Farthest South & Other Stories by Ethan Rutherford

Author:Ethan Rutherford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

SASHA STOOD UP to get a drink.

“What do you do with a story like this?” Nils asked. “When you’re done, I mean.”

“I suppose that when I have enough of them, I’ll put them all together and make a book.”

“I read these stories when I was a kid,” Anna said. “I couldn’t get enough.”

“Right,” said Karen.

“I’m back,” announced Sasha, and sat down near Nils.

“So,” Karen said, and looked down at the pages in front of her. “He can’t stop thinking about this woman, the child’s mother. There are some days when, for reasons he can’t quite explain, she enters his every waking thought. It’s alarming to him, and unexpected. He doesn’t know what to do.”

“Right,” Sasha said. “We got that.”

“No,” Karen said, “like, he really thinks about her.” She stopped here and looked at Anna. “This isn’t a children’s story. It’s something else.”

“I’m sorry,” Anna said. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Excuse me,” she said, and stood. She walked down the hall to the bathroom. While she was gone, no one spoke. The fire was blue at its base, and licked the fake logs in a hypnotic, predictable way. When Anna returned, she sat near the edge of the sofa, close to, but not touching, her husband.

“Where were we?” Karen said. She looked at the page in front of her for where she’d left off.

“He’s thinking about the woman,” Nils said. “The child’s mother.”

“Yes,” Karen said. “Right. Time passed, and this unsettled feeling did not go away. It felt to the fox as though the woman were reaching out to him across some other plane, some dark dimension he couldn’t quite see. He was deeply bothered by this feeling. It would not let him go. And so one day, even though he knew it was not a great idea, he left home and went in search of her.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.