Last week we leaked a few lines from poems in our upcoming issue—and now we’re following up with a spate of prose teasers. Good stuff coming, readers! A mere month away . . .
David Yost, from “The Carousel Thief”:
Farzad’s first experience with competitive eating had been at a picnic table outside a slaughterhouse in Evansville, Indiana: the Second Fried Cow Brain International Challenge.
Vladimir Vulovic, from “Why Chess?”:
In chess, a queen is the strongest piece, but it is the fate of a much weaker king that determines the game. Does chess need queens as hunters and kings as prey to be interesting? If the powers of kings and queens were reversed, would chess turn dull, with kings too strong to be checkmated?
Emma Törzs, from “Safe Word”:
Three years had gone by since Gretchen had been killed, and this past year, working for Lisa, he’d talked about her more than ever before—but on some level the woman he spoke of was just a construct of his sister, a symbol instead of a real person. A well-recited story. It wasn’t until moments like this—alone in his dark kitchen, cheek against his refrigerator—that he really thought of her, her memory pummeling him . . . , a steady rain of anguished, unrepentant fists.
Elisabeth Cohen, from “Mollusks and Optics”:
You regret naming this child Percy. It was a compromise: You wanted Ethan, and your spouse wanted Walter. It seemed a sensitive name for the bookish child you envisioned, who would read Tolkien in an armchair for hours as your older children pursued their complicated social agendas and you cheerfully pulverized the hummus. It now seems unduly like the name of a victim.
