Rumpus Original Fiction: Red Cedar
A living tree is a dare.
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Posts Tagged: Rumpus fiction
Rumpus Original Fiction: Career Day
It was too late for Lucy to be whatever she wanted. All she could do was be herself.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Turning of Celestial Bodies
When I start running, I want you to keep your eyes on it, because you’ll notice something that may seem strange. You will find that no matter where I run, or how long, or how far, you will not see this moon move an inch in the sky.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: On the Farm
On the farm, I understand exactly the degree to which I have come to depend on alcohol, since in the first three weeks I think about it frequently and get worried and even look for it twice in the farmer’s house, and on the fourth week I am less interested, and on the fifth week I do other things.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Chicken
I used my fingers on the neighbor and he liked it.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Prepare a Table Before Me, Anoint My Head with Oil
Before I understood that I was a girl, I understood that I was a body.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Bridal Set
The salad was plump, squealing things I couldn’t understand. I remembered feeling a deep sadness that everything in the world wasn’t painted green, the best color. I hungered for green. The gift of sunlight flecked on leaves, the pale chartreuse of American money.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: White Ash
My wife, Ritu, a receptionist at a motel, works four nights a week. In the morning, I pick her up in our used Honda and drive her home. After she showers, I bring her a cup of fresh ginger and cardamom tea. She smells of lavender, her hair glowing with water beads, her eyelashes stuck […]
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Night of in Tangas
The problem for my father was the same. He had no money to buy confetti and to top everything off he now owed the price of two corundas.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: To Go
Love can feel muddled, vast, diffuse; so little to do with the singular volatility of a firework. I hunger for that kind of crystalline precision, though. That clarity. To scream myself across the sky just once—consuming everything in my wake—and then vanish from view.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Only Humans
Hearing old people’s memories is like watching a once-in-three-generations downpour. In the past, they lived in abundance and air conditioning. So many details go over Salwa’s head. She doesn’t know how to transcribe all the words.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Mycomorphosis
“Everything looks good,” the neurologist said. The hairs on his head, she couldn’t help noticing, resembled plump white beansprouts—they stood from his scalp as if fat with water. His fingers too. “The only thing is that you have extra fungus in your head.”
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Breaking Through
I read somewhere that sounds don’t stop, they keep going all the way into deep space, reflecting off whatever might be in the way and speeding infinitely on. My head feels like deep space, and those voices haven’t even begun to wind down in there.
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You Don’t See the Whole Young Man until the Very End: An Interview with Douglas Stuart
The amount of pressure on young men still to get on with it and to bottle it up and to be strong and be certain is overwhelming. And it shows in the UK. The suicide rates for men are so high. It’s a mental health issue. We don’t allow men to express themselves or talk about their vulnerability, and we blame them for a lot; we get to that phrase “toxic masculinity” really quickly. I don’t believe masculinity is always toxic, I just think sometimes it’s very unhealthy and we need to examine it and open it up.
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Feeling Comfortable Enough to Be Funny Is What Makes Me Want to Write Fiction: A Conversation with Megan Giddings
There was a long stretch where I tried actively not to make things I wrote funny because of a disastrous undergrad fiction workshop where I spent thirty minutes just listening to people complain that a story had jokes. And wouldn’t it have been so much better if the author had let us pay attention to the emotions? Lol.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Genesis
The speed boat moves fast and Genesis notices Kayla’s hair keeps getting into her eyes. She laughs, as do all the others, who bounce up and down and let out high-pitched screams each time the boat rides a wave up into the air before crashing back down on the choppy water. Kayla grips the edge […]
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Bridle
But I am, I wanted to say. I am willing.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Things for Which We Have Prayed
In the nursing home, his few lucid days are passed recounting the things he had prayed for as a child. The zookeepers, he cackles. I prayed for the zookeepers.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: A Girl Lost at Sea
Sometimes, she thinks her parents can mute the world.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Feast
I’m the only deaf person at the party, again.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: A Hundred Orbits
Anoushka reaches for my dresser, too close to the Prednisone prescription. If she accidentally flips it over, I’ll have to tell the truth. She picks up two matching earrings: long ones with black jewels that could be grapes on a branch.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Wherever, Anyplace
For a while, at least, we were safe. The end is the beginning, the beginning is the end.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Parallax
Summer was ending, and my sister was shrinking. I first noticed when we were sitting on the dock near the lake at our summer camp; as she stretched her bare leg toward the water, I saw a new striation of musculature in her calf, a ridge that didn’t used to be there. Atop her denim […]
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