Short Story: “Her Numerous Progeny Prosper and Thrive”
Note: This short story was an “occasional” satire on the relatively-recent death of Queen Elizabeth II, meant to show how ridiculous some of the standards to which various sanctimonious American leftists claimed to hold her would have been in practice.
It is a well-known story, so famed among those interested in this kind of history. On February 6, 1952, a young woman of twenty-five wakes up in a treetop hotel in Kenya, a loft, an eyrie, looking out over verdant wet-season plains. A grim-faced runner comes and tells her to make her way to the nearest telephone, where she is told that her father has died peacefully over the night and she is now the queen and sovereign of vast swathes of the globe.
What does that “sovereign” mean? What might she do with that queenhood? Not much, some argue; some people say that she is a figurehead, a pasteboard mask, an avatar of power rather than someone by whom or with whom or in whom power can actually be used. These people will tell you that she can only act according to the so-called “advice” of her servants, who in turn must be able to win votes in a democratically elected Parliament, and it is that Parliament that can do absolutely anything it likes.
Short Story: “The Thing about HIgh School”
“The thing about high school,” her father said, “is that it’s jocks versus nerds. That’s the basics.”
And she started high school. She did not find it to be jocks versus nerds, exactly.
Short Story: “The Cinephiles”
Historical note: I first conceived of and wrote this story in the year 2018. Make of that what you will.
It was an unseasonable afternoon in late winter and Blaise Bondarenko tracked damp grit into the building. He was here to meet with his film appreciation group for the first time in over a month. There had been legal troubles and Blaise had had to come up with some pretty airtight excuses to avoid them. The weather had been brutally cold as little as a week ago and one of Blaise’s friends was still home sick after being out in it for a few minutes.
Short Story: “The Comet Watchers”
It was a season of unwanted miracles. The world was reeling and kindness seemed expensive. It was the year of the pandemic and the summer of George Floyd. The world lurched closer and closer to some unknown ultimate destination, and Comet NEOWISE appeared in Northern Hemisphere skies.
Short Story: “Critical Lenses on the Film ‘Goncharov’”
Note: This story is a contribution to a fictive body of critical and fan discussion being built around a nonexistent Mafia movie called Goncharov. One can learn the basics of how this discussion came about by searching for the alleged movie’s title. In the Goncharovian spirit of collective authorship and modern myth-making, I’m electing to put this story under a Creative Commons “Attribution” license, the most permissive kind. Anybody can do anything with the material in this story as long as some vague gesture is made towards crediting me with some of the ideas. Many of my own ideas, after all, emerged from the broader atmosphere of improv-like storytelling and mythbuilding that swept the internet in general and the microblogging website Tumblr in particular late last month.
With the recent upsurge of interest in the 1973 Mafia film Goncharov, it behooves the critic to give a brief survey of this film’s previous reception. Critical analysis has focused on several main areas and themes within the film: its sexual elements (in particular the homoerotic undertones between Goncharov and Andrey and between Katya and Sofia) and connected feminist concerns, its religious motifs, its atypicality for an early Martin Scorsese film, and its potential political subtexts, to name just a few. This brief essay will attempt to overview, in an unsystematic way, some of those lenses. Appended are synopses (with much unavoidable repetition) of all cuts and releases of the original film from 1973 through 2003; it remains to be seen whether next year’s fiftieth anniversary release will depart significantly from any of these. Since the focus of this essay is the original film in all its versions, we will not be addressing Quentin Tarantino’s abortive late-1990s remake, or the 1981 Turkish ripoff Moskova’dan dev adam (Mighty Men from Moscow) starring Yavuz Selekman and Cüneyt Arkın. The best treatment of Moskova’dan dev adam in English is a chapter in Yuli Lowe’s 2005 book Remix and Pastiche in Turkish Action Cinema: A Moviegoer’s Guide. Tarantino’s ideas for the attempted 1990s remake, some of which made it in highly variant form into 2009’s Inglourious Basterds, are described in almost all detailed surveys of his oeuvre. Of note regarding the Tarantino concept is that it is generally considered to have a tighter plot than does the cryptic, occasionally slapdash original film.
Short Story: “The Watch and the Windrose”
Once upon a time there was a mechanical watch who fell in love with a rose of the winds. She would visit him at all hours of the day, and she would grace him with her winds in accordance with his hours. Her cold dry tramontanes teased him at midnight and kept him cool at noon; her brisk wet levantes made him worry for his movement in the witching hour and in midafternoon; her siroccos and ostros and libeccios through dawn and through dusk warned him of the dangers of day or of night; at breakfast and dinner her easygoing ponentes entertained him at table and her stiff self-confident mistrals sent him to work or to sleep.
Novella: “The Devil in the Twenty-third Century” (Part Four; Final)
Elmgrove
August 29, 2209
Jess was listening to a “Northies Out Now” demonstration on the radio with a feeling of poised horror just after Cindy and Milt left for the first full school day of the year. She was dreading her tennis date this afternoon because she was fully expecting Etta to try to talk to her about this; Etta almost certainly had very firmly decided views on what was going on, although Jess couldn’t guess what they might be, and she was worried about being expected to have firmly decided views as well and tell Etta about them.
Novella: “The Devil in the Twenty-third Century” (Part Three)
Elmgrove
August 21, 2209
It was less than a week after the first group of refugees arrived on August 14 that problems hosting them started to emerge. The Raffaloviches didn’t have a refugee family themselves, not because they had refused to take one but because the Hewetts across the cul-de-sac had insisted on taking the ones assigned to their street, out of, as they said, Christian charity, a term that Joe did not like to use. Jess and Joe went to the reception that the Hewetts, a couple whose children had all been constituted and were all at college on Mars, gave for these people two days after the Assumption, at which point they found that this particular refugee family involved three parents and everybody had a different last name.
Novella: “The Devil in the Twenty-third Century” (Part Two)
Elmgrove
August 8, 2209
“Are they going to live with us, Mom?” Cindy asked at the bus stop.
“I don’t know where they’re going to live,” said Jess. She felt a little harried. If it had only been Cindy, twelve years old now, she would definitely not have been walking her to the bus stop still, especially if, as today, it was only for summer school. But Milt was seven, and the bus came through the same way, and didn’t seem fair to leave Cindy alone on days when Milt didn’t go out, even though Milt’s little genius kid training or whatever it was only happened three days a week. (Why Cindy had never gone in for the genius kid training even now that she was in middle school, despite getting grades in math and civics that were almost as good as Milt’s and grades in English and science that were better, had occurred as a question to Jess in the past, and she thought that to pose it was to know the answer.) “President Grantland just said he’d take them in only last night.”
Novella: “The Devil in the Twenty-third Century” (Part One)
The émigré Holy Family of Nazareth, fleeing into Egypt, is the archetype of every refugee family. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, living in exile in Egypt to escape the fury of an evil king, are, for all times and all places, the models and protectors of every migrant, alien, and refugee of whatever kind who, whether compelled by fear of persecution or by want, is forced to leave his native land, his beloved parents and relatives, his close friends, and to seek a foreign soil.
—Pope Pius XII, apostolic constitution Exsul Familia Nazarethana
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Elmgrove, New Jersey, Oort Cloud
July 30, 2209
Joe Raffalovich did not have what he considered the bad habit of watching television in the morning, so he did not actually know whether or not NBC had come on for the day when, every morning, he shuffled downstairs, sat down at the table with the wife, and started flipping through the day’s paper while she calmly ate flapjacks and asked him the occasional question about the state of things these days. The two sets of news each day had been hard to sort through for a while but now that they were carried in different papers it was easy to figure out what was going on out in the wider world and what were just domestic issues. It was rare that the two intersected; President Grantland was good about keeping it that way, and, at least going by the way the first six months of his time in office had gone, which was admittedly not as much to go by as all that, Joe and Jessie both fully intended to vote for him for another four years three Novembers from now.
Short Story: “Holding a Battledore”
Note: This story, heavily autobiographical, is the sixth and last in the Haters and Losers cycle.
It was the era of one’s expertise, the century of Obama. The most popular anime in the West was Shingeki no Kyojin and there was still some hope that the Arab Spring might stick the landing. Nicholas Zussman, soon to go into his seventh semester at UMass Amherst and tenth and hopefully final semester of college overall, walked the streets of Hakodate without much care; the personal crises that had beset him in previous years and the terror about the state of the world that would beset him in years to come were, at the moment, nearing the end of what would turn out to be an approximately eighteen-month-long period of equilibrium. No longer did he feel affronted and insecure about his beliefs about the world and about how to behave; not yet did he realize the various hypocrisies and repressions that he had developed to make up for the loss of the affronts and insecurities. Not yet had his relative comfort in his own moral standards given way to ever-stricter philosophy and theology; or, at least, that process had not yet reached its apogee. He knew enough Japanese to have gotten around well enough for the past five weeks and to have been interpreting, as best he could, for his parents, who were with him; Professor Williams would, he hoped, be more or less pleased with him when he got back, even though he had not been doing this through a formal study-abroad program like he had been encouraged to.
Short Story: “Spock, the Rock, Doc Ock, and Hulk Hogan”
2008. A moment in spring, a fifteenth birthday party, walking along train tracks.
Short Story: “A Portrait of Rachel”
At almost twenty-seven years old, Marie Boisjoli had still not entirely outgrown the social dynamics of late adolescence. She had a tendency to default to pithy, doctrinaire opinions of the environments of her youth—high school as a place that could have been a contender in her esteem if certain things had been very different; her first college roundly demonized; and UMass Amherst, at least as it had been five years ago, as a flawed wonderland that might have been practically perfect in every way had she only been a couple of years older and wiser when she was there. She had not rediscovered the Catholicism of her childhood until after she had graduated, and now overlaid on the social dynamics of the standard Millennial extended adolescence was the spiritual perspicacity, consisting in tumult, of the short sharp adolescence of a hundred years ago or more. She lived in an artist’s loft in North Adams and skateboarded to Mass.
Short Story: “A Dog’s Faith”
Note: This story is written, in a strictly limited way, from the point of view of a character who is being a bad friend to somebody in a sensitive situation (questioning one’s gender identity). Due to the writing style, the narration reflects this character’s viewpoints rather than my own. I feel the need to clarify this from the get-go because I know that there are people who find my own approach to issues of sexuality and gender validating or even inspiring, and I do not want to create a nasty surprise or the appearance of betrayal as these readers encounter Hayley Weingarten’s less-than-generous behavior around those topics.
1.
Hayley Weingarten secretly liked to think of herself as a good person, secretly because she did not want to be thought of as the sort of person who self-identified as a good person. She was sixteen and had never done anything particularly wrong in her life, unlike some. She went to church and youth group, she did well in school, and her classmates liked her; one of the “popular crowd,” she was nevertheless spiritually and culturally out of step with the rest of that group. She never had to be told to take Buster for a walk; only seldom did she have to be told to sweep the kitchen before going to bed or to cook dinner with Dad every Tuesday and Friday.
Short Story: “Changeful Northern Skies”
Rot was setting in all over Toby Walker’s house. Evil, blue evil, spread like a flow tide over the wooden wainscotting and along the wooden beams. None of her efforts to get it dealt with had panned out, and even her best friend told her that her front door stank of mildew. It was the end of a not-too-warm but very wet October, and her yard was filled with rain-speckled muted-colored leaves.
Short story: “Strategy of Tension”
One of Becky Zylberberg’s roommates, Rosie Distano, read feminist genre fiction from the eighties and nineties with titles like Nights at the Circus and Tipping the Velvet; she had been in, sequentially, a feminist punk band called Clitemnestra, a Wiccan folk-metal band called Dorothy Clusterfuck, an all-female symphonic metal cover band called Tinúviel, and an agrarian anarchocommunist agitprop band called Tractor Hacker, in addition to putting her own songs on Soundcloud under the name Anni DiPiombo. Raised Italian Catholic among ravioli-battening nonnas and Seaside Heights douchebags (hence the first name, which in full was Rosaria), she had soldiered on through her own doubts about the standard corpus of controversial social teachings into her very early twenties, then bolted from the Church for the neopagan community halfway through her junior-year spring at UMass Amherst because of some quiddity in Pope Francis’s diplomatic relationship with a Southeast Asian dictator Becky had never heard of. These days she described herself as a hopeful agnostic on her good days and a Freudo-Marxist on her bad ones, even though since starting her graduate studies at la Sapienza she had also started going to Mass at Santa Maria Maggiore about once every six weeks. She was nominally working towards a doctorate in international relations with a focus on the European Union, but most of what she actually wrote was a series of thematically linked short stories that she described as satirical but Becky thought of as pretentious.
Short Story: “Finger Food”
It had been about three weeks since his breakup when Thad met Zewditu, and it took another three months or so before they started dating. He met her at Sol Azteca on Beacon Street in Brookline but did not actually see her eating much, merely sitting forlornly at a table with chips and salsa nursing what seemed to be a virgin margarita. Thad normally did not make it his practice to try to start conversations with strange women sitting alone in restaurants, both because he knew that most women did not appreciate it and because he himself did not enjoy it, but he made an exception in this case because Zewditu herself kept looking up at him and his nopalitos with soulful, probing eyes. When he walked up to her and asked her why she was staring, she pointed to a splotch of salsa verde that had gotten onto his shirt just to the left of his necktie, and he had wiped it off madly in deep embarrassment while she stifled a chuckle.
Short Story: “The Thought of Vinegar”
The child went home each night to a house in the cold hills. There were unseasonable storms and winds in the late evenings, storms and winds on which a witch might fly through an upright window to speak to the little girl in benign but frightening tones. The girl’s uncertainty is an uncertainty that a witch might like to solve, in her necromantic way and for her own fey or devilish purposes. The girl might, then, worry a loose strand of yarn at one of the cuffs of her sweater as she speaks to the witch, telling the witch that in her dreams she has other and better unnatural or supernatural friends.
Short Story: “Quintessence”
Esteban Okada was born in Hakodate to a Japanese father and a Filipina mother, in a time of improving fortunes for Japan after the demographic and humanitarian collapse of the previous century. Hundreds of years ago Hakodate had been a flourishing seaport; now, it was close to a Democratic Alliance military elevator under the joint custodianship of Japan and Indonesia. It was around the base of this elevator that he and his friends had played in childhood, flying kites and antique model planes. He had been raised in his mother’s Catholic faith, still uncommon in Japan but not looked upon with as much suspicion as in some other Alliance countries. He discovered young that he was called to be a priest but was not ordained until he was past thirty, due to poor typing skills and reluctance to break an engagement to a famous young artist into which he had rashly entered.
When he was ordained, everybody figured that he would be a military chaplain; growing up in a space elevator community he had gotten a good head for the ins and outs of military life, and the Japanese chaplain corps was severely undermanned. This was in the time of the Alliance’s long war against the Australian-Martian coalition, which in a few years would end very abruptly and thus without showing many signs of ending any time soon before it did. Esteban had qualms about chaplaincy mostly due to a long-standing distrust of the wider society that the military represented and defended. He told this to one of his old seminary professors, an old nun named Tanizaki, and received from her the dressing-down that he had not known he needed.