April 2019 | Fiction

By Dan Domench | view story as a .pdf My father’s a liar. Ask him any question and he looks at you blankly while searching his brain for the best horseshit he can muster. Then he starts right in on you. Take this Sunday morning in the townhouse where I grew up on a...

This is an excerpt from The Sadness, Benjamin Rybeck’s first novel. Rybeck is the marketing director at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas. He holds an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. His work has appeared in Kirkus Reviews, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and Literary Hub, among others. He lives in Houston, TX.

I breathe. “We’ve looked at houses in Kennebunk for six months.” I speak slowly, as if to a child. “Nothing is perfect. Or we can’t afford it. Our current home is old, lots of character. It’s our first house. We’ve been there for 24 years. Our children were born there.”

He was ten yards behind her when she heard him. In the cutaway on the back of her bathing suit he saw a braid of muscle tighten. He stopped and she turned to him, eyebrows arching as if only curious, her right hand moving in the L.L. Bean canvas bag hooked on her shoulder.

The shop lady explained that the little shepherd girl was in fact Bo Peep and that there wasn’t any mention of a shepherd boy in the rhyme, was there? And she even began to recite: “Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep–”

He docked that frigid morning as a fog bank settled along the eastern reaches of Casco Bay.

Winterguide 2016 By Joan Connor We sit and drink, two good friends, in our forties now. We usually drink on Fridays after my husband has left our summer cottage on the island to take the ferry to the bus to the car to drive back to D.C. Diana is my best friend on the...

I began to collect books as soon as I could read, and I enjoyed reading so much I very early decided I wanted to be a writer, to my parents’ sorrow, for they wanted me to be a preacher like my father.

Walter Rhodes watched a man get out of a trumpet-orange rag-top Jeep in the hayfield in front of his farmhouse. The engine-idling bass drum kicked one-two, one-two, one-two… Wind blasted the old man as he drew near, with muscular tan legs sticking out of khaki shorts, biceps pushing at the short sleeves of a faded red T-shirt. The guy had to be in his 70s, carrying a magazine in his right hand, walking toward Walter’s screen door with a side-to-side gait that said I don’t fall or stumble. Sea legs.

My father died this year. No one who knew us would have said we were close. He and my mother divorced thirty years ago, shortly after I had left our New Jersey home to pursue my life. Not long after that he remarried suddenly and settled in a small coastal town in Maine to restart his own life.