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