at one time his only friend. I invited him to stand in the shade of the saguaro. He looked up at the looming plant with its five outstretched arms like a beckoning desert goddess. “No. I am Gotunabe. Thank you, Mam. I am my own shade.”
Barbara Black was nominated for the 2019 Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize and won the 2019 Geist Annual Literal Literary Postcard Story. In 2018 she was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and in 2017, won first prize in the Writers’ Union of Canada Short Prose Competition. Look for her on www.barbarablack.ca, @barbarablackwriter and #bblackwrites.
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