Author: Keith Pilapil Lesmeister

Review of “Illinois” by Desmond Everest Fuller, published in Nashville Review

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I suppose I’m a sucker for any story that features a Midwestern state, so the title alone caught my eye. As did: train tracks, newly minted adults, Slipknot T-shirts, spin-the-bottle, Sarah McLachlan, stocking shelves at a Thriftway, Lyle Lovett, and snorting random crushed pills off a Ouija Board. In other words, I was hooked from the start, and the story earned my attention the entire way through. It turns out the title is only slightly misleading after we learn what’s behind Martha’s ear. I can’t give it away. That would ruin the story.

I do a good deal of reading of short stories published online. My process is pretty simple: I typically read the first paragraph to decide whether or not to keep reading. In this case, I was captured by the setting (the train tracks), the oddness of the characters pitching eyeballs onto the track (you’ll see what I’m talking about in the first paragraph), and the situation itself: Bobby and Heather are engaged to be married, and Bobby has asked the narrator to be his best man. Bobby wants to marry Heather because “Apparently, Heather’s ex, Reynolds, still [sends] her wild horny messages.” Let’s hope Reynolds doesn’t look anything like the Marvel heartthrob Ryan Reynolds, or else Bobby might be shit-out-of-luck.

The story progresses, and we meet the group of friends: the narrator, Bobby, Heather, and the twins, Marla and Brenda. The narrator’s part in all this is how he fits in with this group, navigating personal spaces, work spaces, intimate spaces. There’s a youthful charge to the story that propels it forward, a kind of unpredictable swagger. One afternoon, for example, working at the Thriftway, Brenda hands the narrator a “warm linty pill.” The two wash them down with “…bright green Jones Soda. Pretty soon it was “…getting harder to feel [his] hands,” as he dropped “canned vegetables” in the aisle.

While the pace of the story feels frenetic at times, there are parts, too, that slow down to focus on exquisitely rendered details. One night, on dusted gravel roads, in Bobby’s Corolla, the narrator observes, “Pines saw-toothed in the moonlight.” Or “Heather’s phone kept chirping in her coat pocket like an orphaned baby bird.” Soon, Marla tells the narrator she loves him and they press their foreheads together, and her breath smells “hot and apple.” Details unique enough to draw attention to themselves, while also clear enough for us to see and understand what’s happening.

A compulsively readable story with hints of Jodi Angel and Ann Cummins. Read the story here.

Desmond Everest Fuller grew up in rural Washington. He earned an MFA in fiction at Boise State University and served as associate editor of The Idaho Review. He was a 2023 Sun Valley Writers Conference Fellow and a 2021 Glenn Balch Award recipient. His work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and is forthcoming or appears in Grist, Indiana Review, Zone 3, Florida Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Peauxdunque Review, West Trade Review, The Gravity of the Thing, and elsewhere.

Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the fiction chapbook Mississippi River Museum and the story collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here. More at keithlesmeister.com

Review of “Radio Silence” by Holly Hilliard, published in Reckon Review

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Radio Silence by Holly Hilliard is a summertime story that takes place at Cole’s Resort. The main attraction is a waterslide – “twisted pink tunnel, opaque and rusted, that had been around since the seventies.” The story is narrated in the first person from the perspective of Anna who, at the time, was a teenager and had been “ogled since [she was] twelve.” This because of her “C-cup” which was the focus of her “male classmates” who “stared into [her] chest.” The physical details of the story don’t overwhelm the story, but they do play a critical role, which we see revealed as the story moves forward. Anna works at the Resort with her sister Mia who “…[attracted] lingering looks… desperate flirtations” because “there was just something about her.” Their manager at the Resort is Jackson Cole (of Cole’s Resorts), and his presence or conflict is the leadoff batter in the story. The opening line: “When I heard the news about Jackson Cole, I couldn’t stop thinking about the summer I turned sixteen—the summer I got a job at Cole’s Resort.” I’m a sucker for these narrative frameworks, in which a much older narrator looks back on events from their youth. This allows a kind of pinging back and forth between the narrator of now and the narrator of then, which, I think, provides a level of wisdom and maturity with which the narrator might use to share her story.

The story moves through space and time effortlessly. In one scene we’re at the girls’ house where we meet their parents, in the next we’re on top of the pink slide, in the next we’re on the slide itself, and so on. In each scene, conflicts emerge between the girls and their parents, the customers at the Resort, the sisters themselves, and – of course – don’t forget about Jackson Cole.

The situation of the story coupled with the easy-going nature of the prose were enough to propel me forward as a reader. There’s an ease of authenticity and voice—that elusive aspect of fiction writing that most or all fiction writers hope to achieve. That is, a voice so compelling as to keep readers reading regardless of subject matter or situation. That voice, that authenticity exists in this story, and it’s achieved, I think, through two main aspects: humor and wonderfully placed details. For instance, at the beginning of the story we get this wonderful description of the condition of the slide: “It cost a dollar to ride, even though it was old and much slower than it had been when I was younger, and most of our customers found it highly disappointing.” That could’ve been enough, but Hilliard moves forward with the reason for it being “much slower”: “The denim worn by many of the slide-goers caused the plastic to wear over time… there were no clothing requirements, so long as you wore something.” The detail of the “denim worn” and the addition of “so long as you wore something” places us readers in a very specific time and place. It lends a credibility to this already compelling voice. We know, for instance, this Resort is not located on Jersey Shore.

Another well-wrought aspect is the way Hilliard layers a current topic into the story. In this case a Me Too aspect. It’s difficult to write about current events or of-the-moment topics without sounding stilted or, perhaps, didactic. But Hilliard’s story, turns out, is a model for how one might achieve this layering of a current topic, while staying true to the story and its characters.

An excellent story that explores the full range of human emotion while also addressing the lingering implications of young women who’ve been mistreated and harmed by men in positions of power.

Read the story here.

Holly Hilliard is a graduate of the MFA program at NC State University, where she was the 2018 winner of the James Hurst Prize for Fiction. She now lives in Pittsburgh, PA. Find her online at hollyhilliard.com.

Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the fiction chapbook Mississippi River Museum and the story collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here. More at keithlesmeister.com.

Review of “Ken & Sirina” by K.A. Polzin, published in The Forge Literary Magazine

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A flash piece whose tone and use of time and repetition allows readers to feel a genuine connection between and with the couple in question.

The story addresses the simple yet profound acknowledgment of growing older as a couple. Interspersed with humor and intimacy, the duration of the piece is over the course of an evening and a morning. It takes place on an Arctic cruise, during which the couple in question—Ken and Sirina—contemplate the decisions of a couple on vacation: Should we have one more glass of wine? What time should we go to bed? Will we make it to breakfast on time tomorrow morning? But when they share breakfast with a British couple, who go on about their children, Ken and Sirina leave the meal and discuss their own future as a childless couple (“They’d decided not to have kids, some twenty years before…”). Ken’s a “…don’t-think-about-it-unless-you-have-to kind of person.” But Sirina is not. So the two of them, Ken and Sirina—who now adorn their statements with “meine Damen und Herren”—are forced to confront their childlessness. They reach some conclusions (“…the healthy one can read to the dying one.”), they sip more wine (yes, wine immediately after breakfast), and they tease each other gently, while offering assurances to one another that are incomplete, perhaps unnecessary, but wholly comforting.

A charming flash piece marked by moments of intimacy and humor. Read it here.

K. A. Polzin’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Subtropics, Gulf Coast, Wigleaf, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2023 and the Fractured Lit Anthology 3. Polzin’s short humor has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the fiction chapbook Mississippi River Museum and the story collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here.

Review of “The Smell of Muskoka Pomade” by Jacob Anthony Moniz, published in Southeast Review

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Here’s a flash fiction piece set in the tucked away corners of a bar. While there are multiple people stuffed into a booth, the points of interest in the story revolve around the narrator and his friend/former lover Adrián who, as the narrator observes, “does his best to hide his disappointment,” but the narrator “take[s] notice of the way his face drops.” Something, in other words, is going on with Adrián and the narrator—the two aren’t aligned with one another, something is off, and now they are speaking or not speaking around each other in ways that feel unfortunate in the way that most simple miscommunications feel unfortunate, especially in retrospect when one might realize the importance of a direct statement or question. Instead, the narrator shares with us readers: “I turn to Adrián for some sign that this isn’t where our night is headed…” but it is in fact where their night is headed as “…each take a pill and raise it in what I suppose is a bold, subversive take on a toast.”

What’s brilliant about this flash piece is that these few hundred words open us up to an entire relationship. We feel the torrent of emotion around these two, their past, their present, their potential future. We also feel what it’s like to satisfy a primal need to alleviate any emotional hurt we might be feeling at the moment—to reach for some physical antidote from whatever or whoever might be within our immediate proximity.

A melancholic piece made more so by the characters’ inability to communicate, and their turning to drugs and others to alleviate their emotional wounds.

Read the story here.

Jacob Anthony Moniz (he/him) is a writer and visual artist from California. He holds degrees from UC Santa Cruz, NYU, and the University of Notre Dame. His writing has appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, Penumbra, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Ocotillo Review, The Whisky Blot, and Southeast Review, among other journals and publications.

Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the fiction chapbook Mississippi River Museum and the story collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here. His most recent work is published or forthcoming in Bennington Review, december magazine, and Terrain.

Review of “The Happiest Day of Your Life” by Katherine Damm, published in the Iowa Review

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The Happiest Day of Your Life (published in the Iowa Review) by Katherine Damm is a masterclass in tempo, rhythm, and the all-encompassing clock/time so critically important to writers, especially those who write short stories.

The story takes place over the course of a wedding reception, with the remaining moments of the story—shall we say the denouement? —taking place the morning after in the couple’s bedroom. Not that couple. The couple in question, already married, are Wyatt and Nina. They’re attending a wedding reception of one of Nina’s ex-boyfriends, Greg, who married Lillian. The complimentary cocktail specials are named after the couple, so the attendees bump around while sipping and getting sloshed on Gregs and Lillians.

This all takes place at the Drake Hotel in Chicago. “It’s snowing outside” and there are several characters who come and go. Brief, though memorable interactions, such as John, the cardiologist/philanthropist, who leaves the conversation with Wyatt to look for ghosts (yes, he is a cardiologist who claims to see and believe in ghosts, or maybe he just wants out of the conversation). Or, another one of Nina’s ex-boyfriends, Austin, who Wyatt bumps into while in the bathroom where he “drank water by the palmful.” Austin is the ex-boyfriend who helped Nina feel “feminine.” A remark Wyatt wished he could “unhear.”

The story is narrated through Wyatt’s POV, and it’s a convincing one: a man surrounded by his wife’s ex-partners gets tanked, fantasizes about one part of a woman’s unshaven leg, recalls past girlfriends, dances exuberantly, and has at least a half a dozen interactions, all of which feel significant in their own way. But take John and Austin, for instance (spoiler alert): they don’t make their way back into the narrative, and one wonders, especially with conversations about ghosts, like Chekhov’s gun, might we be waiting for some instance where they appear? Absolutely not. This is a wedding reception which introduces and entertains its own sense of blissful logic, tempo, and pacing. The propulsive pace of the narrative mimics the manic aspects of being at a reception where half of what you might say or do will not be remembered, and if you do remember what you say or do, there’s a better than fifty percent chance you might regret at least some of what you said or did.

The pacing along with the number of characters and interactions teeters on too much—as it should—but then we get this beautiful scene just past midway through the story. Wyatt is drunkenly dancing with everyone, and after one of the songs, he’s escorted calmly to the bar by the groom’s brother. The groom’s brother gives him a drink, and Wyatt responds with: “I love fizzy water.” After that, Wyatt sneaks away, and we get this wonderful—and much needed—moment of calm:

“It was snowing outside, and night. The street was a glassy obsidian, lit white and red as cars passed casting wet, beige piles aside. [Wyatt] rolled his forehead from side to side on the cool pane. The script on the awning across the street read The Grand Ballroom. “If you’re there, then where am I,” he wondered, then remembered that he was at the Drake Hotel, looking over Walton Street at the Knickerbocker.”

After the descriptions above, Wyatt ruminates on family, his parents, the holidays (how many more will they have together?), and then he shares a moment, a brief wave and a smile, with a stranger. It’s so serene that you almost forget where we are, what’s happening, and how long we’ve stepped away from the party. But then “Unchained Melody” starts, “the long diphthong of an “O” buttressed by arpeggiated chords” and Wyatt is suddenly searching for Nina so they might share a dance together. He stumbles around looking for her. He doesn’t find her, not at first, so he orders more to drink. Eventually, he finds her with mascara-stained cheeks. But she’s not crying because of Wyatt.

Wedding receptions are a fascinating blend of people, sometimes family, sometimes strangers, brought together by the couple of the day. The interactions of the people are propelled then by this somewhat loose or strong connection, exacerbated by emotion, exhaustion, and possibly alcohol. The constellation of people around which Wyatt orients himself is wide ranging, but mentally and emotionally he gravitates toward Nina’s ex-boyfriends, specifically the groom, Greg. These thoughts are mostly explored through Wyatt’s interiority, which, in his drunken state, has him wondering about things with regard to Greg and Nina. Wyatt eventually shares with others various bits of information he’d learned in the past, from Nina, some of it still secret. The secret he shares (I won’t tell you what and with whom—you’ll have to read to find out) helps move the story toward its conclusion. Remember the mascara-stained cheeks.

I remember once asking my own spouse why she enjoyed weddings so much, and she said, “I don’t like weddings. I like dances.” And that seemed apt to me. She went on to explain that she didn’t like weddings because we’d been married long enough to know that shit just gets more and more difficult, so the wedding oftentimes—sometimes, but not always, I suppose—being one of the happiest memories, if not moments, for the couple. So much of their emotional energy is consumed by the planning. Then, once it’s over, there’s only one inevitable direction for the pendulum to swing.

Coincidentally, the last three books I’ve read are, in this order, All Fours by Miranda July, Liars by Sarah Manguso, and This American Ex-Wife by Lyz Lenz. The former two are labeled and sold as fiction, while the latter is a mixture of memoir and reporting, mostly about marriage, patriarchy, and most of what we’ve come to know and understand about the confines and downfalls of heteronormative institutions, specifically marriage: that it’s an arrangement, socially and structurally, for men to succeed outside the home while women struggle. In other words, the institution is a far better deal for the guy. Liars is a one-sided view of a dissolving marriage. The protagonist’s husband is a caricature, so thoroughly unlikable as to become laughable, unbelievable. Still, it’s a taut, stark account, very well written, and compulsively readable, even if wholly unenjoyable. And All Fours among others things is a reexamining of how we do marriage and what a modern marriage for multiple evolved and consenting people might look like, especially for people with ravenous sexual creativity and appetites.

While Damm’s story might not mix entirely with the three books mentioned, it does touch on important questions that most married people pause on now and again: what the fuck am I doing in this marriage? Who am I as an individual? Who is this person I married? Are our lives better because we’re together?

I, for one, don’t believe in the one—I guess I don’t know or hangout with anyone who actually believes in such harmful fairytales—but there is this sense by the end of the story of the constant mental negotiations, or questions, we go through while married: is my partner happy with me? Am I happy with my partner? Could I have been happier with someone else? What would my life be like had I married that other person? Would my life be better? While not explicitly stated, these questions lurk somewhere in the subtext of Damm’s story. Or maybe I’m wrong about that, and maybe these questions are unique to my own reading of the story.

In any case, the story takes place at the Drake. A fancy spot. It’s loud, hectic, drunk. People are dancing, talking, milling about. Ordering drinks. In other words, it’s a wedding reception. If you haven’t been to one lately, and you enjoy the manic pace of a night out, or if you simply love a damn good short story, read Damm’s story. It’s a well-crafted story with a sense of gravitas so complete, that despite knowing what’s happening to the characters—getting more and more besotted—Damm’s able to ground us readers with expertly crafted pacing/tempo, pitch-perfect dialogue, exquisite details, and a level of relational tension that compels us readers to say I do want to keep reading.

Katherine Damm was raised in Philadelphia and now lives in New York. She received her MFA from the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine, and her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, and Crazyhorse. She is working on a novel.

Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the fiction chapbook Mississippi River Museum and the story collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here. More info: keithlesmeister.com