The next Weekly Rumpus features fiction from Katherine Zlabek! Here’s an excerpt:
There is a rocking chair in the house. The wood is solid. The varnish is worn. The seat was once a thick, flat oak sheet. Now it is curved from the skirts wearing it out, and greased from the supper hands and the dish hands, hands thick with bacon fat and butter, being wiped on the back of the skirt. A wooden rosary circles the right arm. The beads lock into one another firmly. The entire chain has, no doubt, been carved from a single piece of wood, bead locking into bead. Ginny has spent hours twirling and twirling the beads around, looking for an end, and finding none. The crucifix alone is iron. The chair first belonged to a Catherine Morovitz, who each night would call “Nine bells! Nine bells!” and her children would gather round for Bible and prayers and bed.
The chair fits Ginny just fine. She holds the end of the rosary out to her daughter and says, “Now. You’d have to be careful with this. It’s not a toy. The wood gets dry and then one hard yank from a rowdy kid—it’s ruined.” Hazel nods. Ginny is sure Hazel is not really listening. She is also sure that Hazel will not have kids, which is why Hazel gets the chair in the first place. If she does have children, they will probably be languid and inward, and not notice the woodworking. And suddenly Ginny is seized with the question of what is worse: the not noticing or the hard yank? God help her, she doesn’t know. And bless Hazel’s womb, whatever happens in it. And Jack, of course. He’ll need it.
Katherine Zlabek received her M.F.A. from Western Michigan University, whereshe won awards for both fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Madison Review, Artful Dodge, Bellevue Literary Review, Oxford Magazine, TINGE, The Dos Passos Review and The Flying House Anthology, among others. In 2012, she won the AWP Intro Journals Award. Her collection of stories Let the Rivers Clap Their Hands was a finalist for both the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award in 2012 and the Iowa Short Fiction Contest in 2013. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and is currently finishing her Ph.D. at the University of Cincinnati, where she is a Taft Dissertation Fellow.
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