Fiction


Gregory Sherl is the author of THE OREGON TRAIL IS THE OREGON TRAIL (Mud Luscious Press, 2012) and SWALLOW (Mud Luscious Press, 2013). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in New York Quarterly, Gargoyle, Georgetown Review, Sixth Finch, and PANK.


This is what you tell me: you’re writing a book about forever. My children are in the pages, their children’s children. The dog that got hit by the car but still got three good feet is somewhere in there. The cat from the comic strip, too. He eats some spaghetti on page 74, tells me I’m looking a bit husky on page 86, & can he have that last meatball? By page 311, my children’s children are in college, smoking pot from an apple, forgetting to brush their teeth. I’m alone the most when I close the book. Keep it open you tell me. On page 94 I think about all that mercury in salmon. At Winn- Dixie I promise a package of fish sticks that I’ll never visit a fish farm. Page 299, there I am walking around my neighborhood, my sideburns graying, my irises the shade of a used Q-tip. How old am I? There are 437 pages but I’m too scared to look at the last dozen or so— can you wake up one morning & forget how she tasted? 20 pages after I sprain my ankle from falling off a ladder while putting up Christmas lights over the garage, my daughter gets her braces off, says We can eat the bones together. I’m putting bbq sauce on ribs, I’m wearing an apron that says I’m wearing an apron. From pages 270-281, my children’s children bring me lost treasures they find down by the lake. A tadpole with legs. Two rocks that feel like flesh. If this were a movie I’d wake up & realize how I wasted my life in an empty apartment, how fiction is the quietest way to die. Find me you’d say. There are too many hours to not be touching. On page 403 I only want to play chess in the park. I have a cane but I don’t like to you use it. Carry me I say to an idea I once read. You’re there, I think, writing this down.


Gregory Sherl


www.gregorysherl.com


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