Gary Barwin's Newer: Not New or Selected Short Fiction
Short Fiction | Issue 41
Newer: Not New or Selected Short Fiction
Snow Globe
for Ben Niespodziany
The Good Lord throws a snow globe against a tree. This is the church and this is the steeple. The world is broken fingers. They wrap themselves around a snow globe and shatter it against a tree. The tree reaches into the vault of heaven and gathers the snow globe of the world between its branches. I know what you're thinking. I know what you hope.
Nocturne
Like the night sky, the clarinet has ten thousand fingerholes. The clarinet has twenty thousand fingerholes. Because the world has ten thousand fingers. Twenty thousand. Would you wear the sweater of a serial killer if it had been thoroughly cleaned? Why or why not? And if you took away the sweater, what would be left?
How I Became A Deer
It was new science and I was happy to participate. My bones, my muscles, my nerves, my organs, my eyes. Almost everything except my skin. They extracted all of it and lay me out on a long table, a team of seamstress surgeons sewed a deer skin over me. My eyes aligned with its eyeholes, my legs slipped into the trousers of its legs. It wasn't an exact fit, some changes, small reworkings were necessary. Precise modifications to my original structure. It was only natural. And when they were done and I was ready to stand, they spoke to me quietly about my new life. A tail. Being a quadruped. Antlers. They’d attached the antlers onto me. They were the only solid parts of the deer, except, of course, the hooves, that I'd been given. I adapted quickly. I liked the hooves, antlers, my long body and my tawny skin. It was only after a few weeks that I wondered about my old skin. I remembered how cautiously they had removed it, sharp knives, held breaths, precise peelings back and rollings off. I stepped to the edge of the forest and peered out, careful to not to be observed. I saw my skin, my skin stretched over a slightly stooped and wary body. I knew it was the deer. The deer into whose skin I'd been sewn. I considered that now, stepping through the city, its neighbourhoods and downtown, there was a deer, dressed in clothes of course, but also in my skin. There was the deer acting human, wet eyes and smooth head, but walking quietly, keeping to corners, saying little. Remembering the trees and the multitudinous eyes of their leaves. Boarding elevators to the twenty-second floor and climbing into bed, the covers pulled to its long slim chin as it waited for others to arrive.
Dream
It’s an ancient dream, bees in the mouth instead of teeth, a mouth of bees instead of tongue, the breath, each organ—heart, lungs, liver—turned to flower. yeah, step-down transformer of late spring, the blood turned to buzzing and the figure-eight of bees. distant traffic on the wind and left-over leaves falling from the sky, my phone app identifies a red-tailed hawk unusual here, sleep glistening with words, honey-slow braid of warmth and fear.
Wedding Song
There’s a wedding in the valley of teeth, mouths fill the aisle. I don’t know if I’m going to be ok, the man in the burning building said. I love you so much. The best part of any story is the small dog, hardly noticed, not when all the people have heads made of cake and are forlorn.
To End
The war to end all spoons. The war to end all clocks. The war to end all fingers. The war to end all clouds. The war to end all lizards. The war to end all moons. The war to end all coastlines. The war to end all mouths. The war to end all sand. The war to end all crevices. The war to end all kites. The war to end all whispers. The war to end all thumbs. The war to end all mountains. The war to end all puddles. The war to end all fires. The war to end all puppets. The war to end all extinctions. The war to end all birth coaches.
Gary Barwin is a writer, composer and multimedia artist, the author of 32 books including Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction 2024-1984 (Assembly Press), the play Ovaryman (with Tom Prime) published in Dead Code and other dramatic entertainments. (Anti-Oedipus Press) and with Lillian Allen and Gregory Betts, Muttertongue (Exile Editions). garybarwin.com
Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction, 2024-1984 by Gary Barwin Assembly Press, 2024
Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction, 2024–1984 couples brand new and uncollected stories with selections of the most playful and ambitious of Barwin’s previous collections, including Cruelty to Fabulous Animals, Big Red Baby, Doctor Weep and Other Strange Teeth, and I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251–1457. Known as a “whiz-bang storyteller” who can deliver magical, dream-like sequences and truisms about the human condition in the same paragraph, Barwin’s trademark brilliance, wit, and originality are on display in this can’t-miss collection of short fiction.
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