Category Archives: Great Stories Online

Adnan Mahmutovic: “Integration Under the Midnight Sun” (excerpt)


The latest issue of The Rose & Thorn e-zine features this lyrical and heartbreaking story by Adnan Mahmutovic, from his collection Refugee. “Integration Under the Midnight Sun” offers a glimpse of female refugees from the Bosnian war now living in Sweden, and the varied ways they come to terms with their memories of lost loved ones.


For three years I have been embalmed, but there is faint thunder under my ribs. I wear the same outfit in which I left Bosnia: a blue oversize cardigan somebody wrapped around me that night I was shoved into a bus to Sweden, a pink shirt and a white bra with laced edges underneath, a short corduroy skirt and mismatching colourful stockings like the ones of Pippi Longstocking.

I bask in the midnight sun, which is colder than usual. The polar circle is gliding down to this village. I do not want to go to my one-roomer. I have nothing there but two half-withered plants called Adam and Eve, sheltered behind metal shutters, cut off from all the temptations of nightlight. When they are not placed next to each other, Adam and Eve produce drops of water on their thick leaves—tears of separation. But these two specimens are crying all the time, as if they have been unhappily married since naked times.

It would be nice to have a house like the one back home in Bosnia, but what good would it be if it is not crowded by my parents and seven brothers. There would be no steam from the kitchen and thick, pungent smells of exhausted bodies. I used to tell them apart by the sweat on their cheeks, by the way it mixed with the soap smell from their uncombed hair and their hand-me-down clothes. In the mornings, I would lie in my bed, pretending to be asleep till each and every one of them gave me a kiss. They would whisper, “Snow White, rise and shine.” Waking up, the splendid ceremony.

Not any more. I wake up alone and the first face I see is my own. The mirror tells me my hair is no longer jet black; there are lime white, unwieldy streaks on my head, but my skin is still white….

Read the rest here. Read a review of Mahmutovic’s book here.

Naeem Murr: “My Poet”


This surreal satire of the literati’s psychological foibles can be read in full at Poetry magazine. I may be a fiction writer now, but clearly I’m still a poet by temperament. Highlights:


I live with a poet. Her boyfriend before me was also a poet, and published a book called Crane, in which all the poems are about her. She looks like a crane—the bird kind. I often find her standing on one leg, leaning against our bookshelves, very still, staring into a book as if for a fish to snatch out. Crane upset her. I remember her tearing up one of the poems, shouting, “Want to publish a book: write poems about your goddamn miserable sex life!” The poem, titled “Interdiction,” was about him having a real hankering for all those things in the Bible you’re not allowed to eat—particularly bivalves. What this has to do with The Colonel and Mrs. Whatsit, I can’t imagine.

But then I’ve never understood poetry. You see, I’m a fiction writer. If my Poet ever appears in one of my books, she shall do so as a once-beautiful, but now tragically disfigured nun. We fiction writers are a different breed from poets—alert, happy, optimistic. If you want to find the fiction writer in a crowd, just pretend to throw a stick. He’ll be the one who looks around.

****

…As any true fiction writer knows, fiction writers don’t have time to read, since we’re always writing. Poets, on the other hand, read constantly. My Poet leaves books all over the apartment: in the kitchen, Emmanuel Lévinas (more like Icantunderstandasinglewordovinas); in the bathroom, A History of Bees (what is it with poets and bees?); in the bedroom, A Compendium of Shipping Terms (“fo’c’sle” slant rhymes with “asshole”); in the sitting room, the biography of some naturalist who was in Darwin’s shadow (poets love peripheral historic figures, without understanding that the person no one’s talking to at the party is dying to tell you all about his collection of Victorian hat pins). The reason poets are able to read so much is because they spend more time “waiting” than writing. Waiting! What a bizarre concept. Reading, taking walks, debating whether an autumnal oak leaf is really red ochre or more a perinone orange, all the time twisting the miserable wire coat hanger of their souls this way and that in the hope of becoming receptive.

****

…My Poet loves words in a way that I feel is quite unhealthy and unnatural. She owns a dictionary decades old and so large she uses a small buffet cart to wheel it around our apartment like some invalid relative. For true fiction writers, words are just a kind of filling for the plot. A novel is like one of those mock apple pies made with Ritz crackers and cinnamon—and anyone who claims he can tell the difference is a damn liar!

Today she’s suspending her crane-like attention above this dictionary.

“You need to get rid of that old thing,” I say.

“Henry James used this same dictionary.”

“Is he a relation or something?”

“Henry James,” she repeats, looking up, as if I might not have heard her properly.

“Henry James?”

Letting out a wounded, whimpering sound, she sinks her face into her hands. 

I’m just teasing, of course. I’m fully aware that Henry James is probably some important poet, or maybe one of our presidents.

While I’m not sure if this is what my professor friend means by “the real thing,” one thing I’ve learned from living with a poet is that a passionate antagonism with language is what defines them. As many alcoholics are said to be those who have a kind of allergy to alcohol, so a poet with language—compelled and ruined by it. The secret to a poet’s soul lies somewhere in the little cells of that dungeonish dictionary, in the slow languishing of those old, mad, forgotten words. It’s also in the very particular kind of art she—and every poet—seems to love. Joseph Cornell. I guarantee you will not find a single poet who doesn’t start rubbing herself against the furniture the minute you mention Cornell and his little boxes full of human residue, the pleasures of the miniature.


[After the Poet has read some review copies by more famous authors:]

…These books have clearly very much upset my Poet, who lies sputtering, raging, and roiling about on the floor, shouting, “The agony! The agony!” (I should warn you that she’s not a very happy drunk.)

I can’t say anything for a moment because, in truth, I’m deeply moved by how beautiful and young these writers are, and because I realize, all at once, that both will be characters in my next novel. The girl’s mother—no, her father—no, both her parents die, and she turns to writing poetry, her beauty wasted in brainy pursuits until her hair catches fire on the candle by which she writes at night and she’s horribly disfigured! And then she writes about her lost loveliness in a way that’s so touching that her old high school boyfriend, who is now blind, marries her and reads her scarred skin like Braille! Oh, why would anyone be a poet and roil around on the floor at bad poetry by troubled, sensual, pre-Raphaelite infant theorist prodigies when one can write such stories! I want to tell my Poet this. I want to tell all poets this, but in truth I find it quite sexy when she roils about on the floor wearing nothing but a T-shirt and a pair of boxers.

“There, there,” I say, “it’s not all that bad is it? You’ve got to let young people have their ideas. Young people love their ideas.”

“Idiots!” she shouts.

“Well, hardly,” I say, and to prove it I read out the author bio for the beautiful young girl: “Masters from Princeton, Ph.D. from Yale. She was awarded an NEA, as well as Stegner, Fulbright, Bunting, Guggenheim, Lannan, and MacArthur fellowships. She’s spent the last two years modeling in Milan, and has a rare blood disorder that means she will never visibly age or feel pain.”

Read the whole thing here.

Said Sayrafiezadeh: “Forbidden Fruit”


In this excerpt from his forthcoming memoir about growing up Communist in America, Iranian-American essayist Said Sayrafiezadeh turns a childhood memory of his mother’s grape boycott into a darkly comic, profound meditation on how desire is whetted by prohibition:


In 1973, when I was four years old, César Chávez, president and co-founder of the United Farm Workers, called for a national boycott of iceberg lettuce and table grapes. The Socialist Workers Party, which my mother was a member of, honored the boycott immediately. Under no circumstances, my mother informed me, were iceberg lettuce and grapes permitted in our household any longer….

Even though my mother never once relinquished and allowed grapes to cross the threshold of our apartment, they became a constant, unyielding presence in my life, following me like a shadow. There were political posters about not eating grapes, fliers about not eating grapes, T-shirts about not eating grapes, conversations about not eating grapes. There is a very real possibility that I did not even know what the fruit was until the very moment that it became unavailable to me. I existed in a state of infinite longing that intertwined so tightly with my desire that it was impossible to distinguish one feeling from the other and which set a terrible precedent for me. I was acutely aware that there was something out there in the world that still existed—that was still being enjoyed by other people, even—and that had once belonged to me, but was now forever out of my reach. Desire = longing. All of this culminated in the horrific button my mother made me pin to my jacket, which featured the logo of the United Farm Workers—a stark black eagle with wings spread wide against a blood red background—along with the unequivocal imperative, “Don’t Eat Grapes.” It was not a declaration to the outside world, but a scarlet letter that constantly reminded me of my own sinful desires, which, if I ever managed to quench, would be quenched only through the immiseration of others….

I had become the fox in Aesop’s fable who jumps again and again without success at the dangling bunch of grapes hanging on the branch above him. The rationalization that the fox eventually concocts in order to soothe himself and allay his disappointment is that the grapes themselves are most likely sour and not, in the end, worth his trouble. The conclusion I drew, however, was of a different nature. As the boycott progressed, I began to see what my mother saw: the flaw existed within me. Desire under capitalism—all desire—was a shameful, unwanted condition, and one should never attempt to satisfy their desire, but instead, through heightened consciousness of the world, transcend it, and by so doing rid themselves of it forever.

Read the whole essay on the New York Foundation for the Arts website.

Visit Mr. Sayrafiezadeh’s website here.

Erin McKnight: “Absolution”


Erin McKnight, assistant editor at the literary e-zine The Rose & Thorn, has a beautiful essay in their Spring 2007 issue about her coal-mining ancestors:


I have greedy eyes. They scan photographs hungrily, brown irises flaring while trying to determine whether an unusual color or angle is new. When they realize that what they have found is something they’ve seen before, something that belongs in the picture, they drop back into shallow pools. These eyes don’t look; these eyes search.

When they move across the photo taken on the day of my Christening, they hunt for what they can’t see. They register the flush of youth on my parents’ cheeks, the creased gown shrouding my new body, and the cake with buttery layers promising to announce my entry into the world, but they aren’t finding what matters. Tucked into corners, and folded behind furniture are people in shadow. I suppose it doesn’t matter that I can’t see their faces, because I wouldn’t recognize them if I could. I like to imagine there would be a fuzzy sense of familiarity, but I know better than to believe we’d look alike. For the visitors in this photo all that matters is their sense of purpose, which I know is to claim me.

On this day, they pressed a stain of black into the soft skin on my forehead. I know it now to be an ‘x,’ because there’s nothing else this mark can be. It reminds me of the greasy cross I received each year as a child on Ash Wednesday. This sign transformed me for the duration of its wear and even now, privilege and responsibility smell to me like heavy incense and palm ashes.

The ‘x’ is thick and heavy in its certainty. No delicate lines form my obligation to them. Perhaps the shape lies so deep because its outline was traced numerous times by their dirty fingers. I choose to believe, however, that in death they no longer feared their own hands, and found the confidence to push into my flesh.

They made this ‘x’ with coal––the ink that has stained generations of Scottish bodies––when they smeared their signatures across my head….

Read the whole essay here.