Fiction

from After David (a novel)

After David

Logging on the site is like stepping into a candy store. Or walking into a party and waiting for someone to talk to you, some swaggering dude with a joint in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. Except he is the only one you’re waiting for.

All you have to do is leave your chat window open and the hot pink band will light up, and then they’ll rush in. One of the many amazing surprises of online dating in your sixties is to discover all the twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings who flock to you as the latest taboo to transgress. 

For Love of Stalin

As a child, the teachers in primary school taught us the slogan, “as Children of the Revolution, Stalin loves and protects us.” We all repeated it every morning after the national anthem.

Before that, as a toddler, I had stopped speaking gibberish and began to pronounce words. My father sat at the dinner table in our home wearing his overalls. He worked as a carpenter and drank straight out of a more-than-half-empty bottle of vodka.

“Stop Stalin dead,” I said.

“I heard that!” he said.

Flash Philosophy: Commitment

Commitment—one of those Jello-y concepts, the meaning of which seems plain as day until the day you might be asked to write about it. It sounds churchy, parental, and applying to business, legality, or marriage. I’m guessing that my first exposure to the word, or notion, as a child would probably have had something to do with being admonished to keep your promises. As an adult, it seems as if it might be nearly an Eleventh Commandment—Thou shalt honor thy commitments, or Thou shalt not go back on thy word.

Evening of a Faun

It didn’t sound too promising at first. The man on the other end of the line said that he worked with dancers, and he wondered if I might like to come over and maybe dance for him. Our terse conversation on the phone felt guarded on his end and measured and suggestive. We talked about beauty, and the voice said that he had been beautiful once but that he was “a ruined beauty” now. This intrigued me, as did the roughness of his authoritative voice. It was not the sort of voice you usually heard on this phone line.

Ella

An artist is always alone—if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness. – Henry Miller 

Editor's Note

The KGB Bar and Reading Room was my home away from home in college—you could even say I grew up there. Which is why, years later, this opportunity to guest edit the journal is all the more special to me.

Duty to Cooperate

“How can I help you today?” she asked, her hands on her hips, as she looked at the guy in front of the counter. He was still looking at the menu, trying to decide what to get.

A minute later, she scratched her chin a couple of times. “It’s probably best if you let the person behind you come up, while you figure out what you want.”

He looked at her, his brows furrowed. “I’d like the grilled tilapia with mashed potatoes and buttered corn.”

“For here or to-go?”

Dale

Dale is in a cult. He is a cult member. Dale is seventeen. He is the fourth-youngest member of the cult.

Dale was born into the cult. It is all he’s ever known.

The cult is a religious cult. They worship their own god. The god that the cult worships is the 1984 film The Karate Kid, directed by John G. Avildsen.

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