As promised last Monday, here’s our most recent installment of “Why We Like it.” It was almost a full month ago that graduate student and fiction writer Ian Wissman break-danced into our office because he was excited about a story. There’s nothing unusual about this. It’s a tradition in our office. Except this time Ian’s break dancing morphed into something we’ve never seen before. At first we thought it was an especially mournful blend of Vaganova method pointe work and vintage electric boogaloo. However, when we studied the video footage backward at high speed, we realized that Ian was carefully spelling out the following thoughts letter-by-letter with his body:
Ian Wissman: Micah Riecker’s standout “The Drowned Girl” (6.2) has landed him a spot in the upcoming New Stories from the Midwest for reasons that go without saying to those who have read the story. Riecker’s setup is clever—we’re baited by a father-son moment, a discussion of girls; or rather, the drowned girl young Rick has fallen in love with after two days at his family’s lake house—but just as quickly the focus shifts to the father-narrator’s relationship with his estranged wife, his son’s infatuation merely a catalyst for the man’s reflection. Especially striking is the interplay between Riecker’s risky narrative and his beautiful prose. Moments of absurdity slip delicately into poignancy when the father—fantasizing about the youthful beauty of the drowned girl who daily rises from her watery grave to date his son—thinks back to his fleeting love of the boy’s mother, Ellen. As he wades into the middle of the lake seeking physical contact with the drowned girl, he recalls intimacy with Ellen: “Then I began to touch her, and she spoke to me in Latin, whispering the names of what I touched. The bone by her neck, after I unbuttoned her shirt, smooth as carved soap, became the clavicular head, and it was as if I’d never touched her there.” Shrouded in such language, the father’s initially creepy fascination with the drowned girl is complicated by our awareness of his longing for what he has lost, and our sympathy carries us through the horrifying scene at the story’s end.
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