This next Weekly Rumpus features fiction from Marjorie Celona! Here’s an excerpt:
Harrison asked Vincent to imagine that he was an old pony who’d been bought at auction by a woman and lived most of his life in a shed in the back of the woman’s house. And when the woman died, a truck came around and he was taken to a small farm, where children rode on his back all day. It was not a sad end for the pony, but he asked Vincent to imagine the car ride: being hitched to a truck and driven away, with no sense of where he was going, no sense of whether he was headed toward his own death. He asked Vincent to look at him through this pony’s wide, wild eyes. Harrison did not know how he got his ideas but he felt certain that this would work. Surely Vincent knew the feeling of dread.
“Am I doing it right, Reverend?” Vincent looked up at him with his ancient face. His eyes were wet with fear.
“Yes. It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful, Vincent. You understand precisely.”
“Well, then, yes, I’ll be a part of your play, Reverend. It’s a good cause.”
“It is.” Harrison let go of Vincent’s hand and stood.
Marjorie Celona is the author of Y, a novel, which was recently shortlisted for the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. She has also published fiction in Harvard Review, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Glimmer Train, and other journals. Her most recently published story is listed as “Notable” in The Best American Short Stories 2013.
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