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The Portland Fiction Project:

Sun, 19 May 2013 01:04:39 MST

He tries to explain why Luise, the nurse, puts sticky labels on every object in the house. Her name is not Luise. Rather, Luise is the name of the cat that died when I was seven. Dad and I buried her in…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Spring in Portland is something of a misnomer. The weather is cold and dour, leaving resident’s longing for a balmier climate. As with winter, the sun remains hidden behind the clouds that sag just above the cityscape like the faux-velvet roof-liner of a 1984…

The Portland Fiction Project:

So this is love: locked in bathrooms, staring at bare floors. There was a time when I took comfort in them, their frigidness, in college, when we first met and we were fumbling drunk and urgent hands and boozing our way through silence.…

The Portland Fiction Project:

When you have children, you intend to love them. You expect that they will have needs. That they will be incompetent for a very long time. You knew this when you created them, when you signed on for this. One day I saw the…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Nights when you are like this I cannot sleep. After dragging you to bed, you snore and sprawl in your drunken slumber. I move to the couch. You do not notice.

As I doze in front of the television I imagine what our child…

The Portland Fiction Project:

It is twenty steps from my house down to the yellow house on the corner. On average, it takes me one hundred ten steps to run in one minute. If I keep pace one minute gets me five and a half blocks. It would…

The Portland Fiction Project:

You are sleeping, you are sleeping, I will make you be sleeping. You giggled in my ear. My mother, you handed me a mild overdose of cough medicine. I told you it was too much but you said, take it anyway. I cried hot…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Her house is dark. It is late at night, and he wanders through her hallways. Her living room is full of picture frames with no pictures, a lamp with no lamp shade. Sometimes he thinks her greatest fear is that she will finally be…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Today is Wednesday. I love Wednesdays. I love them for the German name, Mittwoch, which meaning ‘midweek’ is so delightfully direct. “Wednesday” is such a strange word. Did you know that it comes, supposedly, from the Old High German, through Old English, for Woden’s day?…

The Portland Fiction Project:

We’d been at Walmart for two hours. Two hours is usually enough time for my father’s nerves to pass, enough time for the house to be empty and dark when we return. We’d maybe hear walking in the basement or moaning from the bedroom.…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I saw before, on a television show, if you close the refrigerator door while you’re sitting inside of it you’ll get trapped and run out of air. While playing hide and seek the girl on the show was locked in the fridge. She ran out…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I am your face. I know that. It’s why I did my makeup before I left my apartment. Wore the colors you like. And why I keep my mouth mostly shut. Because I like to be your face. A beautiful, female extension. Let…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Rain beat hard against the windows of Brock’s studio apartment.

“Alright, well I’d suggest sticking to your range though,” said Brock.

Randy pressed his lips together, nodding.

“Pat Benatar might be a little high for your vocal range,” said Brock.

Randy looked up from the…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Bernard came in the door, flung off his coat and said “I have two words for you.” He threw a kung-fu punch kick combo with practiced form, accompanied by an exuberant yell from the diaphragm. At the height of his kick, the sound of…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I asked you what you were laughing about. We were eating tacos at Pepi’s. Tofu habanero tacos, because you’re a vegetarian. My exact words to you—it’s important that I remember the exact words. You were wearing a sleeveless shirt with a light colored floral…

The Portland Fiction Project:

She woke not knowing where she was, who she was, or even what she was. The only thing she could say for sure was how she was. As to that: stiff and sore.

First order of business: Open her eyes.

Her lids felt heavy…

The Portland Fiction Project:

There was a line of yellow light at the edge of the steel floor that shook and jolted. The rest was dark. Strapped to the floor, my wrists tied and a wooden board beneath my head, I could hear the diesel…

The Portland Fiction Project:

“This isn’t your dream, it’s mine,” he said, slurping his double-shot espresso and peering at me through steamed-up glasses. I opened my mouth to argue but was distracted by the giraffe that had just ducked into the coffee shop. Its brown and yellow neck…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Let me just say this. I actually believed that a college degree was the key to happiness. Every culture has to have a salvation mythos, to stave off the suicidal thoughts, and I grew up poor enough that college was this mythos, and I…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I live in a ball of cotton and I hold my knees to my face and try to press my head into them, so the knees push through and there will be bones in my brain.

When they taught me to talk, nobody told…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Tonight I found empathy for your depression. I was driving home, home being your house, apartment, referred to here as home because it’s you who’s reading this, only you, and empathy without intimacy is just sympathy. Driving home from the bar, which you know, called…

The Portland Fiction Project:

She got to the reception at six-forty-five, fifteen minutes early. She knew to wait in the hotel lobby, inconspicuously in a darkened corner, until he arrived. The lobby floor was tiled in black marble. Large red velvet curtains hung from on high and swooped…

The Portland Fiction Project:

To get your things you’ll have to come back to the apartment we shared at least once more. A trip timed, if I had to guess, to coincide with my not being around.

My hunch is you’ll try to come some Wednesday, during…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Liam hit his first serve (weak, into the net). His heart was not in it. Thankfully, the crowd was small, with only the occasional coach, and a cadre of anemic boys standing hob-kneed and slump-necked, with fingers hooked limply through the fence, waiting…

The Portland Fiction Project:

There was something about the feeling of his sole touching down on the packed wet sand that made the whole thing feel real. Real, precious and stolen seconds passed with each squishy step.

The motel room had an oak table that was moved closer…

The Portland Fiction Project:

She cries all night, the child, disrupting the silence of my apartment. I bury my head in the comforter as if I might find sleep there, but sleep will not have me when the child is crying. I slide headphones over my ears, turn…

The Portland Fiction Project:

She’s an elementary school teacher, see, so there’s this joke between us, from the very first night we met and took down in the order of three pints of beer and half a pack of cigarettes each and then went home and screwed until dawn,…

The Portland Fiction Project:

The change of clothes under her pillow says she’s ready, ready to go at a moment’s notice. Her favorite dress, her Little Mermaid nightgown, the kind of socks with lace ruffles that turn down at the ankles. She’s not quite four years old, hasn’t even…

The Portland Fiction Project:

“Do you want to see a naked woman?” asks the young man sitting next to me. “Because if you do, there’s a young woman who wants to see you.” I look at the man. He doesn’t look like a pimp, but then I don’t…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Al sat in the warm truck cab and watched the neighborhoods shift and change around him as his dad drove down Sandy Boulevard. He let his hand rest on the warm vinyl seat, faded from decades of sun and damp to a colorless beige.…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I look in the mirror. I will feel better when my face is older, because something about the youth feels so slow. My face tells me that I have a long way to go. A lot of time and a lot of fight. And…

The Portland Fiction Project:

At his mother’s dining room table a fifteen-year-old boy sits and begins writing a list. It is things ‘to do’ and he is writing it, not because he does not accomplish enough — for how much can he really be accomplishing — he goes…

The Portland Fiction Project:

She washes him gently, sponging off blood and other things with warm water and Lava soap, the kind he always used on hands that never came clean. His naked body no longer complies with her touch, and wrestling his girth makes her shoulders slick with…

The Portland Fiction Project:

The man chained in my closet looks just like a software developer, even when he’s stripped to his socks with a ball gag in his mouth. He’s got horn-rimmed glasses and a cowlick that flops forward when his head lolls. Despite the fact that…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Editor’s Note: This is the eighth installment of “These Are The Stories.” Click appropriately to catch up on Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV or Part V or Part VI or…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Birds were interesting to identify, whether by sight or by call, and watching them meant early mornings walking alone in the woods and never knowing what you might see. The Victoria’s Riflebird, a black bird with azure accents, made a guttural machine gun sound…

The Portland Fiction Project:

It was another nice day and I was out for the kind of walk you take in the middle of summer, when the days are long, and there’s nothing to do. I had decided not to stop at the post office like I…

The Portland Fiction Project:

We’re standing outside the bar, my best friend Trish and I, having a smoke, more to pass the time between drinks than out of any real nicotine craving, when a vintage black Beamer pulls up to the curb. It’s been raining, although it’s not…

The Portland Fiction Project:

After dinner, after dishes, after evening things that are, are done. Sitting on a couch as a summer night grows dark. A white slip cover with ties at the corner. She’s forty- three and tall with broad shoulders looking out the window. “I’m pretending…

The Portland Fiction Project:

The half of Mindy’s bicycle that she had locked to the street signpost outside the movie theater was still locked to the signpost when Mindy, Ken and Steve came out of the movie. Steve was chewing on popcorn. His face dropped a couple inches.…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I love you, big happy fat man, because when you run, there is a beautiful echo on you when you stop, like inertia loves your body too. And as you run toward me on this dance floor, at your sister’s wedding, it’s like the…

The Portland Fiction Project:

She’s got no clothes on, the woman has, nothing but a pair of galoshes. Galoshes I suppose on account of it’s raining outside, but can’t imagine for the life of me why she’s got no clothes on. She’s sitting across the aisle from me…

The Portland Fiction Project:

It’s winter and her parents are drinking. Not much. Just brandy. Nice brandy. In small green tinted glasses bought in Florence. Maybe Rome. The family can’t remember, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not much. It’s been a long day, and dad needs…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I’m walking because I’m following the power lines over valleys and through the snow and my boots are frayed and damp and every forty-five minutes it seems I cross a country road and watch for oncoming headlights in the slanted falling snow and I…

The Portland Fiction Project:

!!!Win a date with Haxcomb Lewis!!! I typed on the computer so the phrase swam onto the screen in an assault of orange and purple glitter. I gestured toward Frank with my chin to indicate that it was a question.

Frank deleted it. “That’s…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Editor’s Note: This is the seventh installment of “These Are The Stories.” Click here to catch up on Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV or Part V or Part VI.

The…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I don’t see Brenda and Mike all the next day.

They are missing from the lobby when Amsi comes to pick me up at 8:00 for the snorkel, which after the night we shared, is not entirely surprising, I had a tough enough…

The Portland Fiction Project:

It was a family tradition that every Thanksgiving, my grandpa would nod off over his turkey and stuffing. So it was no surprise when, halfway through dinner, his chin slumped onto his chest and his hand slackened its grip on the fork that was…

The Portland Fiction Project:

White whiskers on a park bench in the early evening light. And, “Sir, do you have a cigarette?” The Whiskers look up at me and nod, and hand me one with an old brown hand from an old brown pocket of an old…

The Portland Fiction Project:

She felt the stiff folds of the pillowcase against her cheek, and knew that she was awake, but kept her eyes shut. There was light behind her lids. She rolled to her left, away from the bedroom window. The window was stuck, and in…

The Portland Fiction Project:

“Too far,” she said. “You went too far.” This was what she said to me. I said, “How could I have gone too far when I don’t even know where too far is?” This is the joke. I used to say the same thing…

The Portland Fiction Project:

The girl was starving. She should have been cleaning her room, as it was Saturday, and it was raining, and despite being ten, a rule is still a rule. Still, she was starving, and this couldn’t be avoided. And so piles of clothes were.…

The Portland Fiction Project:

-significant other discreetly cheated on you [blank]

-significant other openly cheated on you [blank]

-your unfaithfulness came to the attention of significant other [blank]

-dissatisfaction with your job [checkmark]

-inability to find a job in desired field [blank]

-failure to achieve an answer other than ‘no’ when…

The Portland Fiction Project:

A/ We didn’t talk for a couple days about what happened between us and when we tried everything was weighed down in the way things are after a pool party when you are a kid with water in your ears and chlorine in your eyes…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Yes Mister Davis, I understand the nature of my transgression. As you indicated in your rednotes, my paper, although grammatically impeccable, was neither cogent nor germane to the topic, but rather leapt from one digression to another like the rant of a lunatic in the…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I pick up the phone, which had been ringing, after seven rings, because I was in bed with the lights out and almost asleep at the sound of the first, and it has taken me a while to rouse myself and to throw…

The Portland Fiction Project:

***Here, music, a late ‘60s soul-steeped horn section, to set the mood as smooth***

The car you are driving is black. The road is empty on account of the hour. The windows are rolled down. You signal turns with your left…

The Portland Fiction Project:

A blood red pebble the size of a nail head sits in the grass between the rows where I planted summer squash. When I turned ten, for my birthday present Mom and Dad gave me ownership of an eight foot by eight foot square…

The Portland Fiction Project:

An inappropriate place for travel to and from, no one ever came back from being gone, or returned to wherever they had been before. A life could not be adequately built around such a distance, it would take too long.

Here my people live, the…

The Portland Fiction Project:

The poet’s name and appearance have not been confirmed, but according to folklore, all of his or her works — most likely published under a pseudonym or multiple pseudonyms — are composed at coffee shops, and while writing longhand in a shabby notebook, every time…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Things went a little more smoothly for the next few weeks after that. Dominic and Chester greeted each other almost exactly the same way as before: politely, according to script. But there was a growing congeniality and warmth behind each exchange. Sometimes one or…

The Portland Fiction Project:

After asking her neighbor Lionel if it was possible for water to act as a radio, Belinda looked up from her tuna sandwich and saw the underbelly of a spider crawling up the window. She did not rattle or drop silverware and her wrist did…

The Portland Fiction Project:

1. Mel left the house this morning wearing my favorite Bowie t-shirt. Not Ziggy Bowie or China Girl Bowie, but David Bowie as Jareth, the goblin king, complete with contact-juggling crystal balls. I didn’t realize I’d planned to wear that shirt…

The Portland Fiction Project:

It had been twenty-four hours since the first contraction. Katie, who had been a slim boned, petite girl, was now swollen, and a double chin that had never existed, was now permanently there as she bore down. John watched and was terrified in his…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Picture a ten-year-old boy chubby in the appropriate places, uniformed, blindfolded, with a compass hung round his neck, a Swiss Army knife tucked into his belt, and a meticulously folded topo map tucked into his pocket. He is wearing a knapsack, which has been…

The Portland Fiction Project:

It’s the bend, right at the crook, at the twist of her neck that’s so important, the boy thinks. He thinks that he knows that it’s important, to watch this right now. The back of the neck with sharp lines running up and a curl…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Rules of horror: tell the story in the first person.

My grief counselor told me to find a spot conducive to sitting and thinking. She didn’t use the word conducive; that’s how I put it. So I went to the pond. My…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Everything feels old and used and said and tired. And I’m tired, and roll over and sleep and maybe I’ll sleep because I’m tired and I’ve run out of stories to tell. So I’ll just sleep. And toss and turn and wake up and…

The Portland Fiction Project:

The jukebox doesn’t have the song I want, Phil Collins’s “Against All Odds,” so I settle for The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” even though it doesn’t fit the moment quite exactly, or say precisely what I want it to, which is, “You’re the…

The Portland Fiction Project:

There was a boy he was watching. Suspended from the air, the boy hung from a set of monkey bars, and he was furious.

The boy couldn’t see the man. He was facing the wrong way.

“Come over here and let me…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Covert ops:

A clandestine trip to Sears, where she dodged hostile clothing racks and slipped among shoppers like a shadow. The rendezvous took only minutes, and she emerged from the mall with the package firmly secured under her arm.

Undercover surveillance:…

The Portland Fiction Project:

So there I was, he was, not me, I don’t even know why I said I when I meant he, clearly meant he, there he was, among friends. Not friends necessarily but he imagined they all had the definite propensity to become friends, could…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Me and the sea and nothing else but hollow wind and pungent air, sweet and pressured against my skin. And I thought I like it this way. How quiet is like a lead that pours into your bones and anchors you to…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Page 7: (next to the picture of Uncle Harry in front of the park blocks on Broogles Corner, 1978) “Listen, I think we should see other people.” A lateral line of ink connects Uncle Harry’s photograph and inscription to Aunt Jeanette (wearing a raincoat…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Editor’s Note: This is the third and final installment of a continuing story. If you missed them, click here to read Part 2, or Part 1.

He ran through the surf. Salty waves stung his legs as they swept over…

The Portland Fiction Project:

One day Edward lost his hair. It caught me off guard, though I suppose I knew it would happen one day, as his father is bald, his grandfather is bald, and if I am to be honest, I suspect his mother is going bald…

The Portland Fiction Project:

This isn’t what I expected, although I’m not sure what I expected, but it wasn’t this. I’m sitting up here with everybody facing me, and I’m feeling guilty for doing nothing wrong, and I’m feeling like a liar even though I’m not. And suddenly I’m…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Editor’s Note: This is a continuation of Marian’s story “Grey and Green.”

It took less than half an hour for Tom to make it down to the lobby, looking for breakfast. Against the wall, he found some carafes of coffee and poured…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Bella says she doesn’t feel much of anything besides regret these days, and for the most part she’s fine with that, she says, says there’s plenty worse things to feel all the time, among other things a sharp stick in the eye, for one,…

The Portland Fiction Project:

She called late this afternoon, Corinne did, asking when should she pick me up at the airport and how happy she was to see me after so long and remember not to bring any ink pens on the plane, in my shirt or…

The Portland Fiction Project:

While driving a long distance by car, or couched lazily on their porch, whenever they were slightly buzzed, or had time to kill waiting for other things to happen—she would want to have variations of the same conversation, beginning always with a relatively innocuous question.

The Portland Fiction Project:

Dominic and Chester’s apartment was on the third floor of a red brick building on the park blocks. The kitchen was a thin alleyway between cupboards, a counterspace, a refrigerator and it ended anticlimactically on one end with a small circular wooden table with two…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Margaret always liked Christmas and its entitled presents. Home from college for Christmas, she wanted to take it all in. She presented her mother, Anne, with a list every year and her mother liked gathering the things. She also liked watching Margaret as they shopped together,…

The Portland Fiction Project:

He hated Oregon on sight. From the plane he watched a flat desert roll under him without signs of life or mercy. Then mountains. Too big to offer the friendly, rustic beauty of the Adirondacks, but without the grandeur of the ever snowbound…

The Portland Fiction Project:

It’s the captain’s wheel that’s driving me crazy. It’s a ship wheel made of brass, hanging on the wall behind him and I can’t focus on what he’s saying, because all I can think about is how much I hate brass. As a metal, as…

The Portland Fiction Project:

He walked in out of the rain and I lifted my glass to greet him. I sat at my favorite cocktail table in the corner. Floating around my table, the happy hour crowd laughed and toasted. He took off his coat before wading through.

As…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Yes, I was trapped under a rock for seventeen days. When people ask me what I ate, I tell them scabs from my arms. I ate non-discriminately; ants, spiders, dragonflies if I could catch them (and by the fifth day, capturing those winged treats was…

The Portland Fiction Project:

When I sit on the grass, not the sidewalk, but the grass, I am closer to the ground and it feels more stable I stand and move my clothes, to cover me more and then I am hidden. I hold my sign and hope that…

The Portland Fiction Project:

It should not have surprised me to discover that Lucy was decorated with tattoos from the base of her spine to her shoulders. It was mostly tribal characters in dark green ink. I did not ask their meaning. Her back was an emaciated collection of…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Let’s start where this story is heading: boy flat-backed to the earth with legs propped knees-to-the-sky and arms spread to mimic a bird’s. He is looking up through the leafed branches of a tree, which is casting a coded shadow/light/shadow/light pattern down on him.

The Portland Fiction Project:

You’re fuzzy, or the room is fuzzy; with too much smoke and too much noise and six people melted out to the sides, mixing with the shadows in the grain of the wood on the walls. I don’t like how you’re looking at me, as…

The Portland Fiction Project:

And then, and then, and then, and then,

And then nothing.

My trainers wanted to see who could climb the highest, not the fastest. Then they ran out of ropes. Once over the ridge, rocks and dirt were in scare supply. Turned out I…

The Portland Fiction Project:

She’s been crying. She tells me I’m pathetic. I say, “I’m not pathetic but I’ll tell you a story that really is pathetic.” Then I tell her about a young man, we’ll call him Jackson since his father’s name was Jack, whose parents died when…

The Portland Fiction Project:

“You,” said the stout man as he returned with two very full pints to their table in the corner, “are lugubrious.” He had to place his own beer on the table as well as his companion’s and use both hands to slide his considerable…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I get a drink at the bar I often go to on Tuesday nights and see you there. Right off the bat I’ve got questions. R U single? Probably, but then where is your man right now. Why isn’t he sitting next to you?…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I bought Stacy a new bikini because it was summertime, and because it matched the color of mine. She looked at it in its tan packaging and said, pretty shit. That’s not what she said. Out of the side of her mouth, “I appreciate it”…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I circled the buffets and watched an old man eat a piece of roast beef out of his hand while he made eyes at the salad bar. The oil and gravy ran down his wrist and he licked it up, quickly, with bulging eyes. I…

The Portland Fiction Project:

I am reading a book in the time each night I would have spent with you, lying in bed, before falling asleep.

The protagonist is an immigrant, a Slavic Eeyore type with square features and a bald spot. Much of the story deals with assimilative efforts:…

The Portland Fiction Project:

Splinters pinched Lucky’s naked back slowly, and more slowly. After many minutes, it itched more than it hurt. Sometimes it stopped itching altogether for a span of isolated pain. The pain made his heart feel so large it had to be the…

The Portland Fiction Project:

The telephone rings. I pick it up and a deep voice on the other end asks if this is Jacob Meyer. That’s my name, always has been ever since I was a baby, only child of Vincent and Nadine, but I’m working now, crucial…