literary fiction

Review of “Time Management” by Caelyn Cobb, published in Short Story, Long

/ Keith Pilapil Lesmeister / Leave a comment

“Time Management” by Caelyn Cobb, published in Short Story, Long, is either a cautionary tale of corporate life, or it’s a reflection of what has already happened, or is happening. Probably both, but mostly the latter.

The narrative is told from a captivating POV. A third-person that uses the possessive “our” which is normally affiliated with a first-person POV. The narrator in “Time Management” refers to the main character of the story as “our girl.” This implicates readers in unconventional ways—creating a more personal realm of reading for what feels like a cool, distant telling of a story that is at once creepy, odd, fable-like, and reflective of our society’s relationship with late-stage capitalistic dehumanization of workers/people. The POV and the use of “our girl” makes it all the more personal.

While reading, I felt as if the piece was in conversation with other cautionary tales such as the television show “Severance,” and, in a way, Bartleby, The Scrivener. The three aren’t alike in format and genre, but they are, in their own ways, asking questions about how corporations, or society in general, treats women, employees, and the aging population, among other questions.

Objects play a significant role in the story: coffee/cups, cubicle dividers, a bell. These objects, among others, signify differences and, in some cases, changes in the characters. Sometimes the objects unify characters, at other times they divide.

Finally, the story is also a commentary on that one precious resource that unifies us all: time. (Can we even call time a resource?).

“Usually she only had time for sleep, chores, and staring at the wall until it was time to go back to work. Forget applying for those other jobs that her current job was supposed to lead to.”

Time is one of my writerly obsessions. I think time is fascinating—the way we attempt to understand it, define it, contain it, slow it down, speed it up: time is that wonderful equalizer, and while we have no way of controlling it in real life, we can absolutely manipulate it in the stories we write. In fiction writing, for instance—or any writing for that matter—we can massage the sentences and paragraphs to however much time we want. We can modulate how much time we take on the trip from point A to point B. It could be covered in a sentence, a paragraph, or maybe not at all. Maybe the hour-long drive exists only in the white space of a section break. (We were here, now we’re there). Or, we could move backward and show what happened yesterday. Or we can flash forward to tomorrow. These are wonderful writerly features that inform our writing, but they are impossible in real life: we can’t snap our fingers and suddenly arrive somewhere.

In “Time Management” Cobb pushes back on these ideas, delving into fantastical elements to explore what it might mean if we could actually manipulate time: would it make us happier or more successful? Would it make us a better person? This is a significant aspect of the story, and while I’d love to talk about it in more detail, I also don’t want to risk giving anything away. It’s worth a read to find out what happens.

“Time Management” is an engaging and thoughtful story on the menace of living and working in our go-go-go, climb-the-ladder work environment.

Check out the story here.

Caelyn Cobb is a writer and university press editor living in Queens, NY. She is the author of the short story collection Saturn Return, forthcoming from Whisk(e)y Tit Books. Her writing has appeared in Passages North, X-R-A-Y, HAD, and elsewhere.

Review of “The Train to Union Station” by Bob Johnson, published in Brown Hound Press

/ Keith Pilapil Lesmeister / Leave a comment

Brown Hound Press (BHP) is a new online literary journal whose mission is to publish one new story each week. Their fictional bent is “…offbeat, a little different than the norm. Quirky is good. Dark humor is good. You might call our style mystery, literary, or Southern Gothic.”

BHP’s inaugural story was written by celebrated short story writer Bob Johnson, whose debut collection “The Continental Divide” (Cornerstone Press), earned him a spot on the longlist for the 2026 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection.

Johnson’s latest story, “The Train to Union Station,” features Esther, a woman who is on a train from Waterloo, Indiana, to Chicago because she’s answered an ad in Winnetka to be a nanny for two kids. Esther’s left behind a fiancé and her fiancé’s sister, who’d recently moved in with them. When Esther told her fiancé, Kenneth (17 years her senior), that she was leaving, he’d said, “Sweetheart, have you lost your mind?”

Indeed, yes, if she hadn’t lost it already, she was slowly beginning to do so, and Kenneth seemed to be a critical part of her losing her mind. And Kenneth’s sister, too, who seemed to have an unusual relationship with her brother (Kenneth often rubbed her bare feet) would make disparaging comments and “criticize Esther’s cooking and fashion choices.” Kenneth dropped Esther off at the train station and told her, “When this insanity becomes clear to you, Esther, I’ll be waiting at home.”

Over the weekend, I listened to “The Yellow Wallpaper” (I’ve read it a few times already, but wanted to try the audio experience), and while reading Johnson’s story about Esther, I couldn’t help but hear hints of this slow-creeping insanity consuming Esther, in the same way it consumes the narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story.

Except in this case, Esther’s containment isn’t a room in stately home, but instead a train car, where she meets a pushy young man who spills coffee on her and gets too close, physically, along with a train conductor who’s obsessed with Mike Ditka. As the story unfolds, Esther grows more unstable and more uncomfortable.

Objects play a significant role in the story as well, as Esther clings to an old purse whose contents, at one point, spill out onto the train floor—an exposure that results in an unusual amount of embarrassment, as if she’d just revealed her darkest secrets.

“The Train to Union Station” is a masterclass in how to introduce and sustain tension from the opening lines until the inevitable conclusion.

Read the story here.

Bob Johnson’s collection The Continental Divide was published by Cornerstone Press in February 2025 and was subsequently positively reviewed by Stuart Dybek in The New York Times. It has been long-listed for the PEN/Bingham Literary Awards. His stories have appeared in The Hudson Review, The Common, The Barcelona Review, Vol 1. Brooklyn, and many other places. bobjohnsonwriter.com

Review of “Woman from Khao Lak” by Randy F. Nelson, published in One Story

/ Keith Pilapil Lesmeister / Leave a comment

Most of the stories I write about here are accessible online, for no cost. There are exceptions, of course, and this is one of those instances. I have a subscription to One Story, a publication that I’ve subscribed to off-and-on over the years. It’s an excellent literary organization that consistently publishes knockout stories. The latest “Woman from Khao Lak” by Randy F. Nelson is no exception.

The day I received the story in the mail, I read the first page after dinner, but put it down because I wanted to read it in the morning with fresh eyes. I knew after the first paragraph that I was going to love this one: “From a distance we sounded like one of those outdoor birthday parties where the kids have been running wild since noon.” And later, “…if you layered in the screams, the cannonballing, the splashing, the whistles of the lifeguards, and that low sizzle of bodies roasting in the sun, I’d say it was more like a carnival or a county fair…”

And there it is, that often elusive, and oh-so-coveted voice that we short story writers, writers in general, hope to capture in our own prose. That propulsion and artistry of language. Some combination of words whose musicality lulls our imaginations out of the basket, like a snake charmer playing its pungi.

The story takes place at a pool. Water, it turns out, is an essential element. Following the classic storyline “a stranger comes to town,” Nelson, in the next section introduces us to the charismatically mysterious and tragic Mrs. Diana Byrnes. I won’t mention any more about her other than she’s a swimmer and is much older than the lifeguards and staff members at the pool.

The following section—perhaps my favorite—the protagonist sort of breaks the fourth wall by announcing to us that he was eighteen-years-old when the events of the story occurred, but he’s “considerably older now.” A couple sentences later: “I’m saying this in order to let you know that, even though something very sad will occur, you’re not dependent upon a teenager to get you through the whole story.” Here now is an author, Nelson, exploring the full use of POV—that we are now looking upon events that happened a long time ago, but narrated to us from someone for whom these events have taken a different shape and meaning, like sea glass smoothing out over years of rough and tumble.

Simply put, this is a damn good story. Nelson, like all great writers, makes it look easy, effortless. His prose is fresh and confident, breezing along the page like a motorboat on smooth water. Each of the 12 sections of the story — to switch metaphors — is both foundational and adorned with Nelson’s decorative flair, and you can read this story for a mere $2.50. Maybe worth it to pay a few bucks more for a full year subscription. You’ll be swimming in great stories.

More info, including an interview with Nelson, here.

Randy F. Nelson is a multiple-award-winning writer and teacher whose stories have appeared in many national and international publications. He’s the Virginia Lasater Irvin Professor Emeritus of English at Davidson College, where he offered courses in creative writing and nineteenth and twentieth century American fiction. His first collection, The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men, won the Flannery O’Connor Award. Individual stories of his have also been recognized in The Pushcart Prize anthology and The Best American Short Stories.

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