by Chris Maxcer |
IN THESE THREE short fiction stories, the characters are fighting and searching, sometimes at the same time. In “If They Mistake the Moon for the Sun,” the fight is at once with a betrayed best friend and a battle to hold onto something bigger. In “Mesmerize Me,” a woman lets her husband hypnotize her, but it doesn’t work . . . so she fakes it. In “In Between,” leaping can make you savor things that can slip away. From “If They Mistake the Moon for the Sun”: I rolled him onto his back, pinched his nose, and started doing rescue breathing. I thought he was going to die, and I thought that maybe if he didn’t make it, his death would bring Amanda and me closer together. I imagined being Matt and Jenni’s dad, imagined eating bowls of cereal with them in the morning, their hair all messed up and their mouths way too full. Amanda’s fingers trailed over my shoulder as she walked behind me on her way to the kitchen sink—I saw this, and all of us sitting at the old-fashioned plank table, made by Kyle himself. The plaster over the hole in the wall from his punch didn’t match the original texture. I could see him in the faces of his children. I did rescue breathing until the EMTs with the ambulance took him, and we got through that moment, and I never told him what I was thinking, and I didn’t tell him that his tongue was flopping soft and blue or that I tasted onion and pickles and that my tears kept falling...
