Fiction | Page 34 | The Common

Key Concepts in Ecology

November 1, 2015 Fiction, Issue 10, Issue 10 Fiction

Invasive species: a species that is non-native to an ecosystem and that is likely to cause harm to native species.

The creature had been spotted again, and this time, accounts came from two unrelated individuals. The sightings had taken place between the hours of seven and eight that morning, both within a mile of the New Zeniths building. City officials were at that very moment developing a plan of action. What we all needed to do was stay put. This news was delivered by Claudette Bowery, president of New Zeniths, in the lobby at forty minutes after eight.

The Folly

November 1, 2015 Fiction, Issue 10, Issue 10 Fiction

By IVAN VLADISLAVIĆ

Nieuwenhuizen stood on the verge, in the darkness, looking down the street. In one hand he held a brown imitation-leather portmanteau; in the other some small, cold coins given to him by a taxi-driver moments before. The tail-lights of the taxi flared up at the end of the street, and vanished.

Nieuwenhuizen turned to the plot. It was smaller than he’d been led to believe, no more than an acre, and overgrown with tall grass and weeds. The land was bounded on two sides by an unruly hedge, breaking against the night sky, and on a third by a prefabricated cement wall with panels in the shape of wagon-wheels. The fourth side, where he found himself, had once been fenced off from the street: the remains of this frontier—crumpled scrolls of barbed wire, a gate, some club-footed wooden posts in concrete boots—lay all around. He tightened his grip on his change with one hand and on the sponge-swaddled handle of his portmanteau with the other, high-stepped over a tangle of wire, and pushed through the grass, onwards.

Unwinding

November 1, 2015 Fiction, Issue 10, Issue 10 Fiction

by NICK FULLER GOOGINS

Hickory and Joey Bags twitched in their lawn chairs, coming back to life. They’d been zonked on Canadian Ghost for twenty, thirty minutes, long enough that I was starting to get nervous. Nervous and impatient.

We were sitting behind Hickory’s trailer with our feet in the kiddie pool. The beer was running low, and glimpses of morning sun flashed through the trees. It was early, but I could already feel the air warming into another brutal July day, and there was one full cord of seasoned, split wood behind Teddy Whitfield’s place that needed moving. The sooner Hickory woke up to lend me his truck, the better. One cord meant an easy few hundred bucks this time of year, the tourists needing logs for their campfires. I knew it wouldn’t be enough to replace my mother’s Chrysler, but it wouldn’t be nothing, either. At least she’d know I was trying. I’d recently come to suspect the full extent of her disappointment. I suppose you could say I was eager to set things straight.

On Grief

November 1, 2015 Fiction, Issue 10, Issue 10 Fiction

By GBOLAHAN ADEOLA

I. Death

Your father died before sunrise. On a Monday, the first in January. A morning clutched in harmattan’s tenuous grip. Haze like spectral fingers. Cold as a dog’s nose. But not wet. The grasses outside were an arid brown; it hadn’t rained for months. You’ll never forget these, the disconsolate incidentals of that morning. You’ll remember, too, the black shoes that trailed from the doorway like giant soldier ants in advance. You’ll remember the shuffling feet. And the hovering faces that peered down at your mother. Draped in black. Legs splayed in front of her. You’ll remember tottering in, bleary-eyed and only half-awake, and wondering, bewildered, at the many shoes, the blur of unfamiliar faces, the whispers that rustled across the room. You’ll remember wondering what it meant to have a heart attack.

Biarritz

November 1, 2015 Fiction, Issue 10, Issue 10 Fiction

By DWYER MURPHY

We took the twelve-thirty train and got into the Biarritz station just after six. There was a bus schedule nailed to the wall, but the train ride had been smooth and I didn’t want to spoil our momentum, so I waved to the first in a row of taxis and offered the driver ten euros, which was quite a lot for me in those days. Probably there was a flat rate to the center of town, but the driver looked at the thin crowd coming off the train and at Katja, who was wearing espadrilles, and said ten would be okay, once he’d finished his cigarette.

On the drive in, Katja leaned against the window and didn’t say too much. The landscape was gray and battered. It was April, but winter still had a grip on everything: the low sun and the farms, with their lean cows, and the roads, which were scarred by fissures.

The King of Bubbles

April 23, 2015 Fiction, Issue 09, Issue 09 Fiction

By EDIE MEIDAV

Sinking lower in the club’s hot tub and today a birthday marks his face one notch less recognizable when anyway, meeting someone these days means who you say you are matters both less and more. Who cares, really? Get older and it becomes easier to say who you are not. No king of industry, that myth abandoned before anyone finished saying Constantinople, but who even says Constantinople anymore, such flourish abandoned in his particular past as a history major, an epoch in which windmilling toward the future seemed to matter, toting around the flag of belief that what happened before could actually help you later. Now just a service-minded bumbler close to retirement going around to enlighten the masses and so what if certain efforts fizzled? Could happen to anyone.

The Electric City

April 1, 2015 Fiction, Issue 09, Issue 09 Fiction

By KASHANA CAULEY

We bought Detroit because even after buying ourselves new houses and cars, $253 million in lottery winnings left the four of us with a ton of leftover cash. Why specifically? One of our daughters found the ad on Craigslist: One city for sale or rent—slightly used; a fixer-upper; free from most city noise; lots of pretty, healthy trees and grass. The asking price wasn’t ridiculous.The mayor took personal checks. We wanted to be the first people who’d ever bought a city. Sure, important people sometimes got keys to them, but that’s not the same thing.

Leaving Walter

April 1, 2015 Fiction, Issue 09, Issue 09 Fiction

By LORI OSTLUND

“Tell me what you want, Aaron,” Walter had periodically insisted, the words no longer an invitation but a way of chiding Aaron, suggesting that he wanted too much—or worse, that he had no idea what he wanted. In the beginning of their lives together, when they were two discrete people, Walter’s motives felt easy to read.

: Tell me who you are, he seemed to be saying. Tell me what you want from this life. Only later had Aaron understood that his real motive in asking was to discover how he might serve as benefactor to Aaron’s wishes and ambitions and, in doing so, bind Aaron to him.

God’s Fingernail

April 1, 2015 Fiction, Issue 09, Issue 09 Fiction

By MASHA HAMILTON

He brought her stories, long and intricate narratives that he laid at her feet like a dog with a bone. She would have preferred love, or at least more of his wild, open-hearted sex, but that was complicated; after all, she lived in another time zone now, and the divorce, far beyond messy, had left him in debt. For weeks, he’d camped out in his friend’s van—demoralizing for a middle-aged man. He had an apartment on the third floor in what she knew was a rough neighborhood, backing up against the desert. He had a son also, and that’s where his energy needed to go. Stories were what he could manage for her.

Between the Lines

April 1, 2015 Fiction, Issue 09, Issue 09 Fiction

By SUJATA SHEKAR

The morning of the announcement, Bo Htet Aung finished his story. He wrote The End at the bottom of the page, shut the notebook, and slipped it into the briefcase he took to work each day. Then he set about ironing a white shirt and blue longyi with more than his usual precision. He wished he could wear his old major’s uniform, with its crisp olive lines and the peaked cap that added two inches to his height. But it was not that kind of day, that kind of announcement. Instead he pulled his traditional taikpon jacket on over his shirt and left it unbuttoned. His fingers shook too much.