Gev Sweeney: Stories & Stuff

  FAIRLISS REMEMBERED the caterpillar. It wasn’t the time of year for caterpillars. The sun rose late on ice-thorned woods, and geese were living on whatever they could scrape beneath the crust that used to be foliage. Yet  there was the caterpillar: spit-pale, plump, descending on a line that was impossible to see and that had neither end nor beginning. It had come out of nowhere, and nowhere was where it was going. So it was with this woman — this Mary Amalia Saxon. She too had come out of nowhere; she too had a destination that Fairliss could neither name nor imagine. Yet there she was, sitting amid the cozy clatter of the kitchen in borrowed underpinnings and dressing gown, her face a plaid of gashes, her hair a tattered ball on the back of her neck. She couldn’t remember precisely what happened, she was saying. There had been no reason to commit those final moments to memory: no need to hold them close, as one preserves the sound of a loved one’s last breath. She and her Scu

  Priest. Professor. Musician. Vampire. Long a prisoner of the Church, John Hance is damned to eternal life drinking the blood of Christ instead of the blood of humans. An enigmatic girl becomes his student at the obscure college where he's taught for nearly seven years. She knows too much about him. Is she insane or ingenuous? Or is she a divine emissary sent to remind him that, sometimes, justice is something else? Whenever a frightened young singer opener her mouth to him for the first time, Hance remembered Mary Guaire. She had made the same noises when Marsden tightened the  bejeweled garrote around her throat, turning the Queen of the Night's aria into a mess of bubbling squeals as the sparkling chain severed the route between breath and life. The lamentable business had occurred long ago, when people played fortepianos and  electricity was an experiment with lightning. But every time Hance had cause to envision Mary Guaire, he could never entirely dispel the impulse to

  L A T E R she would remember t he woman in the muskrat coat: how she smiled on the snowy street shining gold in the late-day sun , a sleepy puppy in her arms. And later she would remember the hot-powder scent of the movie projector, and the raspy whir of machinery spinning images she couldn’t remember seeing for herself but were captured when they got the dog for Christmas. (See? There’s the tree, in the parlor, a Daddy-tall evergreen dripping silvery strips around obese raindrops in pine-needle grottos glowing blue or red or yellow.) But that would be later. In the beginning she didn’t know where she was or when she was or what she was or who she was or that she was or that there was anything like a beginning. Her life was one thing after the other. Not in the meaning of a parade of trials and troubles and travesties. In the meaning of whatever was in front of her, or beside her or in the room with her. Sh

  In this little portrait of a troubled marriage, it's summer 1814. The United States and Great Britain have been at war for two years. Amid rumors of an attack, a scholar moves his family from Philadelphia to the New Jersey pine barrens. What they can't outrun is the presence of a child long thought lost, and the harrowing effects of a life spent among ruins that can never be rebuilt. "There was no use in exhuming the details: the what-if-I-had-done-thises and the I-should-not-have-done-thats. There could be no going back to the time called 'before.' The only return they could make was to serenity, knowing that everything that came to pass could not have passed any other way." Available in print and for Kindle on Amazon and Amazon UK.

America was built on myths and hero worship. Some legends need reconfiguring ...

U gh, the days after New Year’s: a dismal, soulless chasm that marks the end of holiday cheer and the start of weeks when rooms painted white stay dark in direct sunlight. It’s a bleakness you can‘t rebuff by baking cookies or playing a CD of Schubert’s song cycle   Die Winterreise , The Winter Journey.    But Farrell tries. And now that the cookies are cooling on the counter and Schubert’s hero languishes in the snow,   she slices open boxes that have been stacked in the bedroom, gathering dust, since she moved here last summer. Each is a secular Ark of the Covenant, filled with items that for years have defined and comforted her through her wanderings in her personal desert: a shabby teddy bear. Family photos. High school yearbooks. Pressed roses from the bouquet a boy gave her for her recital. The cross from her mother’s casket. And more. She’s kept all of it safe and dry, untorn and unbroken, free of spiders and teeny bugs that eat old things. But the time for reverence is over. Sh